All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
SUICIDE EXCEPTED by Cyril Hare:
I found SUICIDE EXCEPTED (1954) by Cyril Hare way too obvious--I knew who the guilty party was a quarter of the way through, with confirming clues showing up every few chapters after that as well. I don't think it's just because reading a lot of mysteries makes them easier--others are still just as surprising as before.
To order Suicide Excepted from amazon.com, click here.
"The Rose" by Charles L. Harness:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/02/2004]
"The Rose" by Charles L. Harness is about a confrontation between science and art, but frankly it struck me as a lot of mumbo-jumbo.
FATHERLAND by Robert Harris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/05/2008]
Our two discussion groups meet jointly in November because the science fiction group usually meets on the fourth Thursday of the month. So we try to pick a science fiction book that has appeal to non-science fiction fans as well. In previous years we have chosen THE EYRE AFFAIR by Jasper Fforde, BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward Moore, THE WOMAN AND THE APE by Peter Hoeg, KING AND JOKER by Peter Dickinson; this year we chose FATHERLAND by Robert Harris. One thing you may notice about this list is that all except the Hoeg are alternate histories. This ties in with my panel at this year's Philcon, "Are Alternate Histories Really Science Fiction?" It seems to be true that one reaction people have to the books we have chosen is "Is this really science fiction?" After all, there are no rockets, robots, or rivets.
The answer to "Are alternate histories really science fiction?" seems to be yes, though the explanation varies. Take your pick of:
Regarding FATHERLAND, reading it led people to do further research on the "White Rose" student anti-Nazi movement and Sophie Scholl (about whom there was a biopic last year), and to a discussion of Nazi architecture, both that which was built and that which was merely in the planning stages. (In FATHERLAND, these plans have come to fruition.) We had a brief digression about the Berlin Wall, and I was startled to realize that there was one group member who not only did not remember the Wall going up--she hadn't been born yet when the Wall came down! (The first item on the Beloit College "Mindset List for the Class of 2100" is "What Berlin Wall?" it also notes that for "most of the ... members of the Class of 2011, ... Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead."
A few additional items from that list:
9. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in
South Africa.
10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
16. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
18. The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.
34. They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as "The Joker."
42. Women's studies majors have always been offered on campus.
64. Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and
everything to do with oil.
66. The World Wide Web has always been an online tool.
68. Burma has always been Myanmar.
69. Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.
I will dispute #4, though ("They never 'rolled down' a car window.") since I got a new rental car last month that had windows that rolled down.
And I will cite #17: "They were born the year Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day."
To order Fatherland from amazon.com, click here.
"Stars & Stripes" trilogy by Harry Harrison:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/07/2003]
I finished Harry Harrison's "Stars & Stripes" trilogy (STARS & STRIPES FOREVER, STARS & STRIPES IN PERIL, and STARS & STRIPES TRIUMPHANT). The premise is that an actual event at the start of the American Civil War triggered a genuine rift with England, who then sided with the Confederacy, although their attempts to aid the Confederacy backfired. I have two complaints about the trilogy. One, the whole progression of events seems a bit simplistic, and rather biased in its politics. And two, if one were to remove the parts that served to remind readers of events in previous volumes, and to tighten up the writing, this could easily be one book instead of a trilogy for which readers had to wait two years and pay three times as much for the whole thing. This may be a sad side effect of all of Harry Turtledove's alternate history series--publishers and authors now feel that all alternate histories should be series.
To order Stars & Stripes Forever from amazon.com, click here.
To order Stars & Stripes in Peril from amazon.com, click here.
To order Stars & Stripes Truiumphant from amazon.com, click here.
THE YEAR 2000 edited by Harry Harrison (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00406-7, 1997, 326pp, hardback): edited by Harry Harrison (Berkley, ISBN 0-425-02117-3, 1970, 254pp, paperback):
In 1970, Harry Harrison had thirteen authors write stories set thiry years in the future, in the year 2000. Well, having arrived there, I thought this might be a good time to see how close or far these stories are from reality.
The beginning of the first story, Fritz Leiber's "America the Beautiful," gives you a feel for what these stories are like: "I am returning to England. I am shorthanding this, July 5, 2000, aboard the Dallas-London rocket as it arches silently out of the diffused violet daylight of the stratosphere into the eternally star-spangled purple night of the ionosphere." The story itself deals with both the rising tensions between America and "the Communist League," and the generally self-satisfied feeling that Americans have with themselves. If the former has turned out to be false, there is still some truth in the latter.
The second story ("Prometheus Rebound" by Daniel F. Galouye) reads like something out of the 1930s, making me wonder what he was thinking the year 2000 would be like.
Before there was Mike Resnick, there was Chad Oliver, and before there was "Kirinyaga" there was "Far from This Earth," Oliver's story of progress, if progress it be, in Kenya. It's surprising, in fact, that this was not one of the inspirations for Resnick's series, but it wasn't.
Naomi Mitchison's "After the Accident" is a rather straight-forward genetic engineering story. And "Utopian" by Mack Reynolds reads like one of those stilted Utopian stories from decades ago, right down to people saying things like "If we were still using the somewhat inefficient calendar of your period, this would be approximately the year 2000."
Like Reynolds's story, "Sea Change" by A. Bertram Chandler deals with someone who has "time-traveled" (via deep sleep) from 1970 to 2000. And similarly, Chandler also has a theme of "the old best are sometimes the best," though in a different sense than Reynolds.
Robert Silverberg is one of the two authors who thought the race issue would be critical over the next thirty years. Though his racially separated society of "Black Is Beautiful" did not arise, his story does raise issues that are relevant today, not least of which is when does autonomy become just segregation under a different name. (The paperback edition has an unfortunate typo at the beginning, with "1933" instead of "1983.")
The other story of race relations is "American Dead" by Harry Harrison, and it paints an even gloomier view of the conflict between black and white. What is of interest is that neither Silverberg nor Harrison has any other racial influences in his story. Missing are the Asians and the Hispanics who certainly have an impact in the racial politics of the United States in the year 2000.
"The Lawgiver" by Keith Laumer is still very topical today with its theme of "right-to-life" issues, though a bit heavy-handed, I thought.
Though in real life J. J. Coupling was involved in communications technology (under his real name, John R. Pierce, he was an executive director in Bell Labs when he wrote his story), "To Be a Man" is more about bioengineering. However, it has some very "modern" ideas, in particular more of the concepts that Greg Egan is using these days. (I was particularly reminded of Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful.")
One note: of the thirteen authors, only Aldiss, Coupling, Harrison, Masson, and Silverberg are still alive to see how it really turned out. And the used bookstore where Mark or I bought this went out of business a few years ago as well, after being in existence more than a hundred years.
To order The Year 2000 from amazon.com, click here.
HAUNTED GROUND by Erin Hart:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/11/2008]
HAUNTED GROUND by Erin Hart (ISBN-13 978-0-743-27210-0, ISBN-10 0-743-27210-2) was chosen by the newly formed afternoon book discussion group at my library. This is a mystery novel involving a skull found in an Irish peat bog, a missing woman and his child, and the murder of the sister of one of the main characters. I have to admit that I had some problems keeping the characters straight because I had no feel for how to pronounce most of the Irish names, and that appears to be how I remember names. (Strangely, I remember books visually, seeing the cover as part of my re-collection.) Anyway, I found this book disconcerting--there was something about it that made me think of it as a science fiction book (which it is not), but the writing style seemed wrong for that. The end was a bit too convenient, and overall I was underwhelmed. Your mileage may vary. [-ecl]
To order Haunted Ground from amazon.com, click here.
THE BLACK SPHINX by Matt Hart:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/23/2007]
THE BLACK SPHINX by Matt Hart (ISBN-10 0-552-55421-9, ISBN-13 978-0-552-55421-3) is a young adult novel from Britain. The premise is some sort of alternate history, where London is a small village, and Wolveston is the big metropolis. Except for that, there is little alternate history aspect, and it is more a straight fantasy novel with Dickensian influences. (I guess I was hoping for a world in which the Egyptian dynasties and religion survived.) However, as a fantasy it is pretty good. The cover illustration, by David Richards, is reminiscent of Edward Gorey. (The back cover, however, is rather hideous, as someone apparently decided to maximize the number of fonts used; I think there were fifteen, but it was hard to tell.) And to give the young readers something to do besides just read the book, each page has a couple of words from the Black Sphinx's curse, done as a substitution code with heiroglyphs for letters. I did not bother to decode 294 pages of these, but someone might.
To order The Black Sphinx from amazon.com, click here.
PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/30/2008]
Our book discussion group read PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf (ISBN-13 978-0-375-70585-4, ISBN-10 0-375-70585-6). It was better than a lot of the current fiction chosen for discussion groups in that the people all seem like the sort of people you might meet in the supermarket--there are no serial killers, wacko fundamentalists, etc. But the one element I am going to comment on is the lack of quotation marks. From what I read about this, this may be a new trend among fiction writers: leaving out the quotation marks altogether and having the paragraph structure and internal clues let the reader know who is talking. Many reviewers liked this, saying it gave the book an immediacy and a feeling of involvement for the reader. Others found it distracting and confusing. I am in the latter camp. It was not always confusing, but as someone who grew up reading books with quotation marks, I did find it distracting. It is perhaps less of a gimmick than writing an entire book without the letter "e", but it still seems a gimmick.
To order Plainsong from amazon.com, click here.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DISAPPEARING PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES by Edmund Hastie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/03/2009]
Another collection in the F. A. Thorpe "Large Print Linford Mystery Library" series that my library had was SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DISAPPEARING PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES by Edmund Hastie (ISBN-13 978-1-84782-110-2, ISBN-10 1-84782-110-3). These were "original" pastiches, in the sense that they were not based on cases referred to by Doyle. The title story is about the disappearance of the Crown Prince of Japan from Oxbridge (that marvelous merging of Oxford and Cambridge, used by writers to avoid insulting either one or the other), and is reasonably well-written. The other stories are actually fairly weak and poorly written--not too surprising when you realize that the author was fourteen years old when he wrote them. (I suppose what is surprising is that the first one is as good as it is.) I'm not even sure why it was published, as it just lowers the overall quality of the line.
To order Sherlock Holmes and the Disappearing Prince from amazon.com, click here.
MOUNTAINS OF THE PHARAOHS by Zahi Hawass:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/08/2008]
I listened to MOUNTAINS OF THE PHARAOHS by Zahi Hawass (read by Simon Vance) (ISBN-13 978-0-385-50305-1, ISBN-10 0-385-50305-9; audiobook ISBN-13 978-1-400-13280-5, ISBN-10 1-400-13280-0) on a recent trip. Many parts merely reinforced the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words--listening to the reader describing the layout of a tomb complex, complete with measurements (and given in both metric and English units to boot!) was less than edifying.
Hawass stresses that the pyramids were built by the ancient Egyptians, not by aliens or Atlanteans. He talks about this emphatically in the introduction. A few chapters later, he refers to the builders, and says "the men who built the pyramids- -and they were men..." and I found myself wondering for a minute why he was emphasizing that women did not build the pyramids. And then I realized that by "men" he meant "humans", not "males". Hawass also emphasized his belief that the pyramids were not built by slaves, but by volunteer labor. He tries to give the impression of freely given labor, but his description ultimately sounds more like corvee (labor in lieu of taxes) than true volunteers.
To order Mountains of the Pharaohs from amazon.com, click here.
THE SLAYING OF THE SHREW by Simon Hawke:
Among the most unlikely literary detectives might be Will Shakespeare, in Simon Hawke's series. The second one, THE SLAYING OF THE SHREW, has nothing to add to either detection or Shakespeare and seems to be designed mostly to cash in on Shakespeare's recent burst of popularity. (And even being a fan of Shakespeare didn't help me here.)
To order The Slaying of the Shrew from amazon.com, click here.
GUILTY ABROAD
by Peter J. Heck:
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGLER by Peter J. Heck:
I'm not sure where Peter J. Heck got the idea for having Mark Twain be a detective, but it seems to work. The fourth and fifth books, GUILTY ABROAD and THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGLER, continue the premise, and Heck seems to portray Clemens reasonably accurately without resorting to filling the book with caricatures and familiar quotes. These are among the most enjoyable mysteries I've read (though being a big Mark Twain fan probably affects my judgment).
To order Guilty Abroad from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Mysterious Strangler from amazon.com, click here.
TOM'S LAWYER by Peter J. Heck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/07/2003]
Peter J. Heck has been writing a mystery series with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) as the detective. The sixth and latest is TOM'S LAWYER (yes, they all have this sort of clever title). As with many of this sort of thing, the initial appeal of the premise wears off after a few volumes and one is left to judge the books solely as mysteries. Unfortunately, as mysteries they are (in my opinion) merely passable. If you're interested in Twain, I'd recommend you read one or two (the first, which introduces the narrator, was DEATH ON THE MISSISSIPPI).
To order Tom's Lawyer from amazon.com, click here.
TENNIS SHOES AMONG THE NEPHITES by Chris Heimerdinger (Covenant Books, ISBN 1-55503-131-5, 1989, 229pp, trade paperback):
This is a book whose target audience is teenage Mormon boys. I, on the other hand, am a middle-aged Jewish woman. So why am I reviewing this?
Well, perhaps the main reason is to remind people that there is more to science fiction than what they find in their local mall store, or even in their local superstore. Here is a book that in its eleventh printing, has spawned a whole series, and that I can almost guarantee that practically no one reading this has heard of.
Although teenager Jim finds his classmate Garth a bit of a nerd, he is fascinated by Garth's discoveries in a nearby cave. So he and Garth and his younger sister Jennifer go exploring, fall into a whirlpool, and wake up in the Meso-America of the Nephites and the Lamanites. (The Nephites and the Lamanites are tribes from two thousand years ago described in the Book of Mormon.) So what you have is a group of teenagers who find themselves in another time and have to use their knowledge of history to get by.
Of course, the history is Mormon history, so this is more like finding oneself back in Joseph's Egypt than at Plymouth Rock. And while it must be meaningful and educational to someone who knows at least the basic story, it's a bit baffling to someone who doesn't. (I suppose that one might claim that it should teach it to someone who doesn't know it already, but it didn't have that effect on me, partly because with Jim and Garth back there, things are at least slightly changed from the "real" history.)
Am I recommending this? Not really. Unless you live in an area with a large Mormon population, your local bookstore won't have this. While I assume that you can order it directly from Covenant (no, I don't have the address or phone number, but I'm sure directory assistance can help you), it's not clear that it's worthwhile for most people. On the other hand, if you want to look at some of the "edges" of the fantasy field, you might find this interesting.
To order Tennis Shoes among the Nephites from amazon.com, click here.
CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/05/2005]
While in Los Angeles--or more specifically, in Los Angeles traffic--we listened to Robert A. Heinlein's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY on audiobook (ISBN 0-786-18479-5, paperback ISBN 1-416-50552-0). It is typical Heinlein, with a lot of lecturing about societal mores, and a juvenile hero amazingly naive and clueless for someone raised as a slave and a street beggar. (Not only he is clueless about girls/women, but at age eighteen or nineteen, he's not even interested in them. And, no, he's not gay.)
To order Citizen of the Galaxy from amazon.com in audiobook, click here.
To order Citizen of the Galaxy from amazon.com in paperback, click here.
FOR US, THE LIVING by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/16/2004]
I read Robert A. Heinlein's FOR US, THE LIVING, and I can report that my initial comments still hold. To recap, it was apparently written in 1938, at the time of Heinlein's involvement with social reform campaigns in California. And, yes, it is probably only for Heinlein completists. As I commented to one, "If I wanted a course in economics, I'd sign up for one at Brookdale Community College."
The book is written in the tradition of Edward Bellamy and other Utopian writers. As with many of those, the protagonist falls asleep/is overcome by gas/passes through a time warp/has a curse put on him--oh, sorry, I got carried away there. Anyway, the protagonist is in a car crash in 1938 and through some hand-waving ends up in a body in 2086. (The explanation is even less convincing than that of being overcome by gas.) Naturally he gets found by a beautiful woman, who decides to take him in and provide various teachers who explain at great length how the country's economic and political system has evolved since 1938. As with much of Heinlein's work, everything works because he stacks the deck so that it works. For example, everyone is given enough money to live on, but people continue to work because they want to. This is made at least slightly plausible only because he postulates that all the tedious jobs are done by machine. After all, why would someone take a job cleaning bathrooms if they didn't have to? Heinlein also sets up a situation in which the United States can effectively ignore the rest of the world.
One can certainly see the beginnings of many of Heinlein's ideas here, and for followers of Utopian fiction it has its place, but there is nothing compelling enough to warrant reading this if all you are looking for is a good science fiction novel.
To order For Us, the Living from amazon.com, click here.
SPACE CADET by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/01/2006]
SPACE CADET by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN 0-765-31450-9) is very much a mixed bag. Written in 1948, it swings between being perceptive and being way off-base, being liberal and being reactionary. On the one hand, Heinlein seems to have foreseen microwave ovens when he has the cadets heat something with "high- frequency waves." On the other, he seems to think that learning will be done by a combination of injections and hypnosis--which does make it easier to fill his book with more interesting things than having his cadets sitting in class for hours on end. On the one hand, he has an important black character, at a time when the military had just been integrated, and equal treatment of blacks was almost unheard of. (Actually, when he wrote the book, the military was probably still segregated.) On the other hand, all his main characters are male and have either Anglo-Saxon or French names and backgrounds, even when they come from Venus or Ganymede. The lack of women, Asians, or even eastern or southern European cadets seems very obvious today.
To order Space Cadet from amazon.com, click here.
STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2009]
STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN-13 978-0-441-78358-8, ISBN-10 0-441-78358-9) was chosen for the science fiction book-to-movie discussion group this month. The novel is known for its didactic style, but I had forgotten just how awkward they are. For example, on page 6, the sergeant says, "You're supposed to know the plan. But some of you ain't got any minds to hypnotize so I'll sketch it out." And then he does, even though the chances that the military would keep non-hypnotizable people if hypnosis is how they brief you for a mission is, well, zero.
On page 7 (and various times later, Heinlein makes a big deal of how everyone fights--"the chaplain and the cook and the Old Man's writer." That sounds great for morale, but terrible for efficiency. Even if one has civilians doing most of the support work (as seems to be the case later), having specially trained personnel fight as ordinary infantry seems like a waste of the specialized training.
On page 143 is Heinlein's defense of the entire society he has set up. Why is having the franchise given only to discharged veterans the best way to structure a society? Well, the basic claim seems to be "Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage." (Oh, and "our system works quite well. Many complain, but none rebel; personal freedom for all is [the] greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest web." In other words, proof by assertion--or perhaps by intimidation.)
Anyway, after having a few years of an "all-volunteer" army which turns out to be filled based on economic conditions--people enlist when they are poor and see the military as their only option--I would contend that we do not have a lot of evidence to support Heinlein's theory. Yes, his military weeds people out more strongly, and he seems to imply that there is no economic pressure to join, but I definitely would need more evidence before I thought that Heinlein had something. Add to this Rico's thinking, "I wished I were back in the drop room of the 'Rog', with not too many chevrons and an after-chow bull session in full swing. There was a lot to be said for the job of assistant section leader--when you come right to it, it's a lot easier to die than it is to use your head." Given that the majority of discharged veterans will be enlisted personnel, not officers, the electorate will be mostly people trained to follow orders rather than to "use their heads."
On pages 153 through 156, Heinlein recounts events from the June 1813 battle between the Chesapeake and the Shannon: "... there were four officers in the chain of command above [William Sitgreaves Cox]. When the battle started his commanding officer was wounded. The kid picked him up and carried him out of the line of fire. ... But he did it without being ordered to leave his post. The other officers all bought it while he was doing this and he was tried for 'deserting his post of duty as *commanding officer* in the presence of the enemy. Convicted. Cashiered."
The problem with this is it is wrong. When Cox "deserted" his post in this description, he was not the commanding officer. He became the commanding officer during the time he was taking the wounded man out of fire, and during that time he couldn't desert his post because he was never at it. The true description seems to be, however, that the other officers had already been hit *before* he left his post, but that in the tumult of battle, he did not know that.
Heinlein also said, "This boy's family tried for a century and a half to get his conviction reversed. No luck, of course." This really is wrong. They *did* get his conviction reversed--in 1952, less than a century and a half later, and before Heinlein wrote STARSHIP TROOPERS. Clearly Heinlein heard this story back in the Naval Academy in the 1920s and it made quite an impression on him, but he did not do any follow-up research before including it in the novel in 1959.
And once again, I will note, this just emphasizes that what one learns in the military is blind obedience to orders, and regulations enforced to the letter--which may be fine for the military, but don't strike me as what you want in your electorate.
For that matter, the recruiting sergeant in STARSHIP TROOPERS says, "But if you *want* to serve and I can't talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that's your constitutional right. It says that everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship--but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren't just glorified K.P." Given that, there are probably lots of people who would sign up, knowing that they would never qualify for anything risky.
"If you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match." But why silly? Heinlein seems to have decided that really only able-bodied people should be allowed to vote, and for disable people to want to is just silly.
And speaking of the right to vote, I've been reading the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers recently, and ran across this where James Madison recommends not "confining the right of suffrage to freeholders, and to such as hold an equivalent property, convertible of course into freeholds. The objection to this regulation is obvious. It violates the vital principle of Government that those who are to be bound by laws, ought to have a voice in making them." [Madison's note number 2, 1820s]
Unless it was Madison's intention that women (or slaves) were not to be bound by laws, this seems amazingly obtuse.
Having nit-picked the book STARSHIP TROOPERS, I will now proceed to the movie. First, they dumbed down the lectures. Where the book gives Carthage as an example where violence settled something, the movie uses Hiroshima. But Carthage was completely destroyed (and sown with salt to keep it that way), while Hiroshima was only partially destroyed, and rather quickly rebuilt.
The screenwriter doesn't seem to know the difference between arachnids and insects, using the terms interchangeably. I would let him get away with "bugs" for both, but not the two other terms as being the same.
In the movie, the recruits are constantly saying "Sir" to their sergeants. One does not say "Sir" to a sergeant--if one does, one is immediately told, "Don't call me sir--I work for a living!" One says "Sir" only to officers.
Carmen does not shave her head in the movie. Then again, the ships she is flying appear to have artificial gravity.
And can you really set off a nuclear bomb a few hundred feet away and not suffer any ill effects?
To order Starship Troopers from amazon.com, click here.
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/21/2003]
I'm re-reading Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND for our library's science fiction book discussion group. At the time (for me, 1969 or so), it seemed great. Now, I must admit, it seems awful. All of the things about Heinlein's writing that grate on one's nerves are there, as well as his (apparent) ignorance of genetics and planetology. For example, on page 177 (of the 1961 Avon edition), Jubal Harshaw (a fairly obvious autobiographical character) says, "Most do-gooding reminds me of treating hemophilia--the only real cure for hemophilia is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death...before they breed more hemophiliacs." But hemophilia is a recessive trait, so unless you kill off the hemophiliacs siblings (and first cousins, etc.) as well, you haven't decreased the quantity of the trait in the gene pool. (You have kept it from increasing, I suppose.) And on page 89, he describes the solar system as having four planets of any noticeable size, but then goes on the describe Earth and Mars as if they are two of these four. Maybe that's just bad writing, but I note that the "original uncut version" recently published says it's *three* of the planets, not four, which is even more wrong. (This is on page 118 of the Ace edition; the previous item is page 231 of the new edition.) As far as the longer version, I think I'd rather see a shorter version, with Harshaw eliminated entirely. (Mark observes, correctly I think, that when Heinlein wrote this, he no doubt intended that Harshaw be the focus, not Smith. However, his readers had other ideas.) Since I'm only half done, I may have further comments next week.
To order Stranger in a Strange Land from amazon.com, click here.
TUNNEL IN THE SKY by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/06/2005]
Our science fiction discussion group discussed Robert A. Heinlein's TUNNEL IN THE SKY (ISBN 0-345-35373-0) this month. It was compared and contrasted to such works as ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe, SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON by Johann Wyss, THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND by Jules Verne, and LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding. It is worth noting that the only books listed in the "Customers who bought this book also bought" section of amazon.com were five other Heinlein juveniles and Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, and their "Better together" recommendation is one of the Heinlein juveniles. While there is certainly validity in those choices, TUNNEL IN THE SKY is far more closely connected to the works listed above. The science fictional content is minimal, merely a device to strand this groups of teenagers on an uninhabited world. In fact, the main character is convinced for a while that he is actually still on Earth, possibly in Africa somewhere. One thing we agreed on, though, was that Heinlein included a lot more politics than the other "survival" novels. (One on-line reviewer said, "TUNNEL IN THE SKY has variations of the themes covered in LORD OF THE FLIES." He may not have realized that TUNNEL IN THE SKY predates LORD OF THE FLIES by four years. It is even remotely possible that Golding was writing in response to Heinlein.)
To order Tunnel in the Sky from amazon.com, click here.
A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway:
HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS by Errol Selkirk:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/08/2006]
A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway (ISBN 0-02-051960-5) is Hemingway's reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. However, as Errol Selkirk noted in HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS (ISBN 0-863-16128-6), it was not written until shortly before his death in 1961, and indeed the final editing was after his death. (The book was finally published in 1964.) So a lot of the memories are colored by intervening events: fallings-out with friends, literary successes or failures, and so on. Still, it does give a picture of what Paris was like in that era, and unlike George Orwell in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON, Hemingway was not stuck in a restaurant kitchen washing dishes, but was hob-nobbing with the literary lights of that time. (HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS gives a good summary of his life, but the artwork in it does not do as much to amplify the contents as the artwork in the books in the "Introducing" series.)
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THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2004]
One book suggested for reading groups was Ernest Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES. It is a classic. I did not like it. Simple declarative sentences are fine, but they get boring after a while. One longs for a dependent clause, but one doesn't find one. All the people are obnoxious. The narrator was injured in the war, but Hemingway cannot say how. Who cares?
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]
A few weeks ago, I was rather critical of Ernest Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES (ISBN 0-684-80071-3). Last week we had the discussion meeting, and all six other attendees agreed with me--a unanimous thumbs-down vote. (In case anyone wants to see this as gender-based, the group was three men and four women.) I think I can safely say we won't be doing more Hemingway soon. (Our next books include Joseph Conrad's LORD JIM, Graham Greene's THE END OF THE AFFAIR, Betty Smith's A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, John Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY, Kate Chopin's THE AWAKENING, Paulo Coelho's THE ALCHEMIST, Jasper Fforde's THE EYRE AFFAIR, and Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL.)
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JANE AUSTEN'S GUIDE TO DATING by Lauren Henderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/17/2006]
In JANE AUSTEN'S GUIDE TO DATING (ISBN 1-4013-0117-7), Lauren Henderson seems to have been inspired by THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB. In that novel, the author draws parallels between the plots and lessons in Austen's novels and the lives of the members of a book group reading those works. In JANE AUSTEN'S GUIDE TO DATING Henderson tries to write a dating guide based on Austen's plots and lessons. I should offer the following disclaimer--my dating experience is 1) extremely limited and 2) extremely outdated, having occurred almost forty years ago. (That's about 20% of the way back to when Austen wrote, if you care.) At any rate, Henderson puts forth such rules as "If You Like Someone, Make It Clear That You Do", and "Don't Fall for Superficial Qualities", and "Be Witty If You Can, but Not Cynical, Indiscreet, or Cruel". Pretty bland suggestions, I would say. Obviously this book is not aimed at me; if I had any doubts, the choices in the quiz to determine which Jane Austen character I am frequently were all wrong. For example, one question is "Your favorite movie star is;" and the choices are:
a. Anyone dark, French and sexily brooding b. George Clooney c. Colin Farrell d. Matthew McConaughey e. Viggo Mortensoen f. Harrison Ford
Whether by "favorite" they mean the actor I think the best, or the one I think the most attractive, this list doesn't do it for me. As far as I can tell, the book is gimmicky and is probably not going to solve anyone's dating problems, but if someone more knowledgeable about dating wants to dispute this, feel free.
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THE HISTORIES by Herodotus (translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, introduction by A. R. Burn):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/22/2007]
THE HISTORIES by Herodotus (translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, introduction by A. R. Burn) (ISBN-10 0-140-44908-6, ISBN-13 978-0-140-44908-2) is not reportage. Most of it is not first-person writing, and even when it is, at times Herodotus is either making it up or is extremely gullible. He does not claim to have seen the gold-digging ants, for example, but does present it as fact. He claims to have seen an inscription on the side of the Great Pyramid recording the amount spent on radishes, onions, and leeks for the workers. But he adds that "the interpreter who read me the inscription said the sum was 1600 talents of silver." So obviously he did not know from first-hand knowledge what the inscription said, and was almost definitely lied to by the interpreter (who may not have had any idea what the inscription said either).
Burn points out that Herodotus is willing to report beliefs even when he does not believe them himself. For example, "The third theory [of what causes the Nile to rise each year) is much the most plausible, but at the same time furthest from the truth; according to this, the water of the Nile comes from melting snow, but as it flows from Libya through Ethiopia into Egypt, that is, from a very hot into a cooler climate, how could it possibly originate in snow? Obviously, this view is as worthless as the other two." And talking of Phoenicians who circumnavigated Africa, Herodotus writes, "These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of [Africa], they had the sun on their right--to the northward of them." Well, Herodotus may not have believed these statements, but they are both, in fact, true.
[Note: the ISBN numbers given are for a newer edition, with the introduction by someone other than Burn.]
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