Howling Frog Books

Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1964) I need to write a bunch of posts for Vintage Sci-Fi Month before it's over, but really I am mostly watching politics and I am not happy, friends.  I'm not sure what to say, either, so for the moment I'll just talk about Soviet SF, OK? Hard to Be a God is a fairly early Strugatsky novel, from before their total disillusionment with the Soviet system, but it has some foreboding themes.  It actually started off as a fun, swashbuckling project that was going to be like the Three Musketeers , but it turned much, much darker as the writing progressed.  So: Twenty minutes into the future, Anton is an Earth agent stationed on a different planet at a somewhat medieval level of development.  Living as Don Rumata in the kingdom of Arkanar, it's his job to observe, by recording history for observers at home, and to quietly influence without actually interfering.  He is a great swordsman but may never kill.  Arkanar, h

Psi-High and Others , by Alan E. Nourse I found this at the used bookstore and the cover was so goofy that I had to take a picture.  Then I read the back and got curious about the Galactic Watchers, so here we are.  It's really three short pieces bound together by a common theme. The Watchers have their eye on Earth, and will be judging whether humans can be allowed out of the solar system.  They've sent a representative down to work at a scientific research outfit.  Three tests will determine the outcome; first, when medical technology allows some few people to keep renewing themselves and live extremely long lives, what will be the result?  Then, humanity starts to develop telepathy, and in a story that sounds very much like something out of the X-Men, we see how mankind treats people who are other.  And the last story is about an alien attack that becomes a psychological war between the aliens and the tiny group of people trying to figure out what they even are. The st

The Best of Leigh Brackett , ed. by Edmond Hamilton Last year I discovered Leigh Brackett, Queen of Space Opera, when I read Black Amazon of Mars .  My brother lent me two Brackett collections, and I picked this one, which features some of her best short stories (chosen and edited by her husband, Edmond Hamilton, who also wrote a whole lot of SF including the book that features as the Vintage Sci-Fi Month poster -- boy I sure find a lot of things out this way!).  In reading the introduction, I discovered more fun facts: that Brackett's first screenplay work was with William Faulkner in The Big Sleep (my daughter, who is reading Faulkner in school, had just told me that Faulkner worked on that movie), she was asked to do more Chandler screenplays, and as time went on, publishers no longer wanted her Mars stories because real information about Mars was becoming known and they figured it was too implausible. This is really a pretty great collection.  Some of them are individual st

Dirt: The Quirks, Habits, and Passions of Keeping House , ed. by Mindy Lewis I found this on my bookshelf, and I have absolutely no memory of ever reading it.  None.  I am therefore counting it as a TBR read, because I think I have never read it.  It's a collection of essays or short meditations on housekeeping.  A lot of the essays are about the various writers' mothers' mental issues, usually something resulting in fanatic cleanliness, which then leads to rebellious slobbiness in the child.  Then that kind of backfires when it turns out that living in filth really isn't very fun. There are some pieces that do not fit that mold, though.  A couple meditate on historical, economic, or political implications, some talk about the pleasures of cleanliness, and so on.  The last one is a really lovely essay about the important work of making a home for the people you love. The one that made me laugh out loud in astonishment begins by introducing the writer's secon

Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein The second juvenile novel in this Infinite Possibilities book was fine, though not as good as Tunnel in the Sky.  Citizen of the Galaxy is the last one and I'm not super-optimistic about it, but I might read it anyway; we'll see.  After all, I was at the used bookstore today and got two vintage sci-fi paperbacks to read! Again we have a massively overpopulated future, but this time there are severe taxes on extra children and they're looking for planets to colonize.  Without anything better than near-light-speed travel, it's going to take a long time to find anything, but there is one big help; it turns out that pairs of twins can often be trained to communicate telepathically.  So one twin can stay home and report what the traveling twin sees, and any good planets can be reported immediately. Tom and his twin Pat are chosen to go, and Tom kind of resents that Pat, the dominant twin, has just assumed that he will be t

Yep, I'm still going!  Slowly.  If you recall, Book IV is about Friendship, and the friendship story is mostly a sideline to the much more exciting drama of Amoret, Scudamore, Britomart, and Artegall, plus a whole lot of other knightly pairs and rotten ol' Braggadocio. Let us look back upon these hopeful dates and laugh Scudamore spent the night at the house of Care (known to us as Worry), and is in bad shape.  He meets the Savage Knight, dressed in wild clothes and with no device on his shield.  This is Artegall in his guise as rough justice.  Both are angry at Britomart (unknown to be a lady) and agree to search for her.  They promptly meet her and attack with lots of angry male imagery, but it's Britomart who stabs Artegall.  In the fighting her visor breaks off and her face is seen for the first time.  Artegall apologizes for fighting a lady, but she wants to keep going and Scudamore and Glauce have to intervene.  All show their faces, Britomart recognizes Artegal

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968) Here we have the famous inspiration for the movie Bladerunner, which isn't necessarily all that much like the novel.  As I recall, Bladerunner features a crowded Los Angeles... Rick Deckard, android bounty hunter, is having a pretty rotten time of it, but he gets his chance when a notice of six rogue androids comes in.  If he can take them out, the bounties will really help his finances, and let him buy a real animal again.  In this future depopulated earth, many animals are extinct and people are required to own and care for one.  (It's a status symbol to have a big animal, and Deckard's real sheep died a while back, so he replaced it with an electric one.)  The trouble is, androids are always being made better, and these are the new model Nexus-6; smarter and tougher than plain old humans, the only way to detect them is to administer an empathy test.  As Decker hunts for androids across the near-empty San

When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II , by Molly Guptill Manning I enjoyed this book so much!  I hadn't heard of it, but luckily Maphead reviewed it a few weeks ago, and it turned out to be at my library.  I promptly devoured it, but I didn't get around to reviewing it right away. Manning starts off by describing Nazi Germany's hatred of books that didn't espouse the proper ideas.  I had known that there were book burnings, but I had not realized that they were quite as popular as all that.  Anti-Nazi German writers even collected the disapproved books to save them, sending them to a library in France. Meanwhile, the American government was preparing for the expected eventual entrance into the war.   They needed recreational materials for the soldiers, who universally found books to be an uplifting and relaxing escape and reminder of normal life, and so the military asked for book donations.  The American Library Association got invo

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency , by Douglas Adams The Brits did a TV show based on this book, so of course I had to re-read it before I watch!  This doesn't count as a vintage SF title, but I read it in January anyway.  It is so long since I read Dirk Gently that I had forgotten pretty well everything, except the Electric Monk was slightly familiar.  And there was a bonus! Richard, computer programmer and basic hapless fellow (in the tradition of Arthur Dent) gets caught up in some really strange events; a horse is in his old professor's bathroom, he finds himself climbing a dangerous wall for no particular reason, and his boss is found dead -- extra dead, in fact.  Richard turns to his old sketchy college acquaintance, currently known as Dirk Gently, holistic detective.  Through a long series of very odd occurrences, Dirk figures out what's going on. It's all very fun and Adamsy, and I had a good time re-reading it.  Since I am now a good deal olde

Hey folks, if you're in for the Reading All Around the World adventure , use the hashtag #readingallaround on Twitter and Facebook!  We can share book titles and such. It's dang hard to find a hashtag that isn't already the name of a project!

Los de abajo -- The Underdogs , by Mariano Azuela It's my very first official Reading Around the World title, and I chose to go next door to Mexico. The Underdogs (literally, those from underneath) is a short novel about the Mexican Revolution written in 1915; Azuela served as a doctor during the fighting.  I've got the Norton Critical Edition (and if you're going to read it, you should too, unless you know a lot more about the Mexican Revolution than I do), and the translator says not only that it's the best novel about the revolution, but in his opinion "may actually be the best Mexican novel ever." Demetrio Macías is a tough peasant rancher in the sierra.  When he offends some local official, the Federales burn his home and he becomes the leader of a ratty bunch of rebels.  They move around, doing some fighting and some looting, and when Demetrio is injured, they spend a lot of time in one village.  A literate journalist, Luis Cervantes, joins them; he

Shaggy Planet, by Ron Goulart (1973) This is the first vintage SF novel I've read for the January event that is really a stinker.  I found it on our SF bookshelf and haven't the faintest idea where it came from, nor does my husband, and it turns out we've been giving this thing shelf space under the misguided idea that somebody got it on purpose.  This is just a dumb story and you should not read it.  It's supposed to be funny, but mostly it's clunky.  I wouldn't have bothered to finish it or to blog about it, but I found out some interesting things so I'll talk about those in a bit. The plot is that this mercenary guy is hired to find a businessman who has gone missing on a mess of a planet called Murdstone, part of the Barnum system.  He's got a reporter girlfriend who wants an interview with a guerrilla leader, there's a famine and an opera and some rioting, and these weird shaggy animals they call hummels are suddenly all over town.  Mercena

Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente Is this a fabulous cover or what?  As soon as I saw this book and read the premise, I had to read it.  It's a fairy tale retelling with Koschei the Deathless and Marya, daughter of the Revolution.  (I maintain that "Koschei the Deathless" is the most fantastic name ever.) As a little girl, Marya Morevna saw birds transform into husbands for her older sisters.  She waited for her own bird groom too, but The Russian Revolution changed all that and instead she became a revolutionary with a red neckerchief.  The tales she knew to be true got buried, until Koschei came to the door and whisked her away to a new life -- a life no less cruel than the old, but one where her best friends are a vila, a leshy, and a vintovnik.  She talks with domovoi and hunts firebirds, but Koschei is immersed in his war.  Marya clashes with Baba Yaga, who shows her the price paid by Koschei's many former wives when they, inevitably, ran off with their fa

Tunnel in the Sky , by Robert A. Heinlein Rod Walker, high school student, has been taking a higher-level class in advanced survival.  His ambition is to someday see the other worlds humanity is colonizing, and survival skills are of the first importance.  The final exam is a field test; Rod and his classmates will be dropped on an unknown planet for anywhere from two to ten days.  They can take whatever equipment they wish.  Rod is surprised to find himself alone on the other end of the gate -- they've dropped the students far apart instead of in a group -- and he does all right for the first couple of days.  But the exit gate never opens, and Rod and his classmates have to build a surviving society of their own, without knowing if anyone will ever come to get them. This was a great read!  My 16-year-old daughter loved it too, and says it was what she hoped Lord of the Flies would be, before she read it and was disappointed.  (She really likes survival stories, and as a kid i

Shakuntala (The Recognition of Shakuntala) , by Kālidāsa Some time ago I read The Cloud Messenger , a longish poem by the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa , who lived about 1500 years ago apparently.  I thought I would like to read his play, too.  The introduction of this book says that ancient Sanskrit drama was considered divine, a fifth Veda that was supposed to instruct through pleasure.  All could understand it (unlike the four Vedas), and it should represent the world, give good advice, and "bring peace of mind to those afflicted with the ills of the world" (such as kings).  Drama is not particular and individual, but shows a generalized picture and should produce "the aesthetic emotion" called rasa by building impressions through the words, music, and art.  The story therefore reads like a legend or fairy tale. Shakuntala is a lovely, sheltered girl living in a holy enclave with her adopted father, the sage Kanva.  Other holy disciples and girls live there as well

Star Trek 7 , by James Blish Somebody besides me must remember these fun paperbacks.  When I was a kid, my library had a whole bunch of these and I remember reading a lot of them -- although I don't actually remember the stories, unless they're really famous episodes.  What they really are is short story versions of old Star Trek episodes.  As far as I can tell, they are nearly the same, but Blish filled them out a little. Volume seven starts off with its strongest pieces, putting "Who Mourns for Adonais?" first (that's the one where they run into Apollo), and then the Nomad story, "The Changeling."  After reading that, I had to watch it, so we all saw it together.  The other four stories are less memorable, but there's the one where they find a planet of Native Americans (and Kirk marries a girl!), the one where they all get old, the one with Zefram Cochrane and the electric cloud that loves him, and the one with a barbarian princess who ensla

They Walked Like Men , by Clifford D. Simak (1962) I always love Vintage Sci-Fi January, and I jumped right in with a nice Simak title that has been on the shelf for years.  It turned out to be a really fun read!  This is a great one.  (Then I took about a week off blogging for no reason except that I was finishing a quilt and cleaning a lot! I'm now on my fourth vintage SF read.) Parker Graves, a newspaper reporter, comes home one night a bit tipsy, but that saves his life when he spots a strange trap in front of his door.  Then the trap melts and rolls away.  When more odd things happen around town -- most especially, there's a sudden massive housing shortage -- he realizes that an alien invasion is under way.  Who will believe him?  And why do the aliens look like....bowling balls? It's just a funny, well written story that perpetrates an impossible situation, so I was really wondering how it could be solved.  And the aliens believe that they are doing their takeov

Eneas: a Twelfth-Century Romance , translated by John Yunck Storytime: way back in college when I was taking literature classes, one of my favorite classes was on medieval literature, and it was taught by one of my favorite professors, who had a newly-minted Oxford PhD and probably not much familiarity (yet) with Berkeley students.  She threw a mass of really weird stuff at us, which in retrospect was probably not the usual kind of fare for an average introduction to medieval literature -- though of course I had no idea at the time.  We started with the Aeneid , because it was so admired and emulated, and then at some point we read Eneas , a medieval re-telling of the Aeneid that is also really the first of the French romances.  The author took the old-fashioned chansons de geste about heroes (like The Song of Roland ) and combined them with the new fashion for romantic love and psychological evaluation.  So this story features Sir Eneas, the prince and knight, and his great romanc

The Postmortal, by Drew Magary In 2019, a cure for aging is developed.  It's a gene therapy that will prevent you from ever getting any older, although you can still get sick or die from plenty of other causes.  John Farrell gets the cure while it's still illegal, and he will be 29 forever.  His online journal entries over the next 60 years form this novel. What happens when age can be cured?  According to Magary, first people party a lot (despite their lack of immunity from liver damage).  Pro-cure groups protest, demanding it be legalized, while pro-death groups insist the cure will be disastrous and are ready to commit a lot of terrorist acts in the name of getting rid of the cure.  People almost immediately stop getting married and start getting divorces, or inventing cycle marriages with expiration dates.  But within twenty years, things aren't looking so good.  The population of the US has exploded to 750 million and has become a third-world country, just like ev