Howling Frog Books

Footsteps, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (vol 3 in the Buru Quartet) My Spin title is actually the third in a quartet.  You can see the previous two books:  This Earth of Mankind , and Child of All Nations , in which Minke, who is very privileged for a Native in Dutch-controlled Indonesia, starts to get a grip on what colonial control has meant to his country.  At the close of the second volume, I commented: This volume is pretty well entirely about coming to understand the workings of colonialism, but Minke seems to need even more knowledge before he can begin to act. And at this point the story takes something of a turn.  In Footsteps , Minke learns more and does indeed start to act.  It's also at this point that the story becomes clearly modeled on a real-life person: Tirto Adhi Suryo, an Indonesian journalist who started the first Native newspaper .  Here, we cover the years 1901 - 1912.  At the start, however, Minke is just beginning medic...

Star Trek 10 , by James Blish It's yet another in that series we all read at the library as kids, in which Blish novelized the original Star Trek episodes.  I didn't even know it went up to 10!  This one does have a great Klingon ship on the cover. There are six stories, and I actually couldn't remember some of them, so I wound up watching a couple too.  The most famous on this list was "The Galileo Seven," and there was also one of the worst episodes ever, "The Omega Glory" (that's the one with the Yangs and the Kohms and the pledge of allegiance).   I've never been much of a fan of "A Private Little War," either. "The Alternative Factor," for instance, I didn't remember at all (and I still haven't watched it).  This guy named Lazarus keeps screaming about a monster who will destroy everyone, but then sometimes he's calm.  Spock figures out that they're alternate-dimension versions of each other, and o...

Last Ones Left Alive, by Sarah Davis-Goff I was intrigued by the premise of this story, which is that Orpen has grown up on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland with just her mother and Maeve, who have raised her to fight the skrake, the monstrous menace that destroyed their world.  Now Orpen has to go in search of other survivors, if there are any. So: post-Apocalyptic Ireland!  Fun! But I found it kind of disappointing.  Orpen spends her whole life wishing to go to the mainland for adventure, to see something new, to learn about the world.  The adults around her won't talk about it or explain, which seems like the obvious way to get her to run off unprepared at her first chance.  The skrake, which sounds really interesting, turns out to be....well, I'll put it down at the bottom, if you was to avoid spoilers.* So Orpen is on her way to find Phoenix City, which is supposed to be full of banshees -- formidable women warriors.  Again, every human b...

The Door Through Space , by Marion Zimmer Bradley I'm not a big MZB fan, as I find her Problematic to say the least.  And I didn't care for Mists of Avalon even in the 90s.  But I adore Ace Doubles!  So I thought I'd see what this one was about.  It's only her second novel, from 1961. I was forcibly reminded of Leigh Brackett's Stark novels.  I'm going to call this story a shameless Leigh Brackett ripoff. This guy, Race, used to be a secret agent, but he's been working in an Earth government office for years, in a little outpost on Wolf, that isn't quite a colony.  Wolf has a large population of both humans and non-humans, but they're all pretty strange.  Race's sister, who married his former partner and best friend and joined his culture, shows up needing help, so Race goes off to find his former friend, kill him, and also save the planet from the nefarious conspiracy that threatens it.  And probably he'll fall in love with a girl. ...

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, by Alexandra Popoff Vasily Grossman isn't anywhere near as well-known as he ought to be.  My plan is to read some of his books, but they're heavy stuff so I thought I'd start with this biography so I could get situated. Grossman was born in 1905, in the Russian Empire, and was educated as a chemical engineer in the USSR.   He changed careers and became a writer and journalist in the 1930s -- he was always trying to tell the truth about what he saw, so his first novel was about the miners he'd known at his job.  He then worked as a journalist attached to the army during the war, and was present through nearly all of the battle of Stalingrad.  He was also one of the first people to witness what had happened Treblinka.  After the war, he had to deal with constant censorship and difficulty, as he spent just about the rest of his life trying to communicate what he knew and believed. He worked on the Black Book of Russia...

What an awful cover Little Fuzzy , by H. Beam Piper I'd heard of this novel, but didn't know anything about it when I picked up a battered paperback from a donation box.  I figured if it was pretty famous I should read it. Centuries in the future, humanity has an interplanetary civilization, and Zarathustra is a newly-settled planet.  Rich in resources, it's classed as having no sapient life and is run by a management company.  Then Jack Holloway, a prospector out on the edges, meets up with a critter so cute that it can only be called a Fuzzy.  Little Fuzzy clearly wants to live with Jack, and so he adopts him as a pet...but right away it becomes clear that Little Fuzzy is pretty smart.  In fact, he's got a spear, and he can figure things out, and make art, and the next thing you know he's brought the whole family in.  Pappy Jack is delighted with the Fuzzy family, and so is everybody else, except the executives of the Company.  Because if Fuz...

Ordeal in Otherwhere , by Andre Norton It's very odd, but I've never read Andre Norton.  Her books were all over the house when I was growing up, because my sister was a big fan, but I never picked them up.  So this year I decided I'd have to give Norton a try.  We had a few around the house, but they were all fantasy, so I got some from my sister's old room -- there was a whole pile.  I picked this one. This incredibly amateurish cover hides a pretty good story set on the world of Warlock.  Some googling taught me that Warlock books are not the same as Witch World books; there are five Warlock books, called the Forerunners series, and it turns out that the first one is in my pile too, and the only reason I didn't pick it was that it's in a protective bag with a price tag on it, which made me nervous.  OK, so... Charis, member of a planetary colony gone wrong, is sold to a trader and ends up on the planet of Warlock, where she is supposed to work out ...

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World, by Tim Marshall I've been having a lot of fun reading all that old-time SF, but I have also been reading regular books!  It's just, they are a lot slower.  So here is a non-vintage-SF book for you, that I found just fascinating. Years ago, Jared Diamond showed readers that geography determined much of world history, because basic factors like domesticatable animals, navigable rivers, and mosquitoes are so important.  Tim Marshall shows readers that geography still does determine modern history and current geopolitics.  Why will China never, ever let Tibet regain independence?  Why will Russia do pretty well anything to keep Ukraine firmly under its thumb?  Why does everyone tread very softly around North Korea?  It all comes down to the cold, hard facts of geography. In ten chapters, Marshall explains -- in a thumbnail version -- the past and present of various areas of t...

The Lotus Caves , by John Christopher I really like John Christopher, and I think it's a shame that his books have disappeared so completely.  I'm thinking of collecting him.  I have some, of course, because my oldest really likes Christopher too, and I found that we had more than I thought when I was moving some books around.  So I read The Lotus Caves , from 1969. In 2068, the Moon colony is doing well.  Marty has lived his entire life inside the Bubble; visits to Earth are too expensive, so everyone is there on a 25-year contract, no vacations.  Everything is extremely utilitarian, but there's a nice recreation center for sports and fun.  When Marty and his buddy Steve play a prank, they're punished with a month's ban from the recreation center, which strikes me as a really bad plan if you're trying to squish a couple of rowdy 13-year-old boys.  Marty and Steve find a way to take a crawler out of the Bubble and explore farther than they're all...

The Case Against Tomorrow , by Frederik Pohl Here we have six short stories published in the mid-50s, gathered under the theme of 'ways in which things could go kind of wonky in the future.'  They're not anti -future, of course, just oddball takes on it. The first one, I had read before, though I don't know where.  "The Midas Plague" involves a future in which robots produce a world of plenty, but there's far too much, so it's the job of the poor to consume all the food, clothing, home decor, and everything else.  It's a terrible amount of work, and the richer you are, the simpler a life you can live, and work at an actual job.  I particularly liked the mandated group therapy, which involves a group of therapists for the poor client; only the rich can afford to have just one therapist at a time.  What is the solution to all this plenty? I didn't much care for "The Census Takers" -- which was about overpopulation but wasn't a...

Siege Perilous , by Lester Del Rey In the not-too-distant future, Earth has an orbiting space station, which is meant to ensure world peace (especially for the nation that built it) under shifting alliances within a Cold War that never really ended, but which currently has Russia allied with the US against Eurasia.  Most of the staff are there for only a few months at a time, since living in space is hard on the mental health, but Fred Hunter has been there for ten long years, ever since the station was built.  He built quite a lot of it himself, in fact, before the accident that rendered him unable to return home.  Fred is always and forever homesick, but he has stubbornly remained sane. Then the station is invaded and taken over in a matter of just a few hours, but who are the guys wearing those spacesuits?  Not Eurasia.  A small, scrappy nation?  The invaders' suits are out-of-date, so maybe...but then when they speak, the mystery deepens. "Mount...

The Metal Monster, by A. Merritt I've never heard of A. Merritt, but he was pretty well known; just a long time ago.  The Metal Monster first appeared in 1920 as the inaugural story for Argosy magazine. Four American explorer-scientists (three men, one woman) meet up in the Himalayas and witness some very unusual phenomena in the sky.  Then they run into a vicious crowd of ancient Persian soldiers, the descendants of the Persian armies defeated by Alexander, who fled into hiding.  They take refuge in a cave, where they discover a mysterious arrangement of metal shapes...which move . As the soldiers attack, they flee and find a beautiful woman who commands more of the metal shapes.  Arrangements of cubes, pyramids and spheres move and change to do whatever they need to do.  They're clearly intelligent, and Norhala leads the scientists and the cubes back to a massive city hidden deep in the mountains.  The city is itself made of these living metal sha...

The Voice That Thunders, by Alan Garner Remember last month, when I posted about Four British Fantasists and there was quite a bit about Alan Garner, but I didn't really love Boneland ?  Well, the book also quoted a collection of Garner essays, and I ILL'ed it for fun.  I really only expected to skim through it, but to my surprise... I enjoyed this book of essays so much!  It turns out I like Garner's essays better than his novels, maybe.  They are, of course, still wildly obsessive about his corner of Cheshire, but he's so much more descriptive that it winds up being a lot of fun; it invites the reader in instead of closing out. These are actually mostly speeches given at various meetings, with the odd essay thrown in.  Garner produces this nice mixture of discussion about his family history; Cheshire language, history, and folklore; archaeology; and his writing.  And also his struggles with his mental health; what he thought was depression turned o...

Exiled From Earth, by Ben Bova Ben Bova is another new-to-me author!  This is a pretty short novel, the kind of thing a younger SF fan might read, but it does not feature kids.  Also, Ben Bova is 87 but he's still around. In the future, there are 20 billion people on earth and the cities are no-go zones populated by vicious gangs.  Lou Christopher is a computer engineer at a scientific research center, where they are just on the verge of genetic engineering, and Lou's computer code is the key.  Pretty soon they'll be able to scan a zygote's DNA, find the broken bits, and rebuild them so that people can be born physically perfect geniuses! Instead, the world government arrests all the geneticists and sends them into exile on a space station orbiting the Earth.  They figure genetic engineering will destabilize the careful balance they're keeping, and it's too dangerous.  Lou tries to escape, but failing that, is recruited by a government official who...

Bill, the Galactic Hero , by Harry Harrison I've never read any Harry Harrison!  He wrote The Stainless Steel Rat stories, and also the story that became the film Soylent Green .  So I'd heard of him, but this was the first book I've actually read, and it is from 1965. Bill is a simple farmboy, drafted into the military for the endless war against the Chingers -- giant 7-foot lizards.  After a miserable time at bootcamp, he joins a ship and has a miserable time there, but he accidentally becomes a hero too.  So he's got a new arm that used to be his buddy's, and he's off to the center of the galactic empire, Helior, to get a medal.  Helior is just like Coruscant or Trantor, and poor Bill gets lost in the endless labyrinth.  Now he's AWOL... I think this is really a darkish SF comedy for GIs.  I can see an army vet getting a lot of laughs out of this story, which plays with the miseries and pointless conundrums of military life.  It didn't do...

Spock Must Die! by James Blish This was so fun!  I picked it up at a sharing shelf at the college where I work, and it has clearly made the rounds for a long time.  It's a library discard from someplace in Ohio, a good 40 years old, and started life as a paperback put into a library binding.  I figured out from the introduction that this must be the very first Star Trek novel ever written.  James Blish had been doing the novelizations of episodes -- I read a lot of those as a kid and have reviewed one here f or a previous Vintage Sci-Fi post -- and when the series was cancelled, he wrote this novel too.  It's from 1969, and he's hoping that Star Trek won't die after only three years.  Well, James Blish, I think you got your wish!  The Enterprise is on a long surveying mission on the far side of the Klingon empire when the Klingons spring a massive surprise attack on Federation space!  The crew can't get back to help with the war, but they ...

Huzzah, Karen at Books and Chocolate has decided to go for another year of the beloved Back to the Classics Challenge ! I think some of this year's categories are pretty challenging.  Here they are: 1. 19th Century Classic.  Any classic book originally published between 1800 and 1899. 2. 20th Century Classic.  Any classic book originally published between 1900 and 1970.  All books in this category must have been published at least 50 years ago.  The only exceptions are books that were published posthumously but were written at least 50 years ago.  3. Classic by a Woman Author. 4. Classic in Translation.  Any classic originally written in a novel other than  your  native language. You may read the book in your native language, or its original language (or a third language for all you polyglots). Modern translations are acceptable, as long as the book was originally published at least 50 years ago. Books in translation a...