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....

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 th...

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 ind...

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 ...

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 b...

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 fac...

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 th...