Musical Monday - The Doctor Who Opening Theme (1974-1981)

Continuing my project of incorporating the music from my list of the Top Ten Science Fiction Television Shows into my Musical Monday series, this week's choice is from Doctor Who, the number seven show on my list of selections, and one of the longest running shows in the history of television. There have been many Doctors, and there have been many Doctor Who theme songs. Granted, they are all very similar, but to the trained ear of a Whovian, they are all easily distinguishable. This is the opening set from the period running from 1974 to 1981, which happens to coincide with the run of Tom Baker as the Doctor.

Every Whovian has "their" Doctor, and it is almost always the man who was playing the Doctor when they first saw the show. "My" Doctor is Tom Baker - my mental image of the Doctor always comes with an old coat with deep pockets full of unending supplies of jelly babies, unruly hair topped with a rumpled hat, and finished off with a ridiculously long scarf. And he's probably walking around with Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, or Romana and saving the universe. Or at least the world.

Previous Musical Monday: This Island Earth by The Nylons

Subsequent Musical Monday: Blake's 7 Closing Scene and Theme

Game, Movie, and Television Music     Musical Monday     Home

Follow Friday - 17 U.S.C. § 106 Protects Exclusive Rights in Copyright

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Beauty but a Funny Girl and I'll Tumble for YA.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Is there a song that reminds you of a book? Or vice versa? What is the song and the book?

I think this may be cheating a little bit, but the song I most associate with a particular book is The Greatest Adventure by Glenn Yarbrough, which I always think of in conjunction with the book The Hobbit. This is probably because the particular song was used as the theme song for the Rankin-Bass animated version of  the book.


When I first saw the Rankin-Bass version, I had not finished reading The Hobbit, and this was the first time I had seen any illustrations of Tolkien's world. As a result, this vision of Middle-Earth is what I first think of when I read any of the books. And as a result, this song is what runs through my head when I follow Bilbo on his adventures.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Trajan Bridge Was Built in 105 A.D.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: There Are Currently One Hundred and Seven Nobel Laureates in Literature

Follow Friday     Home

Review - From Death Comes a Scribbler by the Unknown Scribbler

Short review: A short, illustrated tribute to the late Edward Gorey.

Haiku
Edward Gorey died
Returned in dreams and said "Draw"
So the Scribbler did

Full review: From Death Comes a Scribbler is a short illustrated tribute to the late Ed Gorey, a fact that is pretty much given away by the subtitle of the book "A Tribute to the Master Edward Gorey". Written by the "Unknown Scribbler", the book is more or less a picture-driven love note to the master of macabre and off-kilter illustration with a message that more or less amounts to "Thank you for inspiring me to draw" thrown in.

The text of the book is fairly short, and it is likely that this review will contain more words than the book does. But the meat of the book is not in the text, but rather in the Ed Gorey inspired black line drawn illustrations. The story that the illustrations tell is a fairly simple one: the Scribbler learns of Gorey's death, dreams she is visited by Gorey in a dream, receives a command that she continue drawing from him, and then dedicates her future to fulfilling that imperative. The story is clearly told with affection and love, and reads like a caring and heartfelt eulogy. Or at least a caring and heartfelt eulogy if that sort of thing included a visitation by the subject from beyond the grave.

Anyone looking for something more than a sweet homage to an illustrator's favorite inspiration will be disappointed. Taken for what it is, it is an endearing and creepily cute little book that serves as a fitting send off for one of the more twisted and surreal Gothic artists of recent history.

Unknown Scribbler     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2 edited by Isaac Asimov

Stories included:
The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
Goat Song by Poul Anderson
The Meeting by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
Eurema's Dam by R.A. Lafferty
The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr.
The Deathbird by Harlan Ellison
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin

Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitiude 38 54' N, Longitude 77 00' W by Harlan Ellison

The Hole Man by Larry Niven

Full review: The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2 is part of the continuing series of books compiling all of the Hugo Award winning works of short fiction. As with the previous volumes, the stories in this one are all quite good, which probably explains why they all won Hugo Awards. While no author can be said to dominate the book, with two stories each, it is clear that this was a highly productive era for Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin. This volume also contains the lone Hugo winning story attributed to Cyril M. Kornbluth, which was awarded thirteen years after his death.

The Word for World Is Forest is the first of two Ursula K. Le Guin stories in the volume, set on an alien world called New Tahiti by Earthmen, and Athshe by its inhabitants, that is covered by ocean and forest. Humans have arrived to colonize the place, harvesting the timber because on an Earth that has been covered with cement, wood is more valuable than gold. But the world is occupied by short, green furred inhabitants that the invading humans call "creechies" and keep in pens as little more than slave labor. Because the story is set in Le Guin's Hainish universe, the creechies (and several other non-terran populations) are humans, seeded on far flung planets in the distant past. The creechies make poor slaves, often dazed and sleepy, berated by their human foremen as lazy. The technologically advanced Earthmen despise the creechies, and based upon the studies done by their specialist Lyubov, they assume the natives are passive and entirely non-violent. Until the creechies begin to burn human bases to the ground and slaughter all the inhabitants. The rebellion is led creechie Selver, who had lived as a slave under the human invaders until his wife was raped to death and he was maimed. After Selver was saved by Luybov, he becomes a "dreamer", and then is acknowledged as a god. The twin influences of Selver and a particularly brutal Earthman named Davidson bring the gift of war and murder to the previously peaceful creechies who had until then resolved conflict with ritualized displays and singing contests. The main message of the story is the rise of indigenous peoples against encroaching cultural imperialism, with the creechies filling the role of, among others, the Native Americans in the United States, the Zulus and other tribes in Africa, and the Vietnamese in Vietnam, but this time their actions are not in vain. Their overwhelming numbers, combined with oversight of the Earthmen's actions by the other Hainish worlds, leads to the liberation of their world. But the story runs deeper than a mere resistance story, exploring the nature of cultural misunderstandings, and what it means to be human. Every time I read a Le Guin story, it reminds me what a brilliant writer she is, and this one is no exception.

In the early years of the Hugo Awards, Poul Anderson was a dominant writer, with at least one story appearing in every volume of The Hugo Winners, and the Anderson story featured in this one is Goat Song, a high tech retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The main character, named only Harper, sings disquieting songs that lament the loss of the woman he loves. He petitions the Dark Queen, who is the human interface of SUM, for the return of his dead lover. In Anderson's future, all of humanity is cared for, managed by, and controlled by the vast computer network of SUM, even to the point where an entire person's life is stored on discs worn about one's wrist that will allow SUM to heal almost any malady, and resurrect the dead at some future point in time when the world has been perfected. Intrigued by Harper's pre-SUM appeals to mythology, the Dark Queen takes him deep within SUM to question and study him, and grants his request when Harper promises to turn his considerable persuasive talents to promoting the divinity of SUM. But to test Harper, SUM says that his newly raised beloved will walk behind him out of the bowels of SUM, and insists as a test of his loyalty that he not turn and look to see if she is actually there. This being a retelling of the legend of Orpheus, Harper fails and turns against SUM, dedicating his life to destroying it. Through the story of Harpers' rebellion against SUM, Anderson returns to his favorite theme of human freedom, contrasting Harper's vision of an exciting but dangerous world in which humanity forges its own destiny with the safe and comfortable future that SUM promises. The story taps into both the yearnings of mythology, and the promises and dangers of technology. Harper wants those around him to rediscover their almost feral independence, but not simply for the purpose of returning to barbarism, but rather to give them the fire to explore and find their own way to the stars. Technology, Anderson is saying, is a tool, but should never be a master.

The saddest story in the collection, and one of the saddest science fiction stories I have read is The Meeting by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. Completed by Pohl after Kornbluth's death, the story starts with a parent night at a school for disabled children. Harry Vladek, having moved his family to be near the school, attends the event almost desperately hoping to hear that the school will help his mentally disabled son live something approximating a normal life. And when he leaves and returns home where his wife has been caring for their child, the source of his desperation is revealed. In the second half of the story, Vladek takes a phone call from a doctor who proposes to perform an experimental procedure upon his son. And as the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that the proposal is a brain replacement in which the brain of a mentally healthy but physically dying child will be placed in his own physically healthy but mentally disabled child's body. In effect, he will gain a healthy child, but it won't be his child, even though he and his wife will continue to raise the resulting hybrid. One can feel the parents' frustration at having a grown child with the mind of an infant, but one can also feel the terrible anguish they feel at the prospect of going through with the operation. The story concludes with the choice unresolved, leaving the reader with the awful choice faced by the Vladeks.

Pohl and Kornbluth shared their award with R.A. Lafferty, whose story Eurema's Dam tied with The Meeting for the Best Short Story award. Lafferty tells the life story of Albert, the last of the dolts. He can't manage to do much of anything for himself, so he invents devices and machines to do things for him. He builds machines to eliminate pollution, to keep his accounts, to make teenagers behave, to write for him, and do pretty much everything else. Because of his personal incompetence, Albert is an outcast from society, berated even by his own machines. But because he is responsible for pretty much every invention in the world originated during his lifetime, he is honored with an award named after Eurema, the Greek goddess of invention. And this is the point of the story: that invention and creativity comes from misfits. Not from the people who fit in society. Not from the people who can handle all the tasks expected of them. From the failures, who must find a new way to make their way. I'm not sure I buy all of Lafferty's argument, but it does make for an interesting and in some places humorous story.

There are some works of short fiction that have so much going on in them that they get cluttered and seem rushed. But there are some works of short fiction that manage to pack that same amount into their pages and yet still manage to be sublime. The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr. (a pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon) is packed to the gills, and is also sublime. In the story a very young, very sad, not particularly bright, and grotesquely ugly girl named Burke tires to kill herself but before she can finish the job a corporation swoops in and makes her an offer she can't refuse: they "give" her a new body that is beautiful and graceful, and all she has to do is use the products they tell her to use on television. Her real body is essentially locked away in a closet and she is plugged in to a neural network to control her new body, dubbed "Delphi" via remote signals. The story has so many elements going on that almost any one of them could have carried the story on their own. Advertising is banned, but companies skirt the rules and advertise anyway. Burke is human, but hates herself, and can only be happy when she is wearing a robot body. Delphi is incredibly sexualized, made to be erotically enticing to anyone who sees her, and yet her own senses are deadened to save on the amount of bandwidth needed to control her, even to the point where it is implied that she has no sexual sensation at all. The wild imbalance of wealth, the inherent unreality of what passes for reality in popular entertainment, the passion of young love are all featured. The story barrels through to its seemingly inevitable tragic conclusion as the arrogance of youth and wealth intersect with the innocence of dimwitted love, with doubly fatal results. Sheldon somehow manages to jam all of this into an absolutely brilliant story.

Harlan Ellison normally writes excellent science fiction, but sometimes he transcends the genre and writes actual mythology. The Deathbird is one of those times. In the story, Ellison essentially takes on all of Judeo-Christian myth and turns it upside down, telling the entire tale from the perspective of the snake in the Garden of Eden. But as this is an Ellison story, it isn't just a linear narrative, the story unfolds in the form of quiz questions, pseudo-Bible passages, and short vignettes interlaced with a story in which Stark, the last man alive, and the titular Deathbird travel across a ruined Earth to confront the insane creature humans worshiped as God. The story builds to what the reader assumes will be a climatic confrontation, but in classic Ellison style, it turns out that the confrontation between Stark and God is merely an encounter between an adult and a petulant child throwing a temper tantrum. And stark isn't the petulant child. The story manages to deconstruct religion and do it in a witty and satirical manner. Science fiction is a genre that allows an author the freedom to poke fun at the sacred, or obliquely tackle a subject in a way that would be offensive to some if done directly, and The Deathbird is one of those instances. Because this is an Ellison story, the satire is blunt at times, but the humor masks the very real and very brutal savaging of foolish religious myths.

Ursula K. Le Guin's second contribution in this volume is The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. While Ellison's story deconstructs religion, and Le Guin's other story in the volume is a brutal critique of imperialism, this story is a cheerful but biting take down of utilitarianism. Omelas is a beautiful city with happy and virtuous citizens who live peaceful and joyous lives. Most of the story is taken up with loving descriptions of the city, its contented inhabitants, and the delightful pastoral surroundings. But then the story turns, describing a single child kept locked in a tiny, dark room, fed nothing but slop and grease, sitting in its own excrement, and terrified of the dirty mops left in the dank closet with him. Le Guin makes sure to tell the reader that the child has seen the light, and knows what the world is like outside, commenting on the pathetic pleas the child cries on those rare occasions when someone comes in the room, begging to be let out end promising to be good. And the terrifying truth of the story is that the child must be kept imprisoned in order to preserve the prosperity and happiness of Omelas. After showing the reader the beauty of the city, and the misery of the child, Le Guin takes the part of the citizens of the city and explains how they rationalize the situation: surely assuaging the misery of the child would result in much more total misery when the idyllic lives of Omelas' citizenry are irretrievably disrupted. But the reader recoils from this kind of transactional thinking when applied to a child's misery, and the entirely flawed premise of utilitarianism collapses on itself. The "out" that citizens of Omelas have that allows them to avoid being monsters who profit from the abuse and mistreatment of a child is to "walk away", but even that seems like a weak response in this case. By not overturning the system, and merely leaving the system behind, the walkers allow it to perpetuate, acquiescing in its continued torment of the doomed child, even if they refuse to actually profit from it. As with most of Le Guin's writing, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a thought-provoking and at times profoundly disturbing work.

A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin is another story about humans attempting to interact with and understand an alien culture. To a certain extent the story subverts the typical "understand an alien civilization" story, in that understanding the Shkeen seems to be more dangerous than not understanding them. Two "talents" named Robb and Lyanna are asked to travel to Shkeen by the human administrator of the human presence on the planet. They are both telepathic, but Lya is substantially more powerful than Robb. The Shkeen are a primitive but ancient culture that is far older than human culture, and which is unified by a single common religion. Once a Shkeen reaches the age of forty or so, they are "joined", a process in which they allow a parasite named a Greeshka to attach itself to them and slowly consume them. Eventually, a joined Shkeen makes their way to caverns outside the largest of the Shkeen cities and allows themselves to be entirely consumed by the massive Greeshka that dwell there. The humans have generally adopted a hands off policy, after all, they reason, various other alien cultures have strange practices and it is up to them to decide what they want to do. But humans have started converting to the Shkeen suicide cult, and administrator Valcarenghi is concerned by this, resulting in Robb and Lya's investigation. The plot proceeds fairly straightforwardly: exploring the bronze age Shkeen culture and its rituals, the intimate relationship between Robb and Lya, and the history of human presence of Shkeen. Eventually Lya's talent leads her to an understanding of the Shkeen religion, and understanding that Robb eventually shares, to his sorrow. For Lya, her choice is joyful, but for Robb her choice is acutely painful, and, when one thinks about it, seems to pose a danger to humanity's existence. The story is beautiful, tragic, joyful, sad, and foreboding all wrapped in to one package, and like the other stories in this volume, it is excellent.

Sometimes I think that Harlan Ellison is simply toying with his readers. Each of his stories is so different than his others in form, and yet each is so undeniably "Ellison" that it seems almost as if he is doing nothing more than experimenting in how many ways he can take you on a journey through his mind. In Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitiude 38 54' N, Longitude 77 00' W Ellison combines time travel, mysticism, particle physics, and werewolves into a story about the cost of wasted life and redemption. But Ellison doesn't just throw these things into the story. Instead, he gives hints and glimpses, tantalizing the reader with the story behind the story while keeping you engrossed in the story he is telling at the same time. The story itself is difficult to describe in a way that does it justice: a man who owns a fish that will not die and who may be a werewolf answers an advertisement from a company that may be run by time travelers, and asks them to locate the physical location of a metaphysical item so he can die. Once he has his answer, he gets a physicist friend of his to covertly manufacture a way to make a miniature copy of himself to search within himself for the thing he lost, and once he finds it, he realizes he doesn't need to die any more, and instead makes himself a repository for the unrealized dreams of a pair of women whose lives have been wasted. As with most Ellison stories, the story lies just on the edge of insanity and brilliance, and as usual, it lands just a hair on the side of brilliance.

The last, and weakest story in the collection is The Hole Man by Larry Niven, which is surprising since it is a hard science fiction story, and I am usually quite fond of hard science fiction stories. In the story, an expedition to Mars discovers an abandoned alien base, and sets up shop there to investigate its mysteries. This cramped living quarters and an odd alien device spark a conflict between the spit and polish mission commander Childrey and the disheveled and absent-minded physicist Lear. It seems that the aliens used gravity waves to communicate, and Lear suspects that to create them they used a captured quantum black hole, a notion that Childrey ridicules. Although we are told that Childrey is smart and understands what Lear is talking about, the way he behaves in the story seems to run counter to this assertion. And given that Childrey is supposed to be an experience and presumably well-educated space pilot, his incredulity that sets up the conflict and the final confrontation of the story seems entirely unbelievable. The science that underpins the story is interesting, but the story itself is so implausible that it just sort of falls apart. Even so, the story is carried by the interesting science, and as a result is still pretty good.

As with all of the Hugo Winners collections, this one is packed with good to great short fiction. Some of the stories, such as The Meeting, The Word for World Is Forest, The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and The Deathbird are superlative, while most of the others are just a hair behind them. The only mildly disappointing story in the volume is The Hole Man, and even that is a substantially better than average science fiction story. In short, this book is definitely worth reading and deserves a place on any science fiction fan's bookshelf.

Previous book in the series: The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 1) edited by Isaac Asimov

What are the Hugo Awards?

This volume contains the Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story winners for the Hugo Award for the years 1973, 1974, and 1975.

1972 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella: The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 1)

1976 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella: Home Is the Hangman by Roger Zelazny

1969 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Sharing of Flesh by Poul Anderson (reviewed in More Stories from the Hugo Winners, Volume II)

1976 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Borderland of Sol by Larry Niven

1972 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 1)

1976 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Catch That Zeppelin! by Fritz Leiber

1976 Locus Award Winner for Best Novelette: The New Atlantis by Ursula K. Le Guin

1973 Locus Award Winner for Best Short Story: Basilisk by Harlan Ellison

1975 Locus Award Winner for Best Short Story: The Day Before the Revolution by Ursula K. Le Guin

1972 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson (reviewed in The Hugo Winners, Volume 3: Book 1)

1974 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novelette: Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand by Vonda N. McIntyre

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novella
List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette
List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

List of Locus Award Winners for Best Novelette
List of Locus Award Winners for Best Short Story

List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette

1973 Hugo Award Nominees
1974 Hugo Award Nominees
1975 Hugo Award Nominees

1973 Locus Award Nominees
1974 Locus Award Nominees
1975 Locus Award Nominees

1973 Nebula Award Nominees
1974 Nebula Award Nominees
1975 Nebula Award Nominees

Book Award Reviews     Isaac Asimov     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - This Island Earth by The Nylons

Today is Earth Day, first established in 1970 as a collaboration between environmental groups in an effort to work together towards their shared goals, but the tradition of American conservationism goes back much further, at least as far as Theodore Roosevelt who established the first national parks. For Earth Day, I'm choosing the fairly obscure song This Island Earth by the moderately obscure group The Nylons as my Musical Monday selection, because the song makes clear what a precious thing our world is.

No matter where one falls on the political spectrum, it is incumbent upon us to preserve and protect the planet we live on, because there's really nowhere else to go if we screw it up so much that it becomes uninhabitable. Short of nuclear annihilation, we probably can't destroy life on Earth, but we can probably make it so inhospitable that we couldn't live here any longer, and barring some fairly spectacular advances in technology, there no where else that is accessible that we could flee to.

See that dot? That's us.

In my opinion, the fragility of our world is no better represented than this picture, taken by the Voyager I spacecraft from a distance of about six billion kilometers away. In the vastness of space, our Earth which seems in our everyday experience to be to vast and imposing, is revealed to be a tiny and vulnerable speck hanging in a vast and inhospitable vacuum. Earth is so tiny that in this picture, one has to add an arrow pointing it out or the planet gets lost in the background.

To us, the Earth seems immense, but it is not. It is small, delicate, and easily wrecked. I think that Carl Sagan said it best in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, explaining our place in the cosmos, and exposing the urgent need to treat our only refuge with a little bit more respect than we otherwise might:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Previous Musical Monday: The Twilight Zone Opening Theme

Subsequent Musical Monday: Doctor Who Opening Theme (1974-1981)

The Nylons     Musical Monday     Home

Follow Friday - The Trajan Bridge Was Built in 105 A.D.

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Bookworms Avenue and Words Fueled by Love.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: If you could hang out with any author (living) who would it be and what would you want to do?

My initial reaction to this question is to choose science fiction author and l'enfant terrible Harlan Ellison. Ellison is a brilliant writer with dozens of excellent stories, a Star Trek writing credit, a shelf full of Hugo and Nebula awards, and a creative consultant credit for the television show Babylon 5. Based upon watching several interviews of his, he is also an incredibly interesting and erudite individual, seemingly capable of issuing brilliant off-the-cuff insights on any topic at all. However,  is one of the most cantankerous people in science fiction, and the disputes and arguments that follow him around are almost legendary. He allegedly assaulted Charles Platt at a Nebula awards banquet, criticized Gene Roddenberry for changing the Star Trek script Ellison wrote, had his name removed from the credits of The Starlost in a dispute over changes to the show, sued Fantagraphics for defamation, sued James Cameron for allegedly stealing elements of The Terminator from him, groped author Connie Willis onstage at the World Science Fiction Convention, threw such a fit over not being given an award for the film adaptation of his story A Boy and His Dog that the convention organizers scrounged about and found a Hugo Award base to mollify him, and has generally been litigious and argumentative on a regular basis for most of his life. As a result, I would only want to hang out with Ellison if I could be guaranteed that he would be in a good mood.

Which, I suppose, means that my real choice for what author I would want to hang out with would be the equally brilliant, but far, far less irascible Ursula K. Le Guin. Ever since I first read her Earthsea books when I was a teenager, I have been hooked on Le Guin's fiction. As good as her fantasy fiction is, her science fiction work is better, and novels like The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Lathe of Heaven complement short fiction like The Ones Who walk away from Omelas and The Word for World is Forest, resulting in a body of work that raises thoughtful questions about gender, wealth, poverty, justice, and morality, as well as a host of other issues. Her work delves into a number of anthropological themes, which is understandable as her father earned the first Ph.D. in anthropology in the United States. Le Guin is also no stranger to controversy as she was very vocal in her criticism of the SciFi channel's horrible adaptation of her Earthsea series and she also recently resigned from the Author's Guild over their endorsement of Google's digitization of books. But her fights seem to be more carefully chosen, and directed towards advancing her particular artistic vision, whereas Ellison's anger, righteous though it is, seems to be more broadly aimed. Which means that I think a conversation with Le Guin would probably be less likely to turn into a conflagration, and why I think she would be a superior choice.

Go to previous Follow Friday: There Were One Hundred and Four Corinthian Columns in the Temple of Olympian Zeus

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: 17 U.S.C. § 106 Protects Exclusive Rights in Copyright

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Review - Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

Short review: The love of Dent's life vanishes, so he spends a while wandering the galaxy and making sandwiches. Trillian brings Dent his teenage daughter, Prefect shows up, and the Vogons kill everyone.

Haiku
Fenchurch disappears
Arthur Dent makes sandwiches
Then everyone dies

Full review: The fifth (and thus far, last) installment in the Hitchhiker Trilogy, this book covers the Vogons continuing attempts to destroy Earth, a project they began in the first book. Like the other books, the plot is almost entirely beside the point, as Adams engages in the vicious and humorous satire of almost everything. Sadly, though the viciousness and bitterness is still present, the satire seems to have worn thin and lost almost all of the humor found in previous volumes.

The book opens up with Dent and Prefect once again separated, with Dent set to travel the galaxy with his girlfriend Fenchurch, and Prefect determined to investigate the strange happenings that seem to be taking place at the headquarters of the Hitchhiker's Guide. But the somewhat nihilistic nature of the book begins to take hold when Fenchurch vanishes in the middle of a hyperspace jump never to be seen again. After spending an entire book establishing Fenchurch as a love interest for Dent, Adams kills her off in an almost off-handed way, setting the grim and depressing tone for the book.

Bereft of the love of his life, Dent travels the galaxy anyway, selling his bodily fluids along the way. Because of his encounter with Agrajag in the last book, Dent believes himself to be invulnerable, and more or less doesn't care what happens during his travels. Eventually he finds himself stranded on the planet Lamuella and takes up a life as a sandwich maker, which seems like a metaphor for the whole book: after all of the interstellar wandering about and crazy adventuring, the story fades into mundane triviality.

To break up the monotony, Trillian shows up with Dent's teenage daughter Random who takes the Hitchhiker's Guide Mk II (which had been sent to Dent by prefect earlier in the book and forgotten about) and sets out on adventures of her own. Through the usual set of improbable happenstances the entire crew of regular characters all wind up back on Earth in the same bar, whereupon the mysterious plot that Prefect couldn't unravel at the beginning of the book comes to fruition and everyone dies in a way that seems very conclusive even for the Hitchhiker series. It seems as though Adams was determined to kill off the series, and to do so, felt he had to kill off all of the characters. Consequently, the ending of the book is bleak and depressing, and without even a glimmer of hope.

Unfortunately, Mostly Harmless is much weaker than the others in the series. While the previous books had a light touch and managed to poke fun at things without seeming mean-spirited, this book seems almost devoid of any kind of joy or happiness. I have been told that Adams knew he was dying when he wrote this book, which may account for the depressing tone and nihilistic ending. This bit of understanding (if true) explains why the book is so dark and dreary, but it doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read.

Previous book in the series: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

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Musical Monday - The Twilight Zone Opening Theme

Continuing with the music from my list of the Top Ten Science Fiction Television Shows, this week I am picking one of the iconic pieces of science fiction related music as the Musical Monday selection: The opening theme song to the classic 1960s science fiction show The Twilight Zone.

There are some snippets of music or scenes from movies that take hold of the popular consciousness and permeate themselves throughout the culture in such a way that people who have never seen the original source are still familiar with it. "Soylent Green is people!" and "We don't need no stinking badges!" are examples of this sort of phenomenon. This piece of music from The Twilight Zone is another example. It has been used in so many homages and parodies and referenced countless other times that I doubt if there is anyone over the age of fifteen or so who has not heard those creepy notes that kick off the theme. And I doubt that there is anyone who has not heard some rendition of Rod Serling's famous voice over in the introduction. People who have never seen a single episode of the show instantly recognize the music and the narration.

Previous Musical Monday: Marvin, I Love You by Kimi Wong O'Brien (with Stephen Moore)

Subsequent Musical Monday: This Island Earth by The Nylons

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30 Days of Genre - Who Is Your Favorite Publisher of Genre Novels?

Tor Books

My choice is Tor Books. This was a kind of difficult question to answer, since I don't usually pay much attention to which publisher has produced a book, as I tend to follow authors and genres rather than publishers. But, for their influence as the most decorated dedicated science fiction and fantasy imprint, and the fact that they have published many novels by several of my favorite authors, I guess I'll have to pick Tor Books.

The oldest major publisher of science fiction is probably Ace Books, and if you enjoy reading older science fiction, as I do, you've probably read dozens of novels that they published. Ace published the early work of Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and dozens of other authors who are now counted among the masters of genre fiction. Ace gave many authors their first exposure to a wide audience via their "Ace Doubles", which included two novels in one cover, allowing them to feature up-and-coming authors in a pairing with a more established author. However, in the 1960s, Ace published unauthorized copies of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, essentially trying to sell books without compensating the author. For this, and other lesser sins, I simply cannot name Ace as my favorite genre novel publisher.

Another possible choice was DAW Books, which was the first dedicated science fiction and fantasy publisher, and which has published novels by many of my favorite authors. DAW was founded in 1971 by science fiction editor David A. Wollheim after he left Ace Books, and has published more than 1,500 books since then, including many books that I love, including some by C.J. Cherryh, Andre Norton, and Fritz Leiber. In a very real sense, DAW Books was the only competitor I considered for Tor, and on a different day I might have picked DAW instead of Tor when asked this question. A distant third place would go to Baen Books, but only because they simply haven't had the highlights that DAW and Tor have had: Any imprint that has published Catherine Asaro, Larry Niven, and Lois McMaster Bujold is a first rate publisher.

But in the end, Tor gets the nod. Tor consistently produces the highest quality science fiction and fantasy content, which should really be that much of a surprise because the list of editors who have worked for the company reads like a "Who's Who" of genre fiction editing. Tor has been honored multiple times as the best science fiction publisher by the Locus reader's poll, and books published by Tor have won or been nominated for more genre awards than books published by any other publisher. In short, if you pick up a book published by Tor, you're likely to be holding a good piece of genre fiction in your hands. If that weren't enough, Tor has established a policy of having exclusively DRM free e-books, which moves them up in my estimation by several notches.

Ace, DAW, Baen, and even Ballantine. I'm a fan of all of them as publishers for the great science fiction and fantasy they have brought to the market over the years. But sitting at the top of the heap is Tor.

Go to Day 27: What Is the Most Epic Scene Ever in a Genre Novel?

Go to Day 29: What Genre Novel Did Think You Wouldn’t Like, but Ended Up Loving?

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Follow Friday - There Were One Hundred and Four Corinthian Columns in the Temple of Olympian Zeus

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Mab is Mab and Dear, Restless Reader.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: We are about to see a lot of posts and tweets about reader conventions, RT, BEA, ALA and many more are starting soon. Which one would you love to attend? Where and why?

I have never attended a dedicated reader convention, and haven't ever really considered attending one. I suppose if I were to go to one, I'd probably go to something like BEA, which is in New York, and as a result is relatively close to me. This question (and my answer) seems to me to be yet another indication of how out of the mainstream of book bloggers I am. Before I started writing this blog, I had no idea that reader conventions like ALA and BEA even existed. To be perfectly honest, I didn't know they existed until well after I had been blogging, and to figure out where they were to respond to this question I had to look them up.

That doesn't mean that I don't have plans to go to conventions that involve books. I'm just not really enthused about "reader" conventions. On the other hand, I have gone to, and will go to, several science fiction oriented conventions. I've been to Dragon*Con, InConJunction, PhilCon, CapClave, and so on, none of which are dedicated book conventions (although CapClave is the closest), but all of which give the opportunity to interact with authors and pick up books. I got to meet Catherine Asaro at InConJunction, to meet Cory Doctorow and Joan Slonzewski at PhilCon, to listen to Terry Pratchett and meet Lawrence Watt-Evans and Michael Swanwick at CapClave, and Robert J. Sawyer, Terry Brooks, and Mercedes Lackey at Dragon*Con. These conventions have a lot more going on than book related stuff (such as the panel with Felicia Day, Amy Okuda, and Robin Thorsen at Dragon*Con), but they all have at least something of a literary bent.

Right now, the only convention I have firm plans to go to is GenCon, in Indianapolis, and that's a gaming convention so any book related material that will be there is likely to be gaming related. I'll probably go to CapClave later in the year, as that is near where I live and it is explicitly focused on written science fiction, as opposed to science fiction in film or television. The convention I'd really like to go to would be WorldCon, which is where the Hugo Awards are presented every year, but I seriously doubt I'll be able to go in 2013 when it will be held in San Antonio. And I doubt I'll make it to WorldCon in 2014, because that is set to be held in London, and that would be a little bit too far to go. Oh well, maybe 2105 will be the year that I go.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Ice Truck Killer's Calling Card Was the Number 103

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Trajan Bridge Was Built in 105 A.D.

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Review - So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

Short review: Earth is back but the dolphins have gone missing. Dent falls in love and flies a lot.

Haiku
Dent finds Earth again
But there are no more dolphins
Fall in love and fly

Full review: The fourth book in the Hitchhiker Trilogy is named after the message the dolphins left behind when they abandoned Earth just before it was destroyed by the Vogons. The book finds Arthur Dent back on modern day Earth, which is surprising since the planet was destroyed and he ended the last book on Krikket. It turns out that the Vogons didn't account for alternate probabilities, so alternate versions of Earth exist (restored by the dolphins as part of their Save the Humans initiative), giving Dent a place to live.

Dent wanders about on this restored Earth, and so does the story. He gets a ride from a man named Fenchurch who is beset with a continuous rainstorm that falls upon him, finds the location of the cave that he started the last book in, and locates Fenchurch's "crazy" sister. Dent falls in love with her, does a lot of flying (having learned how in previous book), teaches her how to fly so they can make love in the clouds, and generally engages in not much of substance for the first part of the book. There's a plot line involving a more or less crazy scientist who thinks everyone else in the world is insane, and a mystery involving dolphins that is basically discarded in favor of a giant robot landing in London.

Prefect shows up and convinces Dent to go hitchhiking again to see God's final message. Accompanied by Marvin the Depressed Robot, they find the last message, and Marvin dies, finally happy. More so than any other book in the series, the plot to this book is irrelevant. On the other hand, the satire and humor in the book seems so light as to be almost trivial. Instead of the biting humor of the previous books, it seems like the humor in this book is just silly, and without much of a point. The book reads well though, and even air-light humor that is well-done is enjoyable.

Previous book in the series: Life, the Universe, and Everything
Subsequent book in the series: Mostly Harmless

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Review - Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

Short review: Dent and prefect stumble into a plot to destroy the universe and set out to stop it with all of their old friends. In the end, their actions don't really matter.

Haiku
Stuck in the far past
Thrown into galactic war
It doesn't matter

Full review: The third book in the Hitchhiker Trilogy finds Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect stuck on prehistoric Earth. Through a series of improbable coincidences, they escape, find Slartibartfast, and agree to stop a galactic war. After that the plot becomes a relatively stock affair as Ford, Arthur, and Slartibartfast team up with Trillian, Marvin, and Zaphod to avert the war.

Dent and Prefect start the book trapped deep in the past, but hop onto a sofa that improbably pops up next to them, and as this is a book written by an English writer, they jump forward to the Lord's Cricket Ground just days before the destruction of Earth. With their usual perfect timing, the pair arrive just in time to witness a crew of robots stealing the Ashes, which kicks off the plot, such as it is. All of the familiar characters team up and save the universe from the robots who are on a quest to release an isolated race that has decided they don't like anyone else and wants to destroy the entire universe. Most of the book is an extended series of cricket jokes attached to a plot that ambles along before petering out.

In the end, it turns out that the Krikkit race doesn't want to destroy the universe, making the entire plot pretty much pointless. And that is more or less the main problem with the book, and more or less the point of the book at the same time. There are a couple of wrinkles thrown in: Dent has to deal with a time traveler who is annoyed that Dent has killed him several times, it turns out that the inhabitants of Krikkit have been manipulated by a computer built to wage war, Dent learns to fly, defeats the god Thor, and actually does save the universe, but the plot basically runs in a big circle that goes nowhere. This isn't new - the Hitchhiker books have always used their sparse plots as little more than an excuse to spin off a collection of comic set pieces. This time, however, the plot is simply too thin to support the absurdist parody and biting satire, and the book collapses under their weight.

As is true of all the Hitchhiker books, the plot is merely a framework upon which to hang the humor, parody, and satire. This book is the first in the series to begin to show the cracks as old jokes start to become tired and worn, the satire begins to become a little shrill, and the parody begins to become a little wearying. At a certain point, jokes like those revolving around how "Belgium" is the only offensive word left gets tiresome. However, starting from as high a point as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe allows Adams to show a little drop off in quality while still producing a funny and enjoyable book.

Previous book in the series: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Subsequent book in the series: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

1983 Locus Award Nominees

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Musical Monday - Marvin, I Love You by Kimi Wong O'Brien (with Stephen Moore)

Since I am posting reviews of the books that make up the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, I figured that this was the right time to post the despairing story of the love that Marvin the Paranoid Android never knew he had until it was far too late for him to do anything about it. Which seems about par for the course for Marvin, and perfect for Douglas Adams' books.

I have no idea when or how this song was originally released, but I was first exposed to it on the album The Very Best of Dr. Demento. Oddly, despite the fact that I never actually listened to his show being broadcast on the air (mostly because when it was being regularly broadcast I was in Africa, and as a result had no nearby local affiliate), I have always been a fan. The show is now only available online at the Official Dr. Demento Website.

The spoken voice portion of the song is performed by Stephen Moore, who voiced Marvin for the BBC radio and television adaptations, while the siren song of the beauty who left a love note for the depressed robot is performed by Kimi Wong O'Brien.

Previous Musical Monday: Dead Puppies by Ogden Edsl

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Twilight Zone Opening Theme

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Follow Friday - The Ice Truck Killer's Calling Card Was the Number 103

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Book Cupid and Bookworm in Love.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Have you ever read a book that you thought you would hate? Did you end up hating it? Did you end up loving it? Or would you never do that?

As I have discussed elsewhere on this blog, I sometimes read books I know, or at least I believe, are going to be terrible. I have read dozens of books that I was pretty sure I would hate before I turned the first page: PureHeart (read review), for example, had misspellings in the blurbs on the back cover, which I took as an indication that the book was going to be pretty awful, and when I read it, I discovered that my initial assumption had been dead on. Right now I am reading Dark Dawning, which I expected to be a fairly bad book, and it has exceeded my expectations by being a truly putrid, and at times actually offensive, book.

So the answer to the question "have you ever read a book that you thought you would hate" is yes. And in every one of the cases I can remember, my prediction that the book would be awful, and that I would hate it, turned out to be true. But I still read those kinds of books. I don't know why.

Go to previous Follow Friday: The Empire State Building Has One Hundred and Two Floors

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: There Were One Hundred and Four Corinthian Columns in the Temple of Olympian Zeus

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Review - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Short review: The view from the restaurant is just a gnab gib, so everyone steals a ship and crashes.

Haiku
At the restaurant
Watch the whole universe end
Humans aren't from Earth

Full review: The second book in the Hitchhiker Trilogy takes place immediately after the first book concludes. The group of characters featured in the first book split up, with Zaphod finding out that he is the heart of a conspiracy to discover the true ruler of the universe (despite being president of the galaxy, it isn't him - specifically because he is president, and anyone who would want to be president shouldn't have any actual power). After some twists and turns Zaphod winds up at the restaurant of the title with the others, and they all steal a ship.

The ship turns out to be unalterably programmed to dive into a star, and everyone (except Marvin, who stays behind to operate the machine) uses a teleportation device to escape. Zaphod and Trillian find the ruler of the universe. Ford and Arthur find themselves on an alien ship that crashes on prehistoric Earth - and discover that the aliens displaced the indigenous life on the planet becoming the actual ancestors of humanity. This, of course, disrupted the Earth's functioning, meaning that the question for which "42" is the answer may never be solved - Arthur discovers this when he tries to unravel what the correct question would be and gets the result "what is six times nine".

Of the five books, this and the first are the best. The humor is funny without being frivolous, the satire is biting without becoming too nasty. As with all of the books, the plot serves as little more than a frame on which to hang jokes, satire, and comments on the absurd nature of the universe, but those elements are brilliantly well-done in this book.

Previous book in the series: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Subsequent book in the series: Life, the Universe, and Everything

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Review - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Short review: Arthur Dent is boring and normal, but he's going to travel the galaxy with Ford Prefect. And he forgot his towel.

Haiku
Earth destroyed by an
Intergalactic freeway
Don't forget your towel

Full review: The first installment in a five book trilogy, this work is one of the must-reads of science fiction. In the book, the perfectly ordinary and somewhat pathetic Arthur Dent, with the help of the human-appearing alien Ford Prefect, escapes from the Earth just as it is about to be destroyed by Vogons to make room for a interstellar byway.

Arthur learns that Ford is a researcher for a publication called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy assigned to study Earth, and that the sum total of his contribution after years of study is to change the entry for Earth from "Harmless" to "Mostly harmless". Forced to take up galactic hitchhiking with Ford, Arthur winds up on the ship Heart of Gold with Zaphod Bebblebrox, the two-headed president of the galaxy, Marvin the depressed robot, and another human named Trillian.

Through a series of improbabilities (using the Heart of Gold's improbability drive), the characters find Slartibartfast, a planetary coastline engineer, and are told the story of the supercomputer Deep Thought, which was designed to tell what the meaning of life, the universe, and everything was - coming up with the answer "42". Arthur then learns that the Earth was merely a giant computer designed to find out what the question is that the answer "42" applies to, and that it was destroyed just moments before it had produced an answer. Earth's designers, disguised as mice, want to dissect Arthur's brain to find out the answer, but he, and the other characters escape.

The book's plot (and the plot of the various sequels) is mostly beside the point. The book is brutally funny throughout: just about every paragraph contains some absurdity or piece of parody. The political and social satire woven through the book pokes fun at the odd things that we accept as a routine part of everyday life, attacking them from unexpected angles and in many cases exposing the silliness of the assumptions people make about their surroundings.

Subsequent book in the series: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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Musical Monday - Dead Puppies by Ogden Edsl

Because it is April 1^st, I am taking a break from featuring the music of my top ten science fiction television shows on Musical Monday in order to feature a completely truthful song. As the lyrics state, dead puppies aren't much fun. This was Ogden Edsl's most popular song, and is the only song to top Dr. Demento's "Funny 25" countdown two years in a row. The song was the most requested song on the Dr. Demento Show for a long period of time, and the most complained about song as well. It was not, however, Ogden Edsl's most controversial song. That would be Kinko the Clown, which is about a pedophile who poses as a clown to lure children to him. The tastelessness of Dead Puppies pales in comparison.

Ogden Edsl represents a kind of band that would be rendered almost obsolete in the modern era. The pervasiveness of the media essentially killed off the small labels that recorded quirky local bands and released limited runs of their albums. These bands now turn to the internet and record their material on their own, and if they are lucky, they become a viral sensation for a couple weeks, and then they vanish. The fact that the sort of bubbling local music scene that would allow a band like Ogden Edsl a career with the freedom to write and record deliciously weird music is mostly dead makes me sad.

Previous Musical Monday: The Prisoner Opening Theme

Subsequent Musical Monday: Marvin, I Love You by Kimi Wong O'Brien (with Stephen Moore)

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