Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Volume CXXIX, No. 12 (December 2009) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
To Climb a Flat Mountain, Conclusion by G. David Nordley
Formidable Caress by Stephen Baxter
Wilderness Were Paradise Enow by H. G. Stratmann
The Jolly Old Boyfriend by Jerry Oltion
The Universe Beneath Our Feet by Carl Frederick
A Flash of Lightning by Robert Scherrer

Science fact articles included:

Plate Tectonics, Goldilocks, and the Late Heavy Bombardment: Why Earth Isn't Mars or Venus by Richard A. Lovett

Full review: Overall, this is not a very good issue. With really only two decent stories and a bunch of clunkers, this issue seems even more disappointing coming on the heels of the less than stellar November issue of Analog. One weak issue once in a while is merely annoying, two weak issues in a row is a disturbing trend that I hope is reversed soon.

As the most famous author with a story in this issue, Stephen Baxter gets the cover illustration for his Formidable Caress. Unfortunately, being written by a famous author doesn't prevent the story from being fairly uneven in quality. While the setting - a collection of civilizations on interlinked layers each moving at different relativistic speeds, and thus experiencing a different flow of time - is interesting and well-laid out, as are the interactions between the inhabitants of the various layers, the artificial intelligence character seems to be fairly dim, relying upon the human protagonist for information about the periodic "formidable caresses". In the end, the "formidable caress" element of the story seems not particularly interesting and figuring them out seems like it should have been a trivial exercise for the artificial intelligence. The central mystery of the story, focusing on the nature of humanity's "effigies", ends up mostly unresolved and what resolution there is comes out of left field and is completely unrelated to any of the story that preceded it, giving the story a somewhat unsatisfactory feel.

The issue also contains the second half of G. David Nordley's two part To Climb a Flat Mountain. As I said in concerning the first half, a decent conclusion could raise the story from mediocre to good. However, the second half of the story actually moves the rating the other direction, as a somewhat interesting setting and moderately interesting opening is wasted with a "super powerful aliens save the day" twist. The story chugs along in fairly predictable fashion until aliens start resurrecting dead people, reveal that the cube world is indeed an artificial construct, and tell everyone they can go home or not, depending on what they want to do. And then they tie everything up with a big bow and give humanity a figurative kiss. Needless to say, I found the resolution fairly disappointing.

Also featuring super powerful aliens is H.G. Stratmann's Wilderness Were Paradise Enow, featuring the return of Katarina and Martin originally introduced in The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya. Picking up right where the previous story left off, our intrepid explorers are now presented with an awesome choice by the aliens they encountered on Mars. To explain too much of the story would give everything away, so I'll just say that the shape of the future of humanity is at stake and the wrong choice could be fatal. The story is probably the best of the issue, even though in many issues it would be merely middle of the pack.

The Jolly Old Boyfriend by Jerry Oltion is this year's designated December Christmas story, and like most Christmas stories in Analog, the Christmas element seems fairly forced. Thankfully, this story about the return of an apparently dead boyfriend is fairly short, although it is highly predictable and not particularly interesting. Carl Frederick's The Universe Beneath Our Feet is told from an alien viewpoint and requires the reader to unravel exactly what is going on. It is a hard science fiction story, so it all makes sense and everything becomes clear in the end. There's not much to the story, and I would have liked more from the story, as it seemed to end just when things got interesting.

Richard A. Lovett contributes another excellent science fact article Plate Tectonics, Goldilocks, and the Late Heavy Bombardment: Why Earth Isn't Mars or Venus, which seems kind of apropos considering the nature of the fictional events in the background of Wilderness Were Paradise Enow. I have begun to wonder where Lovett finds the time to write as much as he does though: he seems to have a story or article (or both) in almost every recent issue of Analog, and all seem to be thoroughly researched and well-written. Seriously, the man must never sleep.

The combination of Wilderness Were Paradise Enow and Lovett's sceince fact article manage to rescue this issue from being a total loss. Baxter's contribution is also not a complete waste, although it clearly is not his best work. The rest of the issue is pretty much filler at best. Even the installment of Probability Zero is weakly executed. This was, in short, an underwhelming issue full of mediocrity.

Previous issue reviewed: November 2009
Subsequent issue reviewed: January/February 2010

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30 Days of Genre - What Is Your Favorite Book Trailer for a Genre Novel?

These are the sorts of questions that highlight just how idiosyncratic of a book blogger I am. Whereas it seems that most of my fellow book bloggers are plugged into the world of upcoming releases, exciting book trailers, and fan-made soundtracks for books, I find myself mucking about with cheap paperbacks published a decade or more before I was born, or collections of short stories that appeared in pulp magazines back when there was still a thriving pulp magazine industry.

So, the problem for me for this question is that most of the books I read and review don't actually have book trailers, that sort of thing being in the far future when they were published and marketed. And for the books I read that are recent enough to have book trailers, I just don't watch them. The truth is that I had never even heard of a book trailer until I started doing the 30 Days of Genre meme. So my range of choices is fairly limited, both by the nature of the books I read and my own personal lack of experience looking at book trailers.

So, I'll pick a book that I like that happens to be one of the few books that I have seen the book trailer that goes with it. The Dust of 100 Dogs (read review) by A.S. King is a brilliant book about Saffron, a poor girl in modern day Pennsylvania, and Emer, an Irish pirate in the 16^th century, and their oddly intertwined lives, as well as the curse that requires Emer to live out a hundred lives as a dog. I have no idea how the trailer for this book matches up to trailers for other books, but I loved this book, so I figure that's as good a reason as any to choose this as my favorite trailer. Because a trailer is supposed to promote a book, and anyone who picks up this book is going to enjoy reading it.

As long as I'm at it, I may as well point out that the other brilliant book by A.S. King that I have read is Please Ignore Vera Dietz (read review), and it also has a fun trailer to watch. I didn't select Vera Dietz here, but that is only because the book is not really a genre book, although it does have some genre-like elements. In any event, I'm going to put that book trailer here too, because I can. I hope that you enjoy both of the trailers.

Go to Day 13: What Genre Novel Have You Read More Than Five Times?

Go to Day 15: What Is the Cover of Your Current or Most Recent Genre Read?

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Book Blogger Hop September 21st - September 27th: Alice Cooper's First Top Ten Hit Was "I'm Eighteen"

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: What is one thing that your blog readers probably do not know about you?

This is a mildly difficult question to answer, because I have been fairly open about most of the somewhat unusual things about me. Anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time would know that I am a lawyer, I work for the Federal government, I lived in Africa for several years, I went to a boarding school for high school, and I hold a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

I suppose I will go with the thing that surprises people the most in real life, which is that I was a fairly serious athlete in high school, although I was a fairly monomaniacal one. I earned seven varsity letters in high school, all in cross-country or track, and I was All-State in cross-country my 6^th form year.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: William Holden Starred in the Movie Stalag 17

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: "Nineteen" Is a Song About the Vietnam War by Paul Hardcastle

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Follow Friday - Seventy-Seven Is the Smallest Positive Integer to Require Five Syllables in English

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 - Northern Plunder and The Authoress.
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: What hyped up book do you think was worth all the talk?

This week's question and I'm going to go to the inverse of last week's answer and pick Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (or, the original title which doesn't assume the reader is illiterate, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). I know that choosing this book means that I am bypassing jumping in on the Hunger Games (read review) bandwagon, and although I think that the Hunger Games did live up to its hype, I think the first Harry Potter book did so even better, at least for me.

I know that last week I picked Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the book that most failed to live up to its hype, and I stand by that assertion. But the first book in the series was an entirely different kettle of fish. When the first Harry Potter book came out, I didn't really pay much attention. It was a fantasy series for kids, and I was busy sucking in as much science fiction as I could get my hands on. But my brother read them and was converted, and then spent his time telling me I should read them. It wasn't until he sent me the first three books in the series as a Christmas present that I actually deigned to read them. And he was absolutely right. The books were great, and completely lived up to the press they were getting. The series slowly slid downhill later, but the first book more than lived up to the attention it was given.

Go to previous Follow Friday: There Were Seventy-Six Trombones in the Big Parade

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: A Typical Tarot Deck Has Seventy-Eight Cards

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Review - The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

Short review: Andrew Harlan and the other Eternals guard humanity by changing time. But their "help" may turn out to be not so helpful after all.

Haiku
Travel throughout time
For humanity's safety
And that's the problem

Full review: Asimov is most famous for writing his Robot books and the Foundation series, but I think his stand alone novels are among his best works. This is one of his best - a time travel story that avoids creating a situation in which time paradoxes weigh the story down while pointing out some of the troubles time travel might cause, even if applied for apparently benevolent purposes.

Asimov liked time travel stories. His catalogue of short stories is full of them, but this appears to be his only time travel novel. The central character, Andrew Harlan, is a member of the Eternals, an organization that controls time travel technology, and as a result, controls history. The organization is run for generally benevolent purposes, and seeks to protect humanity from danger. Harlan travels through time "fixing" small events to prevent the development of dangerous technology, and protect humanity from itself. Unfortunately, as the plot develops, it turns out that this benevolence comes at a cost, and protecting humanity from danger also means protecting it from opportunity, leading to stagnation and death.

Though Asimov's characters are generally seen as somewhat one-dimensional, the character of the protagonist in this novel makes sense (even if he is a bit wooden). What truly drives this book is its examination of the implications of time travel, even if it were to be used wisely (and not, for example, to go back and create a time paradox by killing your own grandfather before he sired your father). This is one of Asimov's best works, and one of the reasons he is considered to be one of the "Big Three" of the genre.

1956 Hugo Award Finalists

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Review - For Us, the Living by Robert A. Heinlein

Short review: Perry falls forward into the future and finds a utopia built on nonsense.

Haiku
Jump to the future
Find a utopian world
Too bad it's nonsense

Full review: This novel was not published until after Heinlein's death, but was written by him in 1938 or 1939, and consequently has been called Heinlein's first novel. When reading the novel it quickly becomes apparent why no publisher wanted to release it when Heinlein originally tried to sell it: the book simply isn't that good. It would also have been unsalable in the 1930s with its open attitude towards sex, and almost offhanded acceptance of lesbianism. The story, such as it is, follows Perry who is catapulted from a fatal accident in 1936 forward 150 years to the U.S.A. of the future. The reader is then treated to a badly written utopian fantasy that only makes sense if you assume that the entire book is merely Perry's dying brain spinning an elaborate delusion in the last seconds of his life.

The novel shows glimpses of ideas that Heinlein would flesh out and make interesting in other books. One can see the first elements of his future history here, including Neimiah Scudder, the development of Coventry as a place to store disaffected exiles, the use of psychology to treat criminals rather than using a penal system, and so on. Many of Heinlein's ideas are here in embryonic form as well: The idea that government should leave people's social relations solely up to them, an advocacy for an open "free-love" type arrangement between the sexes, and so on.

But the novel is saddled with characters so wooden that you get splinters reading about them. The novel is so didactic that much of it is nothing more than characters giving long lectures on the "correct" ways of doing things. The economic system presented in the novel is ludicrous in the extreme (and is clearly one that only an engineer could love) that has so many things wrong with it that it would be difficult to list them all (some of the most glaring are that the system presented is a recipe for hyperinflation, demonstrates an abject lack of knowledge concerning how banks work, and clearly has no grasp of the time value of money). The social system presented (in the same heavy handed moralizing manner as the economic system) is just as silly, requiring characters to behave in inhuman ways to make it work. The novel is almost as annoying as Bellamy's Looking Backward or Star Trek: The Next Generation, littered with repeated statements about how the humans of the future are so superior to those who lived in the past (the extended lecture supposedly demonstrating why Congress is so much better run in 2086 is simultaneously absurd and offensive).

One element that is clear is that the young Heinlein had an almost child-like faith in the ability of government to cure all ills. Political campaigns are regulated by the government, which makes politicians better. The government takes over banks, which makes them better. The government runs the economy on an engineering basis, which makes it better, and on and on.

The end result is a novel that is boring to read when it isn't making your head hurt with the incredibly silly ideas that are presented as being incredibly good ideas. The book is really only of interest to a Heinlein fan looking to see the development of Heinlein's thought process. For anyone else, this book is simply not worth the time it takes to read it.

2005 Locus Award Nominees

Robert A. Heinlein     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Our Biggest Challenge by Symphony of Science

Once again Symphony of Science gives us a collection of scientists singing about reality in a way that reveals the true poetry in the universe, and the true dangers we face in our future. Two kinds of people will hate this video: (1) people who hate autotune, and (2) people who think global warming is a myth. And I don't care, because this video has Isaac Asimov singing about how we need to have global cooperation for global problems. It also has Bill Nye, Richard Attenborough, and David Alley, who are all cool guys and great advocates for science, but none of them are Isaac Asimov.

This song is unavailable on Amazon, but you can acquire it for free (or a donation of your choosing) on the Symphony of Science Collector's Edition.

Previous Musical Monday: Flash by Queen

Subsequent Musical Monday: Apostrophe: A Grammatical Lament by The Doubleclicks

Symphony of Science Playlist     Musical Monday Playlists

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Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Volume CXXX, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2010) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
Neptune's Treasure by Richard A. Lovett
Thus Spake the Aliens by H. G. Stratmann
The Possession of Paavo Deshin by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Simple Gifts by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Shame by Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn
On Rickety Thistlewaite by Michael F. Flynn
Rejiggering the Thingamajig by Eric James Stone
A War of Stars by David L. Clements

Science fact articles included:
Twins: Never Identical by Victor Raggio, M.D.
Take Off Your Hat: You're in the Presence of Culture by Stephen R. Balzac

Special features included:

Making Reality Ring Untrue: Writer's Tricks for Bringing Stories to Life by Richard A. Lovett

Across My Life . . . by Ben Bova

Poems included:
Undocumented Alien by Robert T. Lundy

Full review: As usual in a double issue, this edition of Analog has more than the usual ups and downs, which is to be expected as it has more content. Unusual for a double issue, there are more ups than downs, resulting in a pretty good issue.

Brittney and Floyd return in Richard A. Lovett's Neptune's Treasure, a hard science story about finding evidence of aliens in the outer solar system. Having previously appeared in Brittney's Labyrinth the two companions, a taciturn outer system engineer and his hyper intelligent juvenile self aware AI continue their adventures in the even more dangerous territory of Neptune's moons (having left the relative safety of Saturn's moons). As usual, the story is well-executed and interesting. Lovett also contributes an article on effective fiction writing, focusing on making a story seem real by using indiosyncratic background details.

Also returning are H.G. Stratmann's Katerina Savistskaya and Martin Slayton in the story Thus Spake the Aliens, who had previously appeared in Wilderness Were Paradise Enow. This story picks up where that one left off, as Katerina, having apparently failed the aliens test in the previous story and doomed mankind to extinction, attempts to figure out a way to reverse this mistake. As usual, dealing with aliens of Godlike power is difficult at best, and Katerina and Martin muddle through to an ambiguous and somewhat hopeful ending.

Another story in the hard science fiction genre is A War of Stars by David L. Clements, which takes interstellar war to an extreme future without breaking any known laws of physics on the way. The future he describes is bleak and harsh, and in the end you aren't even sure who to root for.

Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn contribute the story Shame, which seems to be a Western redressed as a science fiction story about a covert operation gone wrong, and the awful consequences of jumping to the wrong conclusions. The story is okay, but a little predictable. On Rickety Thistlewaite by Michael F. Flynn is also somewhat predictable, although its more exotic setting and strange court politics makes it more interesting.

Rejiggering the Thingamajig by Eric James Stone, featuring a sapient tyrannosaurus Buddhist, a buggy interstellar travel network, a sentient (and enthusiastic) gun and a less than honest help line is my favorite story of the issue. It is funny and serious, and accomlishes the difficult feat of merging these two elements without it seeming forced while telling an interesting story. Also humorous is the Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff story Simple Gifts, although the humor mostly emerges as it turns out that the seemingly simple minded aliens are not quite as simple minded as some of the humans seeking to trade with them believe.

My least favorite story was Kristine Kathryn Rusch's The Possession of Paavo Deshin in which terrible birth parents and terrible adoptive parents engage in a legal battle over a young boy. An opportunistic lawyer seeks to use the case to right a clear injustice in the structure of the laws humanity has bound itself too, but loses her will because she decides that an arrogant father is worse than a mobster father. Almost everyone in the story drips indifference for the boy at the center of it (which I think was kind of the point), but even those who supposedly care for his welfare are shockingly indifferent, and set up a situation where it is inevitable that more children will be subject to this sort of legal shuffle. Despite the fact that the story was well written I found myself just wanting every character in the story to die and get the misery over with.

Victor Raggio contributes the science fact article Twins: Never Identical, which discusses the genetic differences being found even in identical twins. The article doesn't offer much more than that, which is a pity, as drawing some conclusions or even engaging in some speculation based on this data would have been interesting. Stephen R. Balzac's fact article Take Off Your Hat: You're in the Presence of Culture is, in my opinion, a better article. It focuses on how culture is created and transmitted, and how this could be applied to science fiction stories. Ben Bova contributes a retrospective about his life as a science fiction editor and author in Across My Life . . . , which I found quite interesting.

Overall, with only one poor story (and it was only poor because I hated all the characters) and several good ones, this is an above average issue of Analog. Anyone who enjoys the straightforward mostly hard science fiction bent of Analog will not be disappointed by this issue.

Previous issue reviewed: December 2009
Subsequent issue reviewed: March 2010

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30 Days of Genre - What Genre Novel Have You Read More Than Five Times?

This is kind of a difficult question for me, not because I haven't read a particular genre novel more than five times, but rather because I have read several, and it is mildly difficult do pick which one to highlight. I could pick The Lord of the Rings, but I have used so much of J.R.R. Tolkien's material already in the meme that choosing that book seems like I would run the risk of being a little repetitive. I could pick one of the many Asimov or Heinlein titles that I have read multiple times - Foundation, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The Caves of Steel, and so on, but I write a lot about those guys anyway. I could go way into left field and pick one of my very idiosyncratic favorites like Ten Thousand Heroes by James Barbary, but that book is so obscure that citing it won't mean much to very many people, and it isn't really a genre novel anyway. After all of this, my pick is:

Dune by Frank Herbert

I've come back to Frank Herbert's saga of religious fanaticism and space opera several times, and each time I find something new in the story. The first time I was too young to get the allegory that Spice Melange represents, filling the role in the book's galactic empire that oil has in ours. That time I saw the attempt to make the unrealistic tropes of classic space opera - soldiers in the far future using swords, a world in which computers are oddly absent, and so on - plausible.

The next time through I saw the Spice/oil allegory. And then the dangers posed by the fanatical Fremen Fedaykin bodyguards for the messianic Paul Muad'dib Atredies, who had seemed so noble and admirable in earlier readings, became apparent with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and a novel in which prescience plays a major role came to seem oddly prescient. And on further readings the issue of prescience came to the fore, and what that would imply for humanity to have, at its head, a leader who could predict the future and take steps to eliminate those futures displeasing to him. I expect that the next time I read Dune, I will find something else about it that I hadn't seen before. The books that you want to reread are books like that, books that you can glean something new from each time you read them. Dune is that kind of novel.

Go to Day 11: What Genre Novel Should Everyone Read?

Go to Day 13: What Is Your Favorite Book Trailer for a Genre Novel?

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Book Blogger Hop September 14th - September 20th: William Holden Starred in the Movie Stalag 17

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: Highlight one of your favorite reviews from the past month!


The Sundered by Ruthanne Reid

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: There Are Sixteen Myers-Briggs Personality Types

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Alice Cooper's First Top Ten Hit Was "I'm Eighteen"

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Follow Friday - There Were Seventy-Six Trombones in the Big Parade

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 - Escapism and Readers Confession.
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: What hyped up book do you think was not worth all the talk?

My answer is: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. To a certain extent, this is unfair, because there is almost no way a book could have lived up to the hype that the final installment of the Harry Potter series was subjected to. But the book that Rowling produced to cap off her signature series was simply not up to the task of even qualifying as a decent young adult fantasy, let alone the climax of a world wide phenomenon.

In some ways, the lackluster nature of Deathly Hallows was somewhat predictable. The Harry Potter series had been steadily declining in quality since Goblet of Fire, with each new book becoming more long-winded and pointlessly meandering than the previous one. Deathly Hallows, however, marked the nadir of the series. The book was interminably long, and large chunks of its length were made up of an endless camping trip during which nothing of any consequence happened. Potter himself does almost nothing for most of the novel, and then in the end, he defeats Voldemort more or less simply because he is faster on the draw than the evil wizard. Nothing that happens in the book is particularly surprising, or even particularly interesting. The final chapter, which was much hyped as having been written long before, was dull and lifeless. In the end, after all the hype, this book was simply limp and uninteresting, like having a bowl of cold porridge as the dessert following a steak dinner.

Go to previous Follow Friday: At the Third Quarter Quell Katniss Everdeen Participated in the Hunger Games for a Second Time

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Seventy-Seven Is the Smallest Positive Integer to Require Five Syllables in English

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Review - Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

Short review: Danny has the father Dahl wishes he could have had.

Haiku
A father and son
Live a happy country life
And have adventures

Full review; Danny the Champion of the World is different from a typical Dahl story in that there is nothing fantastical in the story, and Danny has a caring, loving home life. Although Danny’s mother died when he was an infant, leaving Danny alone with his father William (Danny’s father’s name is hidden about halfway through the book). Danny's father is kind, caring, thoughtful, and playful. They live in a caravan behind the filling station and auto shop owned and run by William. The caravan has no electricity, running water, or heat, relying on gas lamps and a gas burner for such things. Danny’s life is still idyllic in a rustic way. He helps his father work on cars (his father even lets Danny delay entering school for a few years to learn how to be an auto mechanic). His father takes time off to play with him, making kites and hot air balloons, and the two of them generally spend most of their waking hours together.

This happy existence is interrupted (and the adventurous elements of the book are introduced) by two elements. The first is a visit from Victor Hazell, the local wealthy bully (who, in the tradition of Dahl villains, is also quite fat). After Hazell threatens Danny, William declines to serve him, and ejects him from his property triggering a series of inspectors to come and harass Danny's father. The second is the mysterious nighttime disappearance of Danny's father, which Danny learns is because his father has been poaching pheasants in Hazell's Wood.

The rest of the book details the various adventures Danny and his father have illegally hunting pheasants on Victor Hazell's property. William teaches Danny the secret of pheasant poaching (raisins are the key). Danny has to rescue his father from a pit trap in which William breaks his ankle, and the two collaborate to try to poach every single pheasant in Hazell's Wood just before a planned hunting event hosted by the bullying Victor Hazell. Oddly, it turns out that virtually everyone in the small village where Danny and his father live is involved in the poaching business in some way, as they find allies in their quest at every turn.

Danny comes up with the idea of using raisins filled with sleeping powder from his father's prescribed sleeping pills (for use to help him sleep with a broken ankle) to catch the pheasants, leading his father to dub him the "champion of the world" at poaching. In the end, Hazell is humiliated (and his car is ruined) and although the pheasants (mostly) escape, a few stick around for dinner and all ends well as Danny and his father plan more adventures.

Engaging in a little speculation, I note that Dahl's own father died when he was a toddler, and he was sent to a series of boarding schools (at his father's behest, as he thought the English education system was the best in the world despite being Norwegian). Dahl apparently hated the schools, but never told his mother this, because he knew she was thinking of his welfare. Dahl was also horrified by the practice of corporal punishment used in English schools, which is reflected in a scene in Danny in which Danny is unjustly caned by his teacher, arousing his father's ire.

One can feel the ache Dahl had for a childhood with a loving father. Danny's father brings him up in a way almost opposite Dahl's own upbringing: his father is ever present, protective, fun, and caring. If Danny is in trouble, William protects him. If Danny is scared, William comforts him. If Danny is bored, William plays with him. Despite their material poverty, Danny is wealthy in ways that one can only assume Dahl felt that he was deprived. In the end, Danny the Champion of the World is a touching love letter to a father that the author never knew.

Roald Dahl     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Tintin: Hergé and His Creation by Harry Thompson

Short review: A loving and mostly uncritical biography of Herge told by chronologically analyzing the adventures of Tintin.

Haiku
Hergé and Tintin
Are inextricably linked
Locked in love and hate

Full review: There are few artists who are as closely associated with a single character as Hergé is associated with Tintin. There are certainly no other cartoonists whose career is so clearly defined by a single character. So it is fitting that when Harry Thompson sat down to write a biography of the moody and notoriously difficult Hergé, he wrote it through the lens of his plucky and boyish alter ego. With the exception of the first few chapters which cover Hergé's childhood and early work as a newspaper editor and cartoonist, the entire book treats Hergé's life as reflected in the installments of the Tintin series, describing the influences then current events had upon the course of the Tintin story, and loosely connecting the themes in each book to the events taking place in the cartoonist's own life.

Telling the story of Hergé's life using the Tintin books as a lens shows the close connection between Hergé and his work. Starting with Totor as proto-Tintin, and progressing through the entire course of the Tintin sequence up to the unfinished volume Tintin and Alph-Art, Thompson charts Hergé's life, connecting each character to the author, from Tintin himself, to Haddock, to Thompson and Thomson, to the various eccentric scientists leading to Professor Calculus, and even to the significance of such minor characters as Jolyon Wagg and Bianca Castafiore. And by doing so, Thompson not only explains the Tintin books, he also explains Hergé.

Few Americans truly understand the phenomenon of Tintin. Even those Americans who are fans of the series find it hard to understand the almost rock star status that Hergé held during his lifetime, and the pedestal that Tintin himself was put upon. After all, at first glance, the series doesn't seem like that big of a deal: twenty-two graphic novels, two of which are so embarrassingly bad that they have never been released in the United States, plus another partially finished volume. But, as Thompson demonstrates at the very outset of the book in which he recounts the massive awestruck crowds that gathered to witness "Tintin" (in the form of hired actor Henri de Donckers) return from his adventures in the Soviet Union. And Thompson uses this event to show the inherent irony of the Tintin phenomenon as Hergé himself stood by Henri almost unnoticed by the adoring crowd. Hergé was a celebrity cartoonist, but while his name was instantly recognizable by the masses, he was almost completely anonymous.

And this dichotomy serves to describe much of the relationship between Hergé and his creation. Tintin was in many ways the child of Hergé's own childhood, reflecting his boyish adventures as a Boy Scout living in a conservative Catholic middle-class neighborhood. But as Hergé grew older, Tintin remained idealized as a youthful adventurer who was always willing to stick up for the little guy and poke his nose in to right an injustice. But as revealed in the book, while Hergé might have aspired to be Tintin, he was not Tintin. The most revealing chapters in the book are those that cover the six books made from strips produced during the Nazi occupation of Belgium during World War II. While Hergé suffered from somewhat unfair accusations of working for the Nazi occupiers, the reality was probably worse for Hergé. The cartoonist regarded himself as a patriot - he had served in Belgium's armed forces that were crushed under the invading Wehrmacht - but it turned out that he was not cut out for resistance work. Whereas Tintin would have almost certainly jumped at the chance to carry the fight to the occupiers, Hergé simply didn't have the stomach for intrigue and covert action.

It must have been a devastating realization for Hergé to realize that he was not the hero he imagined himself to be. And given that the curmudgeonly Captain Haddock, a character that Hergé increasingly identified with, was created during the war years, it seems that the cartoonist felt out of step with his hero, and yet unable to escape him. And this seems to be the narrative of the post-war years - Hergé seeking to distance himself from Tintin, but at the same time compelled by public demand and his own demons to continue writing him. And this contradiction manifested itself in Hergé's increasingly quixotic behavior and recurring ailments. Tintin was, it seems, both Hergé's greatest love and the thing he hated most in the world.

The evolution of Hergé and the parallel evolution of Tintin seems like a small subject. But it is also a testament to the potential for human growth, and at the same time a testament to human venality. From one perspective the evolution of Hergé's personal views concerning race and culture, developing from the crude caricatures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo to the more nuanced and realistic depictions of later books such as Tintin in Tibet is almost impossibly remarkable given the cartoonist's background. But on the other hand, the descent of Tintin from the crusading hero who makes a real difference found in Cigars of the Pharaoh and King Ottokar's Sceptre to the ineffectual busybody of Tintin and the Picaros is a sad commentary on Hergé's own personal failings and ambivalence about his own work.

Tintin: Hergé and His Creation is a must read for any Tintin fan. By tracing the intertwined existence of Hergé and his boyish hero, Harry Thompson has found the true face of the artist and at the same time done much to explain his work. While Tintin himself was a fairly straightforward and uncomplicated fellow, Hergé was anything but, and this book illustrates this quite clearly. At times Thompson is a little too close to the subject, excusing some of Hergé's peccadilloes and failings a little too glibly, but overall, this is an interesting look into a man who became famous almost by accident, and then held on for dear life and rode the wave the rest of his life.

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Review - Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Short review: Young girl is dissatisfied. Young girl finds empty fun. Young girl learns that things aren't always what they seem.

Haiku
In a brand new house
Coraline looks for fun things
Her other mother

Full review: I've read my fair share of creepy books aimed at children. Coraline is the one that I think would probably be the scariest for a child to read. It isn't as over the top as some others, but it touches on those fears that are closest to a child's heart - threats to their parents and their home, and turns the concept of love upside down.

Coraline is a precocious little girl living in a new apartment building who apparently has no other children living close enough to be playmates. Her parents seem to be more or less benignly indifferent to her, consumed with their own concerns and exhibiting, at best, a distant kind of love. Coraline does some exploring and interacts with the handful of quirky other residents that share the apartment building, each of whom is only mildly interested in Coraline (they get her name wrong among other sins).

Then the story takes a turn. Coraline finds a passageway to a house that isn't really her house where she finds her "other mother" and her "other father", who are sort of close facsimiles of Coralin's real parents, but with button eyes. They are extraordinarily loving, allowing Coraline to do pretty much anything she wants, supplying her with a pile of magical toys, and otherwise showering her with the attention she doesn't get at her real home.

Coraline enjoys herself, at first, and then things start to go awry. The "other mother" doesn't want her to leave and go back to the real world. When Coraline does, her real parents disappear. She finally returns to the other world, and finds things are not as cheery as they were her first visit - everything starts to basically melt away and Coraline finds herself confronted with a loving, but decidedly malevolent "other mother".

The book is effective because it touches upon some of the basic fears we all had a children - the fear of being locked in a dark space, the fear of being in an alien place, the fear of losing your parents, the fear of being kidnapped, the fear of losing your own identity. And the story is made all the more frightening because the agent of all these horrors is a creature that loves Coraline, albeit in a possessive and (if it is possible to say this) malicious way. Coraline has to fight to get herself and those around her out of the slowly disintegrating other world, and all the while she is shown exactly how much failing to escape will cost her.

All turns out reasonably well (this is a book aimed at younger readers after all), although the "other mother" does get something of a creepy second act after she has apparently been defeated, and the final resolution seemed to me to leave the possibility that the "other mother" could eventually escape.Overall, this is the creepiest children's book I have read, and one of the best as well.

Review of 2002 Hugo Winner for Best Novella: Fast Times at Fairmont High by Vernor Vinge

Review of 2004 Hugo Winner for Best Novella: The Cookie Monster by Vernor Vinge

Review of 2004 Locus Winner for Best Young Adult Book: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

Review of 2003 Nebula Winner for Best Novella: Bronte's Egg by Richard Chwedyk

Review of 2005 Nebula Winner for Best Novella: The Green Leopard Plague by Walter Jon Williams

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2003 Hugo Award Finalists
2003 Locus Award Nominees
2003 Mythopoeic Award Nominees
2003 World Fantasy Award Nominees

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Musical Monday - Flash by Queen

Last Wednesday was Freddie Mercury Day, the day on which former Queen front man Freddy Mercury would have turned sixty-six. So in honor of that day, I'm putting up the theme song to the 1980 schlock fest Flash Gordon. Although the movie has many devoted fans, it is really a terrible movie, but it is terrible in the most deliciously campy way. Queen wrote the entire soundtrack for the movie, and as one can see from the video above, incorporated several snippets into their official music video for the song, which turned out to be much more popular than the .movie itself. There are apparently many people who know and love the song Flash but have never seen any part of the movie.

The movie was clearly inspired in look and tone by the Alex Raymond comic strip, and uses several images from the strip in its opening credits, which also end up in Queen's video. Despite the campiness of the movie, and the silliness of the song, I think both capture the essence of early twentieth century comic strip science fiction, and on that basis they are oddly brilliant.

I am also using this post to announce that over the next couple weeks I will be reviewing all three of the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials (Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe), as well as the Flash Gordon movie starring Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Topol, Max von Sydow, Brian Blessed, and Timothy Dalton.

Previous Musical Monday: From the Earth to the Moon Opening Theme

Subsequent Musical Monday: Our Biggest Challenge by Symphony of Science

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