Recent books

The Complete Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper

I recently polished off Ian M. Banks‘ Consider Phlebas, about a changer named Horza; his Matter, a Culture novel about a shell world with multiple surfaces 1400 km apart; and his Transitions, which is not a book about the Culture but about hopping from one reality to another. I find his books a little hard to get into because it’s hard to care about what happens to the characters. I’ve read a couple of others and they seem very intellectual: Banks is a big-picture guy.

I read The Complete Fuzzy compendium of H. Beam Piper novels. The first is Little Fuzzy. The second is Fuzzy Sapiens. And the third is Fuzzies and Other People, which was discovered in manuscript many years after Piper’s unfortunate suicide.  They are old-fashioned space opera. Everyone smokes and drinks; women are called “girls” and work as secretaries. No one worries about alien diseases or incompatible biochemistry; but on the other hand, biochemistry and evolution are elements in the story. The stories also deal with greed and land grabs.  They were OK light reading and rather charming. They would also be suitable for young readers.

For fillers, I reread John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, an homage to Robert Heinlein but well done and not as obvious as Spider Robinson’s attempts, and Time Traps, a collection of time travel stories edited by Robert Silverberg, whose asides are full of himself as usual.

Finally, I read a couple of good science fiction cat stories from a big book of cat stories. The novella was Novice by James H. Schmitz, in which Telzey Amberdon first appears and makes telepathic contact with an alien species. The shorter story was “The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) from Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1955.

There’s a wrenching difference between the convoluted and rarefied worlds of Iain M. Banks and the straightforward stories by the other authors.

Canadian art and the Group of Seven

This article, “White Feathers and Tangled Gardens,” is an expert from Ross King’s new book, Modern Spirits.

As we all know, their approach was novel:

…one critic cautioned that to paint a Canadian landscape under snow was “unpatriotic, untactful, and unwise.” But Snow I and Snow II unapologetically showed fir boughs weighed down by fresh snow that Harris depicted with luminous strokes of azure, mauve, salmon pink and cornflower blue.

"Snow" by Lawren Harris

Their colours were shocking:

As a connoisseur once admonished John Constable: “A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.” …Would Torontonians, nourished on fiddle-brown landscapes, be ready for works like The Tangled Garden or Autumn’s Garland?

Apparently not:

“that rough, splashy, meaningless, blatant, plastering and massing of unpleasant colours which seems to be a necessary evil in all Canadian art exhibitions these days…”

"Tangled Garden" by J. E. H. MacDonald

They were even accused of being limp-wristed “hermaphrodites” in spite of their canoeing, camping, and manly paintings.

"The Jack Pine" by Tom Thomson

As these paintings were being shown during the first world war, there was some discussion of why these apparently hale artists didn’t volunteer for the armed forces and of Thomson’s retreat into the forests of Algonquin Park. There, in the midst of a dangerous storm, he sketched one of his most famous paintings.

Thomson would turn this small sketch into one of his most famous paintings, The West Wind, in which the potent energies of nature are distilled into the whiplashing curves of the Jack pines. The painting is a scene of struggle, of an elemental tug-of-war between the dynamic and destructive forces that nearly killed him. If Canadians believed that what made them unique was their engagement with this hostile and unforgiving land that dictated the terms of human existence, then Thomson’s painting is an elegant image of this life-and-death encounter..

"The West Wind" by Tom Thomson

All in all, this book is more than a re-hashing of the usual biographical details. I’d like to read it.

Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint

From io9, here’s a review about a new book from Charles de Lint, Eyes Like Leaves: “Trust Charles de Lint to understand the identity crises of shapeshifters.”

The book is described as “a rollicking epic quest fantasy” in which a motley crew try to save Summerland from never-ending winter. If you like fantasy, I think you’ll like Charles de Lint: he’s a good writer.

The secret of Narnia

Michael Ward

New from the world of literature: Michael Ward has detected the organizing principle behind the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis: each of the seven books evokes the mood of one of the seven medieval heavens: Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Sol, Luna, Mars, and Saturn. At first glance it makes sense. That’s why the Christian theme is a minor one and why there’s a Father Christmas but no Nativity.

He has two books that analyze the parallels between medieval cosmology and the seven volumes. There’s a more scholarly critique called Planet Narnia and a more popular book called The Narnia Code. They came out a couple of years ago so you may have heard of them. You can read about them at Planet Narnia.

Hat tip to Jeffrey D. Koonistra, the book reviewer at Analog. He gets a point deducted, though for referring to representative people of their day as Medieval Man and Twenty-first-Century Man.

Summer reading

Those of you who are tired of George R. R. Martin’s meandering opus, A Game of Thrones, might like some Barbara Hambly’s novels. They have mystery, good and evil, monsters, and magic–and things get resolved.

The Antryg Windrose Chronicles (Empire of Gwenth fantasy):
1. The Silent Tower
2. The Silicon Mage (1 & 2 are also published together as Darkmage.)
3. Dog Wizard
4. Stranger at the Wedding (standalone novel in same universe, next summer)

The Kingdom of Darwath fantasy series:
1. The Time of the Dark
2. The Walls of Air
3. The Armies of Daylight
4. Mother of Winter
5. Icefalcon’s Quest

The Unschooled Wizard fantasy series (possibly the same universe in a different era):
1. The Ladies of Mandrigyn
2. The Witches of Wenshar
3. The Dark Hand of Magic

Winterlands (Dragonsbane) a ruined quasi-Scotland with dragons:
1. Dragonsbane
2. Dragonshadow
3. Knight of the Demon Queen
4. Dragonstar

Bride of the Rat God (standalone, 1920s Hollywood with Chinese magic)

Victorian vampires (Victorian Europe with vampires):
1. Those Who Hunt the Night
2. Travelling with the Dead
3. Blood Maidens (haven’t read this one)

Benjamin January mysteries (historical, New Orleans 1830s):
1. A Free Man of Color
2. Fever Season
3. Graveyard Dust
4. Sold Down the River
5. Die Upon a Kiss
6. Wet Grave
,,,etc.

Also recommended:
* Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series
* Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart Victorian series (lighter, YA style, but quite standable)
* Guy Gavriel Kay‘s Fionavar Tapesty series

Gregory Clark, soldier and journalist

Someone asked me about Gregory Clark‘s books. This is THE Gregory Clark, Canadian journalist: soldier, reporter, humourist, and family man, not the American fellow who writes about economics. Clark fought in World War I, winning the Military Cross at Vimy Ridge, and reported on World War II. Greg Clark’s father, Joseph T. Clark, was the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star.  Clark worked for the Star for many years and developed his famous humour columns, often embellished with a cartoon drawn by Jimmy Frise. Clark’s son, James Murray Clark, was also a Star journalist, but was killed in 1944 while serving with the Regina Rifle Regiment.  Clark died in 1977.

The Canadian Journalism Foundation created the Greg Clark award in his honour.

In honour of spring, everyone should read his short essay, “Bird of Promise.”