A speculative mind

  Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi is a reworking of a 1962 novel by H. Bean Piper called Little Fuzzy . Scalzi says it is not a sequel, but to think of it more like a reboot, like the Star Trek reboot movies. I confess that I have not read the original Piper novel. Does that mean I shouldn’t be reviewing it without having read the original? After all, it was probably intended for fans of the original, just like the Star Trek reboot was intended for fans of the original series. Right? Meh. I would imagine that people who had never seen the original Star Trek did watch the reboot. They either liked it or they didn’t based on their own perceptions and how good the movie was. The same is true with this book. Not having read the original, I can only assume that it must follow a similar outline to this one, but Scalzi has put his own stylistic stamp on it. The hero (Holloway) is a typical Scalzi hero, witty, irreverent, sarcastic, and one who suffers no fools. One whose attitude freque...

  I thought I would make a list of the most important science fiction novels. But I had to define for myself what most important meant to me. These are works that were influential either to other works or to society. Or they were the first of their kind or the first variation of their kind. This list is entirely my opinion. There is nothing quantifiable that makes something more important than something else, so we are left with the imperfect analyses from imperfect humans. Also, I have not read every great science fiction book, so the list will be limited to what I have read.     Frankenstein , Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (1818) Let’s start with the one that started it all. There were other speculative fiction stories before Frankenstein, some going all the way back to the Greeks, Romans, and Norsemen (Thor was not an invention by Marvel Comics). But I would argue that Frankenstein was the first truly modern science fiction novel. It really checks the boxes of moder...

  It is difficult to know what people really looked like before photography was invented. All we have are verbal accounts and portraits from artists. Verbal accounts are unreliable and subject to interpretation. I have seen movies made from books and found inevitably that the actor or actress playing a given character looks nothing like I pictured in my head from reading the book, even if the actor fit the general description. Artist depictions are also suspect. Even the best artist rendering can be deceiving (we well know that even photographs can mislead). The artist may have had a motive to make the subject look as good as they could, maybe even better than reality. Consider the portrait of Anne of Cleves. King Henry VIII was looking for a wife after the death of his third wife, Jane Seymore. Anne of Cleves was suggested to him as a suitable candidate (from a good protestant family). But he had never seen her. Henry sent the artist Hans Holbein off to paint a portrait of ...

  Have you ever been on a quest? When I was in college my friends and I spent a weekend at the coast. We played games, did various touristy things, and had a good time (no, there wasn’t that much alcohol involved). We stopped in a little used bookstore in a small coastal town. It was cluttered with mismatched bookshelves and crates or boxes where there were no bookshelves. If there was any organization to it, the system was known only to the owner. That old used book smell permeated everything, a sweet musty odor that coated the back of your sinuses. In other words, it was a great bookstore. One to meander through the stacks of detritus where you might find a hidden gem. In the midst of our search, one of us found something and started to laugh. We all joined round. The object at hand was a book entitled The Platypus of Doom by Arthur B. Cover. But wait; there’s more! The back cover promised more dangerous creatures inside the book: The Armadillo of Destruction, the Aardvark of ...

  Back when I was of an age that was old enough to take on a summer job (I must have been 12 or 13) opportunity presented itself in the form of “Mrs. B.” I don’t think I ever met Mrs. B., but she bussed kids out to the fields where in early summer we would pick Strawberries, and late summer we would pick beans. We didn’t get paid a lot, but we did get paid! This was the first real money most of us had ever earned other than an allowance, and my mother didn’t believe in allowances. She had seen too many kids who expected to get paid for doing things they should have been doing anyway, and some who wanted to get paid for doing nothing. But field work was real work, and you got paid based on how much you picked. If you laid around and did nothing, you got paid nothing. I think we got 80 cents a crate for strawberries. I don’t remember how much we got paid for beans, but it was by weight. I made it through one full season of strawberry picking, but the next year I only made it a few ...

  I think I was half-way through this book before I realized I was saying the title wrong. The word in the title was “Furry” and not “Fury.” This is the first book I have read that is in the Chet and Bernie mysteries by Spencer Quinn. It is not the first book in the series, (it is actually the sixth) and after having read it, I can say that I don’t think it made any difference to me that I had not read the earlier books. I was able to grasp the characters and their relationships just fine. The book is narrated in first-person by Chet. Chet is Bernie’s dog. He has many characteristics you would expect in a dog. He is fiercely loyal to Bernie. He experiences things through his nose and his ears to a degree that humans can’t begin to fathom.   Chet can understand English words quite well (he would have to if he is the narrator) but metaphors and figures of speech throw him. Check out this example when Bernie is counting out money: “Three grand on the nose,” Bernie said, altho...

  My first experience with pizza was not something to celebrate.   I was maybe five years old. I think our family had been out bowling. Not something we did very often. I was terrible at it, but then, I was five. I suspect the rest of my family wasn’t a whole lot better.   Like I said, we didn’t do it very often. But after bowling (I think it was bowling, but I may be confusing it with some other outing. It was a long time ago) we went out for pizza. This was the early 1960’s and the world was a very different place. Pizza was somewhat rare. I think we had only one pizza parlor in town. We were at that time, the 4 th largest city in Oregon, and only one pizza parlor (that’s what we called them back then. Pizza parlors. No, I have no idea why, when the only other thing I remember being called a parlor, was a funeral parlor. That’s not creepy at all). I recall I had some trouble with the word “pizza” as it was not a word I had ever heard before. But I must have been exci...