Tag Archives: Books

Return to Amber, part two

Posted on July 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Okay, so I meant to write this review and get it up here on my blog a couple of weeks ago — it was supposed to follow the first review in somewhat shorter order, but you know how it is with the best laid plans and so on (you know you’ve heard the quote, modified from Robert Burns so we can actually understand what the frak it says). Mule shows and bird migrations had to be commented upon first.

When I read the second five books in the Chronicles of Amber, I noticed one thing pretty quick. Not nearly as much smoking. I thought, well, maybe Mr. Zelazny had quit smoking (to tell the truth, I don’t know for a fact that he ever smoked in the first place). There were a few mentions of pipes. Apparently, Corwin’s son, Merlin (Merle) would occasionally puff on a pipe, but not cigarettes. But as I got past the first part of the first book, even the pipes disappeared. To be sure, there was a lot of moving around, running, fighting, and such — not a lot of leisure time for a smoke — but I started to wonder. I finally realized that a book of matches had played a crucial part in one scene in the 3rd (or was it the 4th?) book of the elder Chronicles. (Sorry I don’t have the books in front of me — they had to return to Lubbock.) And from that point on, there had not been as much smoking in those books, either. Ah hah! All the attention on smoking might have been just  a mechanism to ensure those matches were on hand when they were needed, and no one would be going, “Wait! Where did those matches come from? That’s cheating!”

People who tend to gobble up science fiction, like people who gobble up other genres, get quite good at spotting inconsistencies in the stories they read. And woe to any author who asks too much in the “suspension of disbelief” category. Even if that weren’t true, and readers just didn’t notice one or two inconsistencies,  a writer shouldn’t get lazy, and expect his or her readers to forgive them for sloppy writing. It ends up being sloppy story-telling.

There was still plenty of other-worldly scenery in these books, mostly seen while passing through between this world, Amber, and the Courts of Chaos. The Courts were mentioned in the first books, but we didn’t get to really see the place until the final book. I wanted to see more. The sequel series, centered around Merlin, who’s mother was of noble Chaotic blood, featured a lot of Chaotic settings. (I like chaos. It’s fun to watch. I think it’s why I have basenjis.)

There was also a lot more emphasis on describing various magical powers. Considering that Mr. Zelazny was writing these books in the late 70′s – early 80′s that’s not surprising. Wicca magic, psychic readings, tarot cards and astrology were all the rage about that time. He was cashing in on a sign of the times. Aside from that, though, the story holds up as well as the first five books. I’m glad I got the chance to read them all.

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Return to Amber

Posted on May 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

It was a very long time ago, when I first made the journey to Roger Zelazny’s fantasy world in The Chronicles of Amber. It was, in fact, sometime in 1984. Why do I remember the exact year? Because I remember reading the book in the laundromat at the front of the R.V./mobile home park where I was living temporarily in my parents’ travel trailer after I started working at the Fort Worth Zoo (and 1984 was when I was there). The book was a hardback edition of the complete Chronicles — all five books in one volume — that I don’t even remember whether I owned or had borrowed from someone. I remember reading while I waited for my washer to finish, while I waited for my clothes to dry, and after I put my clean laundry away when I got back to my temporary home. I remember having massive headaches after spending hours with my eyes glued to the pages. And I remember that that is when I had to start wearing prescription lenses. Boo.

When I started re-reading the original five books, now included in a massive paperback tome that holds all TEN Amber novels, I remembered a lot more of the stories than I thought I would (except how all the conflicts were resolved). It’s always good to have a little of the original surprise at the end, even though sometimes knowing exactly how things turn out doesn’t spoil the enjoyment of re-reading a good story.

I remembered that the stories were complex, the plots convoluted, the settings complete to the smallest detail. And there were a lot of settings. Amber and its Shadows are like many other planets all layered on top of our mundane world. There are no space ships involved, but there is plenty of travel from world to world, from reality to reality. I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed the journeys.

Since I’ve learned a lot more about writing fiction in recent years, I have also been appreciating Zelazny’s story-telling abilities more this time around. I thought it might be easier to categorize things a bit. As in:

1.   Characters and Point of View (POV). It’s all written in first person POV. A lot of people don’t like this. I’m not one of them. First person narrows the perspective on the story to the point that anything that surprises or mystifies the main character is going to surprise or mystify the readers. We don’t get to see inside the minds of the other characters (a style I think is often overused). All you need to know is the title of the first Amber novel — Nine Princes in Amber — to know there will be some serious family conflict going on. Seeing everything through the eyes of just one of those princes — Corwin — means you have only his experiences to go on when it comes to sorting out the good guys and bad guys, and you don’t get to find out which ones he might be wrong about until he finds out himself. I think it’s kind of cool.

2.   Tension. I never really appreciated how important it is to keep the pressure on the characters at all times in order to keep moving the story forward. I used to wonder why these poor saps had to keep stumbling from disaster to catastrophe to apocalypse and back through the whole book until I learned that some people would actually stop reading if such was not the case. Really? I always had the attitude — and I don’t know where I got this — that once I started reading, I had to finish the book — no matter what. (Maybe it was kin to that parental decree that I had to eat everything on my plate, even if some of it made me gag.) And showing the tension’s effect on the character with a line like this is priceless: “A hot bath, a full meal, a bed would be very good things. But these assumed an almost mythic quality…” It’s a short little passage, but it speaks volumes about the character’s condition.

3.   Setting. Nothing can beat a thorough job of world-building. A lot of fantasy novels include maps to help us locate all the story locations relative to each other as we travel through them. That would never work with Amber. Sure you could draw the mountain, Kolvir, with the palace atop it, and label places around it like Arden and Garnath, but it wouldn’t be enough. There would be no way to show all the Shadow worlds, and you couldn’t really have Amber without all its Shadows. Anyway, they’re all too fluid to restrict to one spot on a two-dimensional map. No. You have to build the map — the concept — of Amber in your head.

4. Interesting, if somewhat annoying. Like some other classics of science fiction and fantasy I’ve read recently, there are some details that seriously date the first five books. There’s a whole lotta smokin’ goin’ on. Every time they turn around, these guys are lighting up. Cigarettes, pipes, what have you. Considering the fact that Roger Zelazny died just a month past his 58th birthday, I have to assume the fictional habit was a direct mirror of his own. Too bad. He would be 73 now, if he’d lived (in fact, yesterday would have been his 73rd birthday). Who knows how far he might have been able to carry the Amber saga. I’ve only just finished re-reading the original five books, and the first chapter of the first of the second five, so I have no idea whether the conclusion to this round is the final word — I’ll just have to wait and see.

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Ant Feminist

Posted on September 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

I have a friend who studied history and languages and women’s studies while I was studying zoology and mammalogy and ornithology and a whole bunch of other ologies relative to wildlife. We often trade books back and forth. Although we both like some of the same science fiction titles, our tastes in non-fiction don’t line up so much. So we try and broaden each other’s horizons.

And I wander into traps.

Once when she asked me if I liked a book she’d loaned me (which I really did like), and I started waxing enthusiastic, she stopped me.

“But what did you think about how the author …something something …slighted women …something something?”

“Huh?” I frantically tried to reconstruct the book in my mind, but all I could see were cave paintings (the subject of the book). “What part was that in?” I asked, lamely.

“Oh, in the first chapter.”

First? Chapter? So I had completely blown the race before I even crossed the start line. And this happens all the time. I tell myself, well, the author is a product of his time, his generation, and I’ve read so many of the same lame patronizing passages that my mind’s ear just tunes them out. I mean, the words leave their images on my retinas; the messages go up the optic nerve to my brain; the sentences make sense grammatically. But no whistles blow to awaken Fluffy, the three-headed militant feminist watch dog. It might as well all be harp music.

On the other hand…

As I mentioned before, I recently picked up The Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas, and re-read it. For some reason, after I bought it at the used book store, I read the first few essays, then put it down for several months. When I picked it up again, I read practically straight through, then went back and re-re-read the first essays. And I think I know what happened.

Several of Lewis’s essays mention, or even feature, ants, bees, or termites as representive organisms for whatever biological point he’s making. Lewis refers to individual ants, bees, termites as “he.” The first time I came across one of these, I had a knee-jerk response. I wanted to jump up, fling the book against the wall and scream “YOU STYUPID, MISOGYNISTIC, MALE CHAUVANIST PIECE. OF. SHIT!!! ALL. WORKER. ANTS, BEES, TERMITES. ARE. FEMALE!!!” But I hate to mistreat books, so I didn’t. Plus, the guy’s dead.

Point is, I told my friend about it and she said, “That would’ve gone right by me. I would not have noticed.” So now I don’t feel so bad. It’s a point of reference thing, and she and I have way different points of reference. From a purely rational point of view (I do try to be rational, sometimes) the same platitudes apply. He was a product of his time, his generation, and he was writing to/for a predominantly male audience. Those old habits were just not that easy to change.

The question now becomes, are we making any real progress in changing them today?

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A word (or two) about hybrids

Posted on August 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

They were the very first hybrid sport utility transportation. Mules. That’s what I’m talking about. To a lot of people, mules represent the best possible example of that beast we call hybrid. And although it’s true they can’t reproduce like us — and the birds and the bees — they can be cloned.

It seems poetic justice. Mules are, after all, products of humans meddling with nature. The first mules may have been happy accidents, results of horses and donkeys being kept in (domesticated) closer proximity than they would maintain in their wild state. Whatever the history, the future holds the possibility of making exact duplicates of the best mules, or allowing bloodlines to carry on well past the prime breeding lives of the original sire and dam.

I think it’s way cool. I love mules. Maybe it’s the big ears. Zebras also have big ears. That must be it.

But mules are no more than a small tip of a giant hybrid iceburg. We make hybrids all the time. Agriculture is full of them. Seedless grapes (yum). My Mr. Lincoln roses. Disease and pest resistant grains. The list goes on.

Now we have cars with hybrid engines that run on gasoline or electric batteries, or that can use gasoline made from petroleum products or alcohol distilled from corn cobs. A lot of us make our own hybrids. I have an old lamp in the living room — a torchierre — that used to take a three-way light bulb. I turned the knob once for low light, again for brighter light, and a third time for strong reading light. That was the option before dimmer switches came along. Now there’s a chain in place of the knob. I pull the chain, and a compact flourescent bulb lights up — and uses a small fraction of the power needed by the old bulb on it’s lowest setting. And I still have my antique torchierre. Cool, huh?

I’ve been reading a book that I first read about twenty years ago, and will probably talk about again. The Lives of a Cell, By Lewis Thomas is a collection of essays he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine (1971 – 1973) generally titled “Notes of a Biology Watcher.” One of his essays is titled “Some Biomythology” in which he talks about various mythical hybrid beasties (think of the hippogryf that Harry Potter rode). He makes the point that, given what we now know about genetics and the mechanisms of evolution, these creatures could never exist, except in our imaginations. The intriguing question, though, is “why do we create them?” Are we manifesting artistic expresssions of a basic part of our own nature — that we are all patchwork quilts made up of scraps and leftovers of other organisms? Because throughout the book, Thomas returns to the notion that each human being is really a community. And in this essay he makes a particular point that there are organisms , recently discovered (at that time), that rival anything we’ve dreamed up historically to place in these bestiaries of impossible hybrids.

Keeping in mind that he was writing these essays in the first years following the publication of The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970), a book by Lynn Margulis that brought together all the data and made the definitive case for seeing the cells that make up Homo sapiens as co-ops of previously separately living organisms, it’s easy to see his fascination with the idea, and why he keeps returning to it. For most of us, these days, it’s no more outlandish an idea than that the universe is expanding, or that the earth orbits the sun.

In the essay, “Organelles as Organisms,” Thomas opens with the observation that this revolution in biology has caused little upheaval — that, in fact, “Questions about the merits of genetic engineering, the cloning of desirable human beings from single cells, and even, I suppose, the possibility that two heads might actually be better than one, are already being debated at seminars.”

Lewis Thomas died in 1993, so he missed the first successful cloning of a large mammal — Dolly the sheep — in 1996. Judging by the amount of humor he showed throughout the book, I think he would have been highly amused in 2003 when the most successful cloning effort to date produced Idaho Gem, Idaho Star, and Utah Pioneer — three identical MULES!

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Who's a geek?

Posted on August 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

So I went to the library at the local university the other evening to get a book that wasn’t available at either of the local public libraries. I went after 5 p. m. so I could park in a lot and not have to pay (like in the Visitors Parking Garage) and not get a ticket, since school is out and most of the lots are mostly empty.

It didn’t take me long to get the book. I knew what floor it was on and had the call number written down because I had looked it up on line a few weeks ago. And I wasn’t parked that far from the library so didn’t have to walk clear across campus in the scorching heat. Everything was fine, until I got hit with this huge wall of nostalgia. It nearly flattened me. I practically moaned out loud.

I blew it. I blew it so bad. I blew it in so many ways I can’t even begin to enumerate.

I love being on a campus, would love a reason to spend every day working there, walking around all the different buildings, soaking up all the scholoarly vibes. I should have gone back to graduate school. Got a doctorate. Become a professor. Or something. Anything for the chance to work and spend my days on a college campus.

Anyway — the book. Just a Geek, by Wil Wheaton. I’d seen it on his blog and got curious enough to go looking for it. It took me all of about eight hours to read, although some of the blog excerpts I’d already read, so could skim through those at warp nine.

Oh. Yeah. That Wil Wheaton. Who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation — a geeky kid played by (apparently) an authentically geeky kid who grew into a geeky adult and wrote a book about it all. I found it highly entertaining, engaging, and something I could relate to… almost too much.

Wil had a demon he named “Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake,” and as I got to know the two of them through the pages of his book, I noticed someone I’d been ignoring for years, sitting a little behind me, drumming her fingers — “I Never Should Have Left The Zoo.” Oh, brother.

When I first started working at the Fort Worth Zoo I walked around thinking all day, “Pinch me. Make sure I’m not dreaming. Make sure I’m awake, because I don’t want to miss a single nanosecond of this.” And I returned to that theme frequently for the entire three years eight months I worked there. So why did I leave? Along with the considerable philosophical differences I had with a few co-workers and with the individuals who ran the place, I had a plan to finish my Master’s degree and rule the world. I was going to be a SCIENTIST!

The assistant director of the zoo laughed at me when he heard me say that. Laughed. At me.

I, of course, had no idea that getting a Master’s degree wouldn’t make me a scientist. In fact, a Master’s degree doesn’t really make you qualified for a lot of better jobs than a Bachelor’s degree does. It just makes you overqualified for a lot more.

So it might be a little like what Wil Wheaton went through trying to find acting jobs in the post Star Trek phase. Having a hard time finding a good fit as a “journeyman” as opposed to an “apprentice,” but not quite to the level of “master” (which for me would be that PhD)where you can write your own ticket, as it were. But-oh-well.

I did have to kind of laugh at Wil when he said in the book how scary it was to contemplate a complete career redirect in his mid twenties! I changed career paths at thirty, and again at forty, and now in my fifties I’m still not sure I’m grown up enough to decide what I want to do with my life! But to Wil Wheaton, if he should read this — I really enjoyed your book, think you should keep writing, hope you keep getting acting jobs because you enjoy that, and I plan to watch you on Leverage this week. Dude.

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Life's little turmoils

Posted on May 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

The past two weeks have been off-routine for me. I had to skip the Wednesday doggie update, and for that I apologize. Today’s post is also going to be a little off-topic, as I haven’t been working much on my drawing/painting efforts. A week ago yesterday I had a job interview that I spent a lot of time preparing for. I felt great about how I did, and I was on pins and needles all this week hoping to hear that I got the job. Yesterday I got the letter saying another applicant had been chosen.

The feeling of let-down was intense. The job was one that I would have enjoyed — not just something to do to pay bills. I would have been able to learn new things, exercise some of my creative muscles, and not be cooped up in a lab or an office or tied to a computer all day every day. In a word — ideal. But not to be. And that is the way my life has been going for the past several months. I’ve had other job interviews, and thought I had the job in the bag, but no dice. Just when I would get over one disappointment and get back to the “okay, I’m going to make something of this blogging thing and figure out how to make it pay me,” I’d get a call for another interview, and have to get all pumped up about a new job possibility. To say it made me feel a bit schizophrenic would be putting it mildly.

But I have learned some coping mechanisms — many of which involve chocolate. Fortunately for me in this case, the new Star Trek movie came out this week, and the Science Fiction Channel is having a two-day Star Trek “Trekathon.” So I can watch space fantasy while munching on my Oreos. Escapist Nirvana. I also have some writing to catch up on (like what I’m doing now), and a project to finish for my monthly jewelry artists’ guild meeting tomorrow.

Maybe I could become a job-interview-failure-recovery coach. But how lame would that be? After a while, you get used to being disappointed; you almost come to expect it. More lameness. I remember many years ago, my dad gave me a little wooden wall hanging for a birthday gift or something. It had a photo of a cocker spaniel lying in the grass looking all relaxed and cute, with the saying, “Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.” I remember thinking about it for a while and wondering, “is he trying to tell me something?” But he told me he picked it up and thought the dog was cute, so he got it, before he took time to read it and think about it. Anyway, it’s something I’m reminded of at times like this — that there’s some comfort in the thought that, if you can learn to not lower but suspend your expectations, you can blunt the pain a bit.

It helps to have fall-back options, or activities to distract yourself with, if nothing else. It is dangerous to grow overly attached to or identified with a job, or a notion of a job, even. Any more, jobs don’t follow the kinds of traditional patterns some of us grew up with — us Baby Boomers. But I think it’s fabulous to see things start to change like this. I have struggled a long time with the idea that to be a “writer” I have to follow the same path that writers have always followed. I have even been bothered by the “what if no one buys my books and all those trees were chopped down and made into paper for nothing?” That wouldn’t sit right with me. Yes, I really would squirm all the way to the bank. I promise.

But I’ve decided to follow the cyber-publishing path, instead. No gate keepers deciding whether what I’ve written will have any popular appeal. My “audience” can decide directly. Since one of my favorite pastimes is reading, I plan to write a lot of book reviews. With practice, I may reach a point where I can contact publishers and request books to review before publication. That would be cool, and people pay for those things. In the meantime, I will set up ways to make this website pay for itself, and maybe some of my bills, too. I may also have to allow some ads on my site. This is my new job. It is a work in progress.

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Books about writing by someone who knows

Posted on April 20, 2009 | 1 Comment

Not long ago I re-read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, a book that was required reading for the writing course I took through Long Ridge Writer’s Group. This time I read with a red pen in hand to underline key passages and fix in my brain the high points of the wealth of knowledge it contains.  Among all the common sense advice, Zinsser mentions another book he wrote – Writing About Your Life.  I went out and bought a copy.  I thought it might help me with my novel, which is kind of a fantasy memoir about my years in the Air Force.  And yes, it will.

I highly recommend Writing About Your Life to anyone who has even the vaguest notion of one day writing a memoir, whether factual or fictional.  For one thing, it is an excellent example of the genre.  Zinsser has some hugely entertaining stories from his own life that he tells to illustrate how to.  Did you know that his great grandfather, William Zinsser, founded a shellac business in Manhattan and that he still sometimes gets calls asking advice about paints, solvents, and shellac?  Or that he wrote the first, long magazine piece introducing a new comic to the public in the early sixties?  The comic was Woody Allen.

A word that shows up in this book more than once, that some of us need to turn into a mantra for our writing life is “permission.”  Give yourself permission to write your own story, as honestly and authentically as only you can.

Since the format of a blog lends itself particularly well to self-revelation, I would also recommend the book to anyone writing or planning a blog. Unless you are going to have one of those blogs where you tell people how to use a digital camera, train for a triathalon, or walk like an Egyptian, chances are you will be writing about the stuff you’ve done and seen in your life. This book has some great tips on how to bring out the humor, the drama, the suspense in your story, and the personalities of the other people you’ve known along the way.

If you are looking for references to add to your library on how to improve your writing, the first book I mentioned is also invaluable. Originally published in 1976, it is now in it’s seventh edition, and is considered a “classic guide to writing nonfiction.”

I know that spontaneity is supposed to be the heart of the blogoshpere, but as more and more people jump in, it will be the well thought out, consistently well written blogs that people will keep coming back to. At least that will be true for people like me. I notice multiple grammar mistakes, multiple spelling errors, and don’t have the patience to wade through those for whatever gems of wisdom they may be masking. I can find better writing about the same subject on another blog. And I will.

There is a third book by William Zinsser that I also recommend. It’s titled Writing to Learn, and it has lessons for anyone who writes anything on any subject for any reason. Need I say more?

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And Now for Something Completely Different…

Posted on March 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

I have been slacking on the painting, and now I have found another awesome cat portrait to reinterpret artistically  The work is backing up.

But I had to read a couple of books — historical research for my blog, you see.  The first book, The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is one I read a long time ago…in 1980.  I was taking summer classes at the local university, and decided to take “The Literature of Science Fiction” as an elective. I was also taking an astronomy class, so I thought the sci-fi would be a nice complement.

So, The Mote was one of the assigned readings, and it really stuck with me — especially the “Crazy Eddie” bits.  And I quote: “Renner, I must tell you of a creature of legend….We will call him Crazy Eddie, if you like…Always he does the wrong things for excellent reasons.  He does the same things over and over, and they always bring disaster, and he never learns” (my emphasis).

There were many other details from the book that I remembered — perhaps better than I have remembered other books over the years.  But “Crazy Eddie” was special.  My second basenji was Crazy Eddie incarnate.  He was the sweetest-tempered, most insane dog I’ve ever known.  He was the original Crazybasenji, and the book was the inspiration for that name.

When I went to the library to look for the book, I discovered that there was a sequel — The Gripping Hand that had been published almost 20 years after the first.  That’s a long time to wait for a sequel, but the first book didn’t necessarily require one.   It was nice, though to see the story carried forward.  The time elapsed in the book was about the same as that between two books publication dates.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction in my time, but, prior to that summer, I had restricted myself to a few authors that wrote the kinds of stories I liked.  I started off with The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, like a lot of people do.   Then I found the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin.  And there was Anne McAffrey, who wrote the Dragonrider books.  These were actually more in the fantasy genre than they were science fiction.  After I took the class in science fiction, I was more willing to try other authors.  But not that many.

I told a friend at school about The Mote in God’s Eye, and she loaned me a copy of Lucifer’s Hammer, also by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.  Later I read a couple of their Ringworld books.

Then I discovered C.J. Cherryh.  For years I consumed a steady diet of her books — I read Downbelow Station probably three times (and I don’t re-read books much), and the Chanur books at least twice.  About the time I caught up with what she was writing currently, and had to wait for the next book in the series to be published, I got frustrated and switched to non-fiction.  You don’t have to deal with all that trilogy or series delay between books bullshit with non-fiction.  And you can put the damn thing down from time to time, like to eat.

I’m not an ace book reviewer.  But I’ve found that if I write something about a book, I’ll remember it better.  With the kind of non-fiction I read, remembering not just the general theme of the book, but specific details, helps me understand my field of biology better.   So I’m going to publish some of my book reviews on my blog.  I may even write one about “Crazy Eddie” and company.

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