All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE MUSEUM OF HOAXES by Alex Boese:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/18/2006]
When I buy books, they go on my "to-read" queue, which is mostly a "first-in-first-out" queue. But there are really three kinds of books in it--"obligation" books, regular books, and "popcorn" books. The obligation books get read early because I have to review them, vote on them, or return their to the library by a certain date. The regular books get read more or less in sequence. But the popcorn books get read whenever I just want to enjoy myself. THE MUSEUM OF HOAXES by Alex Boese (ISBN 0-452-28465-1) is a popcorn book. This does not mean it is not well-researched, or well-written. It just means that I had a lot of fun reading it.
To order The Museum of Hoaxes from amazon.com, click here.
HIDDEN HISTORY by Daniel J. Boorstin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/07/2003]
I recently read Edward Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Why? Because I read Daniel J. Boorstin's HIDDEN HISTORY, and he praised Gibbon, along with explaining why Americans have a sense of community not found in Europe, and why the Adams family went into rapid decline after its early prominence.
To order Hidden History from amazon.com, click here.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE GIANT'S HAND by Matthew Booth:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/03/2009]
A few years ago, Baker Street Studios published a series of short collections of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In 2008, these were picked up by F. A. Thorpe for its "Large Print Linford Mystery Library" (under the auspices of The Ulverscroft Foundation, which deals with research and treatment of eye diseases). The first of these that I read was SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE GIANT'S HAND by Matthew Booth (ISBN-13 978-1-84782-142-3, ISBN-10 1-84782-142-1), originally published in 2004. It contains three stories: "The Adventure of the Giant's Hand", "The Adventure of the York Place Prophecy", and "The Adventure of the Hollow Bank". These are based on the following off-hand references in actual Doyle stories:
"As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow." ["The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez"]
"Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice--that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of Colonel Warburton's madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a finer field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so strange in its inception and so dramatic in its details that it may be the more worthy of being placed upon record, even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results." ["The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"]
"You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day. I can't afford, therefore, to smile at your three broken busts, Lestrade, and I shall be very much obliged to you if you will let me hear of any fresh development of so singular a chain of events." ["The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"]
Booth does an excellent job--he maintains the Victorian-era atmosphere and does not encumber his stories with feminists, sexual adventures, or any other "updating". The only problem for Americans is that these British imports may seem a bit pricey, running about US$20 each for about 35,000 words. If each volume were a single story, it would be novella-length rather than novel- length.
(The same day I read the parsley story, I also ran across the parsley quote in a completely different context!)
To order Sherlock Holmes and the Giant's Hand from amazon.com, click here.
ENTER DR. NIKOLA! by Guy Boothby:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/27/2005]
Guy Boothby's ENTER DR. NIKOLA! (ISBN 0-87877-032-1) has a copyright date of 1975 for Newcastle Publishing. Although there is a note on the cover that says "former title: A BID FOR FORTUNE", there is no real indication that the book was actually about eighty years old even in 1975 (it was written in 1895), or that it is the first book of a series and does not have a real ending. As an example of the genre of "super-villain" story that pre-dated Sax Rohmer's "Fu Manchu" (who first appeared in 1912) and similar works, it is of some historical interest, but not very satisfying for general readers.
To order Enter Dr. Nikola! from amazon.com, click here.
FREE FOR ALL: ODDBALLS, GEEKS, AND GANSTAS IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY by Don Borchert:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/07/2008]
FREE FOR ALL: ODDBALLS, GEEKS, AND GANSTAS IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY by Don Borchert (ISBN-13 978-1-9052-6412-4, ISBN-10 1-9052-6412-7) is an anecdotal account of Borchert's experiences in a public library in the Los Angeles area. He does not tell us the actual city, but instead refers to it as "Bay City". Fans of Raymond Chandler will recognize this as the city that Philip Marlowe had the most problems with, because the police there 1) thought they were a law unto themselves, and 2) hated private detectives (along with minorities, the poor, and anyone else who did not fit their notion of who should be allowed in Bay City). Borchert's description of the police in his city seems somewhat similar, though in a much toned-down fashion. It is more like what an Indian friend of ours described around here. This friend was stopped for some sort of traffic violation and was addressed rather rudely by the policeman when he asked for his license. When our friend opened his wallet to take out his license, his Bell Labs ID was facing it. Suddenly the policeman became much more polite, with "Mr." this and "Mr." that. (Chandler's Bay City was actually Santa Monica, but that does not mean Borchert's is.)
To order Free for All from amazon.com, click here.
GRAVEN IMAGES by Ronald V. Borst:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/02/2003]
GRAVEN IMAGES by Ronald V. Borst is basically a picture book of classic (and not so classic) posters and publicity materials for science fiction, fantasy, and horror films, starting from the silent era up through the 1960s. There are long essays on each decade written by well-known authors such as Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison (the former was more interesting than the latter), but one gets this book for the illustrations.
To order Graven Images from amazon.com, click here.
PLANET OF THE APES by Pierre Boulle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/20/2009]
The Middletown science fiction discussion group chose PLANET OF THE APES by Pierre Boulle (translated by Xan Fielding (ISBN-13 978-0-345-44798-2, ISBN-10 0-345-44798-0) for March. Now, I recently read a book (to be reviewed in a future issue) in which the author seemed unfamiliar with Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics. Boulle seems to be similarly unacquainted with Newton's Laws of Motion. On page 4, he describes a solar sail: "Thus, when Jinn wanted to increase his speed, he gave [his spherical sail] the biggest diameter possible. It would then take the blasts of radiation on an enormous surface and the vessel would hurtle through space at a furious velocity.... When, on the other hand, they wanted to slow down, Jinn pressed a button. The sail would shrink until it became a sphere just big enough to contain them both, packed tightly together. The effect of the light became negligible, and this minute bubble, reduced to nothing more than its own inertia, seemed motionless, as though suspended in the void by an invisible thread." No, its own inertia would keep it moving at that "furious velocity." Boulle, I believe, confused inertia with friction, and forgot that the spaceship was traveling in a vacuum.
It is true that Boulle is writing social satire, not "hard science fiction." But he seems to forget his characters are on another planet when the narrator describes the humans as being perfectly human, even saying, "I saw she belonged to the white race," [page 29] and having the gorillas wear shirts and jackets "which seemed to be made by the best Paris tailor" [page 60].
I commented in my review of Leopoldo Lugones's "Yzur" that in Spanish there is only a single word which encompasses both monkeys and apes ("mono"), and the translator chose to use "monkey" when "ape" would have been correct. Well, here too, one finds Fielding using "ape" and "monkey" interchangeably as a translation of the French word "singe" (I assume--I don't have a copy of the novel in French).
Boulle also writes something that may have been scientific belief in 1963, but has since been discredited. "He told me there were learned scientists who spent a large part of their time trying to teach primates to talk. They claimed that there was nothing in the conformation of these animals to prevent it." [page 79] As it happens, I read PLANET OF THE APES during the same period I was listening to the Teaching Company course "The Story of Human Language", and the first lecture discusses the impossibility of speech in non-human primates because of the lack of a gene named FOXP2, which is necessary for the development of language skills. And *then* I also read a "National Geographic" article on Neanderthals which *also* discussed gene FOXP2, and its presence in Neanderthals!
A big problem with the movie is that, due to limitations in prosthetics, special effects, etc., in 1968, we are presented with apes who are shaped like humans with ape heads. In the book, the apes are apes, down to the detail of wearing gloves rather than shoes on their feet. In the movie, their skeletal structure is clearly human, and their feet have boots on them. In addition, in the movie, the ladders, stairs, etc., are clearly designed for humans, and the apes are no better at climbing a ladder than a human would be. (The more recent film was able to use digital effects to somewhat overcome this problem.)
To order Planet of the Apes from amazon.com, click here.
BLACK MAGIC by Marjorie Bowen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/11/2003]
Another novel from James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock's list [of hundred best fantasy books in English] was Marjorie Bowen's BLACK MAGIC. This is an historical romance involving black magic and the Anti-Christ. (I suppose it's sort of alternate history, because it has a Pope Michael II following a Pope Sylvester, and there was no such succession in our history, and indeed, all the Sylvesters seem to be much earlier than the time period of the novel.) One problem seems to be that Bowen has a major revelation towards the end that should be obvious to readers in the first fifty pages or so. My guess is that readers of the time (Bowen wrote BLACK MAGIC in 1909) might have been less familiar with such tricks. Or maybe it's not supposed to be a surprise. Even given all that, however, it holds up well.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/23/05]
For those of you attracted to old classic horror novels, but put off by the exorbitant prices these out-of-print works garner at antiquarian books stores, good news: Matthew Lewis's THE MONK is now available in a Dover Thrift Edition (ISBN 0-486-43214-9). And Marjorie Bowen's BLACK MAGIC (reviewed in the 04/11/03 issue of the MT VOID) is available as an Adobe download through amazon.com.
To order Black Magic as a download from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Monk from amazon.com, click here.
FROM THE FILES OF THE TIME RANGERS by Richard Bowes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/27/2006]
Another book I looked at but did not read: FROM THE FILES OF THE TIME RANGERS by Richard Bowes (ISBN 1-930846-35-5) looked like it would be similar to Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" series, but by the time Bowes has added the Greek pantheon (among other things) there is not much resemblance. This is a "mosaic novel" (a.k.a. "integrated collection", a.k.a. "fix-up novel"), but with the components much more interleaved than one usually finds. It is possible I would have liked the individual pieces more; I may go back and see.
To order From the Files of the Time Rangers from amazon.com, click here.
TREKS NOT TAKEN by Steven R. Boyett (Sneaker Press/Midnight Graffiti, ISBN 1-882813-05-7, 1996):
"Call me irresponsible. Some years ago--the stardate is unimportant now--the irresistible motivation of several outstanding warrants and the certainty of my impecunious nature, caused me to enlist about a Federation starship, for just as some men hold the briny Sea in their hearts, I have empty Space in my head."
That's just one sample from this book of twenty selections, showing how some famous authors might have written Star Trek: The Next Generation, had Hollywood waved the money in front of them.
My only real complaint with this is that Boyett concentrated more on modern authors than on the authors of the so-called Western Canon. I would have liked to see Shakespeare's "Merry Ensigns of Windsor," or Jane Austen's "Mansfield Trek" or Charles Dickens's "Data Copperfield" or even George Eliot's "Romulan." (And I would have thought that "The Brothers Data" by Dostoyevsky was an obvious entry.) But we do have Melville, Joyce, Hemingway, and Conrad. We also have Rice, Clancy, Vonnegut, and Dr. Seuss.
I read only the stories for those authors with whom I had some familiarity (which was about three-quarters of them). And for these Boyett captured the style remarkably well, considering the wide range they cover. For anyone who enjoys reading a wide variety of authors and styles, I highly recommend this book. If you can't find it in your local bookstore, it can be ordered from Mark Ziesing (P. O. Box 76, Shingletown CA 96088, http://www.ziesing.com).
And as Boyett himself said, "I don't think [these] make any less sense than last year's Star Trek season."
To order Treks Not Taken from amazon.com, click here.