This may be my most pointless post ever, but tradition must be maintained.

This week’s subject of discussion over at LibraryThing’s The Weird Tradition group was, for the first time, two stories.

Review “The Death of Pan”, Lord Dunsany, 1915 and “The Tomb of Pan“, Lord Dunsany, 1910.

These two short-short stories talk about the mixed reactions of people on the death of Pan. Except, maybe, he isn’t really dead.

Since there so short you can read both combined in under five minutes, there seems little point saying more than that.

This blog is instinctively, resolutely, and deliberately un-self-reflective.

It also marks few anniversaries or commemorations though that’s just a matter of poor planning.

But the spirit has temporarily moved me to make an exception to both.

WordPress informs me it’s been nine years I’ve been at this.

The stats?

So, that’s 36.78 views a day, 22.27 visitors a day, and a mere .52 posts a day.

Lifetime hours spent? Haven’t a clue.

Opportunity costs? Probably millions of dollars lost. Undoubtedly. Really. Honest.

Am I going to keep it up? Reflexively and without a thought like a plant twisting and thrusting toward a beclouded sun.

And thanks to all of you who have stopped by.

Since I recently reviewed H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy books and Dorsai! Dickson, I thought I’d post this from the archives.

Raw Feed (1990): Earthman’s Burden, Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, 1957. 

This is a fix-up of a rather funny set of stories (I don’t know if I would say hilarious) that I strongly suspect were the basis for Star Trek‘s “A Piece of the Action”. 

The cute, teddy bear Hokas are irrepressible and fun as they set out to harmlessly imitate — to often humorously extreme lengths — Earth cultures. Dickson and Anderson use the series to parody the conventions of a variety of literary (and the non-literary genre of opera) genres. I particularly liked the pirate and French Foreign Legion stories. 

The series’ only flaw (and I did chuckle aloud at several points) is that the stories are all a bit formulaic:  Protagonist Alexander Jones gets involved with Hokas, gets drunk or knocked out, things get way out of control with the Hokas, and Jones lucks into (or cleverly exploits) the situation to accomplish his ends.

Review: Fuzzy Sapiens, H. Beam Piper, 1964.

Jerry Pournelle, H. Beam Piper’s friend, said,

It was those Fuzzy books that killed him! They got his hopes up, then dashed them. Beam’s plan was to write one book, or short story, in each century of his future history, not write three bloody Fuzzy novels, including one he could never sell.

On February 14, 1962, Piper got word that Janet Wood at Avon Books wanted a sequel to Little Fuzzy.

As quoted in John F. Carr’s Typewriter Killer, Mike Knerr, Piper’s friend and would-be biographer, said,

Space Viking, in my not so humble opinion, stands as one of the best novels Beam ever wrote—and just what the hell did the book have to do with the Fuzzy thing? If Janet Wood thought that Piper was just going to sit in Williamsport and crank out Little Fuzzy adventures just for Avon, she had another think [sic] coming.

We laughed about it a lot, while Beam struggled to find a decent plot for the sequel. ‘Hell, yes, We’ll do “Little Fuzzy and the Jewels of Opar;” “Little Fuzzy and the Golden Lion” and “Little Fuzzy at the Earth’s Core”… How’s your drink? I’ll get us a refill.’

But, at this point, Piper hadn’t been a hobby writer for many years. The professional Piper was increasingly short of money and figured he didn’t have much choice than to write that sequel.

But, as is the way with publishers, when Janet Wood left Avon, support for Piper’s second Fuzzy novel went with it. Published as The Other Human Race, the original covers of both novels show how much Avon cared about the sequel:

If I was rating Piper novels on how memorable they are, this would be at the bottom. Making notes on this book a bit over seven months after reading it, the only thing I thought I remembered was that a real estate scam was involved, and that it was notable how quickly the former enemies of Little Fuzzy became friends. Neither of which is precisely true. 

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A short announcement.

I will no longer be gouging your eyes out with whatever ads WordPress decided to place on my posts.

I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere for suggestions on how to treat your various maladies.

There may be some further cosmetic changes over time as well.

If, for some reason, you do not get autorouted to the new address — marzaat.com — let me know.

Yes, I decided to go with the oh-so-catchy domain name. It’s the closest thing to a brand I have.

Having found Tom Holland’s Rubicon a worthwhile book, I picked up this one.

Review: Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar, Tom Holland, 2015.

In the follow up to his Rubicon, Holland takes up the story of the legendary Julio-Claudian emperors. With 419 pages of text, he covers all the stories of treachery, torture, matricide, fratricide, sexual depravity, assassinations, mutinies, and excess you’ve heard. To that, he explains how Roman sexual mores, religious festivals, family relations, and the plebians’ continued fascination with the dynasty that started with Julius Caesar played a part in everything.

And Holland, particularly in the chapter on Tiberius, “The Last Roman”, approaches his emperors in an empathetic if not sympathetic way.

The prose is stylish with Holland sometimes using very modern terms to give us the flavor of the strange and also familiar Roman imperial culture. He deftly shows how Rome’s own myths reveal something of their character. Specifically, Romans held their race started with a rape, and its resulting issue was suckled by wolves.

In the book’s pages, you find an emperor who tearfully and theatrically threw himself on the mercy of the Roman public (Augusta), an emperor who never wanted the job and descended into an old age of watching aristocratic children recruit mythological sex scenes (Tiberius), an emperor always ready for a very malicious and deadly joke on an aristocrat (Caligula), an emperor incestuously besotted with his niece (Claudius), and an emperor under the domineering thumb of his mother (Nero). But Holland doesn’t skimp on covering the other power players at this time, particularly the eventually divine wife of Augusta, Livia. She may have been married to Augustus, but her primary interest was always furthering the glory of her own family, the Claudians.

But Holland isn’t just writing an update of Suetonius’ salacious Twelve Caesars. He shows the change in Roman politics, how the Roman people and Senate were tamed, first by smooth talk, legal legerdemain, flattery and then open terror into accepting what they long despised – a king. It is a story dependent on the magical place the dynasty of Caesar had in the mind of the Roman public and “the exhaustion of cruelty” after decades of civil war.

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Raw Feed (2005): Re-Birth, John Wyndham, 1955. 

This isn’t one of Wyndham’s disaster novels. You could see it as sort of an amalgam of the species supplanting children of The Midwich Cuckoos (though here the supplanting is by nuclear war engendered mutations as opposed to alien-human hybridization) and Wyndham’s famous disaster novels. 

Here the nuclear war was centuries in the past, and the plot involves a group of telepathic children dealing with their oppressive society which is dedicated to maintaining genetic purity (or, at least, paying lip service to it — beneficial mutations like giant workhorses are allowed if they only deviate in size) at all costs.

Whereas The Midwich Cuckoos was a horror story of man’s replacement, this novel celebrates the telepathic mutants and the constant change and evolution that is life. It is well narrated by its telepathic hero who briefly glosses over the numerous brutalities inflicted on him and his fellow mutants. At story’s end, a high tech civilization of telepaths is found in New Zealand. 

The narration isn’t as slick or of the same tone as Wyndham’s Out of the Deeps since the narrator engages in a lot of description.

My look at Byron Craft’s Mythos Project series continues.

Review: Shoggoth, Byron Craft, 2018. 

This is much more conventional novel in structure and feel than the preceding novel in the series, The Cry of Cthulhu. Specifically, it is structured like a modern thriller with multiple viewpoint characters, budding romance between some, and a climax that flits between several scenes.

The title, of course, tells us what Lovecraftian menace we’re dealing with, and the opening two chapters cover the invention of the shoggoth and the research project of one Isaac Morley in the late 19^th century around the town of Darwin in the Mojave Desert. Then we move to our time.

Thomas Ironwood, compiler of the events of The Cry of Cthulhu, is the main character here. His work on a missile defense system, using solar powered lasers, is brought to a sudden end when Admiral Hawkins, Senator Neville Stream, and Stream’s rather too chummy associate, US Navy Captain Eastwater, announce a new project using money taken from Ironwood’s work.

Excavating land on the Naval Weapons Complex in the Mojave Desert will be required. The only hold up to the work, and it’s not much of one, is a figure from Ironwood’s past, the much-diminished ex-literature professor turned archaeologist, Alan Ward. He claims the project must be stopped to avoid sites of archaeological interest.

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