Outside of a Dog

phooky reviewed The fabulous riverboat by Philip José Farmer

The Fabulous Riverboat is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip José Farmer, the …

Decidedly unfabulous

1 star

Content warning spoilers and unwelcome frankness

I originally read this in the 80s, found a copy on the curb, and figured I'd give it a reread. This was a mistake.

For one thing, Farmer can't write Clemens. The entire conceit of the series is that you get to throw historical characters at each other; have fun with it! But no, his Clemens is dull and unfunny, terminally afflicted with Science Fiction Information Dump Syndrome. He's supposed to be leading a country, but he's just so dull you can't imagine anyone following him to the corner store for a cigar. Farmer doesn't manage to make him seem clever or even an entertaining curmudgeon.

And then we come to the other problem, which is that Farmer is of that generation of white sci-fi authors who really, desperately wanted to believe that racism was over. In the second half of the novel we're treated to pages and pages of "well, yes, racism was terrible, but now it is The Future, so please be reasonable", which ramps up into a war against a black nationalist state, rape, and eventually a stunning moment where Clemens "darkens his skin" to spy on the enemy.

It is kind of amazing that even in 1971 no one involved in editing or publishing this book sat down with Philip Jose Farmer and gently explained that he had, whether by intention or accident, written a novel in which Mark Twain wears blackface, and that he shouldn't have.

Anyway, a childhood touchstone that should never have been revisited. I tossed it in the trash.

phooky reviewed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Helen Oxenbury

Welcome back to a Wonderland that is as astonishingly new as it is joyously familiar. …

Usually a fan of Oxenbury, but perhaps Tenniel has eaten my brain

3 stars

Look, illustrating Alice is hard. You're laboring in the shadow of Tenniel, and the comparison is going to be made. You can lean into the Tenniel iconography and add your own spin to it, as Disney did, or you can fight it tooth and nail. That's what Oxenbury's doing here, but she's working so hard to be Not Tenniel that she's forgetting to have any fun with it. Thus we have a Cheshire Cat that somehow "grins" without showing any teeth, playing-card people who just look like they're wearing playing cards, and weirdly sterile environments that seem terrified to include any imagery that isn't explicitly detailed in the text. Characters often float along with minimal background. Their expressions seem muted. If anything, it feels like Oxenbury is trying to bring a sort of naturalism to her illustrations here, which is, frankly, kind of a bonkers way of going about illustrating …

Look, illustrating Alice is hard. You're laboring in the shadow of Tenniel, and the comparison is going to be made. You can lean into the Tenniel iconography and add your own spin to it, as Disney did, or you can fight it tooth and nail. That's what Oxenbury's doing here, but she's working so hard to be Not Tenniel that she's forgetting to have any fun with it. Thus we have a Cheshire Cat that somehow "grins" without showing any teeth, playing-card people who just look like they're wearing playing cards, and weirdly sterile environments that seem terrified to include any imagery that isn't explicitly detailed in the text. Characters often float along with minimal background. Their expressions seem muted. If anything, it feels like Oxenbury is trying to bring a sort of naturalism to her illustrations here, which is, frankly, kind of a bonkers way of going about illustrating Wonderland. I love Oxenbury's children books, but she didn't really bring her A-game here.

phooky reviewed Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper

Fenris isn't a hell planet, but it's nobody's bargain. With 2,000-hour days and an 8,000-hour …

Whalers on the Moon

2 stars

Trouble's brewing at the whaler's co-op-- in space! Simple solid old school sci-fi, from before sci-fi got trippy and cool. People fight with fists and guns, light or put out fires, and argue about price fixing in a frontier town. In spaaaaaace. It's fun, I guess.

phooky reviewed Discrete mathematics by Lovász, László

Not very deep, a fun if meandering overview

3 stars

The topics are clearly explained at a leisurely pace, and I enjoyed the frequent, well thought out exercises. This is the rare mathematics textbook that includes answers to all the exercises, instead of, say, leaving you scratching your head for a month before you figure out you're chasing a careless typo.

One quibble: so many combinatorics problems are posed along the lines of "match up every girl with every boy" etc. and it's like, it's the 21st century, can we just, y'know, not?

phooky reviewed Lilith by George MacDonald

Lilith is a fantasy novel by Scottish writer George MacDonald, first published in 1895. It …

Interesting, if not good

3 stars

It's a weird one. It's nominally a Christian fantasy novel, but it's more Gnostic than anything else. It's the kind of novel in which the narrator is invited to literally lay down and die about twenty pages in. It can't quite make up its mind whether its worldbuilding is allegorical or literal. Much of the writing is labored and confused. There is purple, adoring, faintly sexual prose about horses and leopards. Strange beasts erupt from the sand-- are they direct representations of sin, or just weird-ass alien monsters? In the end, it puts forth a very specific theology, one which on one hand offers salvation to everyone, but predicates everything on submission. Not sure how I feel about this one, but it was an interesting read and worth a mull or two.

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phooky reviewed The fabulous riverboat by Philip José Farmer

Decidedly unfabulous

1 star

phooky reviewed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Helen Oxenbury

Usually a fan of Oxenbury, but perhaps Tenniel has eaten my brain

3 stars

phooky reviewed Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper

Whalers on the Moon

2 stars

phooky reviewed Discrete mathematics by Lovász, László

Not very deep, a fun if meandering overview

3 stars

phooky reviewed Lilith by George MacDonald

Interesting, if not good

3 stars