Dinosaurs Life Size (Darren Naish)

Dinosaurs Life Size was written by Darren Naish, author of the Tetrapod Zoology blog. As the title implies, it's meant to give an idea as to just how large those critters were. Obviously, most of them are too big to fit into a children's book, but....

Twenty dinosaurs are included in the book, ranging chronologically from the Triassic Herrerasaurus to the late Cretaceous Citipati, and in size from Microraptor (which almost fits onto its page) to big sauropods like Diplodocus (up to 115 feet long) and Sauroposeidon (an estimated 40 tons). There are also several non-dinosaurs, including the plesiosaurs Plesiosaurus and Liopleurodon, the ichthyosaur Stenopterygius, the pterosaurs Pterodactylus and Quetzalcoatlus, and the early bird Archaeopteryx (which in many ways resembles its theropod ancestors more than its modern avian relatives).

The good: For each one, we get:

• A life-sized picture of the animal, of course - if it will fit on the page. If not, there's a life-sized picture of part of it, plus a picture of the complete animal with the part that's shown life-sized marked. The traditional human is included to provide scale; since this is a children's book, however, instead of the usual silhouette of a man there's a painting of a child interacting with the animal. (The kids with the aquatic reptiles have swimsuits and snorkels, of course!)
  
• A box showing where and when the fossils were first found.
  
• Another box, discussing its size, both weight height/length/wingspan.
  
• A couple paragraphs of text describing it.
  
• A "WOW!" fact or two. ("A Velociraptor specimen was discovered locked in combat with a Protoceratops. The Protoceratops had bitten onto the predator's arm, but the Velociraptor's left sickle-claw was pushed up against the herbivore's neck.")

The bad: My only complaint concerns the Pterodactylus picture: It says the critter was "roughly similar in size to a large gull," but that life-sized rendition doesn't look anywhere near as large as the gulls I see around here almost every day. Naish has mentioned in his blog, though, that "some of the 'life sized' animals are scaled wrong."

All in all, it's a very nice book, and I'd recommend it for any child who's interested in the subject.

Dinosaurs Life Size, by Darren Naish. Barron's, 2010. Children (4-8, according to Amazon). Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course. I haven't seen any other reviews, but Naish's own discussion of the book is here.


Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Sherrie, at Write About Now.

Bamboo People (Mitali Perkins)

Burma (officially, since 1989, the Union of Myanmar) is in southeast Asia, between India and Thailand. It was an independent kingdom for several hundred years, but after a series of three wars with Britain, the Konbaung dynasty fell and Burma was annexed into the British Empire in 1885. The country was occupied by the Japanese from 1942 until 1945 (one of their accomplishments being the construction of a railroad from Bangkok, Thailand, to the Burmese capital at Rangoon), after which the country reverted to British rule.

Independence was granted in 1948. In 1962, General Ne Win - former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and interim Prime Minister - led a successful coup. The military has retained control of Burma since then, ignoring the results of elections and viciously suppressing protests. The junta which seized power in 1988 has been accused of many human-rights violations, including murder, brutal military offensives against ethnic minorities (such as the Karen), forced labour, and the use of child soldiers.

Chiko is a 15-year-old Burmese boy, living alone with his mother in Yangon (the former Rangoon) since his father was arrested for treason four months ago. The father was a doctor, and Chiko learned much from him, including reading and writing (both Burmese and English). Since the arrest there has been no money coming in, and Chiko's mother has been selling off household goods in order to buy food. Chiko wants to become a teacher, and when he spots an ad in the paper he talks his mother into letting him apply for the job and take the examination. It turns out to be a trap, though; boys who have shown up for the exam are grabbed by soldiers and forced into the Army. Their training camp is a former Karenni school near the Thai border.

Tu Reh is a 16-year-old Karenni boy. After his village was burned by Burmese soldiers, he fled with his parents and sister to a refugee camp just across the border in Thailand. Since then, he and his best friend, Sa Reh, have been looking forward to getting revenge. Now, for the first time, he is accompanying his father and other men from the camp on a mission to deliver medical supplies and food to Karenni hiding in the jungle. They are unarmed, but he is at least accomplishing something.

And now, somewhere out in the jungle, Chiko and Tu Reh are about to meet....

The good: First-person present-tense narratives normally annoy me, but after the first couple of pages I didn't even notice that the book was written this way (with the first section narrated by Chiko and the second by Tu Reh).

I really hadn't read much about Burma (other than in books about World War II) before this book came along, and I'm sure most American readers will know less than I did. Perkins manages to provide background information without resorting to info dumps such as my first two paragraphs above; details are worked in as the story progresses.

I lift the cover off the plate and see ngapi, the dried and fermented shrimp paste we eat with every meal; rice; and a few chunks of chicken floating in a pale, weak curry. [Chiko, p 8]

*******

Sidewalk vendors are beginning to set up wares for the afternoon. The rickshaw veers to avoid children playing in the streets. These little ones should be inschool, but they don't have a choice. Schools have been closed so many times that nobody can learn much. [Chiko, p 25]

*******

"Home" in the camp is a bamboo hut on stilts. Looks a bit like our house in the village, but it's much smaller. ... I put my bamboo pole where it belongs, against the wall near my sleeping mat. Afternoon sunshine filters through the walls. Sand is piled in one corner of the room, and a pot of rice steams there on a small fire. [Tu Reh, p 195]

I read Perkins's previous book, Secret Keeper, last year, and was left wondering how, should UFOs ever land and disgorge their crews, we could possibly understand them; the people in Secret Keeper are every bit as human as I am, but I couldn't understand the way their minds worked at all - the cultural differences were just too great. Maybe it's just a guy thing, but I didn't have that problem at all with Bamboo People; the themes of war, hate and revenge were much simpler.

A couple of back-of-the-book notes give background on Burma and its history, and on the author's interest therein.

The bad: The Burmese and Karenni names are a little confusing, especially the latter. For instance, all of the male Karenni are named Reh (Tu Reh, Sa Reh, Bu Reh) and all of the females are named Meh (Oo Meh, Ree Meh, Nya Meh). Since Oo Meh is Tu Reh's sister, and Oo Reh is their father, I'm assuming that "Meh" and "Reh" are actually sex* markers, not names; in fact, I'm going to slide a little farther out on my limb here and guess that they actually mean "daughter" and "son." It really would have been nice to have another note, concerning names, at the back of the book.

And I'm sorry, but "Chiko" is just too much like "Chico" - I kept snickering as I pictured a Mexican boy lost in the Burmese jungles....


Bamboo People: A Novel, by Mitali Perkins. Charlesbridge, 2010. Young adult. Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course - though buying through IndieBound or from your local independent bookseller is highly recommended!

Other reviews can be found here (A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy) and here (Semicolon). Perkins's blog (Mitali's Fire Escape) can be found here, and she has a page about Bamboo People here.


* People have sexes; genders are for nouns.

Fat Cat (Robin Brande)

Long, long ago - spring of '71, or thereabouts - I stopped off at the bookstore on my home from school one Monday afternoon, as I so often did, and was pleasantly surprised to find new paperback editions of two books I'd enjoyed at the library: When Worlds Collide, by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, and its sequel, After Worlds Collide. (Much better than the movie, of course!) Fortunately, I had a couple dollars in my pocket*, and was able to take them both home with me. I read When... that evening, and After... the next day. And then on Wednesday I reread After..., and on Thursday I reread When... - and I don't think I've ever read another book twice so close together.

Until a couple years ago, that is, when I read a book I liked so much that when I got to the bottom of the last page, I didn't even put the book down; I flipped straight back to the first page and read it again. That book was Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature, by Robin Brande, and I kept thinking that I really ought to write some sort of review of it, since I liked it so much. But I really, really hate writing book reviews, so....

Then last weekend the library's copy of Fat Cat, Brande's second book, finally arrived. I got it at once, expecting a good read, and wasn't disappointed.

The book begins, presumably, on the first day of school; at any rate, it's the first day of Special Topics in Research Science. Mr Fizer has a stack of pictures, torn out of National Geographic and other magazines, and each student in the class will go up and, without looking, draw a picture from the stack. The picture selected will provide the topic for that student's research project.

Catherine "Cat" Locke is hoping for a picture of some sort of insects, so that she can build on the fig wasp project she'd done over the summer. But when she gets back to her seat and looks at the picture, she sees a group of Homo erectus - three males and a female - defending a carcass from a pack of hyenas. At first she's at a total loss for what to do, but then:

When I opened my eyes again, there was the woman's butt. And the rest of the woman. And for some reason, it occurred to me in that moment that she was actually kind of cool in her prehistoric way - strong, determined-looking, ready to haul off and hurl that rock while the guys just shouted and looked concerned.

And she was thin. Not emaciated, fashion-model thin, but that good muscular thin like you see on women athletes. She looked like she could run and hunt and fight just as well as the men - maybe even better.

And that's when I realized: I wanted to be her.

To look like her, rather, because Cat isn't thin and fit. Quite the opposite, in fact - she's had the nickname "Fat Cat" for several years now. And so her research project is going to be an attempt at living a pseudo-erectus lifestyle, eating only what H erectus ate (no processed foods) and avoiding as much as possible, with due regard to safety and health, use of technology (walking instead of riding in a car, using the stairs instead of the lift).

But after a few months, between the exercise and the dietary change Cat is no longer fat. In fact, she's turning into a pretty hot chick. And now she has to deal with the boys who are moving in on her - including the former best friend who betrayed her years ago....

I liked the whole concept of Cat's research project. In addition to the physical changes, she has to deal with the idea of suddenly becoming someone boys are interested in, and the resulting changes in her life - first date, first kiss, &c. She has her friend Amanda to help, but the girls have no idea of how the male mind works. (Not that the boys are any better at dealing with the female mind.) So it's a learning experience for all concerned....

Brande says that her next book will be a romantic comedy involving quantum physics and string theory. I'm looking forward to reading that one, too.

Fat Cat, by Robin Brande. Alfred A Knopf, 2009. Young adult. Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course - though buying through IndieBound or from your local independent bookseller is highly recommended!


* The average paperback was what, 75 cents in 1971? Or were they still 60 cents?

Operation Yes (Sara Lewis Holmes)

I read a lot of books, but seldom write reviews - for the simple reason that I hate writing reviews. The process always reminds me of high-school English class, where we would read a perfectly good story and then ruin it by dissecting it. (I'm a surface reader - I read the story exactly as written, without regard for possible parables, allegories or other hidden meanings.) This week, however....

I mentioned a while back that one of the books I was looking forward to this year was Operation Yes, by Sara Lewis Holmes. It finally came out on 1 September, and it was well worth the wait.

The book is set on an Air Force base in North Carolina. Bo Whaley, son of the base commander, doesn't like school; he's acquired a reputation as a troublemaker, too. Gari Whaley doesn't want to spend a year with her uncle Phil's family, but her mother is an Army nurse who's being sent to Iraq for a year. Bo and Gari are both going to be in the sixth grade at Young Oaks School.

Carol Loupe dropped out of the Air Force Academy to become a teacher. She's the only one in her family who isn't in the service - her sister is an Air Force pilot, one brother is at the Academy and the other brother is part of a Special Forces team in Afghanistan. Miss Loupe is also at Young Oaks, doing her first year as a sixth-grade teacher.

Miss Loupe is a very active teacher. On the first day of school, she is down on her knees, taping off a rectangle on the classroom floor whilst calling roll (from memory). The Taped Space is meant to be a stage for improv, leading to some wild scenes. Unfortunately, the School Commission is coming to do a material inspection of the school, and theatre isn't part of the state-approved sixth-grade curriculum....

And then Miss Loupe receives bad news. Very bad news. And Bo, Gari and the rest of the sixth grade - aided by their first-grade reading buddies and 100,000 Little Green Men - set out to help her recover.

Holmes, I believe, was an Air Force brat; she's now an Air Force wife. So her descriptions of life on base sound right, and she deals well with problems like Gari's separation from her mother or Bo's worries about what will happen when his father transfers next year. Favourite bits include the school librarian, who uses book titles as cuss words ("Frog and Toad!" Miss Candy said.); the FOD walkdown Bo organises to find a lost pendant; the performance presented by the Ugly Couch Players, and:

"A milk run is a routine mission," said Mr. Nix to his class as they came through the line. "Does anyone know what the opposite of routine is?"
One of his first graders tried to raise her hand and dropped her pudding. A glob of it landed on his shoe.
"No, that's not it," said Mr. Nix.

Operation Yes, by Sara Lewis Holmes. Scholastic, 2009. Ages 9-12 (though our public library lists it as YA). Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course - though buying through IndieBound or from your local independent bookseller is highly recommended!

Any Which Wall (Laurel Snyder)

Back a couple of lifetimes ago, when I was in junior high school or perhaps high school, I discovered the books of Edward Eager: Half Magic and Magic by the Lake, about the magical adventures of four kids of the 1930s; Knight's Castle and The Time Garden, about the children of the two youngest girls from the first two books; and Seven-Day Magic, a stand-alone book unrelated except by theme to the other four. All five books were about ordinary American kids in ordinary American towns, who somehow stumbled across real, working magic. (I've read two other books by Eager, Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers, but I didn't really care for those two.)

Around the same time, I discovered the works of E (for Edith) Nesbit. I actually first ran across her in the pages of other books, for other authors' characters seemed to make a habit of reading Nesbit. I'm not sure where I first found her mentioned - perhaps in Eager's works, or in those of Dean Marshall (the Guthrie children, from Marshall's books*, were certainly familiar with The Hobbit and The Hunting of the Snark) - but I definitely recommend Five Children and It and its two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet, which again are about ordinary children (English, this time) faced with real magic.

A few weeks back I wrote about five books to be released this year which I was looking forward to reading. At the top of the list was Any Which Wall, by Laurel Snyder. I finally got hold of it this week - and I wasn't disappointed.

The book is about four kids in small-town Iowa - ten-year-old neighbours-and-best-friends Roy and Henry, Roy's sister Susan (twelve) and Henry's sister Emma (six). It's summertime, and they're out for a bike ride in the country when they follow a path through somebody's cornfield and find a wall, "tall as City Hall and about that wide," right in the middle of the field. Not just a wall - a wishing wall (not, of course, to be confused with a wishing well), as they soon accidentally discover.

First things first: The kids agree to keep the magic a secret for themselves.

"Now everyone swear," Henry said. "Swear that you won't tell a soul." Henry looked at each of them one by one. "Swear!"

Susan swore quickly, with a giggle.

Emma's eyes were gigantic as she repeated after Susan. Sacrifices and swearing all in one day!

Roy appeared cool and thoughtful. "I solemnly swear," he said, "though I reserve the right to revisit this issue at a later time, since we just don't know what'll happen. Okay?"

Henry gave a brief head shake that meant "Yes, okay, sure, whatever you say, Roy" and also "That won't happen, goofball" before he went on in a rush of excitement. "And I swear too. Okay!"

Next, as is usual with this sort of thing, the kids must figure out the rules - the way the magic operates, and how to control it. This requires experimentation, of course, with mixed results, but they finally end up in Camelot and meet Merlin, who gives each of them a single glimpse of the future before going off to take a three-day nap.

From then on it's adventure time, as they travel to interesting places and meet up with the world's worst pirate, a Wild West outlaw, a unicorn, a chirky librarian and other interesting people. Some places are more interesting than others....

They were in a barn.

Henry breathed deeply and said, "Man, this place smells worse than Camelot." He sounded impressed. A goat responded by nibbling his shoe.

Susan took her hand from the wall and wiped it on her shorts. "I guess most frontier houses were on farms, so we shouldn't really be surprised, but is everything in the past smelly?"

Roy, holding his nose, answered her. "Yeah, I actually kind of think so. Indoors, anyway, since they hadn't invented air fresheners yet. If you think about it, barns in our time don't smell that great either." Just then, Emma stumbled over a chicken, and there was a great deal of squawking on Emma's part, as well as on the part of the chicken.

Things I liked: The very concept of a wishing wall - a nice variation on the familiar. A couple mentions of Edward Eager (the kids have read Magic by the Lake). Drawings by LeUyen Pham; I especially liked the one of the kids in the diner and the one of them washing the dog. Snyder's sense of humour, which I first encountered in Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, her previous book.

Things I didn't like: It's too short (though 242 pages is actually a good length for a children's novel); a sequel or two would be nice.


Any Which Wall, by Laurel Snyder. Random House Children's Books, 2009. Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course - though buying through IndieBound or from your local independent bookseller is highly recommended!


* The Invisible Island, Dig for a Treasure and Wish on the Moon - which despite the titles are not works of fantasy, but are stories about ordinary kids in small-town Connecticut. Think Melendy (Elizabeth Enright) or Penderwick (Jeanne Birdsall)....


Update 1912 10 Jun: This review by Charlotte includes a brief interview with Snyder, wherein she says that a sequel is in the planning stages, though nothing is definite. Jen Robinson has also written a review.

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains (Laurel Snyder)

Some children's books are educational, others are thought-provoking. This one is just plain fun.

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is about the adventures of Lucy, a milkmaid, and Wynston, a prince. The two grow up together in the town of Thistle, in the Bewilderness, playing, exploring and arguing with each other. But then one day King Desmond informs Wynston that it is time for him to grow up and to begin looking for a suitable princess to become his future queen. And also, of course, to learn to be a proper prince:

"Yesterday I got fitted for a new pair of beaded boots, learned to eat fish soup with a tiny fork, and studied the ancient art of holding my tongue without getting it wet."

Lucy, left alone, decides to head for the Scratchy Mountains and see if she can find her mother, who has been missing since Lucy was two; all anyone will tell her is that her mother is gone. So off she goes, up the mountains, accompanied only by her somewhat confused cow, Rosebud. Along the way she acquires a prairie dog named Cat, takes a boat ride and passes through a most peculiar hailstorm before finally arriving at the neat, orderly, "very civilized" town of Torrent - where people live in alphabetical order, rainstorms run on schedule and the jail doubles as an ice-cream parlour.

She climbed down and led Rosebud around to the front door of the jail, where she found two signs. The first read sternly THE LAW PROTECTS THOSE WHO PROTECT THE LAW. The second proclaimed FLAVOR OF THE DAY: BUTTER FUDGE RIPPLERUMP! Lucy puzzled at this. It didn't seem very Torrential to sell ice cream in a jail, but she was learning not to be surprised at the twists and turns of her strange adventure

Meanwhile, back at the ranch castle, Wynston escapes from his lessons and goes looking for Lucy. Upon learning where Lucy has gone, he and his horse, Sprout, set out into the mountains after her. He also ends up in Torrent (having been commissioned to deliver a letter to someone there), and he and Lucy promptly run afoul of the local laws....

As I said, the book is fun. Lucy's songs are amusing, as are most of the situations Lucy, Wynston, Cat and Rosebud find themselves in. Even the scary and depressing bits aren't too scary and depressing for younger readers. Greg Call, who did the cover, also illustrated the book. My favourite pictures are the one of baby Lucy pulling the dog's ears and the one of the boat and the waterfall. This is Snyder's first novel, and I'm looking forward to her next one.

Other reviews can be found here and here.

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, by Laurel Snyder; Random House Books for Young Readers, 2008. Available from (amongst other places) Amazon, Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble.

Knights' Ransom (S F Welty)

I think it was Betsy Bird who was blogging a while back about old children's books that really ought to be reprinted. Knights' Ransom, by S F Welty, is one that I think fits that category.

In 1396 the Kingdom of Hungary was threatened with attack by the Turkish sultan Bayezid I (also known in the west as Bajazet). An army, largely composed of French and Burgundian forces under the leadership of Count John of Nevers, travelled from Paris to the Hungarian capital of Buda, where it joined King Sigismond's army. Bajazet had not yet appeared, so eventually the decision was made to take the war to him. After attacking a few smaller Turkish towns, the Christian army arrived at Nicopolis (now Nikopol, Bulgaria) and lay siege to it.

Bajazet, who had been fed intel on Christian movements by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, took his time, waiting until his full army was gathered before moving on Nicopolis. His arrival took the Western army by surprise, and the resulting battle was a disastrous defeat for the French. Many were killed; most of the prisoners were executed by the Turks, with only a few kept to be ransomed. I haven't found a list of prisoners or a description of the ransom demanded, but it was obviously paid, for Count John succeeded his father as Duke of Burgundy in 1404.

Knights' Ransom starts near Paris, on the day the French set out for Hungary. Young Vahl Thorfinnsson, a falconer in the service of Count John, is part of the crowd; his task will be to tend Count John's falcons during the journey - especially Crusader, the white Greenland falcon.*

Vahl is captured just before the battle of Nicopolis, whilst out exercising Crusader, and he and the bird are taken to Bajazet, who is also a devotee of the sport of kings.

Dusk began to fall, but the troops of prisoners brought into the camp grew larger and larger. The clash of arms diminished, though the screaming of wounded men grew shriller and harsher as the hours wore on. Vahl caught sight of several standards he knew, borne in triumph by Moslem horsemen. Flaunted in the Turkish camp, the pennons could only mean that their owners were dead or prisoners.

Vahl sat on the warm, dry ground and bowed his aching head in his arms, trying in vain to close his ears as well as his eyes to the evidences of defeat. But his curiosity was stronger than his fear. He wrenched his eyes open in time to see Count John of Nevers and five of his leading knights, in heavy chains like common criminals. They moved under guard, and their rich raiment was torn and soiled with dust and blood, but their heads were still high. They bore themselves, even in adversity, with pride and courage. Groaning, Vahl covered his face with his hands.

Vahl manages to escape, taking Crusader with him, and makes his way back to France. There he is accused of cowardice and imprisoned by Count John's father, Duke Philip II of Burgundy, who refuses even to listen to Vahl's story. Three days later, Vahl is joined in his cell by a friend, Sir Olivier of Artois, who escaped from the battle and was received in France with the same welcome Vahl received. On the day set for their execution, however, they are saved by the arrival of another knight, Sir James de Helly, who has been sent as an emissary from Bajazet.

The sultan is willing to return some two score prisoners in exchange for a ransom consisting of gold, scarlet cloth, tapestries, fine linen - and twelve Greenland falcons. Twelve? There are only three of these rare and valuable birds in all of France, owned by Count John, Duke Philip and the king himself, Charles VI. The king agrees to send these three on to Bajazet as a down payment, while Vahl and Sir Olivier travel to Greenland to obtain nine more.

Only ships from Bergen are permitted to trade with Greenland, so they must sail from Bruges to Bergen, and thence to Iceland, Greenland and even beyond, to the lands discovered four centuries earlier by Leif Eiriksson. They meet with various interruptions along the way, including pirates:

Vahl's place was at Sir Olivier's side, but he could not hold it. The agile knight was everywhere at once; he seemed to find the thickest of the fray by instinct, strike an enemy a disabling blow, and attack another. But Vahl found himself duelling with a short, barrel-chested fellow twice his age and sturdy as an oak. The man beat him back until he could retreat no further except over the deck rail into the sea. Into that icy deathtrap his enemy might have pushed him, had not the pirate suddenly slipped. He recovered too quickly for Vahl to strike him down, but not quick enough to prevent Vahl's safe retreat to the foot of the tiny castle in the stern of the ship. Against him there his assailant soon pressed fiercely. He backed Vahl against the cabin door in the wall and set to work with heavy blows to finish him. One of the pirate's comrades, having struck down an opponent, ran to his aid. Together they fell upon the squire.

The book is rich in historical detail, and includes a glossary, mainly of terms used in falconry, and a map of Vahl's travels. My only quibble was a description of a cottage with strings of peppers hanging from the rafters; peppers are American plants, unknown in Europe until a century after the setting of this book.

Knights' Ransom, by S F Welty, Follett Publishing Company, 1951. Long out of print, alas, but available from various on-line used-book dealers, and probably also through interlibrary loan (ILL).


* The gyrfalcon, Falco rusticolus.

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (S M Stirling)

A while back I wrote a review of The Sky People (TSP), by S M Stirling. Now, at last, I have the sequel, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (CK).

The premise behind these two books is that two hundred million years ago (early in the Jurassic period), Somebody terraformed Mars and Venus, then seeded both planets with life from Terra. The Somebody - dubbed the Lords of Creation - came back from time to time, presumably to tweak things as needed and also to carry more Terran life to the other planets: more dinosaurs, birds, early mammals, later mammals, humans....

SF of the '30s depicted Mars as an ancient, dying planet, and Venus as an energetic, young world of great swamps and jungles. In TSP, Venus was inhabited by both dinosaurs and mammals (bringing to mind the Pellucidar stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs), and the highest human civilisation was a bronze-age city. The Mars of CK, on the other hand, was ruled by a world-wide empire 30,000 years ago; the surviving city-states are in some ways more advanced technologically than the people of Terra.

The prologue takes place on Labor Day, 1962, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. A lot of big names in SF are there, though the only surname mentioned is Burroughs (and ERB wasn't there, having died in 1950). Ted is the Guest of Honour; Fred is there, as are Poul, Bob, Isaac, Arthur, Jack, Beam, "young Larry from LA," Sprague and Catherine, Leigh, and others. Science fiction isn't on their mind at the moment, though; they're all gathering in front of the TV to see the first pictures sent from Mars by the Viking lander.

It was crowded, but virtually none of the fans were there. Not today, though that young friend of Beam's was off in a corner....

The first Soviet probe to reach the surface of Venus had sent back pictures showing humans; now everyone is waiting eagerly to see what will be found on Mars.

SF of the '30s depicted Mars as an ancient, dying planet, and Venus as a world of great swamps and jungles. In TSP, Venus was inhabited by both dinosaurs and mammals (bringing to mind the Pellucidar stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs), and the highest human civilisation was a bronze-age city. The Mars of CK, on the other hand, was ruled by a world-wide empire 30,000 years ago; the surviving city-states are in some ways more advanced technologically than the people of Terra.

The story proper begins on Mars, in May 0f 2000, eleven years after the end of TSP. Archaeologist Jeremy Wainman is setting out to search for the ruins of the ancient city of Rema-Dza, lost thousands of years ago when the world-wide empire fell; Teyud za-Zhalt, a professional practitioner of coercive violence, has hired on as guide and bodyguard. Teyud turns out to be more than she at first appears, however, and soon other Martians are coming after her, looking to earn the rewards offered for her capture, or at least for the delivery of certain portions of her.

Each chapter begins with an "excerpt" from the 20th edition (1998) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, providing more background information on the planet, its people, their technology and customs, &c. Martian tembst (technology) is largely based on bioengineereing. When Jeremy and an associate first enter the city of Zar-tu-kan, for instance:

Each passenger reached into the slot and dropped something as they went by; Sally Yamashita added two inch-long pieces of silver wire.

"One tenth shem," a voice in accented Martian said, through a grill on the side of the stone post.

"Correct weight for two foreigners and up to fifteen zka-kem of noncommercial baggage," the functionary added. "You may pass."

"Doesn't anyone ever try to stiff the tax man?" he murmured to her. "Slipping in copper for silver?"

"There's a mouth with teeth below that slot," she said. "It can taste the purity of metals with its tongue. And if the weight or composition's wrong, it bites down and holds you for Mr. Revenue Service to beat on with his Amazingly Itchy Electro-Rat."

True to the traditions of ERB and Kline, Martians do most of their fighting with swords; they do have guns, but - being bioengineered critters - these are nowhere as powerful as the "radium rifles" used by John Carter. Instead, the weapons generate methane which is stored in a bladder and can then be ignited to propel a poisoned dart.

There's a wild encounter with feral engines (yes, those are bioengineered, too) in the tunnels below Rema-Dza, and the explorers also meet up with more ordinary Martian wildlife:

... just after dawn they'd passed a herd - or flock - of four-footed flightless hump-backed birds that scampered off with black-and-white tails spread, caroling fright with a sound like a mob of terrified bassoons.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book - perhaps even more than I did The Sky People.

As usual with Stirling's books, you can test-drive it before you buy; the prologue and the first six (of fifteen) chapters can be found here.

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, by S M Stirling; Tom Doherty Associates, 2008.
Available from Amazon here, from Amazon UK here, and from Barnes & Noble here.


* Ted Sturgeon, Fred Pohl, Poul Anderson, Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Jack, H Beam Piper, Larry Niven, L Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp, Leigh Brackett. And Beam's young friend, I think, is Jerry Pournelle.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J K Rowling)

(I suppose I should begin by warning that there are mild spoilers here. I do say that a few things happen, but in most cases I don't specify who is involved. So it should be safe to read this, even if you haven't finished the book yet.)

My family got started on the Harry Potter books shortly after the US edition of the second book came out. They were already starting to get a lot of publicity; my mother-in-law was a librarian*, and her library had both books, so she brought the first one home to see what the fuss was about. I spotted it lying on the table and picked it up - and couldn't put it down. And she, my wife and I have bought every book since then as soon as we could after publication. My older daughter started reading them, too, after seeing the first movie. (By now she's read the first six books at least five times each, and I think that as I write this, she's reading Deathly Hallows for the third time....)

I have to admit that by the time this book - the seventh and last one in the series - came out, the questions of who lost, who won, who lived, who died, who married whom, &c, were almost secondary. The thing I most wanted to know was just what, exactly, made Severus Snape tick. We finally get to find out in chapter 33 (of 36); I was right about whom he was really working for (Dumbledore or Riddle), but the reasons behind everything blew my mind.

In the previous book, Half-Blood Prince, it was discovered that Lord Voldemort (once known as Tom Riddle) had split his soul into several parts and embedded most of those parts within objects known as horcruxes; as long as at least one horcrux remains intact, Voldemort cannot be killed. When Harry, Ron and Hermione were last seen, they were planning to drop out of Hogwarts and go looking for both the horcruxes and a means of destroying them. They do, and the fun begins....

If you're one of those who have been turned off by the idea of reading children's books, forget that - this is no longer just a children's series. There's no sex, other than a couple of instances of passionate snogging, but there's quite a bit of violence. Several characters, amongst them a couple whom we've known since the first book, are killed, and others are injured (including one victim of "friendly fire"). Bellatrix Lestrange meets her well-deserved end, at the hands of an unexpected opponent. The final battle between Harry and Voldemort (yes, they do square off at last, and no, I'm not telling who wins - go read the book!) was well done. When Voldemort faced Dumbledore at the end of Order of the Phoenix, he became angry when Dumbledore kept calling him Tom; he seems to like it even less when Harry calls him Riddle.

And speaking of Dumbledore, we get a lot of really interesting background information on him....

Not all is death and violence, of course. A lot of minor characters we haven't seen recently reappear - such as Harry's old Quidditch team (Oliver Wood, Katie Bell, &c), Viktor Krum, the spiders and centaurs from the Enchanted Forest, Dobby and Grawp. Griphook, the goblin who first took Harry to his private vault at Gringotts, plays an important role. We also see the whole Weasley family, including Charlie, Bill and Percy. There are two weddings (one of them offstage), and a baby is born.

A few choice lines:

"If you think I'm going to let six people risk their lives - !"
" - because it's the first time for all of us," said Ron.

*******

Never once had he imagined Dumbledore's childhood or youth; it was as though he had sprung into being as Harry had known him, venerable and silver-haired and old. The idea of a teenage Dumbledore was simply odd, like trying to imagine a stupid Hermione or a friendly Blast-Ended Skrewt.

*******

"NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!"

*******

"OI! There's a war going on here!"

*******

... a herd of galloping desks thundered past, shepherded by a sprinting Professor McGonagall.

I do have a couple of minor complaints, one being that while the Death Eaters are using every unforgivable curse and any other deadly spell they can think of, Harry and his friends are still using stunning spells and trying to disarm their opponents. I also thought the epilogue ("Nineteen Years Later") was a little too cute, though those who are really desperate to know the futures of some characters (Do those two really marry?) will be happy with it.

All in all, it's a good, strong book, one of the best in the series. Rowling does a good job of tying loose ends together in a satisfactory manner. (I'm going to reread the entire series now, in order, using my knowledge of the ending to see what I missed the first time through.)

Update 2209 29 July: Edited to add a couple of points that were in my original (mental) draught, plus a spoiler warning, and to correct some misspelt words.



* I say "was," because she is now a retired librarian.

A Rhyming History of Britain: 55 B.C.–A.D.1966 (James Muirden)

My sister-in-law gave me this book for Xmas '05, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. At first glance, it appears to be something along the line of 1066 and All That, but it's actually a serious (more or less) book. Inspired by Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses, Muirden has written exactly what the title says – a history, in iambic tetrameter, of Britain. As he says in the introduction:

I am not a historian. In fact, I wrote this poem in order to teach myself some history. I thought that sorting facts into verse form would concentrate my mind wonderfully. Which it did!

He picked 55 BC because, as far as I know, that's the first definite date in British history.

To start this Rhyming History,
I've chosen 55 B.C.
The Romans, who had got their hands
on all the European lands,
Could see this last annoying bit,
And thought they ought to conquer it.
Their famous Caesar, Julius,
Did not know what to make of us –
He couldn't work out who was who,
Since everyone was painted blue.
He took some souvenirs away,
Went home, and said 'Et tu, Brute?'

The book progresses onward, through Celts and Saxons (55 BC-AD 927) and the houses of Cerdic and Denmark (927-1066). We learn, amongst other things, about Hadrian's wall, the Saxon invasion, Alfred the Great, the Danelaw, Athelstan (927-939*) Ethelred (978-1016), Canute (1016-1035) and Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). Then William, Duke of Normandy, arrives upon the scene.

King William wanted to create
An adjunct to the Norman State.
At Westminster, on Christmas Day,
He was crowned king; but on the way
He made clear his innate desire
To set each place he passed on fire.
Wherever his lieutenants went
Their dedicated efforts sent
Flames (and insurance costs) sky-high,
No doubt attracting passers-by,
To see what quadruped or chicken
Had thus been rendered finger-lickin'.

William I (1066-1087) was followed by his sons, William II Rufus (1087-1100) and Henry I (1100-1135). After Henry's son died, though, the nobles balked at having his daughter as ruling queen.

He [Henry], did, however, look abroad
To find Matilda (known as Maud),
His Scottish queen, who soon gave birth
To what he wanted most on earth –
A son, the princely William, who
Wed Maud (Matilda?) of Anjou.
Will sailed from France upon the flood,
His White Ship filled with noble blood...
An unseen rock – need I say more?
A single sailor reached the shore.
(Some of the crew were drunk; the manner
Of his sad death recalls Diana.)

We can conceive the king's despair.
He had no other male heir:
Though he and Maud (Matilda) tried,
All she could do before she died
Was bear Matilda (Maud), to be
His hope of continuity.
The husband Henry chose for her,
The Holy Roman Emperor,
Though head of an enormous nation,
Was not much good at procreation.
Matilda (Maud) tried Number Two:
Count Geoffrey, ruler of Anjou.

Now, since the Normans did not think
Rosé d'Anjou a pleasant drink,
Maud's husband was not to their taste.
Another challenge Henry faced
Was nephew Stephen, Count of Blois
(Tricky to rhyme, but there you are).
He'd wed the daughter of a lord,
Whose name just happened to be Maud,
Though also known as (try to guess),
So things were really in a mess:
Two sides convinced that they were right,
Engaging in a royal fight.

Stephen (1135-1154) won the ensuing civil war, but as part of the peace settlement agreed that Maud's son Henry would inherit the throne after him. The Angevin kings, or Plantagenets (so called because of the yellow broom – planta genista – they used as a badge) reigned until 1399, to be followed by the houses of Lancaster and York, and the wars of the Roses.

Along the way we get Henry II (1154-1189) and Thomas Becket, William Marshall, Simon de Montfort, Edward I Longshanks (1272-1307), Llewelyn ap Gruffyd, Robert the Bruce and Edward II (1307-1327).

Edward the Second disappeared:
Murdered, no doubt; and it is feared
A red-hot poker may have been
Inserted in his intestine.

And on and on, for a total of some 200 pages: Tudors, Stuarts, the Civil War and Protectorate, the houses of Hanover and of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha, and the Windsors. Side-notes provide information that isn't given in the verse: Names of battles, acts of Parliament and other events, queens, prime ministers and other important people, as well as dates. We learn about Archbishop Scrope, the Act of Supremacy (1534), Lord Darnley, the Gunpowder Plot (1605), the Great Plague (1665), the Bloody Assizes, the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), the Old Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Peterloo Massacre (1819), Disraeli and Gladstone, and the World Wars.

Pearl Harbor, that uncouth event,
Was, from our viewpoint, heaven-sent.
Japan and Germany had signed
A pact by which they were aligned,
Which meant that Adolf, right away,
Declared war on the USA;
Though what with fighting Russians too,
It seemed a crazy thing to do.
(The 'Axis' nations numbered three,
The other being Italy.
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Describes the state that they were in.)

The book ends (on page 208 of my paperback copy) in 1966:

I'll end my convoluted rhyme
With Bobby Moore lifting up
The 1966 World Cup
When England took their Final bow:
'They think it's over – it is now!'

In addition to all this, the book is illustrated throughout with drawings by David Eccles. My favourites are the one of the English soldiers returning from France with their souvenirs (the Hundred Years War), the variations on British troops heading off to other wars ("Here we go"), and the one of George VI (1936-1952) and the Queen Mum during the Blitz.

Well worth reading, I think. And according to Amazon, Muirden and Eccles have also collaborated on Shakespeare Well-Versed: A Rhyming Guide to All His Plays (2004) and The Cosmic Verses: A Rhyming History of the Universe (2007), which I'm obviously going to have to obtain....


A Rhyming History of Britain: 55 B.C.–A.D.1966, by James Muirden. Walker & Company, New York, 2003. Text copyright 2003 by James Muirden; illustrations copyright 2003 by David Eccles.


* Dates given for rulers are dates of their reigns.

Click on the "Poetry Friday" button at left for this week's round-up, which is hosted by Susan at Chicken Spaghetti.

The Sky People (S M Stirling)

I was about ten years old when my sister brought home two utterly fascinating books. Thuvia, Maid of Mars featured wild adventures and weird beasts on the dried-out sea bottoms of Mars, which was called Barsoom by the natives. The People That Time Forgot was about people, dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals on an island in the southern Pacific; the explorers had apparently arrived on a German U-boat. (The story was set during World War I.)

I'd never read anything like either of these books before, and I was hooked immediately. They were written by someone named Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I started looking for everything I could find by him. Fortunately, this was the mid-1960s, and Ace and Ballentine were republishing almost all of his books in paperback. Over the next few years I managed to get hold of most of them - the rest of the Barsoom and Caspak books (Thuvia was the fourth in a series of eleven books; People was the second of three), all 24 Tarzan books, all six Pellucidar stories (seven if you count Tarzan at the Earth's Core), all five Amtor books (though the last wasn't published until I was in high school), and a host of independent tales. I loved almost all of them. (My favourites are Tarzan of the Apes - the original story of Viscount Greystoke - and Beyond Thirty.)

There were other books, too, by other authors. There were Tarzan clones, of course, some more, some less, close to the original: Bomba, Jongor, Kioga. And there were other planetary romances, set on an old, dry Mars and a young, wet Venus, like Barsoom and Amtor. Unfortunately, I only managed to get my hands on one of Otis Adelbert Kline's books (The Swordsman of Mars, I think it was). But some of Heinlein's juveniles fit the mould (especially Red Planet and Space Cadet), and there were Farley's Radio Man stories; Lucky Starr on Venus was another wet-Venus story. And there was a host of short stories, too, such as those by Brackett, Kuttner and Moore.

Then science came along and spoilt everything: No more canals and dry sea bottoms, no more exuberant jungles full of dinosaurs and primitive (or at any rate, less highly civilised) peoples. Sure, the occasional story came along; David Drake's Surface Action, for instance, was originally meant to be a sequel to a Kuttner story set on Venus, though it mutated into something else.*

Now we have The Sky People.

It's an alternate history, set in a universe where spectroscopic analysis of Mars and Venus showed in the '30s that both planets had atmospheres which would be breathable by any humans who could find a way to get there. By the early '60s, orbital observations had shown cities, roads and other signs of intelligent life. The first EastBloc (Soviet and Chinese) lander reached Venus on 14 Jun 62, and showed grass, flowers, trees - and humans. An American lander reached Mars the following year, and again found life. Both West and East began putting most of their resources into the space race, eschewing military conflict in favour of scientific progress.

By 1988, when the book is set, there are two colonies on Venus. Jamestown, the American one, is near from the most advanced group of natives, the Bronze Age city-state of Kartahown. The Soviet-Chinese base is located further away, though not too far from the westerners. Both groups are thoroughly puzzled by the Venerian flora and fauna, which are in some cases not just highly similar, but near-as-dammit identical, to Terran forms. There are dinosaurs, sabretooths, pterodactyls, giant insects (a slightly denser atmosphere and lower gravity make for some incredibly large flying critters), buffalo and other beasts. The geological record looks odd, too, with a thick layer where life seems to have sprung out of nowhere and exploded all over the planet; after that new species, all very similar to contemporaneous species on Earth, suddenly appear every few million years.

Then one of the EastBloc orbital shuttles crash-lands in the wilds, thousands of miles away from civilisation. The emergency beacon is triggered, showing that at least one of the three personnel on board has survived. The Americans have blimps which can reach the crash site (the shorter-range EastBloc blimps can't), so their assistance is requested. A rescue party sets out, and the adventures begin....

What do I like about this? To begin with, of course, there's the fact that books like this were my first introduction to science fiction, and it's always good to see another one come along.

Stirling's strong world-building and descriptive passages are seen here, as in his other books. There are proper concerns for the cost of imports from another planet:

He flicked off the computer, rose and stretched, looking around and smiling wryly. Jamestown wasn't all that short of housing; adobe brick was—

Cheap as dirt, he told himself.

And they could hire local builders for not much more. Anything that came from Earth was expensive and in short supply, of course, which made for some odd contrasts; the computer was connected to all the others in town with the latest in fiber-optic cable, but the water system was based on shamboo pipes and elm logs bored hollow and pegged together.

The rugs on the tile floor of the big living-room-office would have fetched plenty on Earth, and the furniture was hand-crafted of tiger-striped woods; lustrous furs covered the benches built into the walls. The windows were of thin-scraped 'saur intestine, and translucent rather than clear; the available glass was better, but not much—the first Kartahownian shops were just getting the knack, and it was wavy and full of bubbles. The heating system was an arched kiva-style fireplace in one corner, where a low fire of split oak soaked warmth into the massive walls and radiated out again, keeping the raw chill of the winter day outside at bay. A special research effort back on Earth had been necessary to produce the everlasting fluorescent lights above. It was cheaper to make light-bulbs that cost thousands of dollars each to send to Venus, rather than send replacements for forty-five cent ones that burned out. Even so, residents were 'encouraged' to use alcohol-fueled lanterns as much as possible.

The kitchen-dining area was behind a doorway closed with strings of wooden beads. It had the same mixture of luxury and primitivism; broad counters and an island of polished honey-colored wood whose grain swirled with scarlet streaks, but the stove was built of brick, its main luxury cast-bronze disks set in the top. He'd hired some kitchen help for today, a middle-aged woman named Ametri and her daughter. They were chopping vegetables as he came in, and looked mildly scandalized as he moved over to the oven—in Kartahown cooking was woman's work; there weren't even male chefs. Both of them wore simple ankle-length gowns of what amounted to linen; Ametri had her hair up under a kerchief as befitted a widow, but and her teenaged daughter wore her long black locks tied back with a headband and woven with scarlet ribbons.

Another nice touch is the filling in of background material by use of "excerpts" from the "15th edition (1988) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica." These appear at the beginning of most chapters, and provide historical and planetary data.

What don't I like? It's too damn' short - only 301 pages, as opposed to the 486 and 497 pages of his last two (TPW and AMaC, respectively). The epilogue was a little annoying, though of course it's a set-up for the second book (In the Halls of the Crimson Kings, to be set on Mars). And that next book won't be out for another year.

As usual with Stirling's books, you can test-drive it before you buy; the prologue and the first six (of fourteen) chapters can be found here.

Go. Buy. Read. And read again....


* See here.

Swallows & Amazons III

This is the third in a three-part series about the Swallows & Amazons series, by Arthur Ransome. (The first two parts are here and here.) This time I’m going to talk about the last three-and-a-bit books in the series:

Missee Lee (ML) is another piece of metafiction. Captain Flint, the Swallows, and the Amazons are taking Wildcat on a world cruise (with Swallow and Amazon as ship's boats). Whilst en route from their 100th port (an unspecified location somewhere in the Far East) to Singapore, they meet with an accident involving Roger’s pet monkey, Captain Flint’s cigar, and the ship’s petrol tanks, which results in Wildcat’s sinking and everyone’s being at sea in Swallow and Amazon. The two boats get separated during the night; the Amazons (with Captain Flint) are picked up by a pirate junk, while the Swallows find themselves on an island just off the coast of China. The junk turns out to belong to the Taicoon Chang, who is a lesser pirate chief under the infamous Miss Lee – and the island belongs to Miss Lee herself. Hopes for rescue are dashed when Miss Lee, who has fond memories of time spent at Cambridge years ago, refuses to release her prisoners. Instead, she announces that they will stay on Dragon Island and study Latin with her....

The Picts and the Martyrs (PM) takes place in the early summer of 1933. The Amazons and the Ds are alone at Beckfoot. Well, not entirely alone; the Blacketts’ cook is there with them. But Molly Blackett has been ill, so her brother (Captain Flint) has taken her on a sea voyage; the Swallows won’t be arriving for another two weeks; and the Callums’ parents can’t come to the lake yet because the Professor is grading papers. The good news, though, is that a brand new boat, Scarab, is being built for the Ds, and will be ready in just a couple of days. And the bad news is that someone has told Great Aunt Maria that Nancy and Peggy are home alone. The GA, of course, considers it her duty to cancel all her plans and come to take care of the girls – which means best frocks, piano, poetry, &c, &c. The children agree that things would be even worse, especially for Molly, if the GA discovers that Nancy and Peggy have house guests while their mother is away. And so Nancy comes up with an idea: The Ds will move into a deserted hut near Beckfoot for two weeks (the GA will be leaving the day before Molly and Captain Flint return home) and remain hidden – as the Picts are said to have done – while the other two girls stay home as martyrs, keeping the GA happy. But the doctor, the postman and others have to be roped in as unwilling conspirators, and every day the chance of the Picts’ discovery becomes greater. And then the GA disappears....

There is debate as to whether Great Northern? (GN) is a part of the series proper, or is yet another bit of metafiction, due to a heightened level of danger and violence that is not found in most of the books. There’s also a problem with timing, as the birds which are nesting in this book would normally be nesting during the school term. But Swallows, Amazons, Ds and Captain Flint are touring the Hebrides in a borrowed boat, Sea Bear, and Dick is eagerly hoping to see birds he has never sighted before, especially divers. He gets his wish on what is supposed to be the next-to-last day of the trip, spotting a black-throated diver. But he also sees what looks like a pair of great northern divers, nesting – and great northern divers never nest in Great Britain. There’s another birder in the area, Mr Jemmerling, looking for birds in his motor yacht Pterodactyl, but when he hears about the great northerns his first reaction is to want to shoot them and take their eggs for his collection. And the Ds have spent too much time with the Coots to permit that....

Coots in the North would have brought the Death and Glories up to join the Swallows and the Amazons in the Lake District, but Ransome only wrote a few chapters before stopping work on it. His notes indicate that he was having problems finding a satisfactory solution to getting the boys home after they hitched a ride north with a boat that was being delivered to the lake. Part of the story is available in Coots in the North and Other Stories, edited by Hugh Brogan and published in 1998. (No, I have no idea what the "other stories" are.)

Why do I like these books so much? Well, they’re about kids doing really cool things, like camping and sailing. And they’re a link to a simpler time in the past – imagine the reaction if it were discovered that parents were allowing their children to swim, sail (without life preservers), and camp out on an island, cooking their own meals over an open fire, all without adult supervision. (It’s plainly pointed out in SA, and I think also in SD, that Roger is too young to use matches, though he does have his own pocketknife.)

The politically correct crowd may have problems with a couple of the books. The famous N-word is used in PD, though in reference to black pearls, not to people. And not only do Miss Lee’s pirates speak pidgin, but Miss Lee has the most amazing stereotypical accent, with references to “Loger” (Roger) and “Camblidge.”

If you like these books, you’ll – well, I’m not sure what to suggest here. Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock wrote a trio of books, beginning with The Far-Distant Oxus*, about children and ponies on the moors of southwestern England, but the books are long out of print and the last time I tried to ILL them only the first one was to be had. Some of Enid Blyton’s stories have the same sort of feel, especially the eight mysteries of the Adventure series. The only book about American children and a sailboat that comes readily to mind is The Lion’s Paw, by Robb White.

Want to learn more about the books, or about their author? (During World War I he was a reporter, covering the Eastern Front and the Russian Revolution; he eventually married Trotsky’s secretary.) The Arthur Ransome Society (TARS) can be found here.

(Incidentally, the S&A book covers I used to illustrate these posts were nicked from the Arthur Ransome page at Fantastic Fiction, an excellent source for readers looking to see what other books an author may have written, or the correct order for books in a series.)


* I love Ransome’s story of the writing of this book.

Swallows & Amazons II

This is the second part of a three-part review of the Swallows & Amazons series, by Arthur Ransome. (Part one is here.) Taking up where we left off last time:

Coot Club (CC) takes place during the spring holidays of 1932, just a few months after WH. The Swallows and Amazons are mentioned a few times, but that is all; this book is about the Ds, who are spending the holidays in the Norfolk Broads with Mrs Barrable. (This time their parents are off at a conference near Carlisle, on Hadrian’s Wall.) Mrs Barrable was Mrs Callum’s teacher; she’s an artist, and has rented a sailboat, Teasel, to live on whilst painting pictures of the local scenery. The Ds are looking forward to learning to sail before going back to the lake in the summer, but are disappointed when Mrs Barrable tells them that she can’t handle the boat by herself. But the Ds met Tom Dudgeon on the train to Horning, and he introduces them to Port and Starboard and the three younger boys (who have been playing at being pirates). The six of them are the main members of the Coot Club, the purpose of which is to observe and protect the local birds. Their favourite is a coot which is nesting on the river below Horning, but a motor cruiser which is being rented by a group of remarkably loud, obnoxious visitors moors right next to the nest. The mother coot is frantic, unable to get to the nest, and when Tom asks the visitors (called Hullabaloos because of the noise they make) to move their boat, they rudely refuse. The only thing Tom can think of is to cast the boat adrift, and he does so – but is spotted as he attempts to escape. The Hullabaloos give chase, but Tom manages to evade them. To get out of the Hullabaloos’ way, he offers to join Mrs Barrable and the Ds on Teasel, serving as captain (Mrs Barrable becomes the admiral, with a fleet consisting of Teasel and the Coot Club boats) and giving the Ds the lessons they had hoped for. And off they go, but the Hullabaloos won’t give up the search for Tom....

Pigeon Post (PP) is the first of four books set during the summer of ’32. The Walkers are back up at the lake, this time camping in the garden at Beckfoot, and so are the Ds. Captain Flint has been away in South America on an unsuccessful mining expedition, but he’s on the way home now. He hasn’t sent word to say when he’ll be home, but his last letter said to expect Timothy and give him the run of his study; after much deliberation, the children have decided that Timothy must be an armadillo and are making a hutch for him in the study. In the meantime there’s no sailing, as someone else is staying at Holly Howe and the Walkers won’t have access to Swallow for a couple of weeks. However, the Amazons have heard stories of a lost gold mine in the hills near Kanchenjunga, and their idea is to try to find the gold before Captain Flint’s arrival, to make up for his recent lack of success. The lot of them shift camp from Beckfoot to a farm nearer the alleged gold field (using the Amazons’ new homing pigeons to communicate with home), but there’s been a serious drought and all the adults are worried about the possibility of fires, so they aren’t permitted to camp up in the hills. Time is running out, and they have a rival – a mysterious stranger dubbed “Squashy Hat,” who also seems to be prospecting for gold....

We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea (WD) takes place a week or two after the end of PP. Commander Walker is on his way home from China, with orders to Shotley, so the rest of the family have traveled to Pin Mill*, near Harwich, to wait for him. Once there, they meet Jim Brading, who has just sailed his cutter Goblin up from Dover. His uncle will be joining him soon, and they plan to sail Goblin up to Scotland before Jim goes off to university at Oxford. In the meantime, Jim invites the four Walkers to spend a few days on the boat with him. (He’d invite Mother and Bridget, too, but there isn’t room for everybody.) Daddy is due in just a few days, so they won’t have much time, but there will be enough for them to explore the rivers a bit; Mother insists they not go out to sea, and they all promise. But they are becalmed on the morning after they set out, and Jim discovers that he has run out of petrol for the engine. He goes ashore for a quick trip to get some, expecting to return soon, but doesn’t come back. The four children are alone on the boat, a heavy fog comes in, and they find themselves drifting out to sea....

I couldn’t find my copy of Secret Water (SW), so I had to skip it when I read the rest of the series this summer and will have to work from memory and from on-line notes. The book starts very shortly after the end of WD; Commander Walker and his children are planning on sailing Goblin down to Hamford Water, near Walton-on-the-Naze, to spend some time camping, but Daddy is called away on official business. He maroons the kids on an island, along with the Amazons (whom he has invited down as a surprise for the Swallows), provides them with a rough map of the surrounding islands, and suggests they do some exploring and survey the area whilst waiting for his return. What appear to be mastodon tracks lead to meeting a local boy, Don, and another family called the Eels (Daisy and her brothers, Dum and Dee). The Eels also enjoy camping where the Swallows and Amazons are, and are inclined to be hostile at first, but soon they reach an agreement and start a friendly “war.”

The Big Six (BS) takes place more or less at the same time as the last two books, and involves the Ds. They’re back at Horning, staying with Mrs Barrable (who this time has taken a house) again. Port and Starboard are away at school – in Paris, of all places – but Tom and the three Death and Glories are all present. And the latter are in trouble, because someone has been casting boats adrift, choosing times and places to make it look as if they were responsible. After all, everyone knows that Tom cast a boat adrift last spring; who’s to say that the younger boys aren’t emulating their hero? That’s not all - when the boys spent the night aboard Death and Glory at Potter Heigham, not only were boats there cast off, but also a boatyard was burgled. And now the boys seem to have a lot of money, much more than their parents would have given them. Dick and Dorothea join in the attempt at identifying the enemy before the local constable decides to arrest Bill, Joe and Pete.

There have been a few films based on the books. Swallows and Amazons (1974) is a fairly faithful rendition of SA, starring Virginia McKenna as Mrs Walker and Ronald Fraser as Captain Flint. (The Beeb did a TV series based in SA, in 1963, but most people seem to think it was rather dreadful.) Swallows and Amazons Forever! was the title used for a pair of TV movies made in 1984; the title is misleading because the two films are based on CC and BS, and there are neither Swallows nor Amazons to be seen anywhere.

Still more to come....


*The link is to a pair of pictures showing Alma Cottage (still a working B&B) and the Butt & Oyster pub at Pin Mill. One picture is Ransome's drawing, done in the '30s as an illustration for the book; the other is a recent photograph. Picture from here.

Swallows & Amazons I

I’ve just finished reading the Swallows & Amazons series, by Arthur Ransome. Most of them, that is – my copy of one book seems to have gone into hiding, so I had to skip it. This has been one of my favourite series since I first discovered it (eighth grade, as I recall), and since this is my blog and I can write about anything I want, I’m going to write about this.

The series consists of twelve books, written in the 1930s and ’40s, about English children and sailboats. (A thirteenth book was started but never finished.) Most of the books are set in either the Lake District (on and around a nameless, fictional lake which combines elements of Windermere and Coniston Water) or the Norfolk Broads (using real geography).

The Swallows are the four Walker children: John, Susan, Titty* and Roger. Their father is an officer in the Royal Navy and is seldom seen in the books, but their mother and their younger sister Bridget appear often. The Amazons are the Blackett sisters, Nancy and Peggy, a pair of tomboys who are growing up on the shores of the lake. (Nancy’s name is actually Ruth, but the girls play at being Amazon pirates, and their Uncle Jim has told them that real pirates are ruthless, so....) The only time a definite age is given for any of them is in the first book, when Roger is seven, but going by Ransome’s notes for another book the starting ages of the others are nine (Titty), eleven (Susan and Peggy) and twelve (John and Nancy, the latter being slightly older).

Two other sets of children, the Ds and the Coots, are also important in the series. The Ds – Dick and Dorothea Callum – are the children of an archaeologist; Dot is a budding novelist, while Dick is interested in all aspects of science. They’re somewhere around Titty’s age, with Dorothea being the older of the two. The Coots, who all live in the village of Horning, in the Broads, are Tom Dudgeon, a doctor’s son; twins Bess and Nell Farland (commonly known as “Port” and “Starboard”); and the three Death and Glories, Bill, Joe and Pete. (Like the Swallows and the Amazons, the latter get their group name from the name of their boat.) No ages are given for the Coots, either, but Tom is a little older than the Ds, the twins are about their age, and the other three are a little younger.

Swallows and Amazons (SA) takes place during the summer holidays of 1930. The Walkers (with the exception of Daddy, whose ship is in Malta) are spending the summer holidays at Holly Howe farm, by the lake. The children have been using the farm’s sailing dinghy, Swallow, to explore, and have requested permission to camp on a nearby island. Mother has passed the buck to Daddy, and the book starts with the children waiting for a reply to the letters they have written. The reply comes in the form of a telegram: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN. Hurray! Plans are completed, stores and equipment are assembled, and the four of them are off to the island. The Blacketts, who also have a sailboat (Amazon), have been using the island as a campground for some time, however; the two groups agree to fight a war, with the winners being the ones who first capture the other boat. The Amazons’ Uncle Jim has been holed up in his houseboat (complete with parrot and cannon) all summer, writing a book, refusing to join in the girls’ games, and being no fun whatsoever, and so plans are made to declare war against him, too. But now he seems to have gotten the idea that the Swallows have been mucking with his boat - and then the boat is burglarised and his book is stolen....

Swallowdale (SD) takes place the following summer. The Swallows have returned to the lake, and Uncle Jim (dubbed “Captain Flint” by Titty because of his parrot and cannon) is no longer tied up with writing, but the expected fun isn’t happening; the Blacketts’ Great Aunt Maria is visiting. The GA is a very strict, old-fashioned lady who expects Nancy and Peggy – excuse me, I mean Ruth and Margaret – to wear white frocks instead of shorts and shirts, learn poetry and recite it to her, practice the piano, and never be late for meals. Since Mrs Blackett and Uncle Jim were raised by the GA, they’re too much in awe of her to stand up to her. Until she leaves, the Swallows will be by themselves except when Nancy and Peggy can slip away. And then disaster strikes: Swallow runs into a submerged rock and sinks. Her crew manages to salvage her, but until repairs are completed they won’t be able to sail, or to camp on the island. Fortunately, there’s a valley up on the fells above the lake that makes a good campsite, so the Swallows settle in for a different kind of adventuring - including mountain climbing, with the mountain near Beckfoot (the Blackett home) standing in for Kanchenjunga.

Peter Duck (PD) is metafiction, a fictional story “written” by people who are themselves fictional characters. In this case, the writers are the Swallows and the Amazons, who spent the winter holidays between SA and SD on a wherry on the Broads, with Captain Flint. One of the ways they spent their time was in making up this tale of adventure, in which they sail in search of buried treasure. The story begins in Lowestoft harbour, where Captain Flint and the Amazons are readying their new schooner, Wildcat (named after their island back at the lake), for sea. The Swallows arrive soon, but so does bad news – the man who was going to help Captain Flint work the ship isn’t going to be able to come. This severely limits what they can do, because while the children have plenty of experience with their sailboats, a ship this large is something totally new to them. Fortunately, an old seaman named Peter Duck has been admiring Wildcat, and he offers to take the missing man’s place. But with Mr Duck comes trouble, for many years ago, when he was a young boy, he was shipwrecked in the Caribbean, and before he was rescued he saw two men burying something beneath a tree. He has no idea what it was they buried, of course, but the tale has grown in the telling and now many people believe it was treasure. And Black Jake, skipper of the Viper, thinks that Peter Duck is taking the crew of the Wildcat to retrieve that treasure....

Winter Holiday (WH) takes place a few months after SD, during the winter of ’31-’32. Professor and Mrs Callum are in Egypt “digging up remains,” so Dick and Dorothea are spending the holidays at the Dixons’ farm (Mrs Dixon was Mrs Callum’s nurse when she was a girl), just down the road from Holly Howe. Late-evening astronomy leads to signaling to “Mars,” which in turn brings the Ds together with the Swallows and the Amazons. The plans this time are for an expedition to the North Pole, a place near the north end of the lake known only to Nancy and Peggy. Sledges are in daily use, an igloo is being built, and Captain Flint’s houseboat, which is frozen in, is doing duty as Nansen’s Fram. (Captain Flint is abroad for the winter.) All that’s really needed is a good, solid freeze before the end of the holidays, and they’ll be set. And then Nancy comes down with mumps, forcing her – and the others – into quarantine....

To be continued.


* Try giving a girl a name like that in a modern book! The four Walkers were based on children Ransome knew; the real Titty was given her nickname as a small child because her favourite book was something called Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse.

The Man from Waukegan (J P Zabolski)

Waukegan, Illinois, is a small industrial city (population around 65-70k in the ‘60s) on the shores of Lake Michigan, about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. Amongst other industries, Johns-Manville and Johnson Outboard had factories there. There’s a harbour, used by small boats and by ships bringing in mountains of gypsum. It’s probably best known, though, as the home of comedian Jack Benny and author Ray Bradbury.

J P Zabolski graduated from Waukegan High School in ‘73, and left home to join the Army.

Ten years later, in ’83, he left Waukegan again (by this time he was out of the Army, had gone around the world twice, and had held various interesting jobs in various interesting countries), this time to join the Marines.

Ten years later, in ’93 (by which time he had left the Marines and emigrated to Australia), he returned to Waukegan for his father’s funeral and to sell the family home.

Ten years later, in ’03, he came back to Waukegan, for the first time in ten years, to spend two weeks walking around town, mulling over the changes in the old neighbourhood, the city, and himself.

Zabolski stops to talk with old neighbours, teachers and friends, hunts down childhood treats he hasn’t tasted in years (such as angel food cake), and visits old hangouts. Each stop reminds him of the past, and his stories of this trip are mixed with reminiscences of things past – movies, television, ROTC and other classes in high school, his parents, hobbies, church.

One year [Sunday school] started issuing out report cards that had to be signed by your parents, like the ones in Glen Flora. They had two grades, one for your studies and one for your conduct. I got an ‘F’ for Failure on both. I hid the report card under our wooden porch through the winter, with the nuns constantly asking where it was. Two weeks before the final day, I brought the shriveled thing to Mom to sign. Mom was not pleased. I had never ever received an F on any real school report card.

There have been a lot of changes in the city, but the more things change....

A few doors up Grand Avenue, the house where the female principal of McAllister School for twenty-seven years had lived until she died in 1981 aged 101 was now an antique store. The owner was originally from Savannah, Georgia, and we had a pleasant chat about a variety of subjects. I asked if he’d mind if I sat on the swing on his porch and he was delighted to let me. I love sitting on a porch and watching the world go by.


I had another pleasant romp in the ravines of Yeoman Park before having lunch at the Chuck Wagon. It was still there after all those years, but locals had said ‘the place is run by Mexicans now.’ The sign was the same except that it now said ‘Juan’s’ over the name. Everything else was still exactly the same. Though they had huevos rancheros on the menu, the other food was unchanged. There was a group of four white truck drivers at a table, a friendly black fellow having coffee at the bar, and some amusing waitresses. The hamburger and fries were the same except that there was a wedge of pickle rather than the pickle chips on the plate.


For everything gone or changed in Waukegan, some person from Georgia or Mexico would carry on its traditions.

I’m not saying you should run out and buy this book just because it was written by my best friend (though it was; we've known each other since 1967), or because I’m mentioned in it (though I am). But anyone of about our age, or a little older, or maybe even a little younger, has probably had similar thoughts, especially if (s)he hasn’t been home in a long time.

Heck, I didn’t even like Waukegan that much – I’d come from a much smaller town that didn’t have many more people in it than Waukegan Township High School alone had – but this book brings a feeling of nostalgia that makes me want to go back for a visit.

Cinema-going was always a major part of my life. You’d always go by the cinemas to look at the collection of stills and the exciting posters that would also feature in the Waukegan News-Sun. The price was 50 cents for a child under twelve or $1.50 for an adult, but a double bill of B movies was 35 cents and $1.25 respectively. That meant more money for a 25-cent box of popcorn, or 15-cent drink, candy bar, snow cone, or giant dill pickle. There were also larger drinks, larger candies, and hot dogs.

And I’ve never in my life found a place that serves hot dogs as good as those at the Genessee Theatre were.

"There's no place like home." And yes, sometimes you can go back home again....