William Tenn was one of Sci­ence Fic­tion’s sharpest satirists in the fifties and six­ties. His short sto­ries bit like black­flies. Of Men and Mon­sters was one of his only two nov­els, and it was expand­ed from a short sto­ry. It shows it, as the core sto­ry is still vis­i­ble, and the end shows a dis­tinct falling off in qual­i­ty, with the satire dis­ap­pear­ing so that there can be a con­ven­tion­al, plot-dri­ven res­o­lu­tion. But nev­er mind that. SF writ­ers in that peri­od had no social pres­tige, and very mod­est incomes; it was stan­dard prac­tice to inflate any suc­cess­ful short sto­ry into a “nov­el” that might pay the rent. But Ten­n’s tal­ent lay in beau­ti­ful, self-con­tained minia­tures that did not lend them­selves to expan­sion. Read more »

18576. (Steve Muhlberg­er) [in blog Muhlberg­er’s Ear­ly His­to­ry] Pop­u­la­tion Crash in Europe?
.… . [arti­cle]
18577. (Steve Muhlberg­er) [in blog Muhlberg­er’s Ear­ly His­to­ry] The Chron­i­cle of the Good
.… . Duke and “Mod­ern Times” [arti­cle]
Read more »

18426. [3] (Elias Lön­nrot) The Kale­vala: Epic of the Finnish Peo­ple [trans­lat­ed by Eino Friberg ;
. . . . . edit­ing and intro­duc­tion by George C. Schoolfield; illus­trat­ed by Björn Landström]
. . . . . [read pre­vi­ous­ly in Kir­by (1) and Bosley (2) translations]
18427. [2] (F. R. Kreutzwald) Kale­vipoeg: An Ancient Eston­ian Tale com­piled by Fr.R. Kreutzwald ;
. . . . . trans­la­tion with notes and after­word by Jüri Kur­man Read more »

A most plea­sur­able third read­ing of an old favourite of mine. Edgar Pang­born’s gen­tle and humane nov­els had a tremen­dous influ­ence on me. The book that real­ly hit the mark was A Mir­ror For Observers, but the Davy sto­ries were almost as good. This nov­el intro­duces the char­ac­ter at the age of four­teen, but hops back and forth in time. The back­ground is post-apoc­a­lyp­tic, with the human pop­u­la­tion of upstate New York and New Eng­land reduced to an ear­ly Medieval lev­el of tech­nol­o­gy and the Huly Mur­can Church pro­vid­ing what lit­tle social cohe­sion exists. But this is not a remake of Miller’s A Can­ti­cle For Lei­bowitz. Pang­born saw orga­nized reli­gion as more of a repres­sive and regres­sive force than Miller did. Noth­ing rings false in Pang­born’s imag­ined world. The young Davy is a randy lit­tle raga­muf­fin, and his picaresque progress is more along the line of Field­ing than Bun­yan. But unlike most picaresque writ­ers, Pang­born nev­er placed sex in oppo­si­tion to love, or to moral­i­ty. Rather, he under­stood that sex stands at the heart of moral­i­ty. Spi­der Robin­son has remarked that “Edgar Pang­born said again and again in his books that love is not a con­di­tion or an event or even a state of mind — that love is a coun­try, which we are some­times priv­i­leged to visit.”

As my Decem­ber read­ing has con­cen­trat­ed on the relat­ed sub­jects of shaman­ism, Finno-Ugric lin­guis­tics and folk­lore, it’s appro­pri­ate for me to start off the year by re-read­ing the Kale­vala and the Kale­vipoeg. The Finnish Kale­vala has been a con­stant, haunt­ing pres­ence with me for most of my life, but the less well known Eston­ian Kale­vipoeg is some­thing I’ve got­ten into more recent­ly.  Read more »