A Proposition for all of you.

Ok, if I were to make Forgotten Fiction a regular feature here, would you, my readers, be interested in nominating books for me to read?  The caveat here is, I have to either own them, or be able to pick them up on the cheap. 

You can either respond here, on the Facebook entry that will be coming or shoot me an email about it. 

So, how about it?  Forgotten Fiction a regular feature?  Any books or authors you’d like to nominate?  Drop me a line.

ETA:  There’s a heck of a discussion going on in the Facebook fan group.  Feel free to chime in either here or there.

Geek Girls Rule! #112.9 – Golden Dreams by Ardath Mayhar

I really don’t have a whole lot to say about Golden Dreams.  I enjoy it.  It makes me tear up in the right places, and laugh out loud where it should.  Ardath Mayhar captures the essence of Fuzzies very well, although there are a few inconsistencies.   For one, she has all Fuzzies aware of the story of rescue coming from the stars.  In Piper’s books no Fuzzies mention this, and in Tuning’s he has Little Fuzzy and the other southern Fuzzies completely ignorant of the idea.  Stargazer is the one who shares that story with the Hagga (big ones) in the Tuning book.  She also has the names of the guys who capture the bunch of Fuzzies who become Ruth Ortheris’s Fuzzy family wrong, but that just feels like me nitpicking.

Honestly, while not as gripping as the original Piper books, it is well written and a lot of fun.  She emphasizes the lack of gender divided tasks among Fuzzies, and the importance of fun to Fuzzies as a whole.  She begins her story a generation past when a landslide cut the Fuzzies off from the technology and tools they’d salvaged from their downed ship, and follows the deterioration of their culture as they are forced to spend more and more time hunting and gathering, as well as trying to survive on a planet with many large predators who think Fuzzies, or Gashta, taste great.  I think she successfully conveys the gradual loss of knowledge as the stories are passed on orally, although if the original Fuzzies had a system of writing, as they must have being an interstellar travelling race, I am a little dubious that would have disappeared entirely by the time she says it does.

But again, the bulk of my criticisms sound like nitpicking.  I find this book superior to Fuzzy Bones in most ways, lacking only a focus on the current Upland Fuzzies.   Hearing the coming of the Marines and the ensuing archeaological dig described from the point of view of the Fuzzies would have made me happier.

Apart from the story of the ship and stars being credited to more than just Stargazer, there’s really nothing in this book to contradict either the 3rd Piper book, nor Tuning’s book.  In the second and third Piper book they are aware of the group of Fuzzies up north who haven’t migrated, but he doesn’t explore them.  Having read all of the books in rapid succession this last week, if you want no sizeable or jarring contradictions, read the three Piper books and this one.  If you don’t care, or are a completeness nut, then pick up Tuning’s as well.

Geek Girls Rule! #112.75 – Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning

I just finished Fuzzy Bones, and started Golden Dreams, so you’ll get my analysis of that one, too, as soon as I finish it.

Ace contracted William Tuning to write Fuzzy Bones to either coincide with, or ride the success of, the re-release of the first two Piper books.   I find it sort of  odd that the book written in the 80s is FAR more sexist than the books written in the 60s.  All of the established female characters are there, since Tuning wrote it  as a continuation of the storyline begun in Fuzzy Sapiens.  But Tuning diminishes their importance and involvement as professionals, and emphasizes their domestic roles, choosing to play up stereotyped and cliched male/female interaction.   It’s kind of painfully like watching an episode of Donna Reed.

That said, I do like this book, just not as much as the Piper or Mayhar books.  It’s much longer, the villains are stock, cliched and two-dimensional.  And his depiction of Little Fuzzy is way off the mark.  That said, I love his  Upland Fuzzies, especially Stargazer.  “What make do, Cobra Eyes?” is still my favorite quote.  Sorry, but if you want context you’ll have to read the book. Which is not quite as painful as I make it sound.  Just skim over the Victor Grego/Christianna Stone storyline parts, and the Hugo Ingerman parts, and focus on the mystery of the Upland Fuzzies and you’ll be fine.

I think Tuning felt that “more is better” in the drama/antagonist department, as there are several plotlines occurring concurrently.  The Victor Grego falling in love with Christianna Stone who had gone to Zarathustra to be a prostitute and failed, and her trying to hide that from him, making her blackmailable by the villains.  The crooked attorney Hugo Ingerman and his crazed (completely out of character as established in Fuzzy Sapiens) hunger for sunstones and attempts to rile up the populace while the priest, Rev, tries to hold things together.  And the discovery of the Upland Fuzzies and their secret.  Honestly, he really should have just picked one plot, preferably the Upland Fuzzies, and stuck with it.

I read it out of a sense of completeness, but like I said above, if you skim the Ingerman and Victor/Christianna stuff, the Upland Fuzzy storyline is excellent.  Although the fact that he felt the need to provide Jack Holloway a love interest at the end of the book as a happy ending tack-on is more than a little annoying, and again, sexist as this Sociologist (female character, so of course a “soft science”) who came out to study Fuzzy society suddenly decides to drop everything to take care of him after he’s shot in one of the climaxes of the book.  Barf.

My friend Chris and I discussed the parts of this book I found problematic tonight, and he said that he wasn’t at all surprised that Tuning’s book was the more sexist of the two.  For starters, Piper imagined a world where we would have moved away from the sexism of his era, and Tuning probably decided that he’d have to play up the sexism to realistically mimic the writing of someone from the late 50s early 60s.  Citing more recent works in the Conan world, he explained that when more recent authors try to write in the style of an author from an earlier period, they often wind up creating more of a charicature than a true reproduction because they try too hard.  Also, the 80s really weren’t all that less sexist and horrible than the 60s.  They were sexist in a  different way with the backlash against Feminism really coming into it’s own with the election of Ronald Reagan and his criminal gang, to paraphrase George Carlin.

So, yeah, there it is.  Not a bad read, a little bloated by the extraneous plotlines, more sexist.  I really would have liked him to have focused more on the Upland Fuzzies and their “mystery” as well as the legal repercussions, but I don’t know that he could have convincingly pulled off the legal stuff.  But the Upland Fuzzy stuff is great.

Geek Girls Rule! #112 – Forgotten Fiction 1 – H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy

Ok, I don’t know how forgotten the Little Fuzzy (Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, Fuzzies and Other People) books actually are.  But I’m one of the few people I know who has read them.  H. Beam Piper wrote them in the early 60s shortly before committing suicide.  The first two books, Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens saw the light of day during the 1960s, and were republished in the early 1980s by Ace.  At that time, Ace contracted two additional Fuzzy books to finish the story arc begun in the first two books:  Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning and Golden Dreams: A Fuzzy odyssey by Ardath Mayhar.   In 1984, the partially completed Fuzzies and Other People emerged, contradicting some of the events in both of the new books contracted by Ace, but I don’t feel it makes either of the new books any less enjoyable.  Fuzzies and Other People definitely feels less finished, less polished, than the other two, and it is possible to see where Piper may have intended to go back and fill in dialog or make smoother transitions.

When one takes into consideration the time period in which Piper wrote and lived, the Fuzzy books are surprisingly not hideously sexist.  Women have jobs and professions, many of them are scientists or doctors.  Ok, so all the male characters, and the women themselves, refer to collective groups of women as girls, and most of the female doctors and scientists are in fact involved in either the soft sciences, like psychology, or pediatrics.  However, there is at least one female chemist.

I also realize that the attitudes toward and descriptions of Fuzzy mental capacity and the Fuzzies themselves will probably set off several racism buttons in people, but again, remember the time period in which these were written.  The fact that Piper has a character threaten a hotel with a discrimination suit if it kicks out the Fuzzies staying there for a trial when the majority of hotels in America at the time were still legally segregated was pretty damn progressive.

Character drives the stories, with the technology being mostly background noise.  They have air (hover) cars, video phones (no way, not first thing in the morning anyway), anti-gravity lifters, stenomemophones which transcribe from the spoken word*, but mostly the technology stays safely out of the way of the story.  Just the way I like it.   But it’s also notable for what’s lacking.  No cell phones, no mp3 player type things, and film is still film even if the images can be electronically transferred in the blink of an eye to the other side of the planet (with a noise, one imagines, very like the high speed dub on old reel to reel tape recorders).

Piper does not linger over his descriptions of violence, and I feel fairly comfortable allowing younger readers access to the Fuzzy books.  I can see much in these books to use as teachable moments for younger readers about the way things were.  The problematic symptoms of the time period in which they were written could be awesome discussion points for the parent wanting to explore themes of sexism, racism or paternalism.

I, however, prefer to take them as they are.  I read them for fun, not for education, and my musings about the charming anachronisms within are more the product of an undergrad Comparative Lit course than any serious effort on my part.  The fact that EVERYONE in the books smokes and cocktail hour is de rigeur even in the bush, cracks me up.  I enjoy them because the characters are relatable, the Fuzzies are awesome (I dare you to come away from these books not thinking having a Fuzzy around would be a blast), and the world is believable, with genetic anomalies and everything.  If you can, pick these up for a quick, light, fun read.  There are a few tearjerker moments, and some kind of scary ones, but the endings are always happy and the bad guys all get punished.

While Piper’s Fuzzy books are currently in print, you’ll want to scan used bookstores for both Tuning’s and Mayhar’s.  Neither are currently in print.

*If only voice recognition software were that good yet.