I read the first book of the Poppy War trilogy by Kuang a couple years back (I lose sense of time between now and the pandemic beginning so I can't recall exactly when) and liked it well enough, but wanted to get to some other stuff before diving into book 2, and well never got back to it. Kuang is a very good writer, and I liked that book, but just not enough to be quite hooked enough to commit to the rest of the trilogy. I need to revisit her stuff at some point. So many books, so little time.

-M

The Fuzzy Papers
H. Beam Piper, 1980

This an omnibus edition that collects:
Little Fuzzy (originally published in 1962)
The setting is a very Earth-like planet called Zarathustra, which in the distant future is an Earth colony that is essentially wholly owned by a large corporation called the Zarathustra Company – because there are apparently no sentient beings inhabiting it. However, one day a jewel prospector named Jack Holloway finds a small creature in his hut out in the deep wilderness; it’s about a foot tall, covered with soft golden hair, bipedal with hands that have opposable thumbs, and quite friendly. As Jack becomes familiar with it – and names it ‘Little Fuzzy’ – he realizes that it’s very intelligent, i.e., it knows how to make and use tools, can communicate with him using hand gestures, etc. Little Fuzzy disappears for a few days and then returns with a few more of them, including a female with a toddler. He gets word to a xenobiologist he knows, who then starts to spread the word. This leads to a whole series of problems with the Company, because if it’s ascertained that the ‘Fuzzies’ are sapient, the charter is immediately voided and the Earth authorities have to step in, set up an administration to govern the humans on the planet and establish relations with the new species and ensure that they’re not being mistreated or exploited in any way. Much of the book deals with arguments about what constitutes sentience/sapience, and the last third of it is something of a court drama. However, it’s very entertaining and thought-provoking, as it casts a rather critical eye on colonialism and resource exploitation and the ensuing mistreatment of native populations and environmental degradation (it’s suggested that the Fuzzies finally came into contact with humans after the latter had been on the planet for decades because their mineral exploitation activities and agriculture altered weather patterns and they had to go farther afield in search of food).

(my edition has interior illustrations by Victoria Poyser)
Fuzzy Sapiens (originally published in 1964 as The Other Human Race)
The title here sort of gives away the key question that’s posed in the first book. The story picks up pretty much right where the previous one left off, in which the various main characters are dealing with the aftermath of the Fuzzies being pronounced sentient beings. A provisional government is set up since the Company no longer runs the entire planet, and Jack Halloway has been appointed commissioner of native affairs. A big part of the focus is also the Company and its CEO, Victor Grego, who – in contrast to his vehement opposition to the idea of recognizing the sapience of Fuzzies in the preceding book – rather early on becomes a proponent of them after he finds one hiding out in his apartment. The mystery of how it got there becomes a big plot driver, as does the fact that many people now want to ‘adopt’ their own Fuzzies. And meanwhile, another problem that becomes apparent to the biologists studying them is that the Fuzzies have an extremely low birth rate, which makes it seem like they might go naturally extinct. All in all, this was an engaging story, but I found some aspects of it quite troubling – mainly the way the humans seem to treat the Fuzzies like pets, despite their status as people being recognized. This aspect is never really addressed, nor is the fact that many of the human characters also adopt this paternalistic attitude about doing what’s best for the fuzzies (although they’re both glaringly obvious problems to me).
Otherwise, a kind of amusing detail is that roughly five centuries in the future, humans will all be smoking like chimneys. Some of the Fuzzies even take up the habit.

Just finished The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman.



This is the first Silver John novel, though it was preceded by a number of short stories. These books are part Appalachian horror, part "occult detective" and part fantasy based on folklore. For those not familiar, Silver John is a wandering minstrel of sorts, who travels through Appalachia with his guitar visiting folks, learning folklore, encountering unimaginable horrors and evils, and usually overcoming them through wit and will, aided by the folklore he's learned and an occasional ally. In this tale, he's run up against a couple of brothers of a druidic bent looking to raise an old god and pair it with Native American spirits and servants of the "peoples" who inhabited the Americas before the coming of the "Indians" across the Bering Strait. John is visiting friends whose property abuts that of these brothers, which embroils him into the plot. He is aided in his endeavors by two old acquaintances, Holly Christopher, a university educated folklorist, and Reuben Manco, a Cherokee medicine man.

It's pretty standard and entertaining pulp fiction, Wellman was a veteran of the pulps and wrote in many genres. I really like the premise of the Silver John tales, and the concept of the character, but they can be irksome to read at times, because Wellman writes John speaking in the Appalachian dialect, and since John is also the narrator of the tales, large hunks of the prose are written in that dialect, which can be tiresome to work through. I really want to like these, and I do to an extent, but the chose or working through things written in that dialect means I need to take these in small chunks. The short stories I can deal with, a 180+ page novel starts to push the limits of my tolerance for it. But it is a good story and some well developed characters. It's just the dialect makes the prose tedious at times. But it's fascinating how tapped in to the zeitgeist of 70s occult and folklore pop culture and the older pulp sword and sorcery traditions Wellman is, and how much that stuff informs his stories, which is what keeps me coming back for more despite the use of the dialect. It had been a few years since I had read any Wellman though. It's tough to find at times, as a lot has gone out of print.

-M

i

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

This is the first of the Brother Cadfael series of historical mysteries by Peters (a pseudonym for Edith Pargeter).  Set in 12th Century England, Cadfael is a Benedictine monk who was previously an adventurer who took part in the First Crusade.  He has a deft hand with plants and herbs and the healing properties thereof.  And a deft mind for detective work.  While I was vaguely familiar with the series, I had never read any of the books or watched the British television series. 

In this first volume Cadfael and a group of other monks from his abbey travel to Wales to transport the bones of St. Winifred to Shrewsbury Abbey.  The vision that lead to the quest is questionable and the locals where St. Winifred is buried object to her removal even though the monks received the blessing of the Prince of Gwynedd and the Bishop of Bangor.  When a murder occurs during the monks' presence in Gwytherin, it's up to Cadfael, a native Welshman, to find out what happened. 

Peters used a lot of historic personages in the book and the settings are correct.  Cadfael is an interesting protagonist.  It's a perfectly fine example of the genre and I won't feel bad about seeing what Brother Cadfael gets up to in the next chapter.  

There are so many books and so little time.  I do think it's worth a read if you like the genre, and I do.  

Frank Frazetta Book Cover Art: Definitive Reference by J. David Spurlock



Read this in two sittings (3/4 in the first sitting and could have finished it but I knocked off as I had to get up early this morning to get ready to DM my Saturday group at noon, but finished it after our session finished). It's a quick read because it is mostly art (which is a good thing in an art book). There's an introductory chapter and spare notes or quotes with a chunk of the images, but not much else. It provides a chronological survey of Frazetta's covers for paperback books divided into a few eras. It shows the covers as printed, with trade dress on them so you experience them as they would have appeared on the market. Most are reproduced at about the size of a standard paperback as well, though a few are smaller. After the survey of the paperback covers, there's a chapter on the hardcover covers again in chronological order but not integrated chronologically with the paperback covers. A lot of these were the SFBC editions, but there were other hardcovers as well. My biggest quibble with the book is this chapter, as it note many of those hardcover covers were wraparounds, but on many, only the front cover is presented, which if this was intended as a definitive reference, the whole cover should have been presented. A handful did have the whole cover, but this just seemed to be a stumble on an otherwise excellent presentation of this aspect of Frazetta's career. I recognized most of the covers, though there were a handful I hadn't really seen before (mostly on erotic or softcore romance novel covers he did very early in his career as a cover illustrator, including two where he was a model photographed for covers of such novels. Spurlock is excellent at preparing these types of volumes, and this one is no exception.

-M