(1) TIN TYPES. G.W. Thomas is back with “More Golden Age Robots II” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.
The Golden Age was truly the golden age of robot comics. The reason for this was the World’s Fair of 1939. The robot made a splash that year that reverberated through out all media. The comics more so than anyone. They threw out all kinds of tin-plated beings, some good, some bad. Since most comics in 1939 were based on the old reprint magazines, they all had multiple characters covering a variety of tropes: the jungle comic, the Western comic, the nautical comic, etc. Robot characters were a thing after 1939. Marvel tried out a bunch of them with Flexo the Rubber Man this time around. Eventually they would settle on Robotman. Doc Savage Comics tried Trix but only the one time. Any number of superheroes faced off against the metal menaces with the Marvel Family, Wonder Woman, Captain Midnight, etc. For DC, it was the anthology comic Strange Adventures with numerous tales by Otto Binder, that creator of Adam Link, at it again. (It would be fun to do a round-up post on all of Otto’s robot comics. The list is long.)
Just a reminder, this post only features “tin robots” of around human size. For giant robots, go here. I have tried to list the authors where possible but the Golden Age was a time when such credits were often forgotten or ignored….
(2) JOYFUL CONVERSATION. “Alan Bradley and Olivia Rutigliano talk about creating characters, the joys of writing, and if Sherlock Holmes was a woman” at CrimeReads.
… OR: I was wondering if you wanted to talk a bit about Sherlock Holmes and your relationship to that character. I know you wrote a fascinating, study of Sherlock Holmes previously, interrogating him as, you know, in the, “was Watson a woman? fashion.
AB: I’ve been fortunate enough to have read the Sherlock Holmes when I was very young. I had kind of a sickly childhood, and I had an uncle who brought me old English boys annuals like Chums and Boys Own Annual. And they were full of serials about the wilds of Canada, the Northwest Mountain Police and grizzly bears and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, he also brought me his two volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes books, and I read those. I became a Holmes fan and over the years. I can still remember where I was in Toronto when I discovered the two volume edition of the Sherlock Holmes annotated by Baron Gould. I mean, heaven!
So, I had a very dear colleague, Dr. Bill Sargent, who was, as Conan Doyle would have said, a world famous geologist. He was, he was like Dr. Challenger. He could have been Dr. Challenger, and he could have played him in a movie. And Bill was a great authority, not only on, Sherlock Holmes and folk singing and geology and many other things. And it was he who phoned me one day and he said, “I couldn’t sleep last night it came to me that Rex Stout was chastised for writing about how Watson was a woman and I’d been thinking about it all night. And it wasn’t Watson that was a woman, it was Holmes.” So he said “what do you think about that?”
And he said the next day that my response was, “tell me more.” And so we spent 10 years writing that book. It took a long time because we were both always busy and it was very difficult to get time together. But we did. We had a lot of fun….
(3) TCHAIKOVSKY’S SECOND. Bonnie McDaniel has good things to say about an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel in “Review: Alien Clay” at Red Headed Femme.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is incredibly prolific; this is his second book released this year (the other I’ve read is Service Model ) and there’s one more I have to track down. He has written some of my favorite science fiction of the past few years, including the excellent Final Architecture trilogy.
This book, following the whimsy and small-scale stakes (but still quite good) of Service Model, returns to his usual modus operandi of big stakes and world-altering ideas. If that’s the kind of SF you go for, this book should be right up your alley. It’s also stuffed full of fascinating alien biology, and the author’s version of the so-called “Gaia hypothesis”–what if there was a world-mind (an alien one in this case, not Earth)? What would that look like, how would it have evolved, and how would it behave?
Most importantly, how would humans fit into it?…
(4) KIDSCREEN AWARDS 2025. “Kidscreen Awards Announce Animation Finalists for 2025 Event” – Animation Magazine has the list of categories with animated nominees. See them at the link.
The 2025 Kidscreen Awards have announced the shortlisted entries that are moving on to a final round of judging in this year’s global awards program celebrating excellence in children’s entertainment. In addition to the nine animated series vying in dedicated categories, animation runs throughout the list of finalists for juries to consider….
…All winners will be announced at an awards ceremony taking place on Tuesday, February 11 during Kidscreen Summit 2025 in San Diego.
(5) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Anniversary: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Yes, let’s have a feel-good film, one of Mike’s favorites as it turns out. It’s set between Thanksgiving and Christmas so it is appropriate to tell about now, and I will. I like to as it is indeed a very upbeat movie.
Seventy-seven years ago, Miracle on 34th Street was initially released as The Big Heart across the pond, written and directed by George Seaton and based on a story by Valentine Davies. Seaton did uncredited work on A Night at the Opera, and Davies would later be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Glenn Miller Story, a most stellar film.
SNOWFLAKES ARE FALLING, AND ODDLY ENOUGH, THEY CONTAIN STICKY SPOILERS. REALLY, THEY DO. THERE’S EGGNOG WITH AND WITHOUT RUM OVER THERE… AND COOKIES AS WELL.
Kris Kringle, no I did not make his name up, is pissed off that Santa in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade went missing because he was drunk.
(I know that The Twilight Zone did this later. It’s “The Night of The Meek” in which the drunk Santa Claus Henry Corwin is fired from his department store on Christmas Eve, and he finds a mysterious bag that gives out presents and fulfills his true destiny.)
When he complains to event director Doris Walker, she persuades him to take his place. He does so well that he is hired to play Santa at Macy’s on 34th Street.
Most of the film is about faith. In this case believing that Kris Kringle is really Santa Claus — or not. Or that in a larger sense that individuals believe in him. The Judge rules that both are true and this Kris Kringle is not confined to Bellevue Hospital as certain parties were eager to do.
ANYONE FOR GINGERBREAD HOT FROM THE OVEN? IT GOES GOOD WITH THAT EGGNOG TOO.
Everyone including the most curmudgeonly of critics loved it. Certainly, the most excellent primary cast of Maureen O’Hara as Doris Walker, John Payne as Fred Gailey, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle charmed everyone. Well almost everyone as you’ll see below.
It was shot on location in New York City, with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade sequences filmed live while the 1946 parade was happening. The rest of it was set during the Christmas season but the Studio insisted on a May premiere as that they thought was when Americans went to see films.
The Christmas window displays seen in the film have a very interesting history. They were first made by Steiff for Macy’s. Macy’s then sold the window displays to FAO Schwarz in New York and they in turn sold the windows to the BMO Harris Bank of Milwaukee where they are on display every December in the bank’s lobby on North Water Street.
It was remade with same name in 1994. Due to Macy’s refusal to give permission to use its name, it was replaced by the fictitious Cole’s. Why so? “We feel the original stands on its own and could not be improved upon,” said Laura Melillo, a Macy’s spokeswoman in a Los Angeles Times piece on the film. Or as the LA Times writer put it on the refusal on Macy’s to allow the use of their name, “The Grinch also came early for John Hughes, whose Hughes Entertainment is producing the movie.”
Two final notes.
One group didn’t like it. The Catholic Legion of Decency found it “morally objectionable” largely due to the fact that O’Hara portrayed a divorcée here.
Yes, the Suck Fairy is hanging around drinking the nog, the one well boozed, and I asked her what she thought about it. She’s not fond of the remake but thinks the original is quite splendid. She remembers Macy’s then and watched it being filmed. No, not there as the principal photography was elsewhere.
Alas it’s streaming only on Disney+ this year.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born November 29, 1898 — C.S. Lewis. (Died 1963.)
My first encounter with Lewis’ work was, predictably, with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It happened to be the animated miniseries from the late 1970’s. It was intriguing enough that I wanted to read the actual book, and so I did. The set of Narnia books I wound up was the old order of the series, that started with Lion, and *ended* with The Magician’s Nephew. The overt Christian symbolism didn’t dismay me, although i was awfully confused by Santa Claus. And when I tried it years later…Turkish Delight turned out to taste of…disappointment. And don’t get me started on the fate of Susan in The Last Battle.
So it goes.
I think that for the strength of Narnia (parts of which I think have aged really badly and not well), his Space trilogy is much more my speed and might hold up better in some ways. I first read that about a decade after Narnia, in the early 1990s, as an adult. The extremely odd cosmology and mythology of the Solar System in the series attracted me for its weirdness, and when I later read A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay and found out Lewis had been inspired by it, that felt like a keystone for the series I had read years before. This is what he had been going for, and to certain degrees, achieved. A vast and complicated theology, teleology and mythology just like Lindsay’s work, but on an even greater scale. I owe myself a re-read of the series and see how it hits me, today.
But my favorite C.S. Lewis is one that doesn’t get the play the Narnia and Space series do, and that is the Screwtape Letters. In the spirit of Ambrose Bierce, the Screwtape Letters are from a senior to a junior devil on the best ways to corrupt God’s word and turn people to vice and power. It turns out that someone as outwardly and inwardly Christian as Lewis was is indeed the best person to write a Devil’s advice on corrupting a soul over a lifetime. (The fact that Screwtape and Wormwood ultimately *fail* is just Lewis being Lewis, the letters are very much worth reading even so.)
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY, TOO.
[Written by JJ.]
Born November 29, 1918 — Madeleine L’Engle. (Died 2007.)
By JJ: I first encountered Madeleine L’Engle was not as a genre writer but through her more literary work in the form of her Katherine Forrester Vigneras series, A Small Rain and A Severed Wasp which tell the tale of a woman who’s a pianist, first in her teens and then when she’s in her seventies. Most decidedly worth reading.
Then came the Time Quintet of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters. Truly extraordinary novels. I see that A Wrinkle in Time won a Newberry Award which it richly deserved.
I did not know until I was writing this up that there was a second series of four novels set a generation after these novels. Who’s read them?
There’s serious amounts of her writing that I’ve not touched upon as I’ve not read them, her in-depth Christian writings, her Children’s books, her non-fiction, her poetry and her more literature undertakings. Even a play was done by her.
I did see the 2003 four miniseries version of A Wrinkle in Time that Disney did, and I share what L’Engle told Time: “I have glimpsed it. I expected it to be bad, and it is.” And we will not talk about the Disney 2018 A Wrinkle in Time film as polite company doesn’t do that.
She would receive a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Yaffle has undead teen complaints.
- Bizarro has pottery poetry.
- Carpe Diem plans a goth settlement.
- Tom Gauld looks into some strange research.
(9) LOOKING FOR ALIENS. [Item by Steven French.] Atlas Obscura’s List of Ten Places to Look for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Activity (or where people believe such activity took place!): “Unexplained Mysteries”.
…Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a terrifying or strangely comforting thought to believe that we’re not alone in the universe. Humans have been staring up at the heavens in search of otherworldly foes and friends for as long as anyone can remember.
But what if evidence of extraterrestrial activity were already right here on Earth? From mysterious petroglyphs depicting what appears to be a flying saucer in Nevada to drawings stretching 200 miles in Peru, there are all sorts of sites where aliens allegedly connected with humans. Of course, there are plenty of landmarks created by alien-obsessed humans to match, from a landing pad for spaceships in Argentina to the notorious highway leading to Area 51….
One example:
Rendlesham Forest UFO Landing, England
Often billed as the “British Roswell,” the Rendlesham Forest incident was an alleged UFO encounter said to have taken place at this Suffolk site in December 1980. At the time, the location was a short distance from an American Air Force base, and the alien spacecraft was supposedly witnessed by a number of military personnel. Nowadays, Rendlesham Forest is a picturesque woodland popular with families. The walk from the parking lot and visitor center to the UFO “landing” site is very pleasant, around three to four miles round trip. To avoid any confusion about the location of the event, someone has kindly placed a replica of the sighted spacecraft at the spot
(10) BAD GUYS DOUBLES DOWN. “Watch: DreamWorks’ Super Cool Con-Animals are Back in New ‘Bad Guys 2’ Trailer”: Animation Magazine sets the scene.
There’s no such a thing as one last heist! DreamWorks’ animated band of hilarious thieves will be back to their old ways in this summer’s much-anticipated sequel The Bad Guys 2. The studio just released a new trailer and beautiful poster for the movie, which will be directed by the first movie’s helmer Pierre Perifel and co-director JP Sans (head of animation on the first outing), based on the best-selling book series by Aaron Blabey.
In the snappy new trailer, we find out that Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell) and the gang are in urgent need of some cash, and that’s when they meet with a new crew of aspiring villains known as The Bad Girls, and before you can say “they’re pulling me back in!” they are involved in a bigger heister. Meanwhile, Mr. Snake (Marc Meron) seems to have fallen for one of the Bad Girls….
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, JJ, Paul Weimer, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
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(5) The original ad for Miracle was odd
https://youtu.be/LrQmDsDcYzk?si=rNqkEKjnJo4aBb6Q
Lewis and L’Engle born on the same day of year – wow!
(2) I hope that’s supposed to be “Baring-Gould”, not “Baron Gould”.
(1) Ah, Robbie. He could, I should think, create a case of single malt…
(2) On the one hand, They Might Be Giants, with George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward. On the other… right. “You can pay Doctor Watson, who can deal with the bank.”
(3) As I look, trying to find reviewers to send eRCs to…
Birthday: CS Lewis. I got really tired of him. (SPOILERS. GO AWAY IF YOU DON’T LIKE NEGATIVE REVIEWS)
I still consider Narnia to be a cheat (no, I am not now, nor have I ever been a Christian, and so when I read that in late teens/early 20s, I had no idea that Aslan was supposed to be Christ). But, the end, “oh, you’re all dead…”. Then if it hadn’t been a library book, I would have thrown Perelandra across the room – 180 pp of “stop the Venusian Eve from given the Venusian Adam the apple”. The only reason I read That Hideous Strength was because I read it mentioned Numenor in it. And then… all people who want change are direct agents of the devil, and he pulls the animals out of the city zoo to kill them all? That’s not “great writing”, that’s “slush pile”.
Cartoons, Tom Goauld: but… isn’t a “self-driving car of meat” a horse?
Yeah, I can hear all of you answer, “neigh…”
mark: See, it’s just pure stubbornness on my part that I keep acting on my personal appreciation for the work of C.S. Lewis by including items about him even though it bothers you so much that every single time I do you write a paragraph in the comments attacking him and his writing. I’ve realized I don’t need your permission to be a fan of a writer.
PJ Evans: I trust you’re right, but like CrimeReads I didn’t recognize “Baron Gould” was a mistake. Who is “Baring-Gould”?
William S Baring-Gould ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Baring-Gould )
(I got the last name, but didn’t recognize the first name.) Apparently he invented some parts of the backstory (https://www.sherlockian.net/investigating/baring-gould/ ).
And now that we’re both in the 10,000 for the day…
So mark, I like Narnia a lot and I’m not a Christian. They are truly among the best fantasy works ever done.
If we’re talking about things we find irritating, may I note that I find your constant mentioning of your book falls into that category? Really it does.
It’s no doubt William Stuart Baring-Gould, noted Sherlock Holmes scholar, but how individuals remember names, or how they get transcribed, isn’t necessarily how they actually are. I learned that nearly fifty years ago when taking oral history in University.
I just finished reading Service Model and I wouldn’t call it small stakes. Small canvas maybe, it focuses on two characters over a short period of time rather than the vast cast and centuries of Children series. But the stakes are the survival of humanity.
Regardless, it’s a fun novel
Mike: sorry, I’ll try to remember not to talk about Lewis again.
CatE: I’m trying to keep that down – I really don’t want to be annoying.
(6) I enjoyed the Narnia books very much. They definitely have their weaknesses, Susan’s fate being the one I find most objectionable. But every so often I cackle maniacally about the people who read and enjoyed the Narnia books and, years later, feel Horribly Betrayed when they discover it’s Heavy-Handed Christian Allegory. Yeah, so heavy-handed and obvious that people who don’t grow up with Christian imagery and doctrine need to have it explained to them in order to see it. They’re just not books that are going to affect the religious views of anyone not already pretty well acquainted with Christianity–and not just in the sense of being aware that Christmas and Easter are two big Christian holidays. Otherwise, they’re just fantasy for younger readers.
The Screwtape Letters is what I’d recommend to adult readers, though. I think it’s thoughtful and interesting regardless of your belief set. Of course Lewis is coming from his own Anglican belief set, but it’s as directly Christian apologia the way much of his religious writing is, and as I said, I think it’s thoughtful and interesting regardless of your background.
An Experiment in Criticism is entirely different, exactly what it says on the tin, and also an interesting read.
Cat Eldridge wrote:
I haven’t commented on this before as I thought I was the only one.
mark wrote:
It has been months and every few posts you keep mentioning it, which I notice: you don’t seem to do that at your primary hangout(which I have enjoyed lurking at for many years, lurk because I have found signing up much too much to comment [and the discourse moves too fast to keep up with here halfway across the planet])
Also why do you use a different username at both sites?(I mostly use this nym at sff websites(only 2 for now and my blog isn’t really off related). If you have teens/young adult relatives/advisors you would listen to, I would hope you would listen to them on how to promote your work online/irl.
Happy belated Thanksgiving/Black Friday(?) to all in US[or as my sister-in-law is overseas, all who celebrate either]
ETA this is not my blog and the above are just my personal opinions.
MixMat: if you mean Charlie’s blog, that’s the one I use most places. But also… it’s his blog, and he’s a writer, and it was created, as he said, to promote his books.
5) I never saw the 90’s remake. I feel I’ve missed nothing. Back in the 70’s there was a made for TV remake starring David Hartman, Jane Alexander, Sebastian Cabot (Kris Kringle), Jim Backus, and Roddy McDowell. I still think it was quite good. The only downside was obviously it didn’t have the budget of the original film. The courtroom scenes at the end were in a closed court so they didn’t have to pay a lot of extras.
6) I like Turkish delight.
9) The BBC podcast The Lovecraft Investigations relocates “The Whisperer in Darkness” to the Rendlesham area. (If the idea of Lovecraft’s mythos being discovered by a pair of British self-appointed ghostbusters who come out and compare themselves to the gang from Scooby-Doo, set in the modern world and without HPL’s xenophobic tics, appeals to you, then tLI is your podcast.)
(6) I loved the first and 3rd Narnia books, and the Eustace and Jill ones, Jill being the first “normal” girl with agency that I read about. Also liked The Horse and His Boy. But the tone of The Magician’s Nephew is weird and morbid, and The Last Battle stinks (IMO of course) in general and with regard to Susan in particular, as Lewis’ Christian agenda overwhelms the story. As Le Guin said of one of her own books, axes can too clearly be heard grinding. This view doesn’t stop Mike Glyer or others from thinking differently.
I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, but read it too fast and felt a bit nauseous afterwards, like the time I read both of Graves’ Claudius novels in a weekend.
And I’m a big L’Engle fan, as a writer and Christian apologist.
(2) JOYFUL CONVERSATION. “Alan Bradley and Olivia Rutigliano talk about creating characters, the joys of writing, and if Sherlock Holmes was a woman” at CrimeReads.
The Dr. Bill Sargent mentioned was indeed a geologist (though not sure how world famous, though the Conan Doyle/Professor Callenger reference does go over my head). He was a professor in the Geological Sciences department of the University of Saskatchewan when I did my undergraduate and master’s degree. Being a geophysicist I never had much to do with him – I can’t even remember his field of speciality – and the only strong memory I have of him was that he was an expat Brit with accent to match. I was vaguely aware of his other interests and I even have a small recollection of him on CBC radio expounding on his Sherlockian theories.
mark wrote:
You didn’t address why you use a different handle here/there, I thought as a science fiction writer it might be pertinent to use the same handle.
File770(to my mind) is a fannish space and most writers here don’t spam their work, or maybe it’s all other writers except you(I don’t know if others mind and haven’t said so, this is purely my personal opinion; I think OGH has been quite forebearing of your posts mentioning Becoming Terran/”11,000 Years”/your writing and promotional efforts. Further deponent sayeth not(unless I change my mind).
I started the Narnia novels with The Magician’s Nephew. Actually, my mum picked it out for me from the library. The title struck me as boring, so I might not have bothered otherwise.
What a revelation. Pocket universes, and untrustworthy uncles and witches. With a child’s sensibilities the overt Christian message went right past me unnoticed.
Talking of gateway stories, The Magician’s Nephew gets an explicit name check in T Kingfisher’s excellent horror novel The Hollow Places.
6) I have mixed feelings about C S Lewis but he has my eternal respect for highlighting “[the] wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply“ in his essay On Science Fiction. So many early critics of SF felt the need to justify or excuse the exercise of imagination
To combine (2) and (7), Bill Sarjeant presented his Sherlock as a Woman Theory at the 1994 Mythcon where Madeleine L’Engle was the Guest of Honor. My wife and I were Guest of Honor Liaison which resulted In Madeleine and us being on each other’s Christmas card list until her passing.
6) I have complicated feelings about Narnia these days, but one feeling that’s uncomplicated: It offends me deeply, to my very core, to see the series renumbered with Magician’s Nephew shown as the first book.
Joe says I have complicated feelings about Narnia these days, but one feeling that’s uncomplicated: It offends me deeply, to my very core, to see the series renumbered with Magician’s Nephew shown as the first book.
When were they renumbered, who renumbered them and in the name of Aslan why?
I suspect the Narnia books were renumbered to put them in chronological order of the story.
You are not succeeding. You are, in fact, an example for me of what not to do when I get something of my own published.
Nancy, you meant to say Mark, not me. And I fully agree with you.
“You are not succeeding. You are, in fact, an example for me of what not to do when I get something of my own published.”
Narnia: I loved the books (especially the Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and collected the whole series as a child using my allowance money. In spite of being raised in a good Catholic family, I totally missed that Aslan was a Christ allegory and first learned about it sometime in my 30s. (In my defense, the stories had magic and fauns and werewolves and talking beavers who had sewing machines and a talking lion who came back to life didn’t strike me as being out of place.)
Turkish delight: All the store-bought stuff I’ve had is terrible. But! Get the version of the Joy of Cooking from the 70s and make the recipe that uses gelatin. Making it with just lemon juice is good, but making it with concentrated dark cherry juice is the best. It won’t make you want to sell out your family to an evil witch, but it will delight you and your lucky guests.
It was 1994, when HarperCollins acquired the series, and they moved The Magician’s Nephew to the first position. Wikipedia, on the page “The Chronicles of Narnia,” puts forth the opinions for both versions. I’ll let someone else link to it, as I consistently botch doing so.
Sorry, Cat—copy/paste error.
While Lewis was still alive, John W. Campbell’s nephew (really!) wrote him a letter about a dispute he had had with his mother about whether it was okay to reread the books in internal chronology order. Lewis politely allowed that that was fine, but people (including the estate and publishers) took that way too seriously, and renumbered the books.
https://www.narniaweb.com/books/readingorder/
The problem with putting Magician’s Nephew first in the Narnian sequence is that while the events take place earliest on the timeline, the narration clearly takes place after the earlier books have been told — it’s filled with asides along the lines of “Remember that lamp post? This is how it got there.”
(Like, it doesn’t just show the origin of the lamp post, but in the text it explicitly calls out that this is why there was a lamp post when Peter, Edmund, Lucy and Susan arrived there.)
@Joe: Absolutely- I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone to start reading the Narnia books for the first time with TMN. It seems to me that it would be both bizarre and unsatisfying.
Although to be fair, there was a long period in my childhood when I did habitually read Magician’s Nephew first, and Horse & His Boy between Wardrobe and Caspian. But I was young and foolish.
Nancy Sauer says Sorry, Cat—copy/paste error.
I knew that. Just pointing that.
Look he’s got a fundamental misunderstanding of how hard it to get a review is even for a traditionally published novel. I’ve had Green Man reviewing books, chocolate, music, puppets, film and anything else that catches our fancy for over three decades now. We’ve always gotten requests for reviews that were far, far more than we could review, and that’s just from traditional publishers and the speciality presses.
There’s always been far more books published than there has been reviewers available to read and write them up in the places that you want that book reviewed if you want to maximize the number of desired readers. And it’s shrunk in recent years as most major newspapers have pulled black on book coverage to some degree.
I know that online venues like Goodreads have, in theory, expanded this process. I think of them as book groups more than anything else. And they certainly don’t do anything for the truly small self-published writers.
My opinion of course, nothing more.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with C. S. Lewis since early encounters: Screwtape (a copy was on the church vestry shelves) at 15 or so, the Space Trilogy in college, right next to the academic work (crucially, The Allegory of Love) and the general-literary essays in An Experiment in Criticism. The apologetics struck in my craw, but then, I’d had a crawful of that thanks to a Catholic undergrad education. And he was certainly a fine writer, line by line, and compelling when he wasn’t being overtly theological. Nevertheless, I found something unlovely in That Hideous Strength, where wonder seemed to have curdled into a kind of narrow, bullying ideological inflexibility. But then, I’m an apostate, so what do I know.
My introduction to Lewis was through Perelandra, after I had read Tolkien umpty-ump times and had ventured into reading about Tolkien. I had problems finding the other two books (I was in high school, growing up in a timber town) but eventually came across them. But not before my oldest brother shoved Narnia at me in his attempt to convert teenaged me to his brand of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (looking back, besides being significantly older he was heavily involved in Campus Crusade and bringing it into the military–sigh).
I found Narnia to be okay but not as good as LOTR. The trilogy–to fully understand That Hideous Strength, reading Charles Williams’s mix of Christianity and mysticism is pretty much required. At one point I had a copy of Williams’s Taliesin through Logres. Dense (like most of Williams’s work) but definitely illuminating.
I did eventually spend some time as an evangelical Prot, but bugged out quickly because I couldn’t conform to being the kind of submissive woman being pounded down on my head by church leadership in the late ’70s. Not the place for a smart woman.
Nonetheless, I agree with those who point out that Screwtape is pretty darn good (and extremely accurate). Another on-the-nose writing by Lewis is The Great Divorce, which I wonder about being a possible inspiration for Heinlein’s Job. Maybe it’s time to read the two of them in sequence–Divorce first, then Job (Divorce is about the afterlife and has some pretty good skewering in it).
His two memoirs, Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed are also worth checking out. I probably won’t reread Narnia or the space trilogy, but the other books I’ve mentioned? Oh yes.
“I call Muad’Dibs on the planet Arrakis”
CatE: unfortunately, I do understand how hard it is to get reviews.
MixMat: not sure whether I got on here before or after my first novel. And I already said I’d stop. Btw, you don’t happen to have a spare $8000 for an ad in the NYT book review section?
Andrew (not Werdna): an ex, when we met, had a Keeshund. His name was Duke Leto, and she always said she had dibs on a name for a puppy, if she bred him.
I agree that the Christian allegory in Narnia is not so heavy-handed that it slaps you in the face, but for me, at least, it made the books less enjoyable even though I didn’t realize that’s what it was! Basically, I went to my mom and said, “this part seems really stupid!” And mom explained that it was an allegory, and that Aslan represented Christ, and I wandered off, dissatisfied, thinking to myself, “wow, I didn’t realize that being Christ meant you had to be stupid!”
But I did go on to finish the series, and overall, I enjoyed it. And years later, I developed a better understanding of what Lewis was trying to do. But as a kid, all it did was slightly lower my opinion of both Lewis and Christianity! Which, I’m fairly certain, was not what he was trying to do! 🙂
The Narnia books I read as a child in the 1980s were numbered in internal chronological order – I read them in something closer to publication order, though.
@mark: Duke Leto is a fine name for a puppy.
6) The Screwtape Letters is my favorite of Lewis’s works as well.
The last time I tried to reread the Narnia books, Lewis heavy hand of Christian Allegory was too much for this ex Christian. In high school I tried to read his three “SF” novels but by the middle of Phandera, I couldn’t take the long lectures. That sadden me as I had enjoyed The Shewtape Letters and his “Why I am a Christian.” Still back then, I read him more because of his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien than his faith.
C.S. Lewis’s death was overlooked at the time because it happened the same day that Kennedy was assassinated. A local and much loved organic foods store, Perelandra, closed recently, finally done in by Covid-related sales.
I grew up on the Narnia books, but the only one I’ve read within adult memory is The Last Battle, which I picked up after reading Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan”. I agree with the criticisms there, and the idea that our present world is only a shoddy copy of a better one somewhere else, so that whatever happens here doesn’t really matter, is one I that find deeply offensive.
On the other hand, now that we’ve just reelected Shift to the presidency, the book does seem remarkably astute. And the image of the dwarves squatting in what they insist is a smelly stable, while refusing to open their eyes, is one I can’t forget.
@Andrew Porter: Aldous Huxley also died on that day, by the way (I ran across a crank religious website once that suggested that all three were in hell due to their various apostasies (ugh, it’s still there)).
On the subject of Sherlock Holmes being a woman, my local community theater just put on “Miss Holmes”, which has (as is obvious from the title) a female Sherlock and a female Watson. The playwright did considerable research about when women physicians were certified in London, and there’s actually a plot point in the play about Dr. Dorothy Watson being educated in Bern, Switzerland, because she could not train in England…. (The male characters in the play, especially in the first few acts, routinely erase Watson’s profession by addressing her as “Miss Watson”, to her extreme displeasure….)
“Miss Holmes” is a fun play with a decent mystery (that doesn’t cheat; you’re given the clues). I recommend it to any Filers who happen to be local to a production of it. (THere’s a sequel which I have not yet read or seen, which our theater may be staging next year, because the first was so well-received….)