Archive for the “PBBC” Category

Time Enough For Love, 1988 ed., Robert A. Heinlein
I’ve often thought the influence of Heinlein on the genre is possibly one of the reasons why there is so much pseudo-libertarian palaver amongst the nerd classes. There’s certainly enough of it in the man’s work. Along with the usual inability to understand that a political philosophy that works for fictional macho immortal space-people might not be so hot in the real world.
There’s also a rather explicit pro-incest argument in the man’s work.
Just sayin’.

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Touch Not the Cat, 1976, Mary Stewart
Because, seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. Have you seen the way they clean themselves, or what they eat?

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Adventures in the Rocky Mountains, 2007, Isabella Bird
(originally published as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains in 1879)
I had a teacher in high school who had apparently done his thesis on frontier narratives, as they seemed to be about all we read for a quarter. They almost all seemed to be about white women getting kidnapped by native Americans, with lots of salacious innuendo for the folks back east.
This one is actually good, though, because there’s none of that. Just a woman riding around on a horse, hanging out with cowboys and fighting bears.

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Fur Magic, 1978, Andre Norton
Yeah, sometimes it’s just about the cheap laugh from the title…

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Brak the Barbarian, 1977, John Jakes
Ah, the 70s…when a mass-market paper-back could put a woman rimming a man on the cover and no one gave it a second glance.

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Little Fuzzy, unknown ed., H. Beam Piper
An evil corporation wants to exploit an idyllic world. They are opposed by a lone Earthman who has discovered that the adorable natives are actually intelligent.
Huh…now why does that plot sound so…recent?

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Children of the Wolf, 1959, Alfred Duggan
Whatever happened to historical fiction? I mean, actual historical fiction, not porny romance novels masquerading as historical fiction.

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Beasts in Velvet, 1993, 2002 ed., Jack Yeovil
Novels based on role-playing games are usually pretty reliably bad. Yeovil’s (or, Kim Newman’s, rather) Warhammer novels are one of those rare exceptions, probably due to actually focusing on characters and plots, rather than translating game mechanics into prose or transcribing adventures. I’m a particular fan of genre-blending novels, and Beasts in Velvet is an interesting example of that, a police procedural/serial killer thriller set in a fantasy city.

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Doctor Who, 1996, Gary Russell

The Dying Days, 1997, Lance Parkin

Russell does his best, but the phrase “silk purse” and “sow’s ear” come to mind when thinking about writing an adaptation of the Fox Television tv-movie version of Doctor Who. McGann was good, and there’s even something to Eric Roberts as the Master, but between “half-human” and snake-Master, not to mention regeneration by medical malpractice or the heavy-handed and nonsensical allusions to Frankenstein, but Russell really had to work to turn that storyline into an even half-way enjoyable book.
Parkin, then, has it somewhat easy. He’s simply got the eighth Doctor and Bernice on contemporary Earth, preventing the Ice Warriors from invading England. It’s a nice adventure book, an appropriate farewell to the New Adventures line. Or at least the involvement of the Doctor in the line, as it continued for some time featuring characters introduced in the novels, notably a long line of solo novels for Bernice Summerfield.
And Benny and the Doctor totally do it at the end, which feels curiously appropriate.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2008 English translation, Stieg Larsson

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