I Claim This Blog Post in the Name of Barsoom, Isn't That Lovely?

Before Life on Mars was the title of a couple television shows, it was the concept of science fiction. While perhaps overdone to the point of triteness today, it was still very much a new concept when Edgar Rice Burroughs began writing A Princess of Mars a little over a century ago.

Burroughs' Barsoom series (that's what the native Martians--er, Barsoomians?--call their red home planet) straddles the line between the science fiction and fantasy genres. Fantasy is one of the oldest (perhaps the oldest, if you include ancient myths in this category), while science fiction is by comparison a newcomer to the art of storytelling. So it strikes me as odd that these two genres, somewhat on the opposite ends of time, are often blended and confused for one another. 

Reviewing “She: A History of Adventure” by H. Rider Haggard

She begins almost like an H.G. Wells novel, as a narrative within a narrative. The Editor is publishing an account sent to him by Horace Holly, a colleague whom he’d met at University years before. It is Holly who really narrates the rest of the book, while the Editor inserts annoying little commentaries in the footnotes intermittently.

Holly is a good but ugly man who lived the majority of his life buried in academia. About 25
years before the main adventure begins, a friend of Holly’s named Vincey comes to him the
night before his death, telling him about his son Leo--whom he’s never seen, being grieved
because his wife died in childbirth--and entrusting Holly to raise him.

Vincey also has a morbid mission for his son to fulfill: vengeance. Vincey explains that his
family can be traced back three centuries B.C., to a Greco-Egyptian priest who eloped with an
Egyptian Princess. The two fugitives found themselves in a strange land ruled by a mysterious
white woman. The woman fell in love with the priest, but the priest refused to forsake his
love for the Egyptian Princess, and in a jealous rage the mysterious woman killed him
“with her magic.”

Reviewing "The Snare" by Rafael Sabatini

The Snare by Rafael Sabatini is one of those books that takes a lot of patience at the start, but once you get past the preliminary setup the rest of the story is totally worth the wait.

Set in Portugal, 1810, the story begins with a lengthy  account of how a Lieutenant Richard Butler of the British Expeditionary Force gets drunk and then invades a nunnery (mistaking it for a monastery famous for its wine production). As if that breach of etiquette and diplomacy weren't enough, Butler makes it worse by running away...effectively deserting his regiment and becoming an outlaw. Upon learning of the "Tavora Affair," Butler's superiors investigate, and because they cannot find Butler, assume he has been killed by the mob of Portuguese peasants that gathered to protect their convent.

Richard Butler is not the protagonist of the book.

The narrative then shifts to Sir Terence O'Moy, the Adjutant-General in Lisbon. Butler happens to be his brother-in-law, but fortunately for O'Moy's reputation no one knows this detail.  Despite being a selfish, stupid, and frivolous person, O'Moy loves his wife Lady Una so much so that he's covered for her brother plenty of times in the past just to protect her feelings.

Books and the Natural World

I recently finished reading two books about animals, the semi-fictional The Wolfling by Sterling North, and the coffee-table companion to the documentary series, Blue Planet II by James Honeyborne and Mark Brownlow.

Why do I do this to myself? I love animals, but reading about them is often depressing. Almost every
dog-centered novel ends with the dog dying and a little of my heart with it. Even nonfiction zoology
books aren’t immune to this, because endangered species make me feel so helpless and wish I could
change the world.

Sterling North is probably most famous for his excellent book Rascal, a memoir of one summer in his
boyhood when he raised a pet raccoon. North’s writing style is wonderful, not only artistic in his
descriptions of the natural world, but also exciting. In The Wolfling he goes back further than Rascal’s
setting of Wisconsin during World War I, and explores the life of a boy named Robbie in 1873.
Based in part on research and reminiscences of North’s father, The Wolfling is nevertheless fiction,
calling itself a “Documentary Novel.”