Reading Wednesday
Apr. 24th, 2019 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhA Judgement of Dragons by Phyllis Gotlieb.Science-fiction from the 1970s, consisting of four novellas connected by their main characters, Prandra and Khreng. Prandra and Khreng are a married couple and members of an alien species that looks exactly like bright red leopards, except that they're intelligent, capable of speaking (although they always do so in the present tense, which annoyed me for the first dozen pages and then I came to really like), and telepathic. They've recently been contacted by the Galactic Federation (similar to Le Guin's League of All Worlds or Star Trek's United Federation of Planets), who has agreed to help out with the lack of food on their home planet in exchange for some of their strongest telepaths – including Prandra herself – coming to work for GalFed.
The novellas follow one after the other chronologically and are strongly linked.
In 'Son of the Morning' Prandra and Khreng are on their way to visit Earth for the first time when they're accidentally caught in a time vortex that sends them back to a small Jewish village in early 1800s Poland. They must figure out how to get back to their present without anyone realizing they're there, while also outmaneuvering another alien who's interested in instigating a pogrom for its own amusement.
'The King's Dogs' follows them to a GalFed school where Prandra can be trained in telepathy. Someone is murdering other students and teachers, framing Prandra and Khreng in the process. They have to find the real murderer before blame settles on them.
In 'Nebuchadnezzar', Prandra and Khreng are on their way back home, but they stop at another planet to help out a friend they made at school. They get caught up in violence between two rival gangs of drug smugglers.
Finally, in 'A Judgment of Dragons', Prandra and Khreng return to their home world, where they deal with helping the rest of their people try to adjust to the massive cultural change that is becoming part of a galaxy-wide economy, reintegrate with their now-adult children, deal with the prejudice of one of the GalFed employees, and, oh yeah, face down an omnipotent alternate-dimensional alien power that wants to possess them all.
It's a very 70s series in some of its elements and concerns; why was telepathy such a big deal for a few decades and now hardly ever appears in modern sci-fi? Not to mention the whole cat thing. It seems like modern aliens are usually not "cats, but smart", but go in more experimental directions. When there are aliens at all, that is; they seem rarer in today's sci-fi. Comparing A Judgement of Dragons to C. J. Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, which also features spacing-faring cat-aliens, Gotlieb's version feels a lot more like real cats, more distinct from the human characters. For all the silliness of some of the premises (and check out that extrememly metal cover) there's excellent ideas and characters here. Gotlieb's writing oftens skirts around the main issues, alluding to them rather than stating them straightforwardly, which gives the stories a delicacy and power that's impressive. I thought the first story, 'Son of the Morning', was the best, simply because it's such an unusual setting for alien battles and invisibility cloaks, and yet it works so well and lends such an authentic human sensibility to fantasy.
There are apparently two sequels that I'd love to read, but we'll see; I only managed A Judgement of Dragons itself due to a very lucky find in a second-hand store.
The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing House Plants: The art and science to grow your own house plants by Kay Maguire and Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. A helpful book with advice for growing houseplants. It's not a particularly deep dive into the subject, but does follow its own interesting take by focusing on sorting plants into their natural habitats: for instance, if you want ferns, try to recreate a dim, humid forest floor, while succulents do well with baking heat and bright sunshine.
The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing House Plants opens with general advice on how to care for any houseplant, covering the expected topics of light, soil (including several recipes for differing compost mixes), water, repotting, propagation, and so on. The majority of the book covers 77 individual houseplant species. Each one gets a small paragraph describing its natural habitat, then information on how and where to grow it indoors. Interspersed with this are several "projects", recommendations on how to group and display multiple plants. The book covers both common houseplants (peace lily, spider plant, philodendron) and more unusual ones (black aeonium, pineapple, moonstone). The biggest selling point of The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing House Plants is that every single plant is illustrated, usually with both photographs and Kew Gardens's famous botanical illustrations. It would make a great coffee table book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The novellas follow one after the other chronologically and are strongly linked.
In 'Son of the Morning' Prandra and Khreng are on their way to visit Earth for the first time when they're accidentally caught in a time vortex that sends them back to a small Jewish village in early 1800s Poland. They must figure out how to get back to their present without anyone realizing they're there, while also outmaneuvering another alien who's interested in instigating a pogrom for its own amusement.
'The King's Dogs' follows them to a GalFed school where Prandra can be trained in telepathy. Someone is murdering other students and teachers, framing Prandra and Khreng in the process. They have to find the real murderer before blame settles on them.
In 'Nebuchadnezzar', Prandra and Khreng are on their way back home, but they stop at another planet to help out a friend they made at school. They get caught up in violence between two rival gangs of drug smugglers.
Finally, in 'A Judgment of Dragons', Prandra and Khreng return to their home world, where they deal with helping the rest of their people try to adjust to the massive cultural change that is becoming part of a galaxy-wide economy, reintegrate with their now-adult children, deal with the prejudice of one of the GalFed employees, and, oh yeah, face down an omnipotent alternate-dimensional alien power that wants to possess them all.
It's a very 70s series in some of its elements and concerns; why was telepathy such a big deal for a few decades and now hardly ever appears in modern sci-fi? Not to mention the whole cat thing. It seems like modern aliens are usually not "cats, but smart", but go in more experimental directions. When there are aliens at all, that is; they seem rarer in today's sci-fi. Comparing A Judgement of Dragons to C. J. Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, which also features spacing-faring cat-aliens, Gotlieb's version feels a lot more like real cats, more distinct from the human characters. For all the silliness of some of the premises (and check out that extrememly metal cover) there's excellent ideas and characters here. Gotlieb's writing oftens skirts around the main issues, alluding to them rather than stating them straightforwardly, which gives the stories a delicacy and power that's impressive. I thought the first story, 'Son of the Morning', was the best, simply because it's such an unusual setting for alien battles and invisibility cloaks, and yet it works so well and lends such an authentic human sensibility to fantasy.
There are apparently two sequels that I'd love to read, but we'll see; I only managed A Judgement of Dragons itself due to a very lucky find in a second-hand store.
The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing House Plants: The art and science to grow your own house plants by Kay Maguire and Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. A helpful book with advice for growing houseplants. It's not a particularly deep dive into the subject, but does follow its own interesting take by focusing on sorting plants into their natural habitats: for instance, if you want ferns, try to recreate a dim, humid forest floor, while succulents do well with baking heat and bright sunshine.
The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing House Plants opens with general advice on how to care for any houseplant, covering the expected topics of light, soil (including several recipes for differing compost mixes), water, repotting, propagation, and so on. The majority of the book covers 77 individual houseplant species. Each one gets a small paragraph describing its natural habitat, then information on how and where to grow it indoors. Interspersed with this are several "projects", recommendations on how to group and display multiple plants. The book covers both common houseplants (peace lily, spider plant, philodendron) and more unusual ones (black aeonium, pineapple, moonstone). The biggest selling point of The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing House Plants is that every single plant is illustrated, usually with both photographs and Kew Gardens's famous botanical illustrations. It would make a great coffee table book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
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Date: 2019-04-24 09:40 pm (UTC)Yay!
why was telepathy such a big deal for a few decades and now hardly ever appears in modern sci-fi?
Most of the genre fiction I grew up reading took it for granted, fantasy as well as science fiction. I miss it.
I thought the first story, 'Son of the Morning', was the best, simply because it's such an unusual setting for alien battles and invisibility cloaks, and yet it works so well and lends such an authentic human sensibility to fantasy.
It's still one of my very favorite stories of the Yiddish fantastic, aliens notwithstanding.
There are apparently two sequels that I'd love to read, but we'll see; I only managed A Judgement of Dragons itself due to a very lucky find in a second-hand store.
Mazel tov! Honestly anything you find secondhand by Gotlieb is at least worth checking out. She's so rare and nothing she ever wrote was a total misfire; that's a backhanded way of saying it, but even Tanith Lee wrote some novels I can't see the point of. Gotlieb never did.