Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

This is the last of the Heinleins I got from the library. I’ve probably had about enough. If they had Have Spacesuit Will Travel, I’d give it a go, but they only have an audio download. I’m not good with audio. My attention wanders and it’s not nearly so easy to scan back to where I was last paying attention.

Space Cadet was published right after the last one I read. This copy from the library is very new, like 2005. The title and the new condition of the book made me have a more favorable position from the start. Though I do wonder if anything was changed in its publication history.

I’ll cut here, since I have to cut somewhere and it might as well be here.

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Wired has some very short stories written by lots of different writers. Joss Whedon makes an appearance. I know that’ll get at least one of you to follow the link.

I noticed this first on another wordpress blog I read. I thought the writer was writing in Word and pasting in or something, but, no, it’s WordPress doing it! Smartquotes! Smart-hyphens! Evil!!! And it’s doing it to mine too!!

So, this entry is to test to try it get it to stop doing teh ebil.

“Test”

I was wondering if anyone was reading this blog (anyone as in the general public) and so I was set to nix Google’s Analytics and go back to hitbox. But, I poked in to see if Google was in fact doing anything, and.. it was! Oh, it wasn’t in Opera. :( I tried it in IE, however, and it does show me stuff. Lots of stuff. And graphs and charts.

Mostly I only care about the numbers and what keywords are being used. Since it gives me that, it’s all good. So, yay, no work for me. But boo, not working in Opera.

Again, this post is going to have spoilers, but I’m not going to bother tucking them away where you have to work to see them. If you really care, move along. There’s some cute little kittens over here.

This is another Heinlein book I got at the library, based solely on its title. I was looking, not for known works or potential quality works, but for quaint, dated works. Well, no, I was looking for a ‘typical’ schoolboy adventure story. Just what enamored those kids who grew up reading this stuff? That’s what I was looking to find out. But there was just so much… well, I had to write a blog entry about it.

The book is copyrighted 1947. I have no idea if it’s a first printing or what, but I can well picture that this book is that old. Someone’s written Heinlein’s middle name on the title page and well.. it looks something like this.

ROBERT A.nson HEINLEIN, 1907-

With a ” under the H for some unknown reason. Well, we know that whoever wrote that either wrote it in before 1988, or were clueless as to when he died. Hail, Wikipedia. Could it have been some librarian with some now-outdated need to inform readers as the author’s full name and birth date? Or some snot-nosed geeky kid from days of yore with no respect for books? Well, at least it’s written in pencil.

At other parts, someone’s marked things up with a pen. Mostly check marks next to the start of paragraphs. I can’t figure why, unless it was some nimrod who had no better idea of how to keep track of his place.

The book is also stained, as you might expect. And it smells, to me, like cigarettes. Rather gross. Someone needs to retroactively put in a no-smoking rule around library books. Anyone with a time machine, get on that.

On second thought, I’m going to cut this here. The entry got long. Spoilers ahoy!

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There’s this new series of car commercials featuring a guy living out of his car for a week. They try to play it like it’s funny. For example, he goes out on a date and has to find a place to clean up and get changed.

How could they think this was a cool, fun idea? It’s not just a publicity stunt, or something you might do on a radio show to win a car. It’s an advertising campaign.

Don’t they know people really do this? With cars not quite so new and fancy. With their children. For much longer than a week.

This is not a way to sell cars.

Seems like there should be some Veronica Mars joke in there somewhere that would make for a good title for this entry. But oh well.

This is going to be rather spoily, but I’m not going to cut, because I bet most people won’t care. If you do, you’re warned, stop reading.

Going a bit library-happy and because Heinlein got mentioned at the most interesting (and annoying) panel at Albacon (more Albacon reporting to come, really), I picked up some Heinlein on the last library trip. After I’d also picked up Starship Troopers at the con because it was cheap and the movie seemed to have had potential it mostly wasted.

Anyway, Podkayne of Mars was a particular title I was looking for. It tends to get mentioned because it has a female protagonist and oh-my-gosh-that’s-so-unique. I scanned the titles of all the books on the shelf looking for it and for interesting titles and completely missed it first time around. I only happened to look more closely on a second pass and saw the spine said Heinlein, but no title. The title was there, but nearly completely illegible. Certainly not with the lighting and at the height it was (over my head). The title on the cover was just as bad. Dark, dark grey on black? What’s up with that? First rule of book cover design, MAKE THE TITLE AND AUTHOR LEGIBLE. Maybe time and light had done something to the original colors, but.. not that much, I wouldn’t think.

Turns out I’m pretty certain I’ve read this one before. It certainly hadn’t made any large impression on me, but it seemed vaguely familiar in parts, so I marked it as (R) in my read list. In junior high-ish, I read all sorts of random and ‘classic’ science fiction, mostly stuff you’d find in the library, so it seems quite likely I ran across this one before. (Saved my book-buying for Star Trek books. Mostly.)

I started reading Podkayne with the mindset of looking for every little sexist detail to object to. Well, what other reason to read it? Turns out I needn’t have bothered. As you read further and further into it, it gets more and more sexist. Podkayne wants to be a space ship pilot, which is oh-my-gosh-so—something. It’s not a typical job for a chick, but apparently she’s allowed to do it if she wants. So progressive.

Her mother is an engineer or something and smart and can fire a gun nearly as well as her father can! Go Podkayne’s Mom. :P

There’s a point where you can say, okay it’s just the society she’s living in is a bit sexist. And you can say, okay, so this was written like 50 years ago, so it’s the society Heinlein was living in and he’s just extrapolating. There’s a point where you can say this, but then by the end, you’re not willing to cut him that much slack.

Podkayne wants to be a pilot, but she also is blonde, blue-eyed, with a cute nose she can wrinkle at men to get what she wants. She flirts with guys throughout the book, to learn more about spaceships, or just to alleviate boredom or something. She really loves taking care of babies and apart from one time when she forces her brother to, it’s only girls doing that. Random girls, rather than the mothers, which is the moral of the story, apparently.

She knows how to cook and sew and oh-my-gosh math and science! So weird!

The story is told as diary entries. And, immediately, we’re shown that her ickle brother is smarter than her. Because he’s read her diary (which she’s gone to some measure to encrypt) and has inserted secret entries of his own. Later on, he shows how much smarter he is than her, like constantly, and eventually takes charge to save their lives. Want to strangle the snot-nosed brat. Want to strangle her for being an idiot when she’s supposed to not be.

Then the moral of the story is her mother didn’t take care of her and her psychotic little brother enough, because she was off having a career.

Really, you could almost enjoy the story until the last chapter. After that, you just want to strangle everyone. Starting with Heinlein.

Oh, and she’s part Maori, which she sees as her savage side. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Conclusion: Heinlein was a sexist (and racist) jerk with weird morals he wanted to share with everyone.

I just looked through the awards lists and I’d read a couple of the books/stories without even being aware of it! So they’re updated now. Woot.

I’m finishing up Futures Imperfect by Connie Willis. It contains ‘three short novels’. I’m going to have to do a bit of research to help me decide if it counts as one or three. Are they actually novels? Or are they novellas? If they were published on their own, does it matter which they are?

Thoughts?

If I’ve figured right, I have to read 16 more books this year to beat last year. Doable, but I need to keep on it.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled (if delayed) Albacon posts to bring you this news link.

Peter Jackson’s doing the Naomi Novik trilogy with the ships and the dragons. Bound to be a hit. Not news to some of you, but the article has a picture of her. And she’s self-described as a geek and fangirl.

New York Times Article – With Requisite Annoying Login

Panels Attended:

Science Fiction Writing for the Technologically and Scientifically Illiterate
Non-Traditional Fantasy Settings
How to Write About Something You Know Nothing About
We Are the Orcs!
Behind the Scenes
Is (As It Used To Be) the Short Story the Idea Cauldron for Novels?

Other Stuff Attended:

Peter David’s Signing
Peter David’s Presentation/Reading
Script-reading of “Guardians”
Screening of “Wolf Eyes”

Things Discovered:

There’s a gaming room
There’s anime being shown in the film room – though when I stopped by it was a Japanese movie of some sort, not animated.

More Hotel Free Stuff:

Nothing new, except they replaced some of the stuff we used/took. We forgot to empty the bathroom of stuff before they cleaned. And we check out tomorrow. Wah. :) Randomly, they left an extra bottle of lotion, yet took the only partially used bottle of shampoo.

Other Freebies:

Cookies!
Potato Chips! (someone needs to invent a half exclamation point. That didn’t rate a full one.)
Tshirt (ha ha!)
Promotional bookmarks

Stuff Bought in Dealer’s Room:

8 1$ used books – donations to go to the Star Toys Museum, if I’ve got the name right. In Maryland.
10 3$ used books, because if you bought 10 then it was only 2$ a book.
1 5$ used book

2 of those books are Dad’s. The rest are mine. Because I am addicted.

Random Stuff:

Apparently there’s chibi pageant girls running around the hotel. Dad said he saw some. I only saw the flyers on their table. That’s just one event out of many going on here concurrently.

I saw a Wookiee. Life-size. I took a pic, but I don’t expect it’s a very good one.

Food Consumed:

Friday – A cheese sub from Subway. I even got adventurous and asked for honey mustard on 1/4 of it. I never did figure out which quarter it was on. So I guess I didn’t dislike it. Next time I’ll be even more adventurous and not have plain Italian bread. Also half a small bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. And ice cream at the ice cream social. I think that was it.

Saturday – Egg and cheese bagel from Dunkin’ Donuts. Vegetable lo mein and white rice. 2 donuts. 1 cookie. Some potato chips.

Sleep Acquired:

Friday Night – Between 4 and 5 hours, I think
Saturday Evening – Roughly half hour nap

Once I get more of a chance to sit down and look up websites, I’ll provide author and website links and things. Though surprisingly not too many websites have been mentioned, and I think only one by URL. The rest are sort of left up to you to Google.

Other Freebies I Discovered in the Bathroom:

Sewing Kit
Vanity Kit – q-tips, cotton balls, nail file
Oatmeal Soap

Things Bought in Dealer’s Room:

2 Peter David books – The New Frontier one I wasn’t sure I’d read. So it may end up being a duplicate, but if I get it signed, then it’s worth more than the original one I had. So nyea! And the Sir Apropos of Nothing first book.

1 Peter David book – Dad bought Gods Above because it sounded interesting to him. It’s one of the New Frontier books. The one after the one I bought, I think, so I don’t think I’ve actually read it. Though I have it.

1 Dragon – Dad bought me a stuffed dragon. There was a whole selection to choose from, but he’s the cutest! I promise to take a pic.

More later, most likely. The DR was only open 2 hours today and not everyone had finished setting up.

I’m at Albacon 11 right now.

Panels Attended So Far:

Creating Characters Outside the Mainstream
The Long and the Short of It
B Movies – Peter David was on this one.

Freebies in the Room:

Bottle of Poland Spring
Sleep CD
Earplugs
Linen spray to help you sleep
Sleep mask
The usual stuff in the bathroom, plus body talc that looks like a little salt shaker

Freebies in the Packet:

A DVD of the Battlestar Galactica Story So Far
A copy of the Magazine of F&SF – an issue I’d actually read!
A copy of an issue of the SFWA Bulletin – sweet!

Freebies at the Freebie Thing:

A different issue of the SFWA Bulletin – double sweet!
Bookmarks
Random book cover cards
The usual con and store flyers

Freebies Handed out by Authors:

A booklet with sample chapters from Peter Prellwitz
A metal book fobby thing.. I’m not even sure what it is from Elaine Isaak

Other Stuff:

I’m collecting business cards. I have some from artists especially, so I can see if their websites have cool stuff.

Food:

Ice cream social – free ice cream and toppings!
Water
Soda machine – looks like just Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist, but.. free soda!
I also saw what looked like the remains of potato chips
Hopefully more food tomorrow!

I haven’t taken a lot of pictures. It doesn’t seem a very picture-taking kind of crowd. I’m going to try to take more.

If you have any particular questions, I’ll try to answer them in the comments or the next installment.

I have a question about Jericho for anyone who’s watching it. This is mildly spoily, I suppose, if you haven’t seen the first three eps. But not enough I’m going to do anything to hide it. Just.. look away or skip down to the next entry now.

At the end of ep 2, someone radios him to tell him to blow the dynamite. At the beginning of ep 3, we’re told there’s no radio in the mine. So, um.. what happened to it? Maybe they had one with too short a range, okay, but then that doesn’t work once people are back at the mine.

So, dites-moi, s’il vous plait.

I read a review of this book/series in F&SF and decided to check it out. Literally. I put a hold on it at the library and it finally came back in the end of last month. Jun said she’d mentioned this book before, though I hadn’t remembered her doing so. I grepped, and it turned out she definitely did. And I said it sounded interesting.

Patrick O’Brien.. Patrick O’Brian? How does he spell his name? Google isn’t much help, though it leans towards A. Oh, anyway, him with dragons. Or Hornblower goes to Pern. Anyway, it’s pretty cool. I recommend it to people who like the British Navy, historical novels, and dragons.

More spoily details after my first ever use of the cut tag!

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