The Best of Poul Anderson (Book Review)

     Malzberg, Barry ed. The Best of Poul Anderson (1976) Anderson (1926-2001) was a gifted and prolific SF writer, whose need to make a living made much of his work formulaic. But he was a master at playing with formula and cliche, and his stories range from satire to tragedy. He was a pioneer in the development of "future history", a concept that morphed into something like a movement in the 1950s-70s (see Asimov's Foundation series, or Herbert's Dune) and is now an SF cliche. He liked to set stories in the past as well, finding great inspiration in the medieval romance (which he both parodied and emulated). He tried, and succeeded at, every SF form and genre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson provides a well-done overview.
     Anderson was an economic libertarian, but with an acute sense of the paradoxes and contradictions of the free-market economics he espoused. He disliked hypocrisy, and many of his stories have political or moral/ethical themes. He liked swashbuckling, too, and had a rather ambivalent attitude towards women, whom he often presents as sex objects, albeit usually as tough, intelligent, and resourceful as the men. His books and stories are fun to read when you are in the mood for fantasy or hard SF. He's very good at plotting a story around a technical problem, and making us care that the protagonists get it right. Like a surprising number of his contemporaries, his most common mood is elegiac, even in the tales of the Polysotechnic League, which are essentially space-operas. Technology cannot protect us from the loss of friends and lovers, nor can it make freedom and justice any more likely. Freedom must be taken and defended. Justice depends on individual choice and action, not on systems and protocols.
     In essence, Anderson sees the future pretty much as a variation on the present: people are people, and none of us is perfect. Many of his tales are thinly veiled satires on the present, which he saw as lacking in honour, generosity, scholarship, courage, and various other of the masculine and chivalric virtues.
     A common motif in his stories is the under-estimated underdog. Sometimes a rascal, sometimes an uncouth peon, sometimes an apparently primitive alien, sometimes an apparently weak human on an alien world, but always someone whom the antagonist sees as less than what he is. The underdog wins by means of his wit and insight into his supposed superior's weaknesses. Anderson likes to show that a presumed superiority based on social status, academic learning, political power, bureaucratic process, or other social constructs, is in the long run a guarantee of failure. It's your character, your virtues, and your skills that ensure your success.
     I 've actually started re-reading this book, which will explain why I rate it at **1/2 to ****.

Digital Crops

 White iris

Red poppy

These images were made by repeatedly enlarging and cropping an image. I like the abstract patterns made by the pixels.

Collages

Revelation 1985

Time is money 1975

Pharaoh 1980

Venus 2009

I've made many collages over the years. One can juxtapose images, and experiment with pattern or form, and play with colour harmonies and contrasts. Content, form, and colour do affect each other, I think. I'm in two minds about titles. They tend to be corny, but also suggest a meaning. They may even impose an interpretation, because many viewers want to know what the artist "had in mind", or "what the pictures means".

I'm not sure what I had in mind for "Revelation". It's actually half a collage which I thought was too large and complicated. so I cut it apart. The other half included a portrait of Freud. So there's a clue. Maybe artworks should be labelled and numbered, the way most music is.

Update: 2025-07-29: I use markers and/or or water colour on some of my collages. which I suppose should be labelled "Collage and mixed media".

Art blog link

http://blog.drawn.ca/

Try it, you'll like it. ;-)

Politics: What else is new?

     The Harper government is being noticed. It's not only Bill C-19, renamed the "Protecting Children from Internet Predator's Act", but in fact a blatant attempt to enable spying by the government on us, the citizens who employ it. Now a Boing-Boing contributor has noticed another Harper government attempt to control the spread of information that we, the taxpayers, have paid for. Here's Boing-Boing's note. I guess the Harper government worries that the more we know, the less we will believe Harper government propaganda. As if that were possible.
     Have a good sleep.

Art Trading Cards

In Loomis  & Tooles, when it still was Loomis & Tooles, I found a packet of 2-1/2 x 3-1/2 inch blank cards, labelled "Art Trading cards". The image above is one of the first I made. Mixed media: gel and felt pen. Search on "artist trading cards" for more information. They're fun to do. The small size pretty well forces you to make a simple design. I've also made small collages, such as this one:

The small circles are hole-punch confetti. I tend to doodle, then fill in the spaces with gel pen, like this:

I like gel pens because they cover well. Since they're aimed at children, they come in bright colours, or odd metallic tints. If you want to trade cards, e-mail me at wolfmac.sympatico.ca

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Movie review)

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Premiere, CBC, Sunday 12 February 2012) A nice little movie, of the type that has "Canadian" written all over it. Think Anne of Green Gables, The Wind at My Back, Lives of Girls and Women, Who Has seen the Wind, and so on.
     But Stephen Leacock it ain't, despite the copious use of dialogue from his book, and allusions to several of his best-known pieces from Literary Lapses etc, Blending facts from Leacock's life with loose adaptations of two of the Sunshine stories, it gives us what is now a typically Canadian coming-of-age and life-changing-insights story that our film-makers are so adept at creating. It's well-done: we spent an enjoyable two hours including commercials (which have their own bizarre charm.)
     There's an issue of truth-in-advertising here. I don't think the movie should have borrowed Leacock's title. It's too far removed from the original. Call it Mariposa Stories, or something similar that will warn the viewer that it's not Leacock's work. Malcolm MacRury imposed his own story on the material, which in itself not a bad idea. But did he have to revise the characters and their relationships so far from the originals in Sunshine Sketches? I don't think so. There was no need, for example, to make Peter Pupkin's inamorata the Reverend Drone's daughter instead of Judge Pepperleigh's.
      Leacock's Sunshine Sketches has an acidly dark subtext, which MacRury used as an opportunity for surreal farce. This, too, is fine as far as it goes, but it weakens the satire. Or maybe not: Canadian politics have often descended into farce, and recently have taken on more than a tinge of the surreal.
     Bottom line: a well-done movie, worth watching, but not an adaptation of Sunshine Sketches. It has the feel of a series pilot. **-1/2