When it comes to Cosgrove Hall's "Wind in the Willows" series...

...the only question one has is whether Ian Carmichael as The Water Rat has a better singing voice than Peter Sallis as the Water Rat.

Ian Carmichael. Carmicheal earlier voiced Frith, the God of Rabbits, in the Watership Down film.

Peter Sallis. Better known alternatively as Clegg in the never-ending Last of the Summer Wine series (he's been playing the same character since 1973), or the voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit.

Pyat and the Dusty Tomes *PLUS* I'll steampunk YOU, you whipper snappers!

Book #28 of the year was Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis (1938). This was the first work of Lewis I read after Narnia, during the 5th grade. It was, and is, a highly satisfying piece of speculative fiction. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes lecturing, I feel it has dated quite well, provided one is willing to believe that Mars (or Malacandra) is inhabitable.

Lewis was a master of providing his characters with realistic emotional responses to extraordinary events – or at least describing how I think I would feel in those sorts of situations. The only scene which (for me) rings a bit false is during the climax, when Professor Weston debates with the “Oyarsa” of Malacandra. Weston is a little too much of a caricature, though looking at his philosophies in the light of world events when the book was published, it is more obvious why Lewis would choose to attack them.

I was rather struck by the realization that his protagonist, Elwin Ransom, is approximately the same age as I am now. I’ve read this book now and again from the age of nine or ten, and always imagined him as middle-aged.

I have also been listening to audiobooks from Librivox.org, an excellent source for free public domain texts. This is going a lot slower than you might think, as I listen to them on my morning train ride. I tend to fall asleep after 20 or 30 minutes, or drift in and out of consciousness, and have to go back and listen to the same chapters over and over again. This is actually rather pleasant, especially with some of the readers who have almost become old friends.

I’ve been concentrating on classic children’s book, for the most part, as my attention is rarely sufficient for the various scholarly works or heftier tomes. I tried listening to Wuthering Heights, but found the more dire elements of the plot were insinuating themselves into my commuter-daydreams, and I’d arrive at work feeling out of sorts.

In the last two months I’ve listened to:
The Princess and the Goblin, by George Macdonald (1872)
The Princess and Curdie, by George Macdonald (1873)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll (1871)

I’m amazed that The Princess and… books are not better known. I had not heard of them at all, aside from a passing reference to “The King in Curdie…” in a C.S. Lewis book. Both of them were well worth reading. The Princess and Curdie, especially, is full of narrow escapes and death and strange magicks and monsters.

The hero of the book is Curdie, a teenaged miner who walks the Earth with a horribly deformed dog-thing who serves as his companion and bodyguard. He's armed with a mattock that he carries everywhere, and he has a strange connection to an odd sorceress/angel/ill-defined spiritual power. There’s a giant battle scene at the end, wherein a lone king, a housemaid, an elderly guardsman, a 10-year-old princess and Curdie face a giant army of revolutionaries.

It ends with the victorious king re-establishing himself as a (benevolent) tyrant:

'Behold your trust! Ye slaves, behold your leaders! I would have freed you, but ye would not be free. Now shall ye be ruled with a rod of iron, that ye may learn what freedom is, and love it and seek it. These wretches I will send where they shall mislead you no longer.'

It is interesting to read that starkly anti-democratic sentiment so clearly expressed - and remember that Tolkein was a big fan of George MacDonald's fantasies.

****

I’m having a grumpy old fan moment after reading a bunch of “Which Steampunk Character Are You?” memes.

Darn kids, with your goggles and trenchcoats and vague “Victoriana” pastiches that seem to cover everything from 1880 to 1930! How many of them were reading The First Men in the Moon when they were ten years old, eh? Eh? Or even Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air? Or faithfully watching The Man Who Would be King over and over as a child? Eh? Hmm? Wot? I ask you!

I prefer my steampunk unpopular and obscure, sirs! Or, at least, a marginalized subgenre with relatively few aficionados! Like God intended!

(I also liked X-Files before it got lame. And carrying your backpack over one shoulder? I invented that, okay?)

From now on, I'm all about the 1100s! Like, what if the Chinese built a giant firecracker to the Moon in 1169? Think about it, man!

So, what of Bruno von Boots, in this age of Dr. Horribles and Dr. Steels and Rain Slick Precipices of Darkness and rap songs about tea and popular webcomics about the Luminiferous Aether? Where does he fit in?

Same place as always – hunting gashants along the Syrtis Major canal between Aubochon and nowhere….

Blinkies II

The fireflies are still out there, and seem to respond to a pen light. Or maybe I'm responding to them, I don't know. :)

Also, I somehow managed to have lunch with sassy_fae, anidada, and nottheterritory, all at the same time!