A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, "There's too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we're going down!"

I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

Only Gary Paulsen. He's to wild winter tales what Adrian Tchaikovsky is to bugs.

The true stories behind his books are much more OTT than the books themselves. I hate to doubt a person's word just because their stories seem unlikely considering how much hard-to-believe stuff has actually happened to me, but I can't help wondering if Paulsen just heard some stories and then said he saw them happen. Specifically, the plane he witnessed crashing in the ocean when he was a child on the boat that went to rescue the survivors, only to witness them all get eaten by sharks a la Quint's story from Jaws. ("The sailors were literally pulling people out of sharks' mouths." REALLY?) Or the kid he saw get killed by a deer he was feeding in front of a "Don't Feed The Deer" sign. I 100% believe the dog-and-plane story though.

Be that as it may, this book is pure distilled essence of Paulsen: nature and its dangers and beauty and grossness and violence, hunting and survival and life and death. And flying dogs.

More than anything in the world, Kim wants a puppy of her own

I bought this book at a library book sale because the cover rang a bell. I knew I'd read it as a child and was surprised that I recalled nothing about it. As I began to read, more faint bells rang.

Kim desperately wants a puppy, but her family won't allow it. The entire book is about how she wants a dog, her parents won't let her have a dog, she falls in love with a puppy and scrimps and saves and even hires an elderly dog-sitter so she can have her dog in secret. It's cute, if not terribly memorable. And in terms of engagement with premise, up until the last chapter it's 100% - the book promises a girl and her dog story, and that's exactly what it is.

AND THEN.

The dog-sitter has a heart attack and the secret comes out and she has to move cross-country to be cared for by her daughter... and Kim GIVES THE DOG-SITTER HER DOG. The last page has Kim wiping away tears while going off with her old friend with whom she has no interests in common due to aging apart, with the apparent message that she's learned her lesson that people are more important than animals and to forget about dogs and focus on building relationships with humans.

THAT IS NOT WHAT I WANT FROM A DOG BOOK.

Engagement with premise: This isn't so much a failure to engage with the premise as an utter betrayal of the premise. WTF!!!

Misty and Me

If I'd opened The Dogs without seeing the cover or title, I would have assumed it was a mainstream novel about a college professor who experiences ennui and has an affair with a student. Here are a few typical quotes from the beginning.

Farrell's wife Hilary had pursued Bauer with the enthusiasm of a sportful porpoise.

He looked at her ass.

Sit on my face, Miss Lippman, and know the enamel reality of my teeth.

Then some dogs appear, thank God... or so I thought, until I was promptly flung into an extremely graphic dog sex scene which began with extremely graphic DOG WATERSPORTS. I have no idea where it ended, as I crammed the book into my airplane stuff holder and abandoned it there, hopefully to intrigue and then traumatize some curious flight attendant.

The Dogs



Of course this is disappointing to me that all four of the ridiculous books I found proved unreadable. Perhaps it is disappointing to you too. And so I am giving you all a very special offer!

If you mail me a ridiculous pulp novel, I will at least attempt to read it and report back on my attempt, IF you follow the rules:

1. It must be or at least promise to be entertaining. I think you know what I mean by that. Terrible improving books also qualify (i.e., books purporting to warn about the dangers of Advanced D&D, etc).

2. You must provide a bonus/incentive with the book, i.e., jerky, unusual candy, a pretty card, art, coffee, another book, etc.

3. I have a short attention span so you must do this quickly, before I lose interest or get caught up in something else.

4. Email me at Rphoenix2@gmail.com and I'll give you a mailing address.

Panelists: Rachel Manija Brown, Cora Anderson, Janni Lee Simner

Please forgive or correct any errors made in these notes. They were typed quickly and in shorthand, and I made them legible and comprehensible as best I could. But they are not 100% complete or accurate.

R: What was your introduction to the idea of companion animals?

J: Pern! And imaginary friends when I was growing up

C: The She-ra horse! When I was six, I had an imaginary friend who was a winged unicorn named Starlight with a rainbow mane, who could turn invisible and go to school with me. Oh, and Pern also.

R: Dragonsong I used to think up lists of names ending in -th. I mostly had blue and green dragons - the sidekick dragons. I always liked the sidekick characters. Also, I used to tame wild animals when I was a kid. You can tame a feral cat in about six months, if you’re patient.

R: What is the appeal of a companion animal (telepathic or not)?

R: I was obsessed with animals, and you get into an emphatic empathic communion when you sit for hours with feral cats. Telepathy goes right to the heart of that. Also, there’s a powerful draw in the idea of a creature that can understand you perfectly. At least, there is when you’re as a kid.

C: There’s something about creatures that not only understand you but love you regardless. Pern dragons never say 'fuck this noise, I'm outta here,' no matter what you do). McCaffrey has said Pern is inspired by the feeling, as a five-year-old, of getting a pet. You want the pet to be a perfect friend, and it just wants to be a cat. It's what you want from a childhood pet, then a boy/girlfriend, that you can’t have. It’s the wish fulfillment that something can understand you completely.

J: As an outcast child with no close friends until later, imaginary friends always were there for you and also wanted to do what you wanted. Best friend + subservience.

R: Should we jump into subservience?

C: The Heralds of Valdemar. In those, the Companion will in fact repudiate you and leave. The Pernese bond is unbreakable. In other ones, the animals don't have human morality. The Companions are metaphors for guardian angels; they won't condone serial killers. It’s a different type of relationship.

R: Don't forget they are sparkly magic white horses.

C: It’s the dream of a horse, not a real horse.

J: When I first rode a horse, I was disappointed. They weren't flying!

R: Judith Tarr said Anne McCaffrey based dragon Impression on watching humans with young horses. Of course a real horse is much more rebellious.

C: And can't talk.

J: But then you can believe they understand you perfectly. If they can’t talk they can’t contradict that feeling.

R: Going back to the idea of companions as metaphors for other relationships…

J: Childhood wish fulfillment animals. I get much less interested when it becomes metaphors for adult relationships, but fiction seems more interested in that.

R: Romantic relationship with everything but the sex... and sometimes they do include sex, hopefully not with the animal. The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik has dragons in the Napoleonic wars. Those dragon-human relationships are very much like a good marriage, complete with falling outs, but if the humans have sex, it doesn’t affect the dragons, and vice versa.

C: I've read the first book - that's the one where the relationship is seriously romantic. Another rider treats his dragon as an aircraft, and the dragon just wants to be loved. The rider gives it more baubles and thinks that’s all it needs. It’s classic unrequited love, complete with pining.

J: Most bondings happen with adolescence. It’s a stand in for coming of age/romance.

R: Before the panel we were talking about Ariel, by Stephen Boyett. It’s maybe not that good of a book objectively, but it’s interesting. The hero is a teenage boy in a post-apocalyptic world where technology has been replaced by magic. He bonded with his unicorn when he was twelve, when the book starts he’s nineteen. The virgin mythology is real. They fight sometimes. It’s definitely a romantic relationship. But he can't have sex with anyone, woes. At the end he does, and the unicorn leaves. It’s clear that unicorns are better than sex.

C: And then there's Pern, where you have to have sex. [Audience indicates that they’ve almost all read Pern.] When the dragons do it, so do you. NO EXCEPTIONS!

J: You are forced to the dragon’s schedule. How do they feel when the humans are still at it?

R: The Pern books actually mention that. I think it was meant as id wish fulfillment, but it comes across as problematic, McCaffery used just enough realism that it seems creepy.

C: She's said in interviews that these are not romantic relationship, but in the books, the dragon’s partners are almost always the humans’ partners. So, you start getting sex = love. It makes the concept of choice more problematic.

J: Also one-sided.

R: Pern has very contradictory canon. The dragons are color-coded by gender. Green dragons are always ridden by men, and they’re always female. The only dragons with female riders are gold, and they’re extremely rare. So most dragon-mating would also involve men having sex with men. But it took 10 books for McCaffrey to be explicit about that.

C: I totally didn't notice that when I was nine.

R: I think the dragon mating is meant to be the wish-fulfillment of being utterly swept away by passion. It’s an appealing fantasy, but the execution highlights the creepy aspects: rape is love

C: There’ve been thousands of discussions about this. There’s the 70s trend of romance novels that start with rape. One theory is that in society where it's not OK for women to want to have sex, it's an out so that you don't feel like a “slut.” [Sarcasm scare quotes.] It can be a safety net if you don't own your own desire. Is the dragon mating flight the same thing? “It wasn't me, it was the dragon!”

R: Animals are close to nature, so it may also be the romanticized idea of that. You don’t have to worry about social restrictions. Let’s just all bone!

J: Do any books go the other way? Where the animals and people have to discuss whether they want to have sex?

C: Arrows of the Queen, sort of. A girl is bonded to stallion. Sex is not stigmatized and they are not compelled to have sex when the other, but they can tell. “Could you warn me next time? I'm in the middle of something, and then really?” They negotiate the timing.

R: The C. J. Cherryh Finisterre novels. (Rider at the Gate) We should discuss these more when we get to parodies and dark takes. On this planet, animal life is telepathic and empathic, and can overwhelm humans. Certain people can bond with night horses and put up mental shields. Sex transmits both ways. But it’s not overpowering, you can go with it or not. There’s one scene where the rider wants sex, and the horse is bored.

C: If your companion animal is comparable intelligence to you, what does it mean that the human is the decider?

J: Except in Valdemar.

C: It’s not always the case, but most often. Dragons have no choice in Pern. They have to do what they are told to do, no exceptions.

J: A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There’s a flying unicorn and a boy; neither are making solo decisions.

Audience: In Pern they are bonded, but choices are built into the environment

C: In Temeraire, dragons are human-level smart but subservient. Later in the series they start trying to get voting rights.

R: In other parts of that world dragons are equal to humans, or even superior.

R: Wolf companions are interesting because authors tend to use older research that turned out to be incorrect. The concept of the alpha wolf comes from wolf behavior in zoos. In the wild, the wolf pack is actually a family: a breeding male, a breeding female and pups. It’s not about constant fighting for dominance or rape.

J: A happy family of wolves. I want to read that.

C: Ya'll can talk about sex, I'm talking about Jhereg. It’s got a snarky flying lizard. AND IT’S AWESOME. It’s extraordinarily loyal, but will tell you that you're stupid. It’s much more realistic, like real friends. Not a creepy “I love you forever and everything you do is awesome.”

J: So you need your perfect friend companion, and your companion who will give you advice and call you out.

A: Sabriel: Mogget and the Destructible Disreputable Dog.

R: A kind of subversive version is Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody. Who is whose companion? Sirius the Dog Star is a powerful being in the form of a tiny dog. It’s told from dog’s point of view, and the girl is actually called a “companion.”

C: Other books where the animal is the POV character?

J: Maybe the Valdemar short stories?

A: The Princess and the Bear

A: Traveller (Not fantasy.)

C: Does the bond need to be magical? I was explaining to my mother-in-law what I was doing at Sirens and since she doesn’t read fantasy, I explained what a bond animal was. She is blind and has a guide dog, and asked whether her guide dog was a ‘bond animal.’

J: Even in fiction it’s not always a magical bond, now that you mention it.

R: Sure. Pern is what first comes to mind, but Robin McKinley is next. She has very emotional relationships with non-magical bonded animals. She also has service animals. If you look at Deerskin and The Hero and the Crown, there are points where the heroine is badly wounded or sick, and her horse or dog acts as her service animal.

J: In Tamora Pierce’s books, everyone ends up with animals. They’re not always magical.

Audience: Have you read the Mountain's Call series by Judith Tarr, with the horses? (The Mountain's Call; under a pseudonym.) I loved Pern, but not so much for the sex issues. I read Valdemar, but the companions a bit too much – it’s a great relationship if you fall in line. In Tarr’s series, she really nailed the perfect horse relationship. No one is in charge. There are Gods in horses bodies, but they act like horses.

J: Tarr has a YA book, House of the Star, with magical horses. [Under a pseudonym.] The protagonist asks the horses why they need humans. The horse says humans can think around corners.

Audience: No one was better than anyone else. No subservience.

J: You get something bigger than the sum of either.

C: Question time!

Audience: Friendships vs. Partnership? Dealing with Dragons books.

R: I didn't think of those because I would think of them more as two characters, not an animal companion.

C: In those, the human is the companion animal.

Audience: Back to sex! There are books with deep romantic but non-sexual bonds with animals. Everyone avoided using the word asexual. Is that conscious, that the human is in an asexual relationship? Or is it just bestiality avoidance?

C: In most examples the characters do have sex, just not with each other. I hadn’t considered the idea of bond animals as asexual relationship. That’s a good thing to think about.

R: Yeah, it’s interesting. I didn’t think of it because the partners are usually sexual, but with others.

J: That would be a good opportunity for exploration.

A: It could be a model of an asexual partnership.

A: Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes, is a book where you only get a companion animal if you were bad. If people saw it, they knew you did something wrong.

R: We didn't get a chance to talk about it, but there’s a little subgenre where the animal companion is a part of you, a manifestation of your soul. Zoo City actually had a little take on The Golden Compass included as a fake academic paper.

Audience: There’s the Firekeeper series. (Wolf Captured (Firekeeper)) Would that count as companion animals? Girl raised by wolves. She can't remember who she is. One of the wolves is her best friend. They even have thoughts of 'if we were the same species, we'd be together' but it's not weird. They can speak, but not telepathically; the way wolves speak. Is that a companion animal?

J: Raised by wolves is a trope on its own.

Audience: She thinks of herself as a wolf. When she’s found by humans, she insists she is a wolf. Her relationship with the wolf does become romantic but not sexually. It’s an example of a romantic asexual relationship.

J: There’s a wide range of ways of dealing with this. It hasn't been explored enough.

R: If ya'll go write it, there are lots of places to explore.

J: The animals are always the good guys.

R: No! If you want to see evil companion animals, read Sheri Tepper’s Grass. The companion horse are evil aliens. The Cherryh books I mentioned earlier have a parody of the special girl with a special bond. It doesn't go very well.

Audience: Recommends Yuletide fics that were dark interpretations of Valdemar.

Cover copy: Rage Winnoway’s closest friends have always been her four dogs: Bear, Billy Thunder, Elle, and Mr. Walker. When Rage sets off for the hospital where her mother lies in a coma, the dogs and the neighbor’s goat tag along. On the way, they run into the firecat, who talks them into going through a magical gate. And something wonderful happens! Each of Rage’s friends is transformed. Bear becomes a real bear; Billy Thunder, a teenage boy; Elle, a warrior woman; Mr. Walker, a small, large-eared gentleman; and the goat, a satyr with an inferiority complex. Together, Rage and her companions embark on a quest to save the world of Valley, a journey that is somehow tied to Rage’s family.

I love this premise. I am a total sucker for any sort of "let's establish these characters; now let's see what happens if you make a huge change to something very basic about them." I also really like shapeshifters other than cliche versions of werewolves. So the dogs-become-humans thing? All over it.

The execution is sort of there and sort of not. We get just enough of the animals as animals to see how their altered versions match their animal personalities. But it's a comparatively short children's book with a comparatively large cast, so no one gets as much development as they needed for the whole thing to be amazing. And the plot is very standard old-fashioned quest fantasy in which the heroine gets directed to gather plot coupons.

In between plot points, Carmody was doing some quite ambitious things, such as paralleling the broken relationship between the mother and son dogs (now a bear and a boy) with Rage's relationship with her mother, AND her mother's relationship with her family. Lots of deep issues of love, trust, attachment, and abandonment... but not dealt with in a very deep way. The age level and genre tropes fought the more sophisticated and interesting elements, and what was left was a book that promised more than it delivered.

(Rage, by the way, is short for "Rebecca Jane." I would find this more convincing if a) she had chosen it herself, b) she had any rage.)

The part that fascinated me the most was the incipient sexual tension between Rage and Billy Thunder, her beloved dog who is now a boy her own age, who loves her unconditionally and will say so. He's also described in a quite sensual manner. AND HE'S A DOG. None of this is ever explicitly thought of by Rage, but it is written in a way which I am pretty sure is meant to make the reader think it. But nothing comes of it.

SPOILERS answer your burning questions: does Billy Thunder go back to being a dog? Do any dogs die?

( Read more... )

There is a sequel and a promised third, which may or may not materialize. Has anyone read any of Carmody's other books? I feel like she'd probably be more successful writing to an even slightly older audience, like at a YA level.

Night Gate: The Gateway Trilogy Book One

Please reminisce, fondly or not, about any of these, or other books read in childhood, especially if they seem to have, deservedly or undeservedly, vanished from the shelves. I'd love to hear about non-US, non-British books, too.

[Poll #1720139]

The House of Arden, by E. Nesbit. Now that I've read this, its sequel, Harding's Luck, is probably the only E. Nesbit book I haven't read. Two kids, Edred and his older and rather wiser sister Elfrida, inherit a decrepit castle and its guardian Mouldiwarp, a talking white mole who commands all white things, like daisies and doves, and can send the kids back in time to try to find the hidden treasure with which they can rebuild the castle and fix the tumbledown homes of the people living on its lands. (Nesbit was a Fabian socialist, and liked to sneak in messages about social justice and helping out poor people into her books.) The book is charming, frequently funny (if Edred and Elfrida squabble, they can't travel in time for the next three days, and their enforced attempts to get along are quite amusing), and the Mouldiwarp's method of time travel produces some gorgeous images, such as when daisies begin marching in formation to create a clock face upon the grass.

Witch, by Barbara Michaels. A woman buys a house in the woods near a teeny tiny and very rural Southern town, and soon finds that not only do the locals believe it's haunted by the ghost of a Spanish witch, but they soon think she's a witch too. Bring out the torches and pitchforks! A fun suspense novel with twists that I found fairly predictable, but are enjoyable nevertheless. Southern readers may be annoyed at her portrayal of the town as borderline-medieval, but since I lived in a rural town with a similar mindset that happened to be in India, I took it more as a commentary on insular rural towns in general than at the south in particular.

Straydog, by Kathe Koja. Borrowed from coffee_and_ink's shelves-- she has a nice review of it in her memories that made me pick it up. A slim YA novel about a teenage girl who works at an animal shelter and becomes obsessed with a feral collie, whom she names Grrrl, becomes determined to save from euthanasia, and identifies with more than is healthy. With that premise, you just know it won't work out well. It's very well-written, and it made me cry in Starbucks. So far I've liked all three of Koja's YA novels (Buddha Boy and Blue Mirror) even though they're all pretty similar: intense, bordering on stream of consciousness first person narratives about teenage artists who have an encounter with someone who teaches them about trust or love or art and changes their life for the better, but in the very YA-happy ending mode where the protagonists never win the contest or save the dog or get the guy or whatever it was that they wanted initially-- and yet in the midst of their miserable life with their alcoholic mother or whatever, there is that little ray of inner hope that says they will survive.

The Growing Season, by Noel Streatfield. Four English kids go to stay with their eccentric Irish Great-Aunt Dymphna when their parents are unexpectedly called away on an emergency. Aunt Dymphna recites poetry in response to all questions and expects the kids to totally fend for themselves. The oldest girl, Penny, who is twelve, gets stuck doing all the cooking and cleaning while the oldest boy, who is thirteen, wanders around with the youngest two buying food and trying to catch shrimp. Toward the very end Aunt Dymphna suggests that Penny didn't have to take on all the work herself, but too little, too late. Aunt Dymphna annoyed the hell out of me, and so did every other adult in the book. The kids had never had to take care of themselves before, and all any adult did was give them vague suggestions, then criticize them for doing things wrong and complaining about not being taken care of. They're kids! They're used to being taken care of! Usually I like the genre of kids learning new skills in a new environment, but this one rubbed me the wrong way by being too realistic about how hard it would be, but by then seeming to take the adults' side and claiming it was actually a great learning experience.

Yes, it's another mainstream bestseller which is actually sf. Slipstream, anyway.

Paul's wife Lexy plummets from an apple tree in their yard and dies. There are mysterious circumstances surrounding her death, but the only witness is their dog Lorelei. As in this world, dogs have occasionally been taught to talk, Paul tries to teach Lorelei to talk in order to find out what happened to Lexy.

Flashbacks to their nauseatingly cute courtship and marriage ensue. Lexy (lexicon, get it?) made masks. Masks symbolize the surface which Paul is trying to burrow beneath. They symbolize Lexy's adorable surface which covers up her pain. Paul's travails with Lorelei lead him to a bittersweet understanding of the truth about him, his wife, language, love, death, life, dogs...

Here's how you can tell that the author did not think she was writing sf: although the setting is a world identical to our own except that some people have succeeded in teaching and/or surgically altering dogs so they can talk, and though this single alteration is so central to the plot that the book could not exist without it, the thread of the story which deals with an evil dog-mutilating cabal and with the tragic figure of an altered dog is briefly of crucial importance, then abandoned with no explanation of what happened to the dog-mutilators, the mutilated dog, or why they did something of major significance to the main characters, but which makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it.

I didn't like the book at all. I thought it was over-weighted with obvious symbolism, cutesy, sentimental, and that the sf elements were poorly handled. Also I found all the characters annoying, except for Lorelei, who was boring. On the positive side, it doesn't go into any details about the dog mutilation.

(For non-speaking fictional dogs with personality, see Robin McKinley's DEERSKIN, R. A. MacAvoy's back-in-print LENS OF THE WORLD and its stand-alone sequels KING OF THE DEAD and THE BELLY OF THE WOLF (the dog in the latter books might be a wolf and is unlike any of my other recommendations in being overwhelmingly creepy and disturbing), Gerald Durrell's hilarious MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, the complete works of James Herriot, and all those YA novels where the dogs die gruesomely at the end.)

Great premise, though.