I suppose that a few of you reading this may be interested in my personal life. I will now satiate your interest. If you are not interested (understandable, for I am not very interesting) you can skip this paragraph. I lived most of my life in the south eastern United States. I attended college in South Carolina. (please do not hold me up as an example of the writing prowess of other S.C. college graduates, I am aware of how awful my spelling and grammar are.) I graduated with a B.S. in Biology and worked on a farm for a while. I currently am working on my Environmental Science M.S. at a University in Virginia.
I got the idea for this blog when I was visiting a local used book store and noticing how ridiculous the covers of old science fiction and fantasy novels are. I am not the fastest reader in the world so I will really try to focus on shorter works, I am aiming for things between 150 and 350 pages. This will insure that I can post about once a week. I know that some of the "Songs of Fire and Ice" novels had pretty ridiculous covers back in the day but I just can not take on an 800 page novel and keep the schedule I have laid out for this blog. I hope this blog is pretty entertaining, but the real reason for me writing it is to kinda force myself to read more, and therefore play video games, watch TV, and generally vegetate less. Well any way, lets get down to the first entry!
Tuf Voyaging: by George R. R. Martin
The Cover:
As you can see the cover of this work is a masterpiece of the science fiction novel covers world. The bald man seems to stare directly at the viewer while he idly strokes the cat in his lap. Other cats dance around him in what I assume to be zero or low gravity. Outside the window of his space ship (or space station perhaps?) you observe a large planet that seems to be made entirely of lava lamp material. The block letters of the title call to mind the works of Roy Lichtenstein or perhaps the pop art of Andy Warhol.The Content:
The Bald Man on the cover of the novel is named 'Haviland Tuf.' In the novel he is described as kinda fat, bald, and pretty much harmless looking. On the cover of the novel he looks pretty... well... tough, so I don't think the artist really did a good job there. The character does have a love for cats though and he does travel around in a space ship, so I guess those elements of the cover are accurate.
Tuf Voyaging is a collection of short stories all centered around the main character of Haviland Tuf. In the first story Tuf ends up in control of a seedship called the Ark. The Ark is the last remaining seedship in the Galaxy and has been drifting through space derelict for several hundreds of years. Seedships were designed long ago as a sort of powerful bioweapons platform that, through the use of bioengineering and time distortion effects, can in a matter of minutes clone pretty much any creature you can imagine in its adult from. Haviland decides he wants to use the power of the seedship for good instead of destruction so he begins traveling around the galaxy looking for planets with ecological troubles and using his seedship to correct them. The problems he encounters are varied and interesting and his solutions to them are usually pretty clever. (although I have to say as an environmental scientist in training, I don't like that almost every one of his solutions involves introducing some new invasive species to the environment). Haviland uses the power at his disposal to solve all different sorts of problems from a planet who's population is growing faster than its resources will allow, to an ocean planet that is plagued with sea monsters. Over the course of the novel the seedship is shown to be a source of almost absolute power, and as we all know (and are reminded by one of the characters in the novel) absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the start of the novel Haviland seems to be incorruptible and in fact seems like one of the few honest men left in the galaxy. By the end of the novel, you start doubting Tuf's incorruptibility though as the choices he makes to solve the problems of one particular planet become more and more ethically nebulous.
So, how was the content of the novel compared to its cover? Well to say that the novel was not ridiculous would be untrue. The concept of a starship captain flying around the galaxy cloning T rexes to solve the ecological problems of poorly terraformed planets is inherently wacky. But in my opinion it is just the right kind of wacky to make for a really fun read. I enjoyed the book and feel that it does the awesomeness of its cover justice. And its nice for once to read a Sci fi book where the main conflict is environmental issues and the problems all can't be solved with well placed photon torpedoes. I should also mention that if you do an image search for this title there is an alternate cover that I think is even more ridiculous that the one I posted, but my copy of the book has the above cover.
Next Weeks Title:
Of Godlike Power!
