Lately I have been buying a lot of cheap second hand science fiction novels, most from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I try to stick to writers I know of, and sometimes those books who sound interesting. What I have noticed is that most books from the early eighties and before are pretty thin, about 150 to 200 pages, whereas most book I read now are at least 350 and often more.
This is an oldy by Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) from 1966. We are many (tens of thousands) years in the future. Mankind is kept sterile and kept that way by the Optimen, prime humans who are immortal. The humans are basically slaves and pets for the Optimen. Some humans are allowed to breed, but the embryos are grown vats after being submitted to a cut, where unwanted elements are cut out of their DNA. This also cuts the bond with the parents, essentially making it that nobody has a past or a future. But then Durants appear, with an exceptionally good embryo. It seems to mutate on its own, and then it turns out that the embryo is also strangely fertile. Somehow cyborgs are also involved, working a plot against the optimen.
All in all, the basics of the story sound like it could be a very good scifi story. But all in all the book is too short. You are dumped right in the middle of it, and hardly anything is explained. You very slowly figure out where and when you are, what the world is like at that moment, and who and what is acting why and how. It could have done with a lot more world building. Now it was a bit of a jumble with a lot of interesting ideas but not a good story. Three out of five stars.

Like visiting locations from movies and tv shows, you can also visit or see things from the books. It is harder of course, since a lot more fantasy is used and it doesn’t have to be based on anything that actually exists on earth. But there are somethings, and they can surprise you.

When we were on our holiday to England in September we visited the Norwich Castle Museum, which was a really nice castle and museum to visit. It housed very different collections, natural history, history, art, applied art, egyptian history. In a little corner I found this gem, which really excited it me.

...a very large but undoubtedly ancient potsherd of a dirty yellow colour! This potsherd had in my judgment, once been a part of an ordinary amphora of medium size. For the rest, it measured ten and a half inches in length by seven in width, was about a quarter of an inch thick, and densely covered on the convex side that lay towards the bottom of the box with writing in the later uncial Greek character, faded here and there, but for the most part perfectly legible, the inscription having evidently been executed with the greatest care, and by means of a reed pen, such as the ancients often used. I must not forget to mention that in some remote age this wonderful fragment had been broken in two, and rejoined by means of cement and eight long rivets. Also there were numerous inscriptions on the inner side, but these were of the most erratic character, and had clearly been made by different hands and in many different ages...

This sherd starts of the adventures in H. Rider Haggard’s book ‘She‘. A classic adventure which, among others, is clearly an inspiration for modern day adventure films such as Indiana Jones or The Librarian. In those days (‘She’ was published in 1887) it was not very farfetched to think that there still might be unknown tribes living in the unreachable parts of Africa. In ‘Sh’e, a couple of British adventurers follow the clues on the sherd to the eastern shores of Central Africa where they find a lost tribe ruled over by She-who-must-be-obeyed.

I really enjoyed ‘She’, and the other adventure books of that time. If you read them while keeping in mind the time in which they are written, they are very enjoyable. And I never knew that the sherd really existed. Apparently H. Rider Haggard created it, and his sister-in-law made the drawings of it that are featured in the books (including my version). A great thing to stumble upon, and part of literary history.

When I first noticed this book I seem to remember thinking it would be a book in the magical realism style of Haruki Murakami. Later on one of my LT friends read it, and wasn’t too impressed, and made me think I wouldn’t like it that much either. Luckily I found a cheap second hand copy on our holiday in England, so I decided to try it anyway.
In this book there are three stories contained, and two myths (I would call them that). The stories are of Natalia, a doctor, her youth with her Grandfather, and the youth of her grandfather. The myths are those of the Tiger’s Wife and the Deathless Man. This all takes place in (former) Yugoslavia, just before the second World War II, and during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
I call them myths because they are more like local folk tales (especially the Tiger’s Wife) than the stories of magical realism I am used to from Murakami. But that didn’t make the book any less enjoyable for me. Even though it was a bit confusing in the beginning, because the main characters and time periods changed with each chapter, it came together in the end for me. Not all details were clear in the end, or even made sense when really thinking about it, but for me, that is what folk tales are about. Stories told by different people, none of which have actually seen what happened. Anyway, I really enjoyed this story, of the life of the Grandfather, and the granddaughter trying to understand him by knowing his two most important stories. Four out of five stars.

From the description on the back of this book, it’s not quite clear what it is about. About interacting lives, ebbing and flowing fortunes, wild youth, growing up. And yet that is exactly the description that fits this book.
Because this is not one flowing story, with a main character, a start, a climax, an ending. Instead the thirteen chapters are thirteen little stories by themselves, each covering or told by a different person. Yet together they form a bigger picture, because characters keep meeting each other, running into each other, influencing each other.
This does make it a bit difficult to keep the bigger picture in your head. Chapters don’t follow each other chronologically (the total time span is a good 50 years I would say), and it takes a bit to figure out the main character of each chapter and who those other people were again. But in the end this is a very enjoyable book about all those themes described above, and for once I did enjoy that the writer tells me how a character will end up in the future, because that is the whole point of this story. And extra kudos for the presentation slide chapter, very original and fitting for that character. Four out of five stars.