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Only we're more complicated
This post would have gone up much earlier if our house internet were not being staticky.
1. Yesterday was the first day of autumn. I appear to have celebrated by walking my niece around the neighborhood and singing to her, which says as much about the change of seasons as anything. Catching up on social media tells me that yesterday was also Bisexual Visibility Day. I approve of the liminal timing; I wouldn't have minded knowing then! What I tend to say is that I'm interested in people. That includes people who are not on the gender binary and people whose identities and/or bodies change, but bi erasure is a thing and let's not have any more of it, thanks. Queer works for me. So does bisexual. We now return to your regular schedule of being not very successfully invisible anyway.
(This is where it is probably appropriate to link a comic about a bisexual unicorn, but my favorite of the series is unsurprisingly the genderqueer mer-person. They have armpit fins and seaweed on their hat. The asexual succubus is also pretty brilliant.)
2. A comment to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
steepholm last night caused me to wonder if I had ever written at length about Eleanor Cameron. Sadly, short of posting this excerpt in 2008, the answer appears to be no. I have one note from 2006 that never seems to have made it into a post:
Currently I'm re-reading Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series. I had forgotten how much I like one particular character who appears in the third and fourth books. This is Prewytt Brumblydge, a small, jaunty, almost preternaturally neat and cheerfully conceited Welsh astrophysicist who—owning the daylights out of his preposterous surname—names all of his discoveries things like "Brumblium," "the Brumblitron," and "B-rays." In Mr. Bass's Planetoid (1958), he almost blows himself off the face of Aberystwyth while messing around with cosmic rays. In A Mystery for Mr. Bass (1960), either he's enduring a run of extremely bad luck or a curse has caught up with him for a dishonest deed done in his youth, and being a practical and obstinate man, he refuses to believe it's the latter. It's not hard for me to guess the reasons I zeroed in on him as a child. Where Mr. Bass is a benevolent magical tinkerer, Prewytt is ambiguous and eccentric; rather like the trickster figure that his mercurial confidence sometimes suggests, he has a talent for figuring himself out of corners and often the concomitant problem of having figured himself into them in the first place. It would have been easy for Cameron to cast him as either a villain or pure comedy, those being the standard forms of the mad scientist in the 1950's, but he's neither. He has overtones of both at times, but ultimately he's the kind of character who views the punishment of being sent into an alternate universe as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove his theory of everything, and how can you not like someone like that? (He rings a nice change on scientific stereotypes, too: he's a dapper dresser with marvelous social skills.) I'd almost totally forgotten him. But when I was about seven, he was probably one of the people I wanted to grow up to be.
—Once recovered, this fondness has persisted to the present day. I can't imagine ever having forgotten any of those books now. For the record, I don't especially like A Mystery for Mr. Bass despite its Prewytt-centric plot; it retcons the emotional climax of Mr. Bass's Planetoid in ways I find less interesting than the original and the sudden advent of the supernatural into the series occasioned almost as much disbelief from me as from Prewytt. I do not dispute that The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) is more science fantasy than science fiction, despite its sheer sense-of-wonder joy at the possibilities and mechanics of spaceflight. Basidium was my first planetary romance, although I didn't realize it in elementary school; Tyco Bass has an otherworldly touch about him even then, blowing away like a spore on the wind (or Mary Poppins) at the end of the story. By later books he has taken up residence somewhere abstract in the spiral galaxy Messier 81 and only returns to 5 Thallo Street for significant occasions, a guardian angel in an old grey gardening coat. There are still distinct genre lines the earlier books don't cross—even astral projection is a pulp sci-fi trope—and A Mystery for Mr. Bass does, making it an uneasy bridge between the spacefaring fiction of the first three books and the full-bore Arthurian mysticism of Time and Mr. Bass (1967). Which I do like, although it very nearly belongs to another series. It's numinous. Also it is still true that I cannot eat hardboiled eggs without thinking about Basidium. This theory was tested as recently as last night's fettucine.
If you have not read the separately published short stories Jewels from the Moon and the Meteor That Couldn't Stay (1964), the internet can help with that.
3. Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah. We are going to my parents' house. L'shanah tovah, all.
1. Yesterday was the first day of autumn. I appear to have celebrated by walking my niece around the neighborhood and singing to her, which says as much about the change of seasons as anything. Catching up on social media tells me that yesterday was also Bisexual Visibility Day. I approve of the liminal timing; I wouldn't have minded knowing then! What I tend to say is that I'm interested in people. That includes people who are not on the gender binary and people whose identities and/or bodies change, but bi erasure is a thing and let's not have any more of it, thanks. Queer works for me. So does bisexual. We now return to your regular schedule of being not very successfully invisible anyway.
(This is where it is probably appropriate to link a comic about a bisexual unicorn, but my favorite of the series is unsurprisingly the genderqueer mer-person. They have armpit fins and seaweed on their hat. The asexual succubus is also pretty brilliant.)
2. A comment to
steepholm last night caused me to wonder if I had ever written at length about Eleanor Cameron. Sadly, short of posting this excerpt in 2008, the answer appears to be no. I have one note from 2006 that never seems to have made it into a post:Currently I'm re-reading Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series. I had forgotten how much I like one particular character who appears in the third and fourth books. This is Prewytt Brumblydge, a small, jaunty, almost preternaturally neat and cheerfully conceited Welsh astrophysicist who—owning the daylights out of his preposterous surname—names all of his discoveries things like "Brumblium," "the Brumblitron," and "B-rays." In Mr. Bass's Planetoid (1958), he almost blows himself off the face of Aberystwyth while messing around with cosmic rays. In A Mystery for Mr. Bass (1960), either he's enduring a run of extremely bad luck or a curse has caught up with him for a dishonest deed done in his youth, and being a practical and obstinate man, he refuses to believe it's the latter. It's not hard for me to guess the reasons I zeroed in on him as a child. Where Mr. Bass is a benevolent magical tinkerer, Prewytt is ambiguous and eccentric; rather like the trickster figure that his mercurial confidence sometimes suggests, he has a talent for figuring himself out of corners and often the concomitant problem of having figured himself into them in the first place. It would have been easy for Cameron to cast him as either a villain or pure comedy, those being the standard forms of the mad scientist in the 1950's, but he's neither. He has overtones of both at times, but ultimately he's the kind of character who views the punishment of being sent into an alternate universe as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove his theory of everything, and how can you not like someone like that? (He rings a nice change on scientific stereotypes, too: he's a dapper dresser with marvelous social skills.) I'd almost totally forgotten him. But when I was about seven, he was probably one of the people I wanted to grow up to be.
—Once recovered, this fondness has persisted to the present day. I can't imagine ever having forgotten any of those books now. For the record, I don't especially like A Mystery for Mr. Bass despite its Prewytt-centric plot; it retcons the emotional climax of Mr. Bass's Planetoid in ways I find less interesting than the original and the sudden advent of the supernatural into the series occasioned almost as much disbelief from me as from Prewytt. I do not dispute that The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) is more science fantasy than science fiction, despite its sheer sense-of-wonder joy at the possibilities and mechanics of spaceflight. Basidium was my first planetary romance, although I didn't realize it in elementary school; Tyco Bass has an otherworldly touch about him even then, blowing away like a spore on the wind (or Mary Poppins) at the end of the story. By later books he has taken up residence somewhere abstract in the spiral galaxy Messier 81 and only returns to 5 Thallo Street for significant occasions, a guardian angel in an old grey gardening coat. There are still distinct genre lines the earlier books don't cross—even astral projection is a pulp sci-fi trope—and A Mystery for Mr. Bass does, making it an uneasy bridge between the spacefaring fiction of the first three books and the full-bore Arthurian mysticism of Time and Mr. Bass (1967). Which I do like, although it very nearly belongs to another series. It's numinous. Also it is still true that I cannot eat hardboiled eggs without thinking about Basidium. This theory was tested as recently as last night's fettucine.
If you have not read the separately published short stories Jewels from the Moon and the Meteor That Couldn't Stay (1964), the internet can help with that.
3. Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah. We are going to my parents' house. L'shanah tovah, all.
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Many years ago I got hold of her first novel (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/eleanor-cameron/the-unheard-music/), which I remember as being pretty bad, but there was one bit I'm very fond of: one of the librarians is not very happy about their low pay, 'And Letitia had exclaimed in her bland, cheerful way: "But, Mrs. Topping, you are all priestesses in the temple of learning, and that, surely, is something, is it not?" '
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That's the retcon issue with A Mystery for Mr. Bass.
'And Letitia had exclaimed in her bland, cheerful way: "But, Mrs. Topping, you are all priestesses in the temple of learning, and that, surely, is something, is it not?" '
I hadn't heard of that novel. Hah. Ow.
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They held up for me! They are terrible about gender, but I think they were even when I was a child. Everything I remembered liking, I still like, and I can appreciate some of the beautifully written science even more now. I don't know if any of them are in print right now, but I hope used book stores are kind to you.
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In any case, I'm glad this one did. I really enjoyed these books too--at least the ones I read, which I think was only the first three (though now I'm curious about Time and Mr. Bass). The first one fully convinced me that YES, I too could build a spaceship. It was hugely empowering.
L'shanah tovah.
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Text files on my desktop, generally. The files I tend to lose in crashes are music and e-mail, because they take the longest to back up; I have random stray documents floating around this machine that date back to high school.
I really enjoyed these books too--at least the ones I read, which I think was only the first three (though now I'm curious about Time and Mr. Bass).
It's divisive, I think; I had a lot of trouble with it as a child and I know people who came to it as adults and feel it broke the series. I liked it much better on re-read in 2006 and that opinion has stayed with me. It is a very different kind of book from The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, but there's thirteen years between them.
The first one fully convinced me that YES, I too could build a spaceship. It was hugely empowering.
Yes! That is an important thing to believe as a child. And even not as a child, whether or not you ever build one.
Thank you!
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Apparently Eleanor Cameron was still working on another Mr. Bass book when she died, according to a comment on Mari Ness's review of TAMB at Tor (note: she did NOT like the book at all): http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/06/sometimes-abandonment-is-better-time-and-mr-bass
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That's fair! I think he's objectively freaky!
(note: she did NOT like the book at all)
Wow, no, she did not. That is all right. We do not have all-congruent tastes in fiction.
I would have been interested to see that last one, if it was ever revised to be a coherent novel rather than a time-slippy draft that needed a better poem. It sounds like an expansion of the short story "Jewels from the Moon," featuring Miss Bronwen the time-traveling Mycetian who collects tektites and takes the boys on a dream journey through the solar system and out into the heart of the galaxy, where they watch stars going nova and stars being born. It's great numinous science.
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Thanks! I would certainly read one if it came out.
(I do applaud Mr. Brumblydge's egotism! It is one of the reasons I like him. Also his slight capacity for myth-making, which is the reason we get scenes like this—
Prewytt Brumblydge smiled a strange smile.
"When I was a boy in Aberystwyth, in Wales," he said, "my mother and father used to take my brother and me during summer vacations to a little island in the North Atlantic. It wasn't always quiet there, but it was nature's voice you heard.
"The great seas crashed on the rocks. You think we have waves along this coast? Ah, my boys, you've seen nothing! The ancient Britons had built their rock shelters there, and we played among the ruins. They'd raised great stone monuments, and we played in their shadows. We climbed out on the headlands and sang, shouting to the incoming seas:
"Men of Harlech, in the hollow,
Do ye hear like rushing billow,
Wave on wave that surging follow
Battle's distant sound?
"'Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen,
Be they knights or hinds or yeomen,
They shall bite the ground!"
What a glorious tenor the little man had! How he shook his fist! How his voice rang out! The way he sang that old Welsh war song with its stirring, fighting, tramping rhythm sent the chills up and down the boys' spines. They stared at him in amazement, their eyes wide.
"Well, now," he said, his face suddenly alight with happiness," I must be going. I'm off for Texas, you know, and it's quite a way. Please tell Tyco to call me long distance the minute he gets back, will you?"
—eventually followed by this statement—
"He talked about Aberystwyth," remembered Chuck. "At least he said he was a boy there, but Dr. Frobisher says that Aunt Matilda says that's all nonsense, because he was a boy in Merthyr Tydfil; he never lived in Aberystwyth in his life."
Which may be one of the elements retconned out by A Mystery for Mr. Bass, but I like it and refuse to throw it away. Also, I did not know the tune to "Men of Harlech" for years and made up my own. This happened with many famous poems and pieces of music in my childhood.)
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Not belated at all! Today is Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur ends nightfall of October 4th. You have not missed the High Holidays.
Why have I not heard of Cameron before now? I'll have to rectify that.
See above to
Also, love the succubus.
"Cake?"
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I forgot to say that I am with you on the hard-boiled egg thing.
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The Society of Young Astronomers and Students of Space Travel! I can't remember what happens to it. The author must have just stopped paying attention.
But Stowaway was by far my least favorite of the series anyway.
Interestingly, it's the one I remember least about off the top of my head, although I know it introduces both Mr. Theo and the negative universe.
I forgot to say that I am with you on the hard-boiled egg thing.
Yay! I can remember eating hard-boiled eggs very carefully after I read The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet for the first time. They did not make me regain a healthy green color, but I have thought of them as nourishing ever since. Which they are, really, just not for the same reasons.
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