Bear Necessities

by Allison Pang

Or so to speak. I had to think long on this one, because there really were so many books I read growing up.

But two I remember very fondly are going to be Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

From a religious standpoint, I'm not sure Narnia makes sense for me. I'm not particularly religious at all, but somehow even knowing they're basically Christian allegory never stopped my enthusiasm for the stories themselves. I don't know how many times I've read them, but it's a lot. The idea of four children escaping the mundane world and entering a realm of fantasy was exactly the sort of thing that appealed to me most. Talking animals? Check. Magical creatures? Check. Adventure? Check.

(And the fact that my grandmother had a giant wardrobe full of fur coats in her attic didn't hurt things much, either. My dad would take me up there once in a while and we'd pretend we were going into Narnia.)

Influences for my writing? Yeah - I suspect Mr Tumnus might have a wee bit to do with why Brystion looks the way he does. Just a bit, mind. Mr. Tumnus was all about scarves and tea. Not sex and bacon. (However, James McAvoy up there? Hells yes, my friends. HELLS YES.)

Though, there's a bit of a similarity here, perhaps? -->

But still, I actually drop a few Narnia lines in A Brush of Darkness, though some are more obvious than others.

Also?

I suspect my fondness for the name Lucy came from this series as well (and hence my daughter's namesake.)

And then we've got the Jungle Book. I didn't actually own this one, but every summer we'd go to the beach and I'd check it out of the children's section and I'd hoard it for about a month or so. It was an oversized book with a ton of illustrations. I couldn't find any of the ones I remember online, which is a shame, because it was brightly colored with a primitive feel to it.

A lot of my love for Mowgli probably goes back to that lonely, picked-on nerd girl that I was - there was something rather comforting about a kid who lived on his own in the jungle...and yet that whole "We be of one blood, ye and I," concept was cool too, because it showed me you could find friends and family anywhere - even if those friends were wolves or a bear or a panther.

On the other hand, Mowgli also did what he wanted and didn't really take shit from anyone either. I mean, he kills Shere Khan and dances on his skin for the next 10 years or so, so...yeah. There's a certain savage "and not a single fuck was given that day" mentality that I also liked, also for obvious reasons.

But even the other Jungle stories were pretty fascinating, particularly some of the poetry. A Ripple Song is the one that stuck with me the most (which is basically about a girl who goes into the river and is eaten by a crocodile, but there was always something deliciously sinister about it, simply because it didn't really come out and say it.

Foolish heart and faithful hand,

 Little feet that touched no land.

Far away the ripple sped,

 Ripple--ripple--running red!

At any rate, I leave you with this, which *is* from the Disney cartoon, but that's okay. George Sanders has the perfect voice for Shere Khan, and that upper crust accent sorta steals the show.  (That and the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh is singing about eating someone. Really. Close your eyes and it's rather surreal.)

How Many Hairs on a Woozy's Tail?

by KAK  

 L. Frank Baum holds the title for "Earliest Influence" in my literary life. I learned to read with the Oz series. Tik-Tok, Pumpkinhead, the magic carpet, the Woozy, ...what?

What do mean you haven't heard of... 

Oh, for Pete's sake. Baum wrote some fourteen books about the world of Oz. That doesn't include the comic strips, the novellas, or the shorts about the Wonderful World of Oz. Not every Oz book involved ruby slippers, munchkins, or flying monkeys. Heck, the second book in the series doesn't involve Dorothy! It's about a boy named Tip.

My love of unusual names can be directly traced back to Baum. Who names their characters "Rinkitink," "Ozma," or "Woggle-Bug"? He created cities named Yip and Pinagree, and, of course, Oz. Beyond the Tin-man (who has his own book, btw) and the Scarecrow (also the star of his own book), we have such characters as the Wheelers, Kiki Aru, and the Glass Cat.

Baum's books left me with more than an affinity for names descriptive, strange, or pun-ny. His characters taught me appearances have a lot to do with initial perception but not personal (or plot) development. Baum gave me an appreciation for fantasy, for the endless possibilities in worlds other than my own. While I love historical fiction and paranormal, my genre-of-the-heart is fantasy because of Baum.

Flatheads versus the Skeezers

In Glinda of Oz, the final book of Baum's Oz series, Dorothy returns to Oz to help Glinda (the "Good Witch" for you "Wicked" fans) broker peace between two warring Ozian races -- the Flatheads and the Skeezers. Nearly a hundred years after Glinda was posthumously published, I can assure you, the Flatheads and Skeezers have made it earth and infiltrated humanity. Campaign season is their time to shine. I'm pretty sure the Nome King is running for President.

Have any of you, dear readers, read one of Baum's Oz books? Can one of you tell me how many hairs are on a Woozy's tail?

I Blame the Science Fiction Book Club

by Jeffe Kennedy

It seems to be that one persistent question asked of authors is who their literary influences are. Clearly we ask this even of each other. I've always been impressed, over the years, when bands that are interviewed can reel off three to five musical influences without missing a beat. Now I understand why.

They get asked that question ALL THE TIME.

Fortunately the possible answers to this question are as countless as the stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach. Or at least, as many as the books on the shelves of the Hampden Public Library in Aurora, Colorado. Or the offerings of the Science Fiction Book Club.

That's right - they have a website. Am I the only one who's surprised?

I was all set to give a little history lesson here, but it turns out they're still going. Who knew?

At any rate, when I was a kid, I'm guessing starting around 10 or so, I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club. It was one of those "free" deals where they mailed you one or two books each month. If you didn't want them, you could send them back. Otherwise you were automatically billed for them. I think this was a popular business model in the 70s - seems like there were all sorts of companies who did this. The bite, of course, was that if you forgot (often) or failed to keep track of time (hello - I was 10) and didn't send the books back, they were yours. It was kind of shopping by omission.

My mom would get aggravated over my growing bill and would make me pay her back. I got serious about saving my allowance, doing chores for cash and eventually baby-sitting my little heart out.

Because it turned out that I loved most of the books they sent me.

I read Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire through this club. I read a lot of books that were likely very inappropriate for my age and I discovered authors I never would have otherwise.

That's where Tanith Lee comes in.

Yes - that seems to be her primary online presence. Some other creep is squatting on TanithLee.com, a practice I just abhor. Special circle of hell for those people. But, like many authors of her generation, she seems to have no other website or blog. Sigh.

At any rate, I read The Silver Metal Lover and was spellbound. It starts out, somewhat famously, like this:

Mother, I am in love with a robot.
No. She isn't going to like that.
Mother, I am in love.
Are you, darling?
Oh, yes, Mother, yes I am. His hair is auburn, and his eyes are very large. Like amber. And his skin is silver.
Silence.
Mother. I'm in love.
With whom, dear?
His name is Silver.
How metallic.
Yes. It stands for Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot.
Silence. Silence. Silence.
Mother....

The story was futuristic, with a blend of the surface eutopian/core dystopian society Lee does so well, with a love story. All told with beautiful, metaphorical language I often had to read several times to understand. Fabulous!


There was Sometimes After Sunset, which combined vampires with Mars - something my young mind found twisty and amazing. This bit about a malicious flower delivery has always stuck with me:


The buzzer went. I walked stiffly to the door and opened it. A boy about fifteen, in white overalls, was on the porch. He carried a crystal box, a transparent coffin full of green Savior roses.

"Miss Kerwow?"
"That's not my name."
"It isn't?" Concerned, the boy gazed at the docket on the box. His eyes had a puffy, almost tearful look of disorientation. He was at the age of confusion, when you can only get through by a series of previously planned moves dependent on predicted responses. A reaction out of sequence could derail. I'd been meant to cry out Why, yes, and make a balcony of my arms and breast for the flowers. 

There's Biting the Sun, which is another dystopian lurking beneath the apparent eutopian, where the heroine moves from just plain silly to someone heroic. That journey is echoed in Heroine of the World, an epic story of a young woman who transforms herself into the perfect bait, to take the ultimate revenge. Red as Blood, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer got me going on twisted fairy tales.

But the one that really sticks in my head, that I've read over and over, is The Electric Forest. In this book, the heroine is horribly disfigured from congenital defects and is offered the opportunity to occupy a perfect, beautiful body. The story is layered with switches and double-crosses that truly wowed me. Most of all, Lee infected me with the use of color. Like the first description of her "new" body:

There was a woman in the pillar. She would appear to be about twenty-two or three years of age. She would appear to be alive, but surely could not be. Naked, she was like some glowing incandescent substance. Her open eyes were dark blue neons. Lustrous hair, a fierce blue essence of blue-in color, poured back from her forehead. The hair was cut precisely level with her shoulders, the heavy, mathematically straight mass of it just framing their witness. But she was not any sort of a mannequin. She had nails, lashes, a fine bluish blush of down beneath her navel, leading into black at the pubes. The fawn nipples on her breasts were like furled buds. And she was dusted all over with a pollen of faint fawn freckles. She was beautiful. Beautiful.

Now we know why my editor had me trim down the references to blue in Rogue's Pawn. Ahem.

Yeah. I totally blame the Science Fiction Book Club.