pector@ihuxw.UUCP (11/07/83)
Hey, Rene! Your letter to me about the Med Doctor book was great! Could you post it to this newsgroup since I accidentally deleted it from my login? It certainly seems qualified for the Most Mediocre Book competition. Scott Pector
rene@umcp-cs.UUCP (11/08/83)
You mean, I didn't post it? Gads, my memory is in pieces! Anyway, to
recap: (if somehow I did post this, you may ignore this resummary)
My vote for the Most Mediocre Book goes (since I just recently read
it) for Murray Leinster's Med Doctor stories. It wasn't bad enough to
be in the same class as some of the BAD books mentioned on this
network - it was reasonably entertaining, but elements of it made me
grind my teeth. Some of them were (let's see if I can remember - I
tend to spit things out in a fit of petulance and then forget them):
Housewivery as instinct: (more or less a quote) "Loyalties may come
and go, but a woman's role is changeless" and "she was a wonderful
housewife, acting instinctually as all women ..." (these quotes
probably get worse as memory fades, but they convey the idea in all
his stories. I mean, it was written a while ago, but for heaven's
sake, it was only 1966!!!)
Never trust anyone under 25: Never mind the dangers of the planet, the
fact that there was no one to care for the city, the children, etc.;
the young "men" did what ALL young men (women didn't count - they had
to be the "girls" of the guys) had to do (they were under 25, after
all) - act macho, travel in gangs, have fun hunting with bows and
arrows, and in general have NO sense of responsibility. Burn the
cities! Who cares if civilization goes down in flame!
People act in certain ways and always will: on a certain planet, the
doctor (and his pet something-or-other, murgatroyd) discovers that a
lack of wood burning leads to a wierd craving for awful, disgusting,
slimey creatures (to eat). Of course, anyone who suffers from this
craving is immediately cast out from society, and those cast out are
so disgusted and ashamed of themselves that they decide that EVERYONE should
be equally disgusting, so they go about "infecting" people, and there's
sort of a civil war. Only natural when people do disgusting things
like that, beyond their control or not.
Business men are unscrupulous to extremes: one uses a cattle herding
device (it sends electrical "twitches" through certain areas
(changable at will) that make it extremely unpleasant (and possibly
fatal) to wonder into or stay in that area. This was used to move
cattle around on a cattle planet) to herd people away from their
cities periodically so that they think it's a natural phenomenon. Then
this business man (they're all alike!) comes in to buy up the land
really cheap.
Ah, well. It was readable, but so full of stereotypes! Even Heinlein
had women doing important things (ruler of 20 universes, and so
forth) (even if most of them just wanted to be good obedient wives and
have babies). *sigh*
Anyway, there it is. I thought the combination of not-too-bad writing
and stiff stereotypes made it really mediocre. Any other mediocre
books out there?
- rene
"I don't think changing diapers is instinctual"
--
Arpa: rene.umcp-cs@CSNet-relay
Uucp:...{allegra,seismo}!umcp-cs!rene