The People of the Axe, by Jay Williams; Sweeney's Island, by John Christopher

[rachelmanija]

I had originally planned to write about these novels in the same entry merely because I read them in quick succession, and also because they're both utterly obscure novels by writers who are better-known for other books, so most likely no one but me has read them. But as I began to write, I realized that they do have some interesting parallels and

Comments

[sartorias]

I finally gave up on John Christopher (I read the Tripod things as they came out, and found each one successively worse) but that Jay Williams sounds like a real find! I never heard of that one.

[copperwise]

(In a lapse from his generally thoughtful portrayal of the aliens, he has them take strong boys as slaves and beautiful girls as museum exhibits. Why would giant green tentacled three-legged aliens think _any_ kind of girl is pretty, let alone have the same standards of human beauty that humans do?But the girls are chosen for the honor by their fellow humans, who don't know that they're going for a museum. The Masters keep museums of life from all the worlds they conquer. Since they've been watching us through satellite transmissions for so long before taking over, it never seemed odd to me that they had managed to learn what it is that humans consider beautiful, and plan their museum exhibits accordingly. The museum always seemed to me to exist to appreciate what was considered best of a world by the inhabitants of that world,much like we might have a museum exhibit on the art of footbinding, though a modern Westerner would likely not appreciate it aesthetically the way the ancient Chinese did. It's a window into someone else's

[klwilliams]

I've never heard of Sweeney's Island. When did it come out?

[rachelmanija]

1964.

[lady_ganesh]

For that matter, why do I live in a world where the Danny Dunn books are out of print?