"Davy," Edgar Pangborn

[teenybuffalo]

I just read Edgar Pangborn's Davy, which I've had built up for me as a stylistic masterpiece. It didn't even start to live up to my expectations. It was a mildly interesting read about a teenaged boy being awesome and having improbable amounts of sex in the far future hundreds of years after The Apockyclipse, or something. I liked the made-up slang

Comments

[negothick]

Fascinating. Maybe all SF book reviews should be delayed for 50 years after publication! I read it, oh maybe a year or two after it was first published, because I know I was still in high school, and it was pretty hot stuff. Even at the time, I knew it was a take-off on Candide--as well as Canticle (though I didn't see all the parallels you drew). I was deeply into the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tradition at that time, and this novel didn't seem surprising to me in that respect, except in the fact that it had characters at all, as opposed to stock figures. As for the "ancient remains that are comical to us because we know their origin," this was published a few years before the first film version of Planet of the Apes, with its Statue of Liberty, perfectly recognizable though buried for eons.

I haven't re-read it since the mid-70s. Maybe it's time. Or not.

[moon_custafer]

On the other hand, it's a downer to see female characters being destroyed by this problem, and it turns out it's also a downer to see it happen to male characters.

I really wish I could recall the author and title of a short story I read as a kid, where the framework is that the narrator is recounting an adventure years before where he was sent to investigate a mysterious spate of mutations in an East African wildlife sanctuary, which turned out to be the result of radiation leaking from a mad scientist's experiment, and well, afterwards he realized he'd been exposed too, and that's why you're adopted, son.

[negothick]

Thank you, Google--I think I've found it for you. L.Sprague DeCamp's "The Blue Giraffe" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Giraffe

The original pub. date? 1939.

[moon_custafer]

Thanks! I'm not normally that into L. Sprague de Camp, but I recall that story fondly.

[alexx_kay]

Curiously, yours is the second review of the book I've read recently(-ish): http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/tales-of-a-darkening-world

[asakiyume]

This seems to have made the world so much warmer that it's uncomfortably like a post-apocalyptic setting someone would write today, when the bugaboo is climate change/global warming.

I bet there's something sociological that could be said about when and why the zeitgeist produces heated SF settings and when and why it produces chilled ones. Ice planets and steamy planets. Hmmm. Maybe we need a humidity factor in there, because there's steamy, but then there's also desert.

The basic male costume is a shirt and a "loin-rag" and that's it.

Why a shirt, I wonder. I mean, why go to all that trouble to cover a not-very-vulnerable, not gonad-related part of your body? If your nether regions have just a loin rag, then I say, dispense with that troublesome shirt!

[moon_custafer]

Perhaps to limit sunburn, or to keep their shoulders from getting chafed while carrying a satchel or a French horn with them everywhere? A caftan or a robe would be a better solution to both those problems, mind you, but perhaps the author or his publishers didn't think such garments macho enough.

[asakiyume]

A caftan or a robe...

--definitely. I can't see any permutation in which you'd want very-covered uppers and skimpy loincloth lowers.

I do like the idea of carrying a French horn everywhere.