Dreamsongs Volume 2 (2004) by George R. R. Martin

Dreamsongs Volume 2 (2004) by George R. R. Martin:

This collection is generous and generously gifted with lengthy, illuminating essays by George R.R. Martin. Originally released in one volume, breaking it up into two volumes definitely helps with actually reading it.

• "A Beast for Norn" (1976): The first tale of Haviland Tuf showcases his biological and ecological engineering skills thanks to the massive seedship Ark, along with his idiosyncratic personality and one of the more medieval-futuristic planets of the far-future Thousand Worlds universe. This version is the original, while that in Tuf Voyaging has been edited and expanded.
• "Guardians"  (1981): A Haviland Tuf story that riffs on how seemingly minor changes to an alien environment lead to catastrophic consequences for the human inhabitants of a watery world. Tuf's favourite animals, cats, play a key role in this one.
• "The Road Less Travelled" (Unproduced screenplay, Twilight Zone) (1986): A never-produced screenplay would still make a dandy TZ episode.
• "Doorways" (Unproduced version of pilot) (1993): A different, less-expensive version of this screenplay was made into a pilot that never made it to series. This would now be familiar to viewers thanks to shows like Sliders.
• "Shell Games" (1987): One of Martin's first heroes in the shared-universe superhero series Wild Cards was the amiable Great and Powerful Turtle. Fun stuff.
• "From the Journal of Xavier Desmond" (1988): Compiles the linking story from Wild Cards novel Aces Abroad, focusing on the Mayor of Jokertown, the elephant-trunked Desmond.
• "Under Siege" (1985): Time-travel story incorporates a story Martin wrote for a history class (that story appears early in Volume 1 of Dreamsongs).
• "The Skin Trade" (1988): Award-winning novella involves a city run by werewolves and a mysterious mirror.
• "Unsound Variations" (1982): Martin turns his college experiences with chess tournaments into an excellent time-travel story.
• "The Glass Flower" (1986): Melancholy farewell (for now and then) to Martin's Thousand Worlds universe.
• "The Hedge Knight" (1998): A story from the Game of Thrones universe, set roughly a generation before the events of the novel.
• "Portraits of His Children" (1985): Somewhat metafictional horror story about the lengths some writers go for inspiration.

Overall: Excellent overview of Martin's writing from the mid-1980's to 2003, with a few dips further into the past to suit both thematic divisions and series that ended in the 1980's. Highly recommended.

Hungry Like The Wolf, Man

The Wolf Man, written by Curt Siodmak, directed by George Waggner, starring Lon Chaney Jr. (Larry Talbot), Claude Rains (Sir John Talbot), Bela Lugosi (Bela), Maria Ouspenskaya (Maleva), Evelyn Ankers (Gwen), and Ralph Bellamy (Colonel Montford) (1941): One of the high points of the Universal monster movies of the 1930's and 1940's. Trimmed to the bone (70 minutes of running time) and smartly suggestive rather than explicit, The Wolf Man follows Lawrence Talbot,an affable Americanized second son returning to the family estate somewhere in England after 18 years away because of the death of his brother at the paws of...a werewolf!

Shape-changing hilarity soon ensues as Talbot gets bitten by a Gypsy werewolf named Bela, played by Bela Lugosi. Soon, Talbot is turning into a werewolf and threatening new gal pal Gwen and pretty much anyone else who goes outside during a full moon. For the purposes of the movie, a full moon lasts three days. Werewolfery isn't super-precise.

The Wolf Man pretty much invented many of the werewolf tropes that writers and film-makers now treat as myth-based, including the bipedal, clothes-wearing version of the werewolf, which bears no resemblance to any man-wolf of the past. We also get the famous werewolf rhyme, and an iconic performance by Maria Ouspenskaya as an old Gypsy woman who knows a lot about werewolves.

Lon Chaney Jr. wasn't a great actor, and he was always overshadowed by the achievements of his 'Man of a 1000 Faces' father, Lon Chaney Sr.. He's a bulky, affable presence, though, and the film plays to that, making him a bewildered innocent doomed by chance. Well, sort of doomed. There were still a lot of sequels to be made. Claude Rains is nifty as always playing Larry Talbot's father, whose telescope gives us a comedy scene that's probably a lot funnier and creepier now than it was in 1941. Recommended.