Reading List: It Sure Can Happen Here

When I was growing up, one of my favourite miniseries ever was V (the original). I think I liked the sequel even better, because in that one, we finally win! Humans beating the evil aliens was pretty much the main message I got out of it. I was too young to catch any subtext to the story, namely its Nazism/Holocaust allegory. It seemed blindingly obvious when I was older. I mean hey, c'mon:

But to little kid version of me, once I saw lizard faces, motherships and cool blasters, what more was there to see? It was only when I rewatched the shows in my adolescence that I picked up on the message hiding (just barely) under the surface. Suddenly, adolescent me thought this was the most profound thing ever put on television. At that age, I still wasn't exactly deep.

As I grew older, not only did V's central allegory seem way too on the nose, it also seemed to lack relevance. Ethnic cleansing and genocide were certainly out there in the public consciousness, but here in the Western World, the idea that people could so easily allow an insidious movement to subvert the basic human decency of people well aware of what happened in World War II seemed painfully quaint. Overdone.

And yet here we are. I'm not even going to bother listing all the things going on in the world, because if you don't even know, this blog probably isn't for you. Writing that might have seemed dated a few decades ago is now totally of the moment.

Recommendation: The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker

I recently finished the third book in the late Kage Baker's fantasy cycle and will be posting a review of it shortly.  It has been a while since I read the first book, so I won't have a detailed review of it here, however I'd like to give it a recommendation, especially since I recently had a discussion with a friend about it.  She was not normally a fantasy reader and was interested in books that might get her introduced to the genre.  The first book that came to mind was The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker.