E M Foner Union Station Series 1: Overview & KDP

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 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 October 2020

EM Foner Union Station Series & Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

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Preamble

EM Foner Union Station does not fit my normal Classic SciFi inclination. As you would know from my Classic SciFi series, ten to date, I am a fan of old-fashioned classic science fiction and also would like to remind or introduce people to some of the best books.

My series of Classic SciFi is 1. James Blish A Case of Conscience, 2. Daniel F Galouye Dark Universe, 3. Avram Davidson Rork! 4-7 William Gibson Trilogy 4. Neuromancer, 5. Prophecy, 6. Count Zero, 7. Mona Lisa Overdrive, 8 Ursula K. Le Guin The Word for World Is Forest, 9 Isaac Asimov I, Robot & Killer Robots, 10 Arkady & Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic. There are many more to get around to.

In the articles I try to do slightly more than a conventional book review by providing a deeper background and some analysis.

Roy Lewis The Evolution Man is also labelled by Penguin as Science Fiction. I would label it more as humour and not what I call Classic SciFi; though I’d highly recommend it as a must read.

My preferred science fiction and use of the word classic are those books from the 1940s on that try to advance novel ideas and a theme that is plausible and pays lip service to scientific rigour whether from hard science or the social sciences and psychology.

Nevertheless, there are other genres and I have read works from many of them, including the occasional fantasy novel.

My liking of and slight addiction to EM Foner’s Union Station Series does not fit this model. It is unusual for me. Akin perhaps to an otherwise intelligent reader’s attraction to Mills & Boon or Westerns but this does not do justice to EM Foner. The categorisation with Mills & Boon and Westerns is also important. The story or the clothing of each type of writing falls within similar forms of ritualised convention. In EM Foner’s case this is quite clever, if somewhat unusual. The Union Station books are funny and subversively intelligent but quirky.

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Union Station Series

There are 18 Union Station books to date published over the last six years. They are all of similar quality and their ratings average over 4 on Goodreads, which as a reader tends to be my preliminary criterion of excellence these days. When browsing books on secondhand shelves anything over 3.75 tends to be a reliable guide to my giving new authors a go.

I’ll cover the individual books in another article.

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Richard Evans Schultes and Rubber

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Featured: Wade Davis The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes, 2004.

 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 September 2019

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Richard Evans Schultes & Rubber

Introduction

I met a young Swiss man about thirty in Pakistan in 1995. I’ll call him Marc. We shared a jeep with he and his girlfriend up the Kaghan Valley through the snow. The first time I saw Marc, though he was lean and wiry, I mistakenly thought that he was not prepared for the rigours of Pakistan. I was wrong.

He’d walked alone the length of Africa a year or so before. Earlier he’d travelled with a friend in the Pacific. The friend adopted his approach of not wearing shoes through the bush and ended up in hospital with blood poisoning.

I imagine that Richard Evans Schultes was of that type. He was a botanist, explorer and admirer of indigenous tribes for their plant knowledge in the Amazon, at a time when that was still possible.

Schultes’ personal hero [from a young age] was Richard Spruce, a British naturalist who spent seventeen years exploring the Amazon rainforest.

Although George Lucas modelled the character of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark on several famous archaeologists, he could equally have been modelled on Richard Evans Schultes. Like Indiana Jones, at Harvard Schultes dressed as a conservative professor and thought of himself as conservative:

[He was] outfitted in grey flannel slacks, red suspenders, starched white shirt and a white laboratory coat. I was to learn that this was his uniform in Cambridge, as much as his pith helmet, khaki pants, and khaki shirt were his uniform in the Amazon.

He remained continuously in his beloved Amazon Valley [from 1941] until 1953, when a Harvard administrator discovered that he had only taken out a one-year leave of absence, and it was time to return. (Michael J. Balick)