Customer Reviews

Butterfly Kid

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The things I like best about looking for Chester's, Michael's, Tom's, and even Toni's books are that I find both that most of the books are still available and surprisingly, a number of old friends are still lurking about. Amazon is going to have start serving coffee and small loaves of black bread if this continues.

After Chester, Michael, and Tom left Ave D, and Jamie left 6th St., the Ave D, 6th fl walk up apartment was turned over to one of the walk-ons from Butterfly Kid; a person I soon joined, sharing it and life and thus being able to attest to Jamie's history. However an added comment is relevant that Chester's recorder music comes alive to me as much from this tale of Blue Lobsters and culprits named Lazlo, as from the live listenings enjoyed on the street or in the Rienzie, and that is a clue to the readability of this work.

For those wanting to wander down the real fantasy streets of the Middle Ages of the Village or, for those wishing to refresh some memories, "Butterfly Kid" will romance and entertain you. Yes, many of us have read it and reread it again, but not just for the nostalgia. The tale is fun; the prose bringing the fantastic to bright color and the characters very much to life.

Pick up the next copy; read it quickly; check on its whereabouts regularly; and just hope who ever whisks it away enjoys it as much as we all have.

When Chester, Michael and Tom -- Anderson, Kurland and Waters -- were living at 63 Ave. D, I lived around the corner on Sixth Street. I read the Book when it first came out and was charmed. I knew everybody in the thing, which is a strange place to be. When it was nominated for a Hugo -- and lost to Zelazny's "Lord of Light" -- I was amazed. That book? Written by friends of mine? A Hugo? Wow!

The remarkable thing is that most of the book is true, with names slightly changed to protect the guilty. I know people who saw the Blue Lobsters. Really! The funny thing is that no one I know who knew Chester could keep the book on their shelves. You'd read it and then go look for it to loan to someone else to read and it would be gone! We figured that Chester recalled them to resell to new readers.

I was also surprised to learn that my girlfriend -- a charming woman, if a bit young for an old bohemian like me -- read it in high school. As an assigned book! Wow, the Eighties must have been strange!

If you can find it, read it. Search it out. It will reward you with the wonder of Chester's use of language, 'cause even tho' it's all true, Chester tells it better than it was!

And, yes, it was part of a sort of trillogy. The other parts by Michael -- and never, under any circusnstances Mike -- and Tom did exist. They weren't quite as wonderful to me as Chester's part, but worth reading if you find them.

Chester is gone, sad as that is. I haven't heard anything about TA in a while. Michael is still around and writing, good as ever, both SciFi and mystery.

A hue and cry should go out to the people who hold the rights demanding that they reprint it. It deserves to be easier to find even if the search is worth the effort.

If you do get your hands on a copy of "Butterfly Kid" don't expect it to stay on your shelf after you read it. I suspect Chester is still redistributing the wealth of his words.

First in a series of three loosely linked novels (Michael Kurland "The Probability Pad" and Tom Waters "The Unicorn Girl" are the other two in the series. All three books are among the funniest I've ever read, as well as complete with allusions to 60's culture and other science fiction. The Waters book, for example, begins in Berkeley in the 60's, and segues neatly into Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy universe. Please God (and publishers!), introduce a new generation to the glories of reality pills, lobsters with attitude, and slipping universes.

If you "participated" in the 60's counter-culture (either rock n roll or drugs), whether you remember very much of it or not, you will find this book hilarious! Chester Anderson can turn a phrase in unique ways and paint scenes so vivid (and so improbable) that I laughed out loud many times on my first reading. I then read it again and again and again, always finding new things to smile at. I loaned my copy to a friend. He lost it. I bought another copy. I lost it when I moved 10-12 years ago. I've looked to replace it ever since. I mean, really! The idea of a bunch of hippies sitting around waiting to get high enough to save the world is funny enough, but the blue lobster's idea of torture, connecting Chester to machines which made him experience illusions, and dreams that he would have PAID for, is just too much! "I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit. I wasn't thinking very well at all! Masterpieces of understatement throughout. "She was blonde or so, wearing white capri pants just too tight enough." Anyway, if you're "stuck in the 60's," this is a must read.

What do you get when a band of six-foot-tall, blue lobsters from another planet secretly land in Greenwich Village, befriend the village idiot, plan to introduce a hallucinogenic drug into New York's drinking water, and the only thing that can prevent global conquest by crustaceans is a busload of Hippies? Chester Anderson's "The Butterfly Kid", that's what you get, baby.

Chester Anderson, as a character in the book somewhat loosely based upon himself, stumbles upon a teenybopper in the park one day, and is surprised to see him create butterflies out of thin air! Not much later, Chester's friend Andy suddenly dons a dayglo-blue halo around his body. Upon further investigation, it turns out that the village idiot, one Laszlo Scott, has been distributing some new drug throughout the village, and it's effect is quite unique, quite exciting, and horribly dangerous.
When Chester and his roommate, Mike, discover the extra-terrestrial shellfish source of the new drug, and what they plan to do with it, it becomes a race against the clock for Greenwich Village's not-quite-finest to thwart the alien's plan by any means necessary.

Although this book is pretty hard to find (it's been out of print for twenty or so years now), it's definately worth searching for.

S. Daniel Wilson, California, USA

I'll pass on details of Butterfly Kid; others have done that well here. Get a copy and read it. (If you live in Connecticut and can't get a copy, write to me at psevetson@usa.net and come over and read mine.) I also have a copy of The Unicorn Girl, the second book in the "series"... but McCaffrey's entry of the same name seems to have eclipsed any references to it in the various search databases. I can, further, find no reference at all to Waters' "The Probability Pad" (supposedly the third entry in the series) in any search database. I'm beginning to suspect that Waters never got around to writing his contribution.

This book was an underground classic, circulating in 'samizdat' -- i.e., Xerox -- format for over a year before it was finally published. I recommend it "highly" -- but then, I've used 'reality pills'!

Chester Anderson and Mike Kurland and a few of their friends save the world from blue lobster invaders, who choose the wrong moment in history (and the wrong location) to attempt a drug-induced takeover. This is a very funny book. Baby-boom readers especially will enjoy this somewhat psychopharmacologically enhanced view of 1960s-1970s Greenwich Village.

This book is acually 1st of a three-part series, each book written by a different author. In each Chester, Mike and (starting in the second book) Mike Waters fight valiently, if somewhat haphazardly, against alien forces bent on destruction of the Greenwich Village way of life. The other books were The Unicorn Girl, by Michael Kurland, and The Probability Pad, by Michael Waters. All are hilarious. All deserved more attention than they got. All are very hard to find these days. I highly recommend them.

This is the first in the wonderful hippy scifi trilogy, and all three are by different authors. This one, and the final by Waters, are a little more disconnected and hippy like than the second by Kurland, but all are great fun to read. Only the Kurland has been reprinted since the 1970s, so they will be hard to come by until some intelligent publisher reissues them, and most publishers today are the opposite of intelligent. If you can, read all three. They are wonderful fun