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IMG_5904 c Bagel Bandits by Groovyal - Taken @ Caps, Texas

“Welcome, dear guests,” said the Mole who was sitting on the right and was probably the Right Mole.
“Sit down,” said the Left Mole.
Iria and her friends sat down on the stools that stood on their side of the table.
The brothers looked at Iria carefully, and Alice did not like their looks at all. They were predatory, wolfish. In front of the twins there were large jugs from which they poured some brown liquid into their mugs. And it was unlikely that it was kvass.

© Kir Bulychev, 1988 - The City Without Memory - Chapter 11 The Moles got angry


I bet this is a book you never heard of, because it has never been translated into English (what a pity)! :) Let me introduce you to my favorite book from the Alice (Alisa) Seleznyova series by Russian writer Kir Bulychev, "The City Without Memory", which is a direct sequel to "The End of Atlantis" (but much more interesting!), with some recurring characters from "Gai-do".

You probably know who Alice is, if you ever heard of "Alice and the Mystery of the Third Planet" - the English dubbing of Soviet animated feature film "The Secret of the Third Planet" (1981), for which she was voiced by Kirsten Dunst. Or maybe you heard of "Guest from the Future" (1985) Soviet TV miniseries, it was really popular in USSR.

In the sci-fi book series, Alice is a girl from the distant utopian future (2080s), in which there are no more states (it's implied that the Soviet Union has gone on to encompass the globe), no more illnesses (except the flu), no more shortage of anything, and no private property. Science has improved humans, making them smarter, stronger and healthier, and there are robots, flying cars, faster than light spaceships, time travel, language-learning devices (makes people fluent in 1 hour!) and more. Alice is a daughter of a space zoologist, and she wants to be one herself, so she travels a lot and had many adventures on Earth and other planets (and in other times), including fighting space pirates, saving planets from various threats, meeting fairy-tale characters and more. She had various age in different books (the series is quite messy in terms of chronology), with the oldest age being thirteen, like in this book.

I will explain what the book is about in the text below, but it's so interesting and I'm so obsessed with the story of those characters, that it's quite a longread (sorry!). So I'll tell about the background of the picture first. :)


I had a series of six books about Alice, each one included a 2-3 full-length novels or a bunch of short stories, written between 1965 and 1989. I guess it was a complete edition of all Alice books which were written at the time (the books were bought by my grandparents for my father), but the series was continued, and I have never read any of 90s-00s books about Alice. The books I had were illustrated by Yevgeniy Migunov, and this picture is actually my attempt to build a scene depicted by him (for some reason he forgot to remove space helmets, which contradicts the text), but with a different viewpoint, because I'm really proud of my versions of Alice, Iria and Pashka, so I couldn't make my tribute to famous Alice Seleznyova with only her back visible. :)

But why this scene? Because it is an only illustration which allows me to make a double tribute - to Alice, my childhood hero, and to the Mole brothers. Yeah, they're bad guys - this is actually a scene when they're going to tell Iria they suddenly decided to marry her because she's the most beautiful woman (and they not ask, they demand - like father, like sons) and they're going to throw the dice to decide which brother will marry her. Even little me knew it was very wrong, and I hated them for it (despite the fact their wish wasn't granted), but hear me out - the wolf helmets! Little me was looking to this one and few other illustrations with Moles for hours, and I thought that this is a coolest costume EVER! :D Like, seriously, how badass it would be to wear a wolf head on a head! (hmm, maybe that's why I have not just one, but two partial realistic fursuits now xD)

So I waited for ages for this, and when Lego finally released a modern beautiful version of the Wolfpack bandit - the Beastmaster (they released a thief in 10332 before, but he's hard to find), I knew at last I'll be able to show their cool outfits and tell the story of those legendary warriors! :) Well, they really had a well-written backstory, like every villain should. By the way, they became good six years later in the book's epilogue, they work as forest rangers now.

There should be more candles - they had a reason in the book to have candles literally everywhere in the castle - especially on the wall (which shouldn't be visible that much according to my idea, but then I realised I couldn't just show Alice's back, we need to see her face - or this picture is no better than any other with Moles and without her), but I ran out of LED dot lights for candles. Actually there is one candle on the table unseen because of the main characters and two more candles out of the frame, but at the point when I saw it, I wasn't able to disassemble a wall to move those candles elsewhere, because it would move the LEDs of other candles, and I had troubles attaching them. The red and white colors of Alice outfit and her hair are based on her canon look from the animation film I mentioned in the beginning. And if you look closer, you'll notice that Moles wear their boots in a canon way as well. XD Now to the book!


"The City Without Memory" starts with a first ever expedition from Earth to planet Krina, the homeworld of an advanced civilization, who secretly sent a group of scientists to Earth 300 years ago (from Alice's time, so late XVIII century) to watch and study how our civilization develops, which was an easy task, because Krinians live a few centuries, despite otherwise looking human. But 250 years ago the group suddenly lost all contact with their planet, and they had to pose as Atlanteans since, until they were rescued by Alice and her friend Pashka (Pavel) Geraskin in the previous book "The End of Atlantis". The expedition was meant to return the stranded scientists back home and to solve a mystery why no one on Earth, now also an advanced space-travelling civilization, as well on other developed planets, has ever heard of Krina, and why it doesn't respond on multiple current attempts to contact it. But when their ship began to descend over the planet, it disappeared...

Someone has to do something, but it would took weeks or even months until the space equivalent of UN approves the rescue expedition (sounds familiar, doesn't it?). Alice can't wait in uncertainty, wondering what happened to her Krinian friends. So with the help of Iria Gai, her sentient genius spaceship Gai-do (both debuted in the book "Gai-do") and Pashka she started her own rescue mission. Iria is a badass daughter of a genius inventor from planet Vester, who wanted a son, so he raised her to be an expert in spaceships, other machinery, martial arts, shooting, etc, and who built Gai-do for and with her. Now Iria is happily married to Tadeusz Sokol, who she once saved, lives in Poland and raises their daughter Wanda, but Tadeusz was sent as a crew member to Krina on the ship that disappeared, so she's eager to rescue him (again).


Long story short, when Alice and friends land on Krina (losing Gai-do in the process - he had to redirect all energy to keep a force field, which allowed them to land safely, but he burnt all fuel for it, and had to be grounded until someone would bring him a fuel from the lost ship), they discover a dystopian medieval society built on a ruins of once a great civilization, with no one of locals having any idea that they once traveled to the stars. They don't even remember the meaning of many words and falsely attribute them to wrong things! Alice and team found the lost ship of the first expedition, crash-landed in the wood, with the door teared from the inside, and the signs that the crew left it taking nothing with them, not even their suits for setting foot on the unknown planet or beloved talisman. Then the team had to watch the death of their former "Atlantean" friend from that ship, who didn't recognize any of them and seemed to be mad (actually he lost all his memory). This mean the things got serious - this is the first time in overall light-hearted Alice series when an important character from the other book got killed for real. Usually there were just Disney deaths for some villains...

Later Alice and friends learned that all the knowledge and education are forbidden and punishable by memory loss (on this planet there are pits with a fog, which made ones who fell into them to forget everything they know), because only a special caste called the wisemen can know the meaning of words. But there are a group of rebels called the rememberers ("pomnik(s)" in the original), who live in the Shelter and kidnap children. The people think they do it to eat them, but actually they teach them (that's how they grow new rememberers). There are some noble feudals called the bows ("poklon(s)" in the original - meaning a deep bow) and the priests of oblivion called the tasters ("vkushetz(s)" in the original - a clever wordplay, because a pagan priest is pronounced "zhretz" in Russian, which sounds close to a rude, but not obscene equialent of the verb "to eat" - "zhrat", and there is also a posh and obsolete equialent of "to eat" and "to taste" - "vkushat"). The world described in the book is very interesting, and always fascinated me in the childhood.

But back to Alice and friends! On their way through the forest they got kidnapped by the atani pygmies, who later mistook Iria for their goddess the White Mistress (who is actually a statue of a book reader) come alive. Iria plays along with the role, demanding pygmies to untie her and friends, and bring their hi-tech belts and other belongings back, but they don't understand the language, so they call their interpreter Very-Mery. Just a few minutes later it turned out that Very-Mery is actually a traitor to his own kind, who gave a tip to his master, a forest baron Left Mole for him and his men to raid the pygmy village and drive them into slavery (which he did many times with other villages). Left Mole, the bow, mistakes Iria for the bow, so she, Alice and Pashka were escorted to the Moles family castle, which is actually an old observatory. There they had to wait in the tower, where they meet Mole's younger sister, sixteen year old Squirrel, who tells them about her family.


Her father was Old Mole, the terror of the forests, a bandit and a murderer like few others, and a domestic tyrant. When he was young, he found an abandoned observatory on the hill in the forest while pursuing a deer, so his band moved to it. Later they build a wall around it, and he claimed it his castle, which meant that he is no more the forest robber, but the bow. He was called Mole because there was a special tradition of naming children - the parents have to pay the wisemen to choose a beautiful name for the kid, and the wiseman who named him sold to his grandfather a picture of this animal along with the name. So he and his men wore the heads of this mighty forest predator as their helmets. Actually, of course, it was a wolf, but the wisemen thought that wolf is called mole, and only the wisemen has the right to know the meaning of the words, so no one knew they were wrong.

Once Mole visited the City and saw Centipede, a beautiful daughter of the taster of the church of the Saint Centipede. He swore she will become his wife. He counted on the help of a young pigmy Very-Mery, who was just a kid when Mole raided his village and caught his tribe to be slaves, but the smart kid escaped the dungeon, run to Mole and told him where their tribe's treasure cache is. Now a spy for Mole, Very-Mery befriended the slaves of the taster and got wind that Centipede is going to visit her aunt Hackle-Woodlice, a sorceress and prophet, on the River Island, and that she left on a small ship with a small guard, because it's harvest time, during which peace is established. But bandit Mole didn't care about traditions, so he called his band and on the night they killed the guards and kidnapped Centipede. Only one guard survived and ran to the city to tell Lord Radiculitis (the ruler of this land, for whom the bows are vassals) what happened, Lord's anger and the anger of the tasters was terrible. He sent a whole army which besieged the Mole's castle for three days. Mole lost one eye, he ran out of arrows, his men who survived were injured and barely could stay on their feet. But besiegers had no idea of any of that, and when the great taster died during the final assault, his army retreated. Poor bride Centipede waited for somebody to rescue her, but no one came.

A year after that the twins were born, and Centipede sent a messenger with great gifts to the wisemen, but they were too afraid of the anger of the Lord Radiculitis and the tasters, so they refused to gave any names, and she had to name kids after their father - Left Mole and Right Mole. At least a sorcerer Hackle-Woodlice was happy with the gifts received, so she made a prophecy, that the twins will never quarrel or separate if they wear only one boot each: Left Mole - the right boot, Right - the left. And they did it, even during the winter, though at first few years they caught colds often, but later they got used to it. Their boots are the only way to identify them, because they look exactly the same.

The twins grew cruel, their father would bring them forest birds and animals and forced his sons to torment them. When he left the room, their mother rescued those poor creatures to nurture them and release back into the wild, and explained to her sons that animals should be loved. Because of that the twins obeyed either their father or their mother, depending on what was necessary at the moment. They were afraid of their father, because in anger he could beat them cruelly, but they loved their mother in their own way, because she fed them and looked after them.

Once Centipede and the twins were on a walk around the castle's hill, when they saw a wounded female unicorn with two little twin foals. It was a miracle - the unicorns lived deep in the impassable forests, they rarely were seen by humans, and no one could tame them because they died in captivity. A dying unicorn looked like she was trying to talk, like if she was asking Centipede to take care of her foals, and Centipede promised so. The servants who saw the scene from the wall, sent for Old Mole, who decided to made a stuffed unicorn out of the deceased body, and take foals to the city to sold them for a large amount of money. But even though Centipede was afraid of her wild husband, she was brave enough to tell him it's better to raise the foals for the twins (Mole and his men rode on deers), and the boys supported her, so he gave up his idea. The foals grew like brothers to the boys, and they could even understand what unicorns are saying, but each brother could understand only their own unicorn. When Lord Radiculitis heard of the real unicorns living happily in the Moles castle, he offered any amount of money for them, but the proud Old Mole refused. Then Lord called for the second campaign to conquer the castle, but the war for the straits has started, so he no longer had time to deal with a stubborn vassal.

At some point after the fateful meeting with the unicorns, the daughter of Old Mole was born, but nobody cared for her (except for her mother), and she didn't even get a beautiful name (by local standards) - she was named Squirrel. She was beaten with the belt by her father, who thought that she was odd because her mother met the Sullen Crone in the forest in a year when she was born, which is a bad sign (one who met her would never be happy), so Squirell ran away from him into the forest and disappeared there for several days. She was also abused by her brothers, so she grow wild, closed, with no social skills and clearly traumatized (as I realised while re-reading book as an adult, but that's the story for another time).

The twins grew up and became young bandits, brave and cruel, feared by everyone. Many times they were ambushed by the rememberers, faced the hordes of pygmies wanting to kill them, fought the squads sent by neighboring bows, but there were no better fighters in the world than the Mole brothers, and there were no animal faster and smarter than their unicorns. Later Old Mole get lost when pursuing some animal, alone, without guards, and fell into the pit where the spirit lives, who takes the memory away. When he was found by his sons, he recognised no one, and he was so emaciated, so afraid of everyone, and saw nightmares so horrible that he hanged himself in the castle's tower. As the time went on, everybody forget that Old Mole was just a forest bandit, so his kids were considered real bows (but still looked down by more noble families, who could remark that the twins were bows in a first generation), and along with other barons and bows they were invited to join the army of Lord Radiculitis in his great campaign to conquer the Shelter of the rememberers. Very-Mery was the one carrying this news when he learned where the pygmies are going to host their annual festival, so he told his masters about it, and this was how Left Mole met Alice and friends in the forest.


That's enough, I think. :) Now you know who those characters are, but not what happened later in the scene and in the book. There were quite a lot of adventures in a medieval world - that's why I liked the book so much. I hope you enjoyed my picture and story!

- wee me having great fun in Old Phil's Amusements in Portrush County Antrim - 4 -

SOO 2032, EMD GP40, ex MILW 159
SOO 2038, EMD GP40, ex MILW 165
SOO 2035, EMD GP40, ex MILW 162

Wild Bastards
Developed by Blue Manchu
Published by Maximum Entertainment

Niccy and I just got back from a transatlantic cruise so I've finally got some shots to post!

Niccy and I were on our way to do something or other when we came across our good friends Barb and Carol trying their luck in the casino.

Looking at the screen I can see that Carol had a winner with this go but in the end we all know why they're called One Armed Bandits! BTW, this is NOT how they were paying for their trip although it did eventually lead them to a good deal!

This was a spur of the moment happened to be walking by no planning sort of shot. I went with B/W for this shot since the lighting in the casino was lousy at best. Casino ad shots are always slick and processed, I'm more of an on the fly kind of guy!

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All 540 of my speedway badge collection can be found here. flic.kr/s/aHBqjBY5qB

All 540 of my speedway badge collection can be found here. flic.kr/s/aHBqjBY5qB