StormRaven's One Hundred (and Beyond) for 2011

Between the last book I read and this one I read:

The Economist (January 1st-7th, 2011)
Science News (January 1, 2011)

Realms of Fantasy (December 2010) (read review)
Stories included:
Queen of the Kanguela by Scott Dalrymple
Maiden, Mother, Crone by Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky
The Banjo Singer by Dennis Danvers
Tools of the Devil by Jerry Oltion

Book One: They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley.

.

Short review: A seemingly scientology-influenced work of mediocrity that somehow won the 1955 Hugo for Best Novel.

Long review: After awarding the Hugo Award to The Demolished Man in 1953, the award was temporarily retired. Apparently everyone thought that the Hugos awarded at the 1953 Worldcon would be a one-time event as opposed to an annual affair. In 1955 the award was brought back after its short hiatus and the Best Novel Hugo was inexplicably awarded to They'd Rather Be Right (later renamed The Forever Machine).

Why this turgid and pointless work of mediocrity won the Hugo remains a mystery, especially given that there were numerous far-superior alternatives available including Brain Wave by Poul Anderson, The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, Earthman, Come Home by James Blish, Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement, and The Star Beast by Robert Heinlein. Hugo voters could have followed the International Fantasy Award and voted in favor of Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers. Or they could have even selected The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. But no, they elected to choose a book so weak that it is the only Hugo winning novel to be allowed to go out of print for decades. (Note: In 1955 the selection process appears not to have been formalized fully, so there was no short list of competing nominees, this selection potential alternative winners is merely drawn from the array of other works of science fiction and fantasy published in 1955).

One odd side effect of They'd Rather Be Right's Hugo win is that every now and then, when some enterprising writer decides to plunge into science fiction and read all the Hugo winners, they plough through the excellent 1953 winner The Demolished Man, write glowing praise for it, and then are never heard from again on the subject of science fiction. I am guessing that it is because they move on to this example of lousy writing and lose their verve.

The story of They'd Rather Be Right is pretty straightforward, which is actually part of the problem with the book. A group of scientists create a thinking machine they call "Bossy", which causes public panic as everyone thinks that the machine will relegate humans to second class status. On that note, one has to wonder what sort of public relations failure one would have to engage in to name your thinking machine "Bossy" in the face of a panicky public. The novel opens with two of the scientists on the run, aided by a telepath named Joe Carter who hides them on skid row. They reassemble their machine and despite the fact that the machine was supposed to be designed to prevent airline crashes, they decide instead that the obvious thing to do is feed it a bunch of psychological data, hook it up to Mabel, their ex-prostitute landlady, and watch her become a young superpowered woman.

If you think this doesn't make much sense, you're right. But the book was written to order as a serial appearing in Astounding Science Fiction for editor John Campbell, who by the time this work was being penned had already become a proponent of L. Ron Hubbard's ludicrously pseudoscientific Dianetics (going so far as to proclaim that Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize for creating Scientology). How does this connect to They'd Rather Be Right one might ask. Well, when Bossy is connected to Mabel it "cures" her of old age by eliminating all of the false ideas she has, and replacing them with logical ones, leaving her more ethical, smarter, healthier, apparently immortal, and possessing of the power of telepathy. This process seems closely analogous with the Scientology practice of "auditing" a person to eliminate the "reactive mind" and "thetans", which proponents of Scientology claim will leave a person more ethical, more intelligent, immune to a host of illnesses, and eventually possessing of supernatural powers.

This is not the only Scientology influenced element that the books seems to display. Hubbard's hatred of psychiatry is fairly public knowledge now, and it should come as no surprise that the sole psychiatrist character who appears in the novel is a dogmatic, venal character whose theories are quickly and easily dismissed by the clear-thinking Mabel. Whether Clifton and Riley inserted these sort of Scientology-like element as the centerpiece of their book because they were influenced by Hubbard, or influenced by the same sorts of popular thinking that inspired Hubbard, or simply because they knew that Campbell would like and and be more likely to buy their work, the fingerprints are there.

The Scientology influence isn't all that drags this book into sub-mediocrity. Once Bossy has been assembled and its magical healing powers revealed, the plot, such as there is of one, just sort of peters out. Joe and the two professors turn to a wealthy industrialist for help in getting out from under Federal indictment because they assume that because he published an editorial in favor of Bossy he'd be sympathetic to their cause. And instead of any kind of plot twist developing, he is wholeheartedly on their side, even when it becomes apparent that he won't get what he wants out of the relationship. It turns out that one has to give up all of your prejudices and beliefs in order to benefit from the use of the machine, prompting Joe to state that most people wouldn't be willing to do this but would "rather be right". It also turns out that anyone who successfully goes through the procedure becomes telepathic, another development with hug potential implications that is left unexplored. Joe's aberrant telepathy is also a mystery, and since he is already a telepath, it seems that no one thinks that he should go through the Bossy based process. Apparently, if you are already a telepath, the possibility of becoming immortal isn't that enticing.

Rather than examining what might happen if you had a society in which some people are effectively immortal and superpowered and others are not, the book ends just as the machines begin rolling off the assembly line. Instead of examining the effects of this sort of development, Clifton and Riley are pretty much content to have their cardboard characters lecture the reader about "opinion control" and give vague indications that the world is controlled by nebulous and yet pervasive public relations campaigns that, on a whim, can turn the populace on a dime. The one character who tries to undergo the process and fails simply resigns himself to the fact that he is destined to remain old and sick, which seems like an oddly listless reaction to what would probably be devastating news. This just highlights the fact that the "character" isn't really a character, but just a prop being used by the authors to make a point. Having made its argument in favor of Dianetics via computer interface, the book just ends.

They'd Rather Be Right is widely regarded as the worst novel to ever win a Hugo Award. I'm not inclined to disagree with this assessment. Given that, it is not a terrible book, but rather a very formulaic piece of mediocre fiction overlaid with a veneer of poorly disguised Scientology. The book isn't even bad enough to be derided as enjoyably awful, it is just bland, dull, and uninteresting. Overall the experience of reading the tasteless blandness of They'd Rather Be Right is akin to eating stale white bread, and is an experience best to be avoided.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Hello Raven and Happy New Year! Wow, They'd Rather Be Right - I'm looking forward to your review of this notorious book. I know next to nothing about it except that it is rumoured to be the worst book ever to have won a Hugo.

I've never heard of They'd Rather Be Right. I think ignorance is bliss sometimes, however. :)

Looking forward to reading your reviews this year, StormRaven!

Belated Review: The Samaritan: A Novel by Fred Venturini.

.

Short review: If you are a loser, even an inexplicable supernatural power won't change that.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Blank Slate Press is a small press publisher dedicated to promoting authors from the greater Saint Louis area. The Samaritan by Fred Venturini is their first publication. Set in rural southern Illinois with a protagonist almost entirely paralyzed by his own self-doubt and insecurities, The Samaritan is bleak, dark, and depressing, but at the same time compelling.

The story follows the life of Dale, a small town loser with limited social skills and no ability to deal with women who seems to mostly drift along aimlessly punctuating his journey with brief and unsuccessful bursts of initiative. Dale's unlikely best friend is Mack Tucker, who is in many ways his polar opposite - a gifted athlete who is loud, brash, aggressive, and almost inexplicably popular with women. But Mack is only a gifted athlete in the small town arena that he and Dale grow up in, and Dale grows to realize that in the wider world Mack will be just another small town hero who can't take the next step.

But while Dale realizes this, and becomes more and more paralyzed into inaction by his recognition of his own inadequacies, Mack does not, and as events play out, never has to confront this reality head on. Life seems to conspire against Dale, every time he decides to take a risk and break out of his shell, his attempt is foiled and things get worse - climaxing in a horrific scene that ends his first, and pretty much only, attempt to romance a girl, the pretty and mostly inaccessible Regina. Like many small town kids, Dale and Mack had big dreams, but the harsh reality of the world kills them by graduation, which turns out entirely differently from the way Dale had envisioned. And on the way, Dale discovers that he has a unique and completely unexpected ability that seems like a miracle, but in the context of his life his gift only drives him into despair.

The story moves from a tiny rural town in Illinois to a slightly larger small town in rural Illinois as Dale sinks further into listless despondency. Unmoored from reality, Dale drifts through his life until a chance encounter with Reanna, the twin sister of his lost love jolts him out of his inactivity. It turns out that she has married badly to a dealer in meth, the scourge of rural U.S.A., and Dale quickly realizes that her husband abuses her to boot. Dale attempts to intervene, and as usual, his attempt just makes matters worse.

And then Dale's strange ability becomes the key to his plans to set things right. You see, Dale inexplicably has the capability to heal any injury no matter how dire, up to and including regenerating lost body parts. Dale's plan, like everything else he does, is executed in a clumsy and halting manner, with missteps and false starts. Eventually he links up with Mack again, who, as always, is the catalyst to action that Dale requires to push him forward.

In a world of reality shows and instant celebrity, it seems inevitable that Dale would end up as the centerpiece of such a circus, and thus The Samaritan, a reality show about a man who gives away his organs. Mack, of course, sees this as his ticket to fame and stardom in a way that Dale, myopically focused on his puppy dog infatuation with a self-destructive woman, cannot. Dale trades in his internal pain for the real pain of repeated surgeries in a vain quest for the love of a woman who is dead hoping to obtain it vicariously through her sister who considers him to be an annoyance at best. Though blessed with a gift that in a comic book would make him a superhero, Dale's reality is that of grinding pain, and a life that is, in his mind, only marginally better than a life without his gift.

Eventually, after dozens of agonizing surgeries, Dale finds the hopelessness in his attempt to rescue Reanna when he is finally given a letter she wrote to him pleading for a donation to save her abusive husband. Just like Dale doesn't really want to be saved from being a loser by Mack, Reanna doesn't want to be saved from a husband who beats her. In short, no matter what supernatural power you might have, you cannot save someone who does not want to be saved. After pointing out that he is not truly a Samaritan, no matter what his Hollywood billing might say, because he sacrifices almost nothing with his donations, Dale decides to donate the one organ he believes he cannot regenerate - his heart - and donate it to Reanna's vile bastard of a spouse in a vainglorious suicidal gesture.

Of course, this being Dale, even his suicide is a failure, and doesn't even have the intended affect on Reanna. It seems that when you are a small town loser with shrinking dreams and no real idea of how to change your life, you are destined to remain a small town loser no matter how amazing your powers are, or how much you are willing to sacrifice. And maybe what you think you want isn't really worth getting. Dale, who has the most amazing gift, and who sacrifices everything, never gets what he thinks he wants. But in the end he ends up more or less satisfied. Reanna, on the other hand, does, and one suspects that her life is not destined to work out well.

Other than the fact that the book seems to imply that trying to help an abused spouse is a lost cause from the beginning, The Samaritan is an excellent book. It takes a brutally honest look at the bleak landscape of the overly romanticized small towns of rural America and exposes the petty nastiness and violence that lurks there. But at the same time, it shows just how noble even the most misguided fool can be, even if that nobility is seemingly ill-directed. As the debut novel for both Fred Venturini and Blank Slate Press, this is a compelling, albeit harshly bleak, read.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field (December 2010).

Book Two: Dragons of the Valley: A Novel by Donita K. Paul.

.

Short review: The inhabitants of Chiril supposedly wage a desperate war to keep their incompetent royal family on the throne. But first, they take some time to sit on their behinds to have tea and daggarts. Then they show how to win a war by sitting around in a tavern not doing much. Because Wulder will save you if you just sit on your ass long enough.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: Dragons in the Valley is the sequel to The Vanishing Sculptor, and the second book in the Valley of the Dragons series which is a prequel to The DragonKeeper Chronicles series. I say this to point out that if you haven't read the previous six tedious books set in Donita K. Paul's world of pseudo-Christian preaching, this book will be nigh incomprehensible if you try to pick it up and read it first. I know this from direct experience, having tried to do exactly that. On the other hand, none of Donita K. Paul's books are really worth reading to begin, so anyone who simply skips them isn't really missing much. To be perfectly honest, the only reasons I kept slogging through these books were (a) a sense of obligation to properly review this book, having accepted it as an Early Reviewer Book, and (b) I kept hoping against hope that they would get better.

So, the question is, did they get better? The answer, unfortunately is "not really". Like all of the other books Mrs. Paul has produced, the book is little more than badly presented Christian apologetics dressed up in fantasy clothing. Though there is a meandering and fairly generic story contained in its pages, the book wanders off to extended digressions about the "principles of Wulder" and unconvincing conversion revelations at the drop of a hat. The overwhelming blandness of the story and the annoying and empty preaching combine to result in a book that isn't even bad enough to despise, but is merely bad enough to dislike.

The book starts out with three characters being given cryptic instructions to steal and separate the statues that were rejoined at great effort in the previous book. Why must they steal the statues? They are just told by the kimens who come and tell them in the middle of the night that they are "in danger" and expected to hop to following these diminutive messengers without question. One of the odder elements of the books is that kimens, as a race, somehow seem to get messages directly from Wulder. Why? Who knows, because it is never explained. No one in the books even really considers to ask the question "why are the kimens always getting messages from Wulder, and how do we know they are actually messages from Wulder, and not just random stuff the kimens invent". Even in Chiril, which is supposed to be very different from Amara because the inhabitants of Chiril have not been "shown the light" of Wulder, everyone seems to think kimens have some sort of special insight. This is yet another of the myriad of ways that Chiril remains exactly the same as Amara. It seems that, having created one fairly bland fantasy culture, Mrs. Paul decided that creating another would be too taxing, and just transferred most everything about the culture of the various imaginary races from one continent to the other.

So, having stolen the statues and cavalierly separated them on the say-so of a trio of random kimens (which in the last book was something that threatened to cause the destruction of the entire world), the heroes are then transported to a secret kimen village (which turns out to be not-so-secret after all, not that this matters) where the statues are reunited. At this point the characters are told that the statues have to be hidden away because the neighboring country of Baardack is threatening to invade, and apparently having the statues fall into the hands of a different hereditary dynasty would be a problem. Presumably this is because the rulers of Baardack or competent, because the rulers of Chiril clearly are not. One also wonders, given the extraordinary amount of pain and suffering that the separation of the statues causes, and since Wulder is supposed to be responsible for all of the events that happen in the world, exactly how big of a jerk is Wulder that he let this all happen. In short, by being responsible for everything that happens in the book, Wulder comes off as a complete dick who seems to revel in the death, pain, and suffering of war. But apparently that's okay, so long as the characters in the book learn the right lessons as a result.

The bulk of the book is punctuated with the drumbeats of impending war between Chiril and Baardack. Everyone knows that war is imminent, including King Yellat of Chiril. Agents from Baardack infiltrate into Chiril and begin making prominent officials disappear. So what is King Yellat's response? To send out Verrin Schope, his dimwitted wife, and a useless giant parrot to hang out in a tavern and try to figure out what is going on. Except everyone seems to know what is going on: everyone figures out almost immediately who the enemy agents are when they stumble into the tavern Verrin and his wife are sitting in. But do they call in agents of the law to apprehend the miscreants? Nope. They just let them continue killing people while trying to figure out how they are getting away with their evil schemes. Here's a clue: they are getting away with their evil schemes because you, Verrin Schope, are letting them. Where Mrs. Paul thinks she is including some masterful espionage intrigue, she just makes the story ludicrous. Verrin and Beccaroon don't have to ferret out how their enemies are doing what they are doing, or lay low, or otherwise keep themselves incognito - they are operating within their own country with the authority of the national government at their back. They can just have the oafish bad guys arrested, which would put an end to the disappearances (which turn out to be assassinations, so by sitting on their hands and wings, Verrin and Beccaroon allow dozens of people to be killed, and a later scene makes this crystal clear, but all Beccaroon does is express momentary regret that his gross incompetence resulted in a wandering man's death at the hands of some ruffians). Making this even stupider, they know that the head of Baardack's forces, Doremattris Groddenmitersay (did I mention how much the names of Mrs. Paul's characters suck) is lurking about. But do they try to stop him and decapitate the leadership of the invasion force? Of course not, so chalk another one up for the message in favor of complete passivity that runs through all of Mrs. Paul's writing.

Meanwhile, the Wizard Fenworth (one of the trio who helped steal the three statues near the beginning of the book) observes a strange and unique creature apparently in the employ of King Odidoddex of Baarack (among her other "gifts", Mrs. Paul is terrible at coming up with names) that is called simply "The Grawl", a creature presented as a feral, almost animal-like hunter that serves as a mercenary. So naturally Fenworth takes one of the three statues and heads off to investigate "The Grawl" (and he's always referred to this way, with a capitalized "The"). Remember, these are the three statues that must stay together or the life of Verrin Schope and the entire existence of the world is endangered. And Fenworth more or less cavalierly picks one up and heads off for a few weeks to follow an interesting creature as it murderously rampages across the countryside. And it turns out that having the statues separated causes a moral malaise to spread throughout Chiril as well, hampering the ability of the nation to prepare to defend itself against the impending invasion, but oddly seems to have no similar effect on Baardack. I suppose that God, I mean Wulder, is a Chiril partisan or something. Of course, Fenworth doesn't actually try to stop "The Grawl", and in the one confrontation with him just sends him away, which allows "The Grawl" to surreptitiously kill dozens of other people. Perhaps it is because they seem to assume that Wulder will make everything turn out okay in the end, but Mrs. Paul's protagonists never seem to consider the consequences of their own inaction.

At the same time, the artist Graddapotmorphit Bealomondore (once again, I'll note how much Mrs. Paul's character names suck), having been more or less randomly gifted with the Sword of Valor by Fenworth, heads out on a "quest" with the librarian Librettowit, the almost completely useless Princess Tipper, and a couple of interchangeable kimens. Along the way, Tipper breaks her ankle, they run afoul of more Baardackian agents, they find Fenworth, and Paladin pops in to drop off a dragon for Tipper and report that the war has actually started. This dire news, of course, prompts Fenworth to take the statues and Librettowit and head off to build a temple for them. Because, as the most powerful wizard in Chiril, it wouldn't make sense for him to help out with the actual war effort. Instead, he runs off to take a month or two to make an elaborate underground sanctuary in a remote part of Chiril. Meanwhile, they send the artist with no military skill and a magic sword and an incompetent princess to join in the war effort. And the only thing that makes sense about that decision is that King Yellat and his trusted advisers seem to be even more incompetent, with Verrin Schope (improbably) and Paladin (inevitably) being the only two who are capable. Because of this, King Yellat doesn't listen to them, and the war goes horribly badly for the Chirilians. One spends a good part of the novel wondering exactly why everyone seems to think it is so important to Wulder's plans to keep the incompetent royal family of Chiril in power. Not that the reader gets to see any of this, because, as usual, all of the action in the book takes place off-stage, and is only reported to the characters in the book (and thus to the reader) as news after the fact. Even the fall of the capital of the kingdom and the death of King Yellat is delivered to the reader as second hand news.

The war might not have gone so badly for the Chirilians, even with their incompetent leadership, but as usual in a Donita Paul book, everyone seems to stop every couple of pages to have some tea, cakes, and fried fish. And Mrs. Paul feels the need to import more of her made-up food jargon too. Verrin Schope has an innkeeper make beet, carrot, and onion soup, and makes sure to inform everyone that it is chukkajoop. Hollee the kimen cooks jimmin chicken, because just cooking chicken wouldn't be jargon-laden enough. Fenworth introduces daggarts to Chiril, because just eating doughnuts wouldn't be "fantasy" enough. And so on. Even the beastly and supposedly feral "Grawl" turns out to be a dandy who keeps a secret fortress where he takes hot baths, peruses his extensive library, and eats tasty soup and roasted lamb. Everyone, it seems is a gourmet who stops off for hours to take in a seven course meal in the middle of waging a desperate war.

Even with all the stopping to eat leisurely meals, the Chirilians might have fared better in their war if they hadn't always been stopping to gaze in wonder at the world around them and then make the leap from the fact that trees are pretty to the assumption that therefore there must be a creator deity who loves them. This book, more than all the others that came before it in the Amara/Chiril based series, contains some of the most unconvincing "conversion" scenes where characters "find the joy in Wulder" and become believers for little reason other than it makes them feel good in their tummies. These conversion scenes take place in between the extended tedious discussions concerning the principles of Wulder. Actually, lectures concerning the principles of Wulder where Fenworth and Schope drone on with vague and pretty much worthless platitudes. Even the Sword of Valor gets preachy, spewing out random, cryptic messages that the characters mistake for deep, meaningful advice.

So, after all this fumbling about, it turns out that Chiril is defeated, but in the end, Bealomondore and Paladin organize a defense of the Valley of the Dragons against an invading force spearheaded by "The Grawl" and his force of shoergats. "Wait", I hear you cry, "what are schoergats"? I understand your confusion. After all, "shoergats" were not listed among the catalogued seven "high" races and seven "low" races that we were told were perfectly balanced against one another way back in DragonSpell, and adding a new race would change everything with disastrous consequences. But that was before we added meech dragons, minnekins, and grand parrots to the mix, so one more random race thrown in seems to be about par for the course at this point. Shoergats, we are told, are a race of flying creatures that love dragon meat so much and are so ferocious that they hunted dragons almost to extinction on Chiril. But when the big showdown between "The Grawl's" shoergats and Paladin's corps of dragon riders takes place, the shoergats are soundly defeated without any significant losses on the dragon side, and of course, the battle takes place almost entirely off-stage. In the end, "The Grawl" is defeated (and despite The Grawl being obsessed with killing Fenworth, he doesn't even get close to the wizard, being defeated instead by Bealomodore and his magic sword), the invading forces are defeated, and then in a handful of pages the entire fortunes of war change and Baardack is defeated. Tipper, through a bizarre and contrived succession law becomes queen of Chiril, and then Paladin shows up out of the blue to propose marriage to her. Making the Paladin marriage proposal even more bizarre is that through the book, the character who had spent the most time with Tipper was the artist-turned-hero Bealomondore. Mrs. Paul could have had a cliched, although slightly more interesting plot line where Tipper realizes that her infatuation with Paladin is based on nothing more than an immature girl's idealized fantasies and she is actually in love with the man who has spent time with her, who is mostly responsible for converting her to believing in Wulder, who stoood by and protected her, and who has grown from a callow youth into a responsible hero. But no. In Mrs. Paul's world, the idealized adolescent fantasies win out. After an entire book of tedium, all of the plot elements are wrapped up in the most contrived manner possible in about a dozen or so pages.

Basically, this is not a very good book, but this is not unexpected, because none of the previous books set in Mrs. Paul's Chiril/Amara setting are very good books. The sloppy world building, evidenced by the random addition of the shoergats, just shows the level of contempt Mrs. Paul has for the genre she has dressed her preachy pseudo-Christian lecture as. The characters who are supposed to be "colorful" like Princess Peg and Wizard Fenworth are annoying (and in Fenworth's case, come off as idiotic rather than eccentric). The characters who are supposed to be "inspiring", like Paladin, are horribly bland. The characters we are meant to empathize with, like Tipper and Bealomondore are generally unlikable or merely pathetic. The story is a fairly standard fantasy invasion story, only made unusual by the extreme incompetence of the good guys, and made tedious by the inclusion of heaping shovelfuls of didactic pseudo-Christian preaching. As usual, the Wulder described in the book seems to be a complete dick, despite the novel's continual attempts to talk about how loving and kind her is. Of course, he's not so loving and kind to the thousands of people killed, maimed, and wounded by the war he let fester. This book seems like it is singularly ineffective at conveying a message that would be of interest to a nonbeliever, and the deity described in the book is such a jerk that it seems to me that it would offend a believer. In the end, there is just not any audience that I could see to recommending this book to.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Yay! More tea and daggarts! :)

Great reviews for They'd Rather Be Right and The Samaritan! Although I don't think I'll be reading either: the latter just sounds far too bleak.

Book Three: The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman.

.

Short review: Dream is captured, released, loses his power, recovers it, the natural order is disturbed, and restored.

Long review: Preludes and Nocturnes is the first volume in Neil Gaiman's much-praised Sandman series. The volume introduces us to Dream, one of the Endless and the central character in the series. But though Dream is the central character in the series, he is not human, and does not behave according to human concerns. In fact, the primary attitude that Dream seems to display is indifference to all concerns other than his own. Being Endless, Dream simply does not care about the wants or needs of mortals, which gives him an indifference that some might call evil, but within his own viewpoint, is merely natural.

The story doesn't just introduce Dream, but rather presents him as he is: an enigma. Dream's introduction to the story in the first act of the volume is almost accidental. Seeking to gain control over Death, a cabal of sorcerers instead captures Dream, without even realizing who he is at first. Gaiman shows the power of silence, as Dream barely speaks in this segment, instead merely waiting and watching through his imprisonment while the effects of his incarceration reverberate through the outside world. It seems that not having Dreams changes the world for the worse. While his captors become increasingly desperate, agitated, and angry as the years pass by and they see the end of their days approaching, Dream sits quietly, implacable, uncaring, and timeless.

Eventually, being timeless, Dream escapes, and sets about to regain his lost power and find his revenge. Revenge proves easy for Dream, finding the symbols of his power proves less so. The remainder of the book is broken into four main arcs, as the Sandman seeks to recover his pouch, his mask, and his ruby. But first Dream stops off at the house of the eternally feuding brothers Cain and Abel, the first indcation that there are other beings like Dream that live in perpetuity. Dream summons the triple goddess to gain information, and it turns out that even he is bound by rules. As with the rest of the book, the artwork reflects the dream-like nature of the story, enhancing the text.

To recover his symbols, Dream must enter the mortal realm, and this is where one of the more incongruous seeming elements of the Sandman series comes to light - it is set in the DC Comics universe. Seeing Dream interact with John Constantine is somewhat odd, but seeing him raid the Justice League headquarters and ask J'onn J'onzz for information is downright strange. Each story sequence shows the Sandman hunting down the fragments of his power stolen from him by his captors, firstthe pouch, then the mask, then the ruby, each one more difficult than the last, as he deal, in turn, with humanity's lust for pleasure, the desires of a grasping demon, and finally an insane mind who has turned Dream's own power against him. As the story progresses, we see Dream's own aspects, first as a benevolent purveyor of fantasy (and the detrimental effects of allowing fantasy to take control) and a being that can express gratitude, and then as a supernatural power that can challenge the entire hosts of Hell, and finally, as a nightmare made manifest.

Every segment reveals a bit more of Dream, and everything comes to a head in 24 Hours, a horrific story that seems to provoke the most visceral reactions from readers. But this is necessary to illustrate the full range of Dream's character, because he is not merely the representation of humanity's hopes and desires, but also of our fears and darkest thoughts. And when those fears are in the hands of an insane mind and let loose upon the world, they have dire consequences. But the other important revelation in the story is that Dream simply does not really care about what is to him a period of temporary the havoc, but only that his own power has been threatened, and his own responsibilites have been undermined. This segment is gripping and brutal, but without the macabre twists of 24 Hours Dream's character would have been incomplete.

And without 24 Hours the beauty of The Sound of Her Wings, the final act of the volume, would have been wasted. Because, as comes out during his conversation with Death, Dream is so much more terrible than she. Death, in the story, is beautiful, swift, and sure. Death moves from person to person, bringing them to their mortal end and ensuring that they are carried away to somewhere beyond. Dream in contrast is brooding and morose, listlessly dissatisfied with the ennui of having completed his more recent adventure and considring the eternity that lies before him. After seeing Dream deal with lesser beings throughout the volume, the introduction of another coequal member of the Endless is perfectly handled, and sets up the rest of the series quite well.

The Sandman series is regarded as one of the masterpieces of graphic novel writing and Preludes and Nocturnes gets it off to a strong start. Although origin stories can often drag, bogged down with the need to provide background information, the stories contained in this volume introduce the protagonist and the world around him without losing the narrative flow. With a strong set of stories complemented by superior artwork that reflects the enigmatic nature of the main character, Preludes and Nocturnes is an excellent beginning to an excellent series.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read: The Economist (January 9th-14th, 2011)

Book Four: The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card.



Short review: Danny is born into a magical family but he has no magic. Well, actually, he has a kind of magic everyone wants to kill him for. Things get bumpy after that.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Orson Scott Card has made a career out of crafting coming of age stories featuring gifted youthful prodigies from dysfunctional or nonexistant homes. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Danny North, the protagonist in The Lost Gate, is a gifted scion of a magically endowed family who is forced to flee his less than idyllic home in the Virginia hills when his unique and dangerous talents are uncovered. As one might expect, the novel seems somewhat derivative of Card's earlier works such as Ender's Game, The Worthing Saga, Seventh Son, or even Treason. However, this is a formula that Card has become quite adept at, perfecting the ability to churn out readable pages, and he throws in just enough new elements to make the story interesting.

The novel opens with Danny North living uncomfortably among his many relatives in the family "compound" outside Lexington, Virginia. The source of Danny's discomfort is that he is apparently the only member of his large, extended family that does not display any kind of magical talent, referred to by the pejorative "drekka", which makes him, in his family's eyes, no better than the non-magical "drowthers" that populate much of the world. It turns out that Danny's family is not merely a collection of wizards, they are the Norse gods in exile, or at least the descendants of the Norse gods. And, as we learn, there are rival families all across the world, each the source of myths and legends drawn from various cultures: the Greeks, the Persians, and so on. All of these beings are, we are told, descended from travelers from the distant world of "Westil", who came to Earth and guided the destiny of human nations according to their capricious whims. The idea that the "gods" of human mythology are in fact powerful alien beings from another world is reminiscent of Stargate: SG-1, an element that Card hangs a lampshade upon by having a character make an explicit Stargate reference.

But the gods are in decline. It seems that over a thousand years ago Loki, the capricious master of Gate magic, closed all the magical gates in the world, including the critical 'Great Gate" to Westil, whereupon he vanished. It turns out that going through the "Great Gate" to Westil provides the boost to power that differentiates godlike power from the more trivial albeit real power displayed by Danny's relatives. Loki's betrayal precipitated a slow decline in the power of the various families of "gods", and sparked bitter wars between them, mostly directed at the North clan, who the other families blamed for Loki's actions. In the end, the families agreed to a truce, but the price was the eradication of any new 'Gatemages" so as to prevent any one family from being able to recreate the Great Gate and gain an unassailable advantage over the others.

Danny, the son of the two most powerful North family members, turns out not to be a "drekka", but rather (and more or less predictably) a "Gatemage", which, it turns out, the family was secretly hoping for. This, of course, immediately puts Danny's life in danger, as the family is obligated to kill any Gatemage they find. But it turns out that most of those with power in the family don't want to kill Danny (unless they are found out, in which case they'd kill him without a second thought), but rather hope that he will live long enough to make a Great Gate so they can go through it and regain their lost glory. The mercenary nature of his family's interest in him offends Danny, and before he flees, he asserts that he will never work with them. And so he heads out on the road to try to hide from every magical family in the world (most notably, the rich and powerful Greeks) and figure out how to use his power.

The book flows well, but the rest of Danny's storyline seems oddly empty once it gets going. Danny, being a Gatemage, is good with languages, quick to learn stuff, and a natural born trickster. Card draws upon the myths of Hermes, Mercury, and Loki to establish these traits, asserting that as messenger gods they were all Gatemages (and implying that all messenger gods were Gatemages), and thus the attributes they share are the attributes of Gatemagery. But since Hermes and Mercury are essentially the same mythical character, this seems like an awfully slender thread to build upon, especially since the messenger gods from many other traditions are so disparate in their attributes. But this is Card's fictional reality, so he gets to set that precedent. The problem is that Danny uses that precedent to try to figure out how to use his powers, and it just isn't that convincing as a result. The other problem with Danny's journey is that, as a Gatemage who can always escape from trouble by gating himself away, there is limited tension in any situation Danny finds himself in. But that doesn't really matter, because with the exception of a handful of rent-a-cops, pretty much everyone Danny runs into wants to help him out. Despite the fact that we are told that danger lurks around every corner to ensnare the young Danny, every person he meets up with who says they want to help him actually does want to help him (although some only want to help him insofar as it helps them as well). Even the one character who could have proved an interesting nemesis for Danny turns out to be little more than a fawning fan of his, hoping he will make her life meaningful. No one ever tries to trick Danny and trap him or betray him, which makes his story more or less predictable.

And Danny himself is fairly standard as a Card hero. Like Alvin Maker, Danny loves to run. Like Card himself, Danny likes singing and has an affinity for thespianism. Also like Card, Danny eschews athletic competition, which is odd because Danny is also an excellent athlete. Like Ender Wiggin, Danny is precociously self-aware in a way that almost no teenager is. Danny, most importantly, struggles with the question of how to avoid becoming corrupted by what seems to be almost limitless power. Though he stumbles into petty thievery, Danny is always haunted by the spectre of the possibility that he, or those that he enables to become supernaturally powerful via his gift, might abuse their abilities and become tyrannical. The tendency toward power corrupting is a theme that runs through most of Card's works, and it seems as though it will develop into a major theme of this series as well.

Interwoven with Danny's story is the story of the man in the tree, later known as Wad, which takes place on Westil. Wad is a mystery, even to himself (although given the context of the story, it is likely that an astute reader will figure out who Wad truly is long before the book reveals his actual identity). Unlike Danny, Wad finds himself often in actual danger, despite his very real magical power because he is confronted with other personages of power and eventually has interests to protect. Also unlike Danny, Wad finds himself dealing with people who say one thing, but do another. Wad, it seems, must deal with the reality of betrayal that Danny only zealously guards against but never has to confront. Wad's story, set in a pseudo-Viking world, plays out like an epic Norse tragedy in the vein of the Volsung Saga, complete with betrayal, death, and anger.

Eventually Danny's story intersects with Wad's story, which makes Danny's story much more interesting. It also serves as the climax of the book, and resolves some questions, but like all good opening books of a series the resolution raises as many new questions as it answers. In the end, the reader is left wondering what will happen next as the story only seems to have gotten truly started when the book ends. This is, perhaps, inevitable in a book intended as the start of a series, but in The Lost Gate the end seems to come quite abruptly, and with altogether too many balls still up in the air. Except for the singular central plot point that is tied up, everything else remains decidedly unsettled, so the book doesn't really end so much as it offers a promise of more story to come.

Overall, The Lost Gate is a reasonably good fantasy book with some interesting ideas. However, the book is held back by a fairly bland and predictable main plot. To a certain extent, it seems like Card is just recycling characters and ideas that have shown up in his earlier works. One expects an author to have recurring themes in his works, but Danny North's character and story simply seem too much like the character and story of Alvin Maker, or Ender Wiggin, or Jason Worthing, or Lanik Mueller, or Bean, or a number of other characters from Card's oeuvre. It seems at times that Card merely took all of his previous plot and character ideas into a big bag, shook them up, and pulled them out to paste together into a new book. From a certain viewpoint, this would be a better book for someone who had not read a lot of Card's work previously. That said, even recycled Card plots and characters are pretty good, and Card's prose is well-written as always, so although Danny's story thus far seems kind of bland, Wad's story gives definite hope that it will move in a new direction as the series progresses. On that basis, this book gets a cautious recommendation.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Bland and predicatable were pretty much my reactions, too, although it read quickly. I actually put it down in the middle for a week and a half while I read other things, which tells you how much the story-telling tension wasn't there! But I also will probably read the sequel to see if it gets any better.

Book Five: Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 35, No.1 (January 2011) by Sheila Williams (editor).

.

Stories included:
Killer Advice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Two Thieves by Chris Beckett
Dolly by Elizabeth Bear
Visitors by Steve Rasnic Tem
Interloper by Ian McHugh
Ashes on the Water by Gwendolyn Clare

Poems included:
Five Pounds of Sunlight by Geoffrey A. Landis
Retired Spaceman by G. O. Clark

Long review: Featuring two murder mysteries and two imprisonment stories, the dominant theme of the January 2011 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction appears to be "crime and punishment". The final two stories, Interloper and Ashes on the Water throw in a minor apocalyptic theme, with one set in the growing heat wave of an impending apocalypse, and the other in the aftermath of one. Overall, despite this somewhat grim subject matter, the issue is a pretty good one, with mostly well-written stories despite their often harsh subject matter.

The first murder mystery, Dolly by Elizabeth Bear, is something of an homage to Isaac Asimov's classic R. Daneel Olivaw robot mysteries. The story is a variation on the locked door mystery, but is set in a world in which people seem to have eschewed human interaction in favor of highly sophisticated robotic servants and companions. However, this provides the opportunity to use these companions as highly sophisticated murder weapons as well. Confronted by a murder that doesn't seem to add up, the two investigating detectives make a leap of intuition that gets to the real point of the story: how sophisticated can our machines become before they become more than mere machines. Though the story treads on some pretty familiar ground, the murder mystery is well done and the homage to Asimov is touching. The other murder mystery, Killer Advice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is also the featured story on the cover, and is the longest story in the issue. Also something of a locked door mystery, the story is told with a rotating viewpoint that focuses heavily on the dysfunctional personalities of the various characters drawn from the crew of a sabotaged ship and the residents of a run down space station resort. The mystery itself doesn't really play fair with the reader, pulling the solution out of a hat at the very end with no foreshadowing concerning the motives of the killer, but as in Dolly, the mystery is just a vehicle for the real meat of the story, which is the interplay of personalities, one of whom is a killer. The story is interesting and enjoyable despite the hide-the-ball aspect of the mystery story itself due to the exploration of the insides of the mind of someone who can kill, and several others who cannot.

Every issue has to have at least one story that provides some levity, and Two Thieves by Chris Beckett is that story in this issue. One would think that a story about two violent criminals sent to permanent exile in a penal colony wouldn't be humorous, but when they find an altogether unexpected avenue of escape, they take it only to find that their bumbling greed lands them in even more trouble than they were in before. The story is humorous, but the humor is definitely bitter humor. The other prison story, Visitors by Steve Rasnic Tem, is not humorous at all, but painfully tragic. The story follows a pair of parents as they visit their imprisoned child in a system that provides hope for many, but despair for them. Though they believed they had made the correct choice for their offspring, the story takes a brutal turn when it is obliquely revealed just how much the incarceration has cost their child. The story contains a faint glimmer of hope, as the mother desperately tries to give her son back what has been taken from him, although the story is still dark and depressing. Even so, it is my favorite story in this issue.

Of the two apocalyptic-themed stories, Ashes on the Water by Gwendolyn Clare is the more frightening, because it is all too plausible. Set in a future India in which water has become so scarce that the rivers themselves have been walled off from the populace, the story deals with the love one sister has for another in the face of this adversity. Granted, one sister is dead before the story begins, but the protagonist is determined to honor her sister's memory despite the effort required to do so. In the end, she lets go of her sister and her dreams and faces up to the new reality that is encroaching upon old India, and the changes that this will force upon them. Though it has a high body count, Interloper by Ian McHugh is just not as effective a story. Though it has all the elements necessary to make a very good story, the real problem is that there is simply not enough text to do all the things that McHugh wanted to do with it. There are simply too many characters, too much back story, and too much going on in the plot to adequately tell the story in the eleven pages that it takes up. While it is clear that there could have been a really good story here, in its current form it simply feels too rushed as a short story, and should have been expanded into a novelette or a novella. It is, as a result, the weakest story in the issue.

Lightening up the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the issue is the poem Five Pounds of Sunlight by Geoffrey A. Landis, which compares a beloved pet to the entire weight of sunlight hitting the earth. You'll never look at a cat the same way after reading this poem. The other poem in the issue is Retired Spaceman by G. O. Clark, a work that deals with high aspirations and the wistfulness of failure.

With so much of the issue dealing with crime, imprisonment, and apocalyptic themes, the January 2011 Asimov's Science Fiction is a fairly dour installment of the magazine. Even so, the stories are all pretty good, and the only one that is weak is only marred by the fact that it wasn't given enough pages to allow its interesting story to develop properly. Even though all the stories are good, none of them really rise above that level, so although this was a decent read, it isn't a great one. With this issue, Asimov's appears to have gotten off to a moderately good start in 2011 by delivering a selection of enjoyable and thought-provoking short science fiction to lead off the year.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

I've been wondering about this recent Card (and Pathfinder as well). I've been cautious of him since the later Bean books and especially Ender in Exile seem to hammer at some of the Mormon things that never used to be as blatant in earlier works - especially especially his treatment of women.

It doesn't sound like there are many women at all here - maybe it escapes that for that reason?

There are, umm, six notable female characters in the book. Plus a couple of minor female characters who show up in one or two scenes. The women all basically come off as madonnas or whores for the most part. Or, in one case, a madonna who transforms into a whore. But they are all basically props for the Danny and Wad stories without much independent personality of their own. Two of the women basically fall all over themselves in love with Danny the minute they meet him while a third basically tries to has sex with him on the floor in front of her husband the minute she meets him (when Danny is 13 to boot).

Gosh, that sounds-- interesting. The lack of independent personality does not surprise me. Card seems to be getting systematically worse in that respect as he goes, which is one of my complaints about Ender in Exile.

Book Six: Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Vol. CXXXI, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2011) by Stanley Schmidt (editor).

.

Stories included:
The First Day of Eternity by Domingo Santos
At Cross Purposes by Juliette Wade
The Unfinished Man by Dave Creek
Enigma by Sean McMullen
Stay by Stephen L. Burns
The Frog Prince by Michael F. Flynn
A Snitch in Time by Donald Moffitt
Some of them Closer by Marissa Lingen
The First Conquest of Earth by David W. Goldman
Out There by Norman Spinrad
Non-Native Species by Janet Freeman
Probability Zero: Multivac's Singularity by Richard A. Lovett

Science fact articles included:
Other Earths in Space in Time by Kevin Walsh

Special features included:
Writing Fiction . . . About Yourself by Richard A. Lovett

Long review: I've said several times that the double issues of Analog and Asimov's often seem to be weaker than two of the single issues. Though I have no idea why this is, for some reason, when compiling a double issue it seems that the editors let a story or two that just isn't up to the magazine's usual standards slip through. Happily, the January/February 2011 double issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is, unlike some other double issues, full of a collection of stories that are all at least good,, and has many stories that are very good. As with many issues of Analog, this issue seems to have a couple of unannounced mini-themes. In this case, the mini-themes appear to be "first contact", and "colonization", with three stories that could be broadly classified as falling into each category.

The issue leads off with an editorial by Stanley Schmidt about the difference between what he considers science fiction and what he considers alternate history and where the two intersect. Schmidt opines that although he enjoys all types of alternate history stories, an alternate history story that does not also incorporate a science fiction element simply does not meet the criteria for being included in Analog. He gives a clear and cogent explanation of the difference between alternate history and science fiction, while also providing one of the best descriptions of the parameters that serve as the boundaries of the science fiction genre that I have ever seen. I agree almost entirely with Schmidt's thoughts on the matter, which is probably one of the many reasons that Analog is my favorite genre magazine.

Stay by Stephen L. Burns is one of the quirkier stories in the issue, but it is also my favorite. Set in a future in which alien invaders eliminated humanity and replaced them by essentially uplifting the world's population of dogs to sentience, the story is both funny and thoughtful. The dogs, many of whom vaguely remember what the world was like before the aliens arrived, must deal with leftover problems from humanity's time dominating the Earth, as well as problems that they have created for themselves, although some of those problems stem from their slavish imitation of vanished humanity. The story is quite well-done, as the now human-like dogs still display very recognizable dog-like personalities, which gives a fairly serious story a very humorous angle. In the end, the story is about the power that a race's gods hold over them, but it is also about figuring out a way to let go of those gods and grow into one's own. Despite what seems like a goofy premise (and a fairly silly opening), the story is possibly the most thought-provoking in the entire issue.

The first mini-theme of the issue - first alien contact - kicks off with the first story in the issue, which also happens to be the story featured on the cover: At Cross Purposes by Juliette Wade. First contact stories are one of the classic subjects of science fiction, as the idea of humanity meeting and attempting to establish communication with an alien race seems to be one that is endlessly fascinating. This also means that new first contact stories need to attack the question from an unusual angle, and At Cross Purposes attempts to do this by throwing some cultural miscommunication into the mix. This is not a new wrinkle, it has been the theme of numerous prior stories, even appearing as an element in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, but Wade's is well-written, the aliens are interesting, as is their rather alien way (but ultimately comprehensible) of viewing the world. The story is pretty good, and fun to read. The most interesting first contact story in the issue is Enigma by Sean McMullen, which isn't really a first contact story at all, but rather a first non-contact story. A crew of explorers finds a planet covered by a world-girdling city, but with no sign of habitation, which is the enigma of the title. They stumble about trying to figure out who built this globe-covering structure, and only figure out its purpose after something of a catastrophe. One interesting twist to the story is the fact that all of the humans are modified with animal DNA which is intended to make them better at their assigned jobs, but an unspoken subtext of the story is that this interferes with their understanding of the nature of the enigma city until after one of them has done something fairly rash. The third first contact story is an alien invasion story played for laughs titled The First Conquest of Earth by David W. Goldman in which aliens show up to invade the Earth but surrender in the face of human resistance. It turns out, however, that conquering the alien invaders isn't quite as much of a boon as one might think. The story is humorous, but darkly so.

The other mini-theme in the issue is colonization of other worlds, with Some of them Closer by Marissa Lingen the better of two very strong stories. In Lingen's tale, a veteran terraformer returns to Earth after years spent transforming a colony world into a place habitable for humans. Due to the combination of the long years put in on the job and relativistic travel, she returns to an Earth much changed from when she left, and struggles to fit in. She forms a friendship with the only person who she feels comfortable with, and eventually decides to forge a new path in a decision that when made, seems like it was almost inevitable. There have been many stories dealing with the sense of dislocation that time-displaced space travelers would feel upon their return to Earth, but few have done as good a job as this one. Though not exactly a colonization story, Non-Native Species by Janet Freeman explores exactly what sort of damage introducing a new species into the environment might cause. Though the story has a little bit of an alarmist bent concerning the potential negative consequences of genetic engineering, the story itself is interesting, although the resolution is a bit too pat for my tastes. The final colonization story in the issue, and also the final story in the issue is The First Day of Eternity by Domingo Santos (translated by Stanley Schmidt) that follows the crew of the aptly named generation ship Diaspora as they set about colonizing a new world. What makes this otherwise fairly standard story about new colonists struggling to cope with an alien world and alien life is the fact that the ship was originally sent out by a Jewish organization in an effort to find and settle a new Zion. Over the generations, the Jewish faith has been morphed strangely as a result of the colonists living in a confined environment under the protection of a more or less omnipotent artificial intelligence. After living aboard ship without having to make any decisions of their own, the colonists are confronted with the possibility of life in the open and on their own. This, as one might expect, causes many some serious consternation and leads to the more or less expected conclusion, although there is a minor twist at the end that seems both hopeful and sinister at the same time. Though the story leaves many questions unanswered, it is so good that one doesn't mind so much as one hopes that Santos will return to the characters and write more about them and their lives.

Not dealing directly with colonization, but rather on the subject to exploration is the very short Norman Spinrad penned piece Out There. In just two pages Spinrad captures exactly why humans are driven to explore and coincidentally, why people write things like science fiction stories. The story, though extraordinarily brief, is simply brilliant. As with most entries in the series, Probability Zero: Multivac's Singularity by Richard A. Lovett is also quite short, and provides a fairly humorous possible explanation for why humanity has not reached the much predicted "singularity", and why it may never do so. Also dealing with exploration, but adding questions concerning genetic engineering to the mix, The Unfinished Man by Dave Creek is a decent story about a visit between two genetically enhanced humans who meet when one checks up on the other's solitary exploration of a fairly hostile planet. With this potentially deadly environment as a backdrop, the interactions of the two characters are drawn into sharp focus and makes the epiphany the protagonist undergoes seem quite believable.

The lone time travel story in the issue is A Snitch in Time by Donald Moffitt, which also happens to be a murder mystery of sorts. Moffitt explores the potential pitfalls of using time travel to try to go back and solve a cold murder case. In the story, solving the murder this way proves to be fairly easy, but everything else proves to be a little more difficult, as using evidence gained in another time (and in the version of time travel used by the story, another reality) proves to be legally problematic. Things don't go quite like the protagonist of the story expected, but justice does prevail after a fashion. The story is an interesting twist on the science fiction murder story. Also something of a mystery is the espionage story The Frog Prince by Michael F. Flynn featuring the scarred agent with a fractured personality who first appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Analog in the story On Rickety Thistlewaite. In this story, the supposedly retired scarred man is captured by one of his enemies and is being transported to enemy territory for reasons that are only partially explained. The cat-and-mouse game between prisoner and warden takes place in the confined space of a small ship that serves as an improvised prison and paddy wagon. Though the story only has three "real" characters, since the scarred man has a half dozen personalities all swimming about inside his head, much of the action takes place internally as they debate among themselves how to escape their captor. This internal story is complemented by the external story as the scarred man deals first with his kidnapper and then with a somewhat unexpected wild card, and finally, with a deadly new element that threatens everyone on board the tiny ship. Full of intrigue and interesting characters, this is one of the best stories in this issue.

The science fact article in the issue, Other Earths in Space in Time by Kevin Walsh, deals with the ongoing issues concerning the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, and specifically with the possibility of discovering other Earth-like worlds out there. Walsh puts the possibility of such discoveries in perspective, pointing out that Earth has only really been "Earth-like" in the sense that most people today understand it for a very brief period of its existence, and that most of the "Earth-like" planets we might discover will probably be quite different from the benign and benevolent Earth that we are familiar with. Also included in the issue is the Richard A. Lovett penned special feature Writing Fiction . . . About Yourself in which Mr. Lovett gives advice to writers about how to make your writing more effective by inserting elements of oneself into your fiction. The article, which is a variant on "write what you know", is fairly good, and offers what seem to be pretty good writing tips.

Overall, this is a very good issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Unlike many of the double issues, which seem to sag here and there, this issue has no poor stories, or even any that I would consider below average. Despite having several stories that deal with two broad themes, the inclusion of a variety of other stories and fact that each of the theme-related stories attacks their "theme" from very different angles keeps the issue varied enough to keep the issue from seeming repetitive. Loaded with good story after good story, this is one of the best double issues of Analog that I have seen in a while, and well-deserving of a strong recommendation.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Seven: The Sandman: Dream Country by Neil Gaiman.

.

Short review: Four independent short interludes following The Doll's House. As a bonus, the volume also includes the script of Calliope.

Long review: Dream Country is the third volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, and the first that is devoid of a unifying story arc. Instead, it contains four stories - Calliope, A Dream of a Thousand Cats, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Facade - only related by their common association with the Endless. Dream himself does not even appear in Facade, which features his older sister Death comforting a distraught failed and retired super-heroine. Though the stories are unrelated to one another, and not really explicitly related to any of the larger story arcs that are contained in several of the other volumes each story, even the story in which he does not appear, provides insight into Dream as a character.

The first story in the volume is Calliope, named after the central character, one of the nine muses of Greek mythology. The story is a harsh and brutal one as Calliope is not free, but rather has been captured and in the course of the story is transferred as a possession from one captor to another. Her new owner, the primary antagonist in the story, is an author out of ideas who keeps his beautiful muse imprisoned and repeatedly rapes her (literally) for inspiration. The story of Calliope's imprisonment to satisfy the human hunger for power and riches parallels Dream's own imprisonment at the beginning of Preludes and Nocturnes, and Calliope's call to the weird sisters ties Dream's reality more closely into the Greek mythology that was hinted at in the opening volume of the series (if there are any doubts, Dream's alternate name of Morpheus, used frequently in the books, should dispel them). But the key element to the story is that Dream becomes involved at all - though it is established that he and Calliope had a prior relationship that ended badly, he comes to her aid nonetheless. Further, when Dream secures Calliope's freedom, he does not continue to torment her former captor, but instead shows clemency. In short, the story shows that Dream, despite being a being of endless existence, has been changed by his own captivity and its aftermath, and has become a more merciful being as a result. Despite his forbidding presence as the master of nightmares, Dream is, it seems, a less frightening entity post-capture than he may have been before.

The second story, A Dream of a Thousand Cats is, despite featuring a cute white kitten at its center, the most disturbing of the stories in the volume. Perhaps it is the fact that it features the cute white kitten, and the dreams that even such cute cats may have, that gives the story its impact. The story once again highlights human cruelty to those around us, in this case, human indifference to their pet cat's progeny leads to a dream of revenge that eventually leads to Morpheus, this time in the shape of a massive black cat. Morpheus tells a tale of a world in which cats ruled over humans, and which was eradicated by the dreams of humanity, leading to the realization that if enough cats dreamed the world back to the way it was, they would not longer be pets, but rather masters. This tale gives substance to Dream's other name Oneiros, or "He Who Shapes" which crops up several times in the volume - in Gaiman's world Dreams shape reality. In the end, the cute kitten dreams kitten dreams as his oblivious hosts comment on how cute he looks while having what seems to them to be an innocent hunting dream. But the reader knows the truth, and knowing the truth, the kitten seems not cute, but sinister, a transformation that it seems only Neil Gaiman could pull off.

The third story in the volume is probably the most famous of all the stories in The Sandman, the World Fantasy Award winning A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Shakespeare repays his end of a deal he made with Dream by presenting the performance of the first of two plays commissioned by the Sandman for an audience of creatures from the faerie realm. Though much heralded as the only comic book to win a World Fantasy Award (for short fiction in 1991), I am somewhat lukewarm about the story. Though important for establishing Dream as a character allied with, or at least conversant with the creatures of faerie such as Puck, Titania, and Oberon, and interestingly self-referential as creatures from the fairy realm watch human actors portraying themselves in a story that is like, but not completely true to reality, the story seems fairly predictable and pedestrian compared with the more original flights of fancy that make up the other stories in the series. Because of this circular quality, the entire story has dream-like elements behind dream-like elements that fold in on one another. As an English writer, it seems inevitable that Gaiman would have to include at least one Shakespeare homage in his work, but even though he brings out the inherent wildness and danger that was traditionally associated with characters of the faerie-realm that Shakespeare expunged from his version, the constraints of Shakespeare's vision serve to also constrain Gaiman. Though it is still a strong story, it is not, in my opinion, anywhere close to being the best of the Sandman stories.

The final story in the volume is Facade, and is a story in which Dream does not even appear. The prime character in the story is a lonely, scared, and desperate retired super-heroine (who fans of more obscure DC super-heroes will recognize as "Element Girl") living alone on a tiny stipend, whose only human contact is apparently a rare phone call from her agency contact who makes sure her pension checks are sent to her. She is unexpectedly called by an old friend and asked to meet for lunch, and it soon becomes clear that our retired protagonist, who goes by the name "Rainie", is not scared because she fears for her safety, but fears she will never be able to have human contact again due to the grotesque side effects of the transformation that changed her from a regular human into a super-powered being. This story element almost off-handedly calls into question the light-hearted nature of most super-hero comics by showing the terrible price that many of the costumed crusaders would pay for their prowess, and how they can lose their own humanity in the process. Soon she is visited by Death, who happened to be passing by, and the true terror of Rainie's existence comes to light - that she cannot even seem to seek the solace of death to escape an existence that has become repugnant to her. And in this exchange with Death, we learn something about Death, and about Dream at the same time: Death is merciful, even when she does not have to be, in a way that probably would not even occur to Dream unless someone suggested it to him. After all, in Calliope, Dream had to be asked to release Ric Madoc from the terrible curse he had laid upon him, and even releasing him from it proved to be no solace. This continues the theme set up in Preludes and Nocturnes and which continues to run through the series: Dream is terrible, and Death simply is.

The final section of this volume is the script for Calliope. As Gaiman explains, when he was starting out, he didn't know how to write a script for a comic book, and had to ask how it was done, eventually posing the question to comics legend Alan Moore. In what seems to be a measure of thankfulness, Gaiman includes the script to Calliope as an example for others so that they can see one way that it can be done. Gaiman is careful to note that this is not the only way to present a script for a comic book, nor is it the only way he has written scripts. It is, as he says, merely the way that Calliope was scripted. It is fairly interesting, with a handful of notes from Gaiman (that are almost illegible at times), and Kelley Jones, who was the artist who drew the issue. Since the reader will have already read the issue, there's nothing really new here, but it is a somewhat interesting look at how comics are put together.

Although Dream Country does not contain a single story arc, the individual stories are a much needed pause in the action of the series, allowing for some interesting character development. As a member of the Endless, time essentially has no meaning for Dream, and thus the stories can (and do) jump around to where it is most convenient to provide a clear view on Dream's character. But time does have meaning for the reader, and providing this interlude for the reader to get a stronger grip on exactly who Dream and Death are and a better picture of how they fit into the larger world seems almost necessary. Making this brief pause in the larger story work is the fact that each of these individual smaller stories are quite good on their own, which adds up to a strong volume that should leave the reader both satisfied by the material within it and looking forward with anticipation to the next installment in the series.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Fantastic review - you're making me want to reread these!

Agree with Aerrin - nice review! I'm tempted to pull these off the shelves again...

And I agree as well! I never read the whole Sandman series, just bits and pieces here and there, and I really should rectify that...

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (January 15th-21st, 2011)
The Economist (January 22nd-28th, 2011)
Science News (January 15, 2011)
National Geographic (February 2011)

Book Eight: Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 35, No. 2 (February 2011) by Sheila Williams (editor).

.

Stories included:
The Choice by Paul McAuley
Out of the Dream Closet by David Ira Cleary
Waster Mercy by Sara Genge
Planet of the Sealies by Jeff Carlson
Shipbirth by Aliette de Bodard
Brother Sleep by Tim McDaniel
Eye of the Beyond by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

Poems included:
Entanglement, Valentines, and Einstein by W. Gregory Stewart
Flicker by Uncle River
Tower by Jane Yolen

Long review: With three post-apocalyptic stories, a story about a death resulting from childbirth, a story about a father's seeming callous indifference to his child, and a story about the dangers posed by giant evil corporations, the February 2011 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction seems to have, as its overarching theme "the future is going to suck but humanity will soldier on". Even the remaining story in the issue Brother Sleep, despite not being overtly dark, has a depressing overtone. Oddly, the two stories featured on the cover are also two of the weaker stories in the issue, which makes one wonder why they were featured so prominently. I suppose that the Paul McAuley story is featured because he has name recognition, but that doesn't seem to justify putting the cluttered mess that is The Choice on the cover.

The first of the two post-global warming stories is also the aforementioned story featured on the cover - The Choice by Paul McAuley - in which McAuley pretty much throws a bunch of popular science fiction tropes into a blender and pours the story over the pages. A young man with a possibly insane and definitely dying mother living on an artificial island amidst the risen ocean waters, takes his best friend to see a stranded alien artifact whereupon his friend runs afoul of criminals looking to gain the advantages of alien technology and eventually the protagonist's best friend's abusive father seeks revenge for the death of his son. Our hero winds up in jail, and when he gets out he is faced with the titular "choice" to try to claim some profitable technology for his own or set out to seek his fortune wandering the world. The story is kind of anticlimactic because McAuley doesn't give his main character many reasons to choose the option he rejects, and a whole bunch of reasons not to. Other than the minor let down at the ending, the story is interesting although there is so much going on that it seems a bit cluttered. Either the story should have been lengthened to allow for more background development, or some elements should have been left out to allow for a more focused telling. The other (and in my opinion superior) post-global warming story is Planet of the Sealies by Jeff Carlson, which starts off seeming like a story about the exploration of a dangerously hostile alien planet. It becomes clear, however, that the alien plant being explored is Earth with a destroyed environment. The characters are hunting for valuable relics from the past in a massive landfill, although what they are hunting for is not what one might expect. Carlson mixes a fairly hard science story with the tension between the need to huddle together to survive and the urge to strike out and explore and delivers the best story in this issue.

The second story featured on the cover is Out of the Dream Closet by David Ira Cleary, a very surreal feeling tale that I think I was supposed to get more out of than I actually did. The story is set in a strange reality with only four real characters, the central one being a precocious woman whose father/creator has frozen her physical development at the age of ten, a situation she considers intolerable. Her father forbids only one thing, and of course, that is exactly what she does in rebellion. The problem is the reason why this act is forbidden is not really adequately explained, and as a result her father appears to be little more than a capricious jerk. The story clearly means to be deep and meaningful with lots of symbolism with a capital "S", but I found it mostly slow and pretentious.

One quirky element of this issue is that it features two stories that are follow-up stories in which an author returns to the setting of a previously published story. The first of these two, Waster Mercy by Sara Genge, is set in the same post-apocalyptic Children of the Waste landscape as Genge's previous stories Shoes-to-Run, from the July 2009 issue of Asimov's, and Malick Pan, from the April/May 2010 issue. While the previous stories featured protagonists from the wastelands, this story has as its central character a missionary from the "civilized" part of the world seeking anything but martyrdom in the desolate world. The story reminded me a little bit of A Canticle for Liebowitz, although the theology and goals of the central character are quite different from any of the Catholic holdovers in Canticle. The protagonist meets a denizen of the wastes, and things go about as one might expect when a fish out of water has to deal with one completely in his own element. As all of Genge's other Children of the Waste stories, this one is quite good, and one of the best stories in the issue. The other story set in a previously visited imagined reality is Aliette de Bodard's Shipbirth, set in the same alternate reality as the July 2010 story The Jaguar House, in Shadow, and which continues the story of a world in which the Americas were discovered by the Chinese and are dominated by a technologically advanced Aztec Empire. The story focuses on Aztec mythology concerning childbirth, which like many things for the Aztecs, is intimately connected with danger and death. The story gives a glimpse into the creepy form of space travel of the reality, and the terrible sacrifices that must be made to make it work. Told from the perspective of a doctor attempting to assist the birth of a "ship mind", the story continues to highlight the alien perspective and casual brutality of the Aztec culture that dominates de Bodard's posited reality.

Covering similar ground as Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain, Brother Sleep by Tim McDaniel imagines a future Thailand in which most people are relieved of the need to sleep, and the rare unfortunates who are unable to successfully undergo "the treatment" that makes this possible find themselves at a marked disadvantage. The story shows the social stratification along the lines of sleepers and non-sleepers, and places Horse, its main character, right in the middle as a non-sleeping college student with both a brother and a roommate who are still sleepers. Though he has a pile of advantages, Horse discovers that being one of the "elite" comes with a cost and doesn't solve all problems, eventually finding himself envious of those around him, and longing to escape reality just for a little while and sleep. The shortest and weakest story in the issue is Eye of the Beyond by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg. The story is fairly simple: businessman who owns a company that sells cheap clothes for deceased people to wear is pressured to sell his business to a giant evil corporation. He resists, is given a collection of dire warnings by those around him that such resistance will be futile and self-destructive, and then the big evil corporation takes over his business and arranges to have him killed. The problem with the story is that is basically all there is to it. That the giant evil corporation is EEEEVIL is simply taken for a given through most of the story, with very little being given to support this point other than the fact that they want to buy the hero's business and some vague background noise. Exactly how the giant evil corporation convinces the main character's family, friends, and associates to sell his business out from under him is never explained – they just do. The efforts the main character goes through to save his business are never detailed – he just says he tries. While the story is clearly supposed to be scary polemic about the dangers of giant evil corporations, because everything the corporation does that is evil takes place in the shadowy background, it just doesn't have much impact. In short, if you want to write a cautionary tale, you have to say more than "the giant evil corporation wins because it is a giant evil corporation" if you want to have much of a story.

I have said before that Asimov's Science Fiction is just not quite as good a publication as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and this issue isn't going to make me change my mind. While most of the stories are decent, and a few are above average, Out of the Dream Closet and Eye of the Beyond both serve the drag the issue down again. Although this is an okay issue of Asimov's, it is nothing special and fairly grim to boot.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read: The Economist (January 29th-February 4th, 2011)

Book Nine: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.

.

Short Review: Humankind virtually vanishes from the face of the Earth. The Earth doesn't care. Sexism survives. The Earth doesn't care about that either.

Long review: In 1951, four members of the British Science Fiction Convention got together and decided that there should be an award for science fiction and fantasy related books. That year they handed out the first genre related fiction award to George R. Stewart's post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides, a somewhat desolate and despairing book about the world after almost all of humanity disappears as a result of a world-wide plague. The story is told from the perspective of Isherwood Williams, referred to as "Ish" for much of the book, an anthropology graduate student who is one of the few to survive the ravages of the plague. To a certain extent, it is a little bit like The Stand without all of the supernatural elements (which makes sense, as it was supposedly one of the inspirations King drew upon when he wrote that book). The story is told in three parts each more distant in time from our world, with shorter connecting chapters bridging them.

The first section of the story, titled "World Without End", is the strongest part of the book. In the opening pages of the book Ish is bitten by a snake and falls ill. After he recovers, he discovers that during his delirium, humanity appears to have vanished from the face of the Earth. After establishing the basic outlines of the disaster that wiped out all of his fellow humans, Ish takes a car, a dog, and his hammer with a cracked handle and decides to explore the world looking for anyone else, although he is awfully selective about who he will spend time with given that there seem to be no more than a couple dozen people left alive in all of San Francisco. Because Ish is an anthropology graduate student, he spends a lot of time intellectualizing about humanity, and how the survivors will react to the death of so many millions, repeating the phrase "secondary kill" over and over again to describe people who can't face a world in which all of their family and friends have died and commit suicide, or take foolish risks and get killed, or simply set about drinking themselves to death, Ish, of course, suffers from none of these mental infirmities, and comments several times on how much nicer the world is without people.

Even this early in the book some improbabilities start piling up. One is expected to accept, for example, that even after the electrical grid fails, gas station pumps will continue to work. Ish also behaves fairly profligately, at one point killing a calf and its mother solely so he could cut out the calf's liver for dinner. (I was also left wondering, given that he had two entire dead cows to pick from, why he chose to eat the liver, and only the liver, as opposed to cutting himself a thick juicy steak). Over the course of his trip, which eventually leads him to a desolate New York City, Ish encounters a couple of people, including a black couple living in the rural South who seem to me like the people most likely to prosper in the post-human world, since they seem to actually know how to raise food for themselves. They make for a thematic contrast with the delusional couple Ish meets in New York who spend their time drinking martinis and playing cards, and who are certain to die as soon as the first snows arrive. Eventually Ish turns back, and returns to San Francisco, where as soon as Ish finds himself thinking that he needs some female companionship, an appropriate woman serendipitously shows up. Eventually Ish settles down with his new found partner, a woman named Em, setting the stage for the years to pass.

The second section, which leaps ahead twenty-two years after the death of the bulk of the human race is titled, naturally enough "The Year 22". It is in this middle section that the book starts to seriously fray at the seams. In an interstitial chapter between "World Without End" and this section, it is established that two other men and three other women come to live on the same suburban street where Ish and Em have taken up residence. The little band of people living on the outskirts of San Francisco take to calling themselves the "Tribe" and produce a fairly large band of children. Among the more implausible elements of this section is the idea that these survivors would continue to derive much of their sustenance from leftover canned goods. It is in this section that Ish's annoying passivity comes to the fore. Ish frets that the Tribe has not taken up agriculture or animal husbandry, but consoles himself with the thought that none of them know what they are doing in that regard to begin with, so they wouldn't have enough expertise to do it. But Ish makes a big deal in the book about finding the city public library and the Berkeley university library, and what a great source of knowledge they would be. One is left to wonder why he doesn't bother to educate himself on these sorts of topics given that they seem to be of fairly critical importance (especially given the implausibility of things like canned tomatoes still being edible twenty-two years after they were first canned - even canned food has an expiration date, let alone the fact that the cans would likely rust through in that time frame).

This passive refusal to actually do much of anything seems to be a pattern, since Ish says he thinks it is important that the offspring of the initial seven survivors be educated, but makes only the most halfhearted attempts to do so. Time and again Ish thinks of some element of civilization or technology that he considers fairly important to pass along, makes a halfhearted attempt to do so, and the first time any kind of obstacle to doing so crops up, just gives up. This even shows up when the story reveals that the younger generation had begun to invest Ish's hammer (and the entire older generation as mythically powerful "Americans") with supernatural significance, and Ish makes only the most perfunctory effort to dissuade this fetishization before giving in and allowing this sort of nonsense to take root despite his opposition to it. It seems that Stewart wanted to show how difficult it would be to continue civilization with such a diminished population, especially given the focus placed upon Ish considering which of the younger generation would follow in his footsteps as the intellectual leader (using that term loosely, given the fact that Ish does precious little actual effective leading), and the sad end result of that plot line. However, the way the difficulty in preserving civilization and learning is presented in the book doesn't really make it seem like this is inherently difficult, but is instead only difficult because Ish and the other survivors basically let it happen through their own foolishness, despite having all the resources necessary to prevent this outcome. In short, this element of the story doesn't ring true, but rather seems to be artificial, because Stewart had in mind a particular outcome, and wanted to force the story into that direction no matter how silly it made his characters appear to be.

It is also in this section that the fact that the book was written in 1949 really shows through, and really dates the book in a bad way. There is a level of casual sexism and class snobbery that, while not really shocking, is certainly noticeable. There is a little bit of racism too, but it is somewhat muted, showing up on when Em, Isherwood's post-apocalyptic wife, reveals in a fairly oblique reference that she is of mixed race descent, and Ish's response, though accepting that such things are of no consequence in the post-human world, reveals a level of fairly casual racism in itself. One thing that I suppose is heartening is that while the language of Em's revelation was probably clear when the book was made, the reference is pretty opaque now, and one could easily miss it, or simply not understand it today. Unfortunately, the casual sexism is not nearly as well masked by time. In fact, it is made much more apparent. For example, when Ish is trying to decide who will be the "intellectual" to follow in his footsteps and be the driving force that attempts to preserve culture and civilization, while he considers each of the other male members of the Tribe, he casually dismisses all of the women as a group by saying that they are all consumed by the concerns of motherhood and making homes for their men. This is an area where the class snobbery raises its head too, Ish dismisses George, the one blue collar member of the group, as simply being obviously too dimwitted to have anything important to contribute in the mental arena.

This section of the book also highlights the very 1940s morality that pervades the book. Despite pretensions of being very forward thinking (Ezra has two wives, and of course, Ish is married to a woman who is of mixed race ancestry), the arrival of the stranger Charlie and the plot that follows demonstrates that Stewart and thus his characters, seem to have stepped right out of a bad high school health film. Charlie shows some fairly inappropriate sexual interest in the mentally childlike Evie, which Ish and the others regard as troubling, but what turns out to be Charlie's "serious" offense is that he admits that he has "Cupid's disease", or in other words, some form of venereal disease. This is such an crime that the Tribe immediately sentences Charlie to death. Apparently, in the post-apocalyptic world, having the clap is a hanging offense. This sequence, more troublingly, illustrates the Tribe's casual dismissal of another element of society - the idea of laws. At one point, when deliberating Charlie's fate, George suggests that punishing Charlie before he has actually committed a crime would be against the law. To which Em derisively responds "What law?", after which everyone concludes they can pretty much do anything they want to to Charlie. But no one stops and say "Hey, maybe we should think about having some rules to follow for our growing community". And the concept of having laws that people know about and are applied fairly is left to die because Em basically thinks the idea is silly.

The third section of the book "The Last American" is also the shortest. It is supposed to serve as more or less the pay off of the entire book, showing the changes that take place as Ish becomes old and the other "first generation" members of the Tribe die out until he is the last living link to the world before the great plague. At this point, Ish's passivity takes over as he sits and watches the world move on around him. The fetishization of Ish, as one of the mythic "Americans" and his hammer continues to take on larger significance, but even when invested with supernatural significance, Ish fails to seize the opportunity this status should provide and basically sits on his ass because it is easier than trying to direct events to keep some vestige of civilization alive. (One thing that I find bizarre is that when he is asked questions in his capacity as a supernatural entity, and refuses to answer, the young men of the Tribe "pinch" him until he answers. Pinch? What grown man pinches someone to get their way?) In this last section one can only come to the conclusion that the libraries that Ish so carefully made sure to locate and keep sacrosanct in the earlier sections will be useless in the new world, since no one will be able to read their contents. In the end, Ish hands over his supernatural power, beginning what one assumes is a new religion for a new world, leaving as his only legacy the introduction of the bow and arrow, and a fetishized hammer.

I think that a lot of the problems I have with the book stem from Stewart's apparent thematic decision to have a book that shows the disintegration of civilization, and have a single viewpoint character, meaning that this disintegration had to take place in the course of a single lifetime. And consequently, this means that the characters can't really be very proactive or accomplish much of anything other than root around in the ruins of the pre-collapse world and scavenge off of its carcass. As a result, this is a very frustrating book, as most of the troubles the characters end up having are more the result of their own stupidity than the depopulated world that they find themselves living in. Even still, this book remains a classic of science fiction - even if you've never read the book, if you've read or viewed any post-apocalyptic fiction written since its publication, you probably read a book that was influenced by it. The opening section, describing the empty world devoid of humanity is brilliant, and even though the later sections are made less effective by the passive indifference of the characters, they illustrate quite effectively how the world might adjust to the loss of human influence, and how little the world really needs us. Despite being a flawed work, it is a flawed work that is definitely worth reading.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Ha! Your short review made me laugh. I read this last year and found it intensely frustrating, even taking the publication date into account. I'll be interested to see what you have to say!

Between the last book and this one I read:

Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (January 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (February 2011)
The Economist (February 5th-11th, 2011)
The Economist (February 12th-18th, 2011)
The Economist (February 19th-25th, 2011)
Science News (January 29, 2011)
Science News (February 12, 2011)

Book Ten: The Elements of Style, 3rd Edition by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White.

.

Short review: Get it. Read it. Improve your writing.

Long review: There are some books that everyone should own a copy of. The Elements of Style is one of those books. Although it is only eighty-five pages long (with an additional seven page index), the book is an essential guide to the basics of writing concisely, clearly, and effectively.

The book lays out rules and suggestions for writing in the English language, starting with the mandatory, moving on to the strongly suggested, and finally to the merely recommended. As a rule of thumb, it seems that the earlier an item appears in the book, the more critical it is that a writer follow the instructions given if they want their end product to be worthwhile. So, for example, a writer could ignore some (or all) of the advice regarding style in Chapter V and still produce a coherent and readable piece of work, but ignoring the rules of usage in Chapter I will almost certainly result in an incomprehensible mess.

Following the rules and advice laid out in this book will result in a clear and straightforward piece of writing. Most writers would do well to try to follow all of the rules and pointers in the book, especially those who are producing written material in a professional context. When writing a business letter, or a grant proposal, or even just an e-mail to a work associate, the most important goal for the writer is to convey his intended meaning properly, and following the advice in this book will substantially aid in reaching that goal.

But wait, I hear you cry, my favorite author routinely ignores several points that the book makes. I'm sure they do. But I would also lay heavy odds that they are aware of the stylistic element that they are flouting, and they are doing so deliberately, and after at least some consideration as to the impact of making such a choice. The Elements of Style provides the template for what might be called conventional writing. If one wants to be rebellious and engage in unconventional writing, and be effective when doing so, one has to know the conventional rules first. Even still, all but the most skilled writer ignores the advice contained in this book at his peril.

Anyone who writes should have a copy of this book on their shelf, and should read and reread it on a regular basis. Even the most experienced writer who peruses this manual is likely to be reminded of some tidbit of advice that could strengthen their prose. And even for those who reject all of the advice on the way to forging their own unique style, this book is a must read, as one should at least be conscious of what one is rejecting (although, to be perfectly honest, I cannot imagine the output of a writer who did reject all of the suggestions in this book being anything other than an unreadable nightmare). The Elements of Style is an essential part of every person's library.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

National Geographic (March 2011)
Poets & Writers Magazine (March/April 2011)
The Economist (February 26th-March 4th, 2011)
The Economist (March 5th-11th, 2011)
Science News (February 26, 2011)
The University of Virginia Magazine (Spring 2011)

Book Eleven: Dancing With Gravity by Anene Tressler.

.

Short review: Life is difficult when you are a self-absorbed slightly paranoid narcissistic jerk. Even if you are a Catholic priest.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Father Whiting is a Catholic priest who works in a Catholic run hospital counselling patients and their families. Unfortunately, he's also a juvenile, self-absorbed, narcissistic, paranoid jerk. Throughout the book, he drifts through life, self-absorbed enough to be certain that everything everyone else is doing must be directed at him, paranoid enough that he agonizes over what they must be thinking or planning, juvenile enough that he lashes out when the woman he has a crush on chooses to have a relationship with someone who is actually available, and misogynistic enough that almost every interaction he has in the book with a woman is strained and uncomfortable. In short, Father Whiting is a petty, vain, and generally objectionable person.

Having a dislikable main character in a book is always a risk, even if you intend to rehabilitate him by the end of the book (and that seems to be the intention of the book, although I didn't find Father Whiting's turnaround to be particularly convincing). This is especially true if you are going to tell the story using that character as the sole viewpoint character, as all of their selfish, cruel, and vindictive thoughts are conveyed to the reader in undiluted form. And because the only lens that the reader sees the other character through is the mind of the protagonist, it is impossible to seperate the other characters from the protagonist's perception of them. The result is that most of the other characters end up seeming almost as unlikable as the main character. One is left wondering if Jerry really is a sanctimonious prick, if Lillian really is a needy and clingy woman, if Sarah really is vapid, and, finally if Nikolai really is a thoughtless cad and ass. Even though one suspects that they are not, whether or not the characters actually are a collection of disagreeable people, because we see them through Father Whiting's eyes, they appear to be so. As a result, the reader is left wading through a morass of petty, almost meaningless relationships between characters that that no one would ever want to actually interact with.

But it is a mark of the skill of a writer that they can take this volatile mix and still produce a book that keeps the reader engaged and turning the pages. However, Tressler is able to pull this off, even if at times one keeps reading for the same reason that one slows down to see a train wreck, as you wonder exactly what new boorish action Father Whiting is going to take next. Though Whiting himself suggests that he is sleepwalking through his life, it seems more like he is actually obsessing over the trivial and magnifying mundane events into crisis after crisis. This pattern is established from the very opening pages of the book when Father Whiting, just returned from an extended conference in Italy, overhears a dispute between the hospital president and the head of the hospital's board of directors. Whiting then obsesses over whether anyone saw him eavesdropping, and spends much of the next chunk of the book worried that he will be fired for this pecadillio, inflating in his mind a cryptic meeting arranged between himself and the head of the Sisters of the Little Flower, the order of nuns that manage the hospital, into a call to the carpet so he can be fired for his indiscretion. The meeting is nothing of the sort, and instead Father Whiting is asked to take over additional responsibilities relating to a circus that the sisters have improbably inherited. While Whiting is busy obsessing over what people think about him, the rest of the world seems to move along without caring about him very much.

This pattern repeats itself several times in the book, with Whiting agonizing over the minutia of interpersonal relationships, always narcissistically assuming that everyone he comes into contact with, or who happens to just walk by, is as focused on Whiting as he is on himself. It does not take long for the reader to conclude that Whiting was sent to Italy, not so that he could learn anything in particular, but because everyone else at the hospital needed a break from dealing with him. In the one scene we see in which Whiting is performing his putative job, pastoral care, he is unable to offer any kind of help to a grieving parent dealing with a sick child, able to only come up with empty platitudes, while another parent actually takes steps to comfort the woman he is supposed to be ministering to. Even when he is ostensibly helping Jerry, a fellow priest and an old friend who is getting treatment for cancer, Whiting uses this as an opportunity to preen. And in his most obnoxious performance, Whiting develops a crush on Sarah, one of his coworkers, and when she doesn't return his affection (probably because she realizes that he's supposed to be a celibate priest), he immediately begins to resent and denigrate her.

Which leads one to realize that Whiting's relationships with almost all of the women in the book are strained. To a certain extent, even though he is described as being firty-eight years old, Whiting behaves like a maladjusted teenager and this is at its most apparent when dealing with women. The most obvious is his relation ship with Sarah, where he behaves like a jilted lover with his feelings for her turned on a dime. He switches from caring for her to finding her vain, petty, and foolish in the space of a single moment. His interactions with his secretary are strained, as she dominates and bullies him, even though she supposedly works for him, and he is never able to work out any kind of reasonable working relationship with her. Finally, near the end of the book he generates some backbone and explodes before ordering her to transfer out of his office in a scene that seems to be intended to show how he has begun to assert himself. Instead, he comes off as pathetic, unable to resolve a work related problem in an adult manner.

But it is Whiting's relationship with his mother that proves to be relevatory concerning how he developed into such a jerk to begin with, and in a roundabout way, it seems to be tied in to why the son of an irreligious woman would choose to become a Catholic priest. Whiting's mother Lillian was a minor actress who refused to accept that age ended her career and then turned to training performing dogs to stay on stage, drfiting from town to town to ply her trade. She also split from Whiting's father when he was young. The resulting nomadic lifestyle seems to have left the younger Whiting feeling rootless and resentful of his neglectful mother. To a certain extent, Whiting's leap into the arms of the Church seems to have been the result of a desperate desire to find a stable home to live in and a stable authority figure to follow that had been denied to him throughout his childhood. But the pernicious effect seems to have been to trap Whiting in a kind of extended adolescence, so that thirty years after most men would have begun to progress into behaving like an adult, Whiting still behaves like a spoiled teenager.

The central element of the story is Whiting being asked to bless the Little Flower Circus, which brings him into contact with the vivacious and energetic troupe of performers that make up its cast. This group includes Nikolai, a trapeze artist, and Sarah's lover. The life-loving performers are clearly intended to serve as a cntrast to the washed out colorless existence of Whiting's everyday life, and after some resistance he gravitates towards them and the apparently fascinating Nikolai. Whiting finds himself among people who actually do things - they perform, they work the concession stands, they teach children their craft, and otherwise actually help people - and the inactive and ineffectual Whiting is at a loss. Whereas he is self-absorbed, the performers appear to be almost selfless. This is further highlighted by the revelation that the circus was created in large part as a cover to spirit people in danger out of oppressive countries and to safety in the United States, and though some of the performers are refugees, others are not, but took the risk to help others out anyway.

Eventually Whiting strikes up a kind of friendship with Nikolai, eventually developing an infatuation the trapeze artist (including clumsily copying a love poem onto a card to the performer, an act that Whiting, as usual, obsesses over like a love-struck preteen). This part of the novel was, to me, the least convincing element of the book because other than being told over and over again that Nikolai is a muscular man that everyone likes, there is no real reason given for the attraction, and no real reason why Nikolai would return Whiting's fumbling schoolboy crush. To a large degree, Whiting's motive seems to be little more than petty revenge at being spurned by Sarah - since she turned him down, Whiting seems bent on proving to her that he is desirable by stealing the object of her affections. I suppose one is to focus on the fact that Nikolai is a man of action, which Whiting craves, but as much of the embryonic relationship takes place out of the sight of the reader, it seems undeveloped and not a sufficient reason to result in the level of impact upon Whiting's life that Nikolai's presence is supposed to have. This may, however, be intentional, as much of the relationship between Whiting and Nikolai, like the relationship between Sarah and Whiting, may be nothing more than a figment of Whiting's imagination.

So the book rambles on with Whiting becoming more and more wrapped up in his work with the circus, at which point Jerry decides to reinforce that he is, in fact, a complete sanctimonious prick by warning Whiting not to "go down the path he's on" and should instead focus on the useless pastoral care. Whiting, since he is also a sanctimonius jerk, passes on the favor telling Sarah that her thought to leave the hospital and join the circus to do public relations work for them is ridiculous. Eventually, after he ignores his dealings with his mother for weeks several events take place that push Whiting towards his transformational moment. Whiting is told by the head of the Sisters of the Little Flower that he is being relieved of his duties for the Little Flower Circus, which, being completely self-absorbed, he interprets as an indication that they have discovered and disapprove of his infatuation with Nikolai. But when he rushes to find Nikolai, he finds him with a tear-stained Sarah. In a fit of pique, Whiting gets himself lost in a rainstorm, and stalls his car on a flooded road. After spending the night trapped, he is rescued by a good samaritan who refuses payment, an action of unselfishness that stands in stark contrast to Whiting's own selfish passivity. Finally, and probably most predictably, Whiting's mother dies just before he is scheduled to go visit her for the first time in weeks. In effect, Whiting repays his mother's years of neglect of him as a child with months of neglect for her as a dying adult.

But even the successive hammerblows of these events don't shake Whiting's self-absorbtion. In fact, at his own mother's funeral he is obsessed with the thought that Nikolai might show up. When Nikolai doesn't show up, Whiting feels slighted. But the curtain on Whiting's self-absorbtion comes crashing down - Nikolai doesn't show up because the circus is being moved to New Mexico and he had left to go to another circus in Spain. And this is why Whiting is being relieved of his duties with respect to the circus. In short, everything that Whiting was convinced was directed entirely at him turns out to have nothing to do with him. On the other hand, Nikolai proves himself to be a thoughless ass by discarding Sarah without a second thought, and Whiting is self-centered enough to feel some happiness that her life is essentially ruined, but then coraks out some sympathetic words and starts thinking about forgiveness. After a couple hundred pages of acting like a misogynistic selfish teenager, Whiting begins to ask the people around him to forgive him, which is supposed to mark the beginning of his change. Maybe I'm not a forgiving person, but at this point everyone around him should have simply told him to jump in a lake and drown himself for the good of humanity.

Dancing with Gravity is a strong case study of a really quite (one might say irretrievably) flawed and selfish human being. Through most of the book one rides along looking over his shoulder as Whiting justifies his petty vindictiveness and self-centered behavior. For most of the book you keep hoping someone will punch him in the nose. By the end, you are hoping that someone will strangle him to death. And it is the end that just didn't work for me. After Nikolai's departure, Whiting is handed a poem from the trapeze artist that is supposed to change Whiting's perspective on life. But since his relationship with Nikolai comes off as being little more than the crush of an emotionally stunted misanthrope, one doesn't feel that the poem would have any real impact on Whiting. There is a brief epilogue where Whiting has gone to South America to help one of the performers who had been hiding from a corrupt banana republic government with the circus*, but this element was just not convincing as it came so abruptly after Whiting's "big change" that the reader doesn't have time to accept a changed Whiting before one shifts to him hiding under a bridge. But even though Whiting's transformation just doesn't seem convincing, it only takes up a handful of pages at the end of the book, which means that the bulk of the book is quite strong, although it is dominated by a very unappetizing character. Despite the unconvincing ending, Dancing with Gravity is a strong book that lets one see the inside of a horribly flawed human, and while one probably won't sympathize with him, one can at least try to understand how a person who is supposed to have devoted themselves to others could be so completely devoted only to himself.

*This character bothered me. Exactly how does someone expect to hide by performing in front of hundreds of people on a daily basis? And then when he thinks he has been discovered, he flees by returning to the oppressive state the circus helped him escape from. This character, Anjo, just seems to be too stupid to believe.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

National Geographic (April 2011)
Science News (March 12, 2011)
The Economist (March 12th-18th, 2011)
The Economist (March 19th-25th, 2011)

Book Twelve: The Circle Cast by Alex Epstein.

.

Short review: The tale of Anna, also known as Morgan, between Gorlois' death and Morgan's return to Britain from exile in Ireland.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

The myth of King Arthur is probably the most pervasive myth in the English language. It has been told and retold in a myriad of different ways, each reflecting the era in which the writer lived: Arthur was written into the Mabinogion, he was the subject of the classic medieval romance of Thomas Mallory, her was used for political satire and comedy by T.H. White, and authors like Catherine Christian and Bernard Cornwell have attempted to posit a "real" Arthur and write historical fiction featuring him and his various companions and enemies. Arthur shows up in retellings of Robin Hood (connecting him with the other pervasive English myth), in science fiction epics, in bad movies like First Knight, and in decent ones like Excalibur. The arena of Arthurian myth retellings is a crowded one.

So when a new entrant in the field shows up, it has to either be brilliantly written or approach the subject matter from a unique angle in order to stand out. And finding a unique angle is getting harder and harder to do. So when he decided to write about the life of Arthur's primary antagonist Morgan le Fay, Alex Epstein was embarking upon an uphill task to make his story stand out. Even his slightly unusual angle, telling the story from the perspective of Morgan le Fay, has been more or less done in The Mists of Avalon.

Morgan is an interesting and somewhat enigmatic character in Arthurian legend. In the standard tale, she shows up as Gorlois' daughter as set dressing behind Uther's betrayal of Gorlois and seduction of Ygraine to father Arthur. Then she disappears until showing up again to have incestuous sex with her half-brother, conceive Modred, and instigate the overthrow of Camelot. But there is almost nothing in the myth about what Morgan was doing during the interstitial decades while Arthur grew to adulthood. Into this gap steps Epstein with The Circle Cast to fill in the blank years with Morgan's story.

Epstein takes a quasi-historical approach with his retelling. Gorlois is a post-Roman governor in a Britain struggling against encroaching waves of Saxon invaders, and Anna is his beloved daughter. From there, the story dances along the line between historical based fiction, mythology, and fantasy. The tone of the story seems to be "almost historical fiction", as it takes place in a Britain and Ireland that seems like it could be close to what they were like in the "real" Arthur's time, but they also seem to a be, to a certain extent, somewhat inconsistently idealized. The Irish eschew armor, not because it is expensive and most of the Irish are poor, but rather out of bravado. The Irish approach war like a giant football game, until the consequences of the battle come forward, and then they kill all of the enemy warriors, take their women as slaves, and plunder their property. They are hopelessly honorable at some times, and hard-headed realists at others. But this seems to be the result of trying to walk the fine line between a "historical" version of the myth, and the effort to capture the myth and its chivalry, romance, and magic. And for the most part, Epstein manages to walk that line successfully enough that the reader is carried along into the quasi-historical version of the story he presents.

For the period where it intersects with the basic Arthur legend, the story treads a fairly standard line: Uter lusts after Ygraine. Gorlois and Uter go to war, which ends badly for Gorlois. But while the war was underway, Uter persuades Merlin to disguise him as Gorlois so he may have a tryst with Ygraine and father a child. But beneath this story, Epstein begins to stake out the differences as Ygraine leads the women of Gorlois' army in a magical circle to call upon the divine power of Celtic goddesses to protect them and lead them to victory - and Morgan realizes that her mother's invocation failed, and of course, this is seen as contributing to Gorlois' inevitable defeat and death. But like all of the the magic described in the book, it is so ambiguous that Epstein leaves open the possibility that it is merely in the minds of the characters that magic works, and they are living in a purely mundane world. But to Anna and the people around her the magic is real, and so whether or not it is actually real is not particularly important.

It is after Gorlois' defeat that the book really gets going. To keep her safe from Uter, Ygraine send Anna to Ireland accompanied by a disgraced soldier, a Greek, and her Irish slave and nanny. And Ygraine gives Anna a new name: Morgan and tells her to find her Ygraine's kinswoman in an Ireland full of warring clans, mercurial druids, and Christian missionaries. And so begins the newly-named Morgan's long circular journey that takes her out of and back into the Arthur myth. But through it all, Morgan burns for revenge against the man who killed her father, forced himself upon her mother, and drove her into exile in a wild and uncivilized country.

Once in Ireland, Morgan is confronted by an alien culture which she has to navigate, first as a princess, then as a slave, then as a cloistered resident of the budding Christian community, and finally as a revered and feared princess and queen with magical influence and presumed fairy blood. One element that runs through the entire book is Morgan's status as an outsider. Even at the beginning of the book when she is in her father's fortress she is set apart by her understanding of the forces of magic that her mother calls upon, but is unwilling to accept. Once she flees to Ireland, she is a Briton in a country not her own, which immediately makes her an outsider, and before long she is taken as a slave and becomes the property of an outsider in the form of a village wise woman who is mistrusted and despised by the people who depend upon her expertise. And when Morgan takes refuge among the Christians, she is again an outsider, as she remains a pagan despite residing among the faithful. Even when she is taken as a princess and then a queen, her alien knowledge derived both from reading her father's books and from her connection to the pagan traditions learned from her experience as the slave of the wise woman sets her apart from her subjects. Even when she returns to what was once her home, she remains apart, much more so than when she left.

Perhaps it is her continuous separateness that makes Morgan the antagonist to Arthur's vision of Britain. Whereas Arthur heads a community symbolized by their "all are equals" Round Table, Morgan is a perpetual outsider, set apart from those around her. But through all of her lonely wandering Morgan has her hatred of Uter and her tie to the magic of the land to keep her going. But the story also shows exactly how much her desire for revenge cost her, which sets this story apart. In most versions, Morgan is set upon a course of destruction that puts her at odds with the knights of Camelot, but she merely appears as a force of wooden evil, opposing Arthur merely because she is opposed to Arthur - in one version she even tries to justify herself with the line "in Chess someone has to black the black pieces" - but here one sees every possibility laid before her that she spurned in order to pursue her desire to kill Uter, although her true enemy, and the true architect of her misery, is Merlin.

And each of the options that Epstein lays before Morgan is tempting, but not enough to replace the anger inside her. Neither the prospect of a peaceful life as a Christian, or the potentiality of being the queen of a united Ireland and mother to children with a man who loves her can turn her aside from the terrible fate that the reader knows awaits her if she pursues her course of vengeance. Of course, since the end of the story is already known, each time Morgan seems to settle in to a happy future, the reader knows that this is only an illusion that will be set aside so that Morgan can move on to her appointed destiny as the downfall of Camelot.

But despite her best efforts, the experience in Ireland changes Morgan, in ways that seem to soften her as much as they harden her. When she returns from Ireland and finds her mother had been tacitly complicit in Uter's seduction, Morgan finds herself forgiving her, perhaps a nod to the time she spend with the Irish Christian community. But when called upon to face an encroaching band of Saxons, her lessons in war making learned from her father and years spent putting them to practical use advising her husband Conall make her step into the role of a war leader seem natural. And because he has made it clear that magic is real to the characters, even if somewhat ambiguous to the reader, when Morgan unleashes her final spell, it seems real to everyone in the book, and believable to the reader.

In a crowded field, Epstein has managed to take an unusual central character, approach the subject from a somewhat unique quasi-historical angle and produce a very readable and enjoyable book. For anyone who has ever wondered how Morgan le Fay became the woman she is, this book fills in those blanks. The only weakness is that it ends too soon, just as Morgan is about to unknowingly meet her brother, leaving the reader to wonder how she gets from where she is at the end of this story to the point where she is the mother of a bastard child by her own brother and the foil for all her sibling stands for. Even so, this book is an interesting and enjoyable addition to the Arthur myth, and definitely worth reading.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (March 26th-April 1st, 2011)
Science News (March 26, 2011)
Renovation: Progress Report One (March 2010)
Renovation: Progress Report Two (September 2010)
Renovation: Progress Report Three (December 2010)

Realms of Fantasy (February 2011) (read review)
Stories included:
The Swan Troika by Richard Parks
Thirteen Incantations by Desirina Boskovich
Magpie by Mark Rigney
No Tale for Troubadours by Pauline J. Alama
The Time of His Life by Scott William Carter

Book Thirteen: Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge.

.

Short review: Jackal is the chosen scion of an insane government, gets railroaded for a crime she did not commit, and is subjected to experimental punishment.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Ren Segura, also known as Jackal, is the Hope of Ko. The fact that she is a Hope is the first indication that the world in which she lives in has gone insane. This is because the way that the nations of the world selected their respective "Hopes" is by choosing a child born on the first second of the first day of a predetermined New Year. In other words, an accident of birth results in a child be catapulted into a position that results in status, authority, and unrelenting pressure. That a child such as Segura would be placed in this position and left to be raised by a mentally unstable mother, and an indifferent father seems almost incredible. And it turns out that the insane selection criteria based upon birth time was not merely suggested, but mandated to such an extent that being born six minutes later is a huge issue sufficient to pose the risk of a ruinous scandal. So Segura starts the novel as a woman who has been placed on a pedestal for no real reason, subjected to the whims of her jealous and unstable mother, and placed under tremendous pressure to handle projects more suitable to someone with decades more experience and training than she possesses. One has to wonder why she had not cracked before the "scandalous" information about her birth is revealed. Though the novel is ostensibly about Ren's imprisonment and subsequent mental afflictions, it seems that the circumstances of her early life were damaging to begin with. In effect, Segura is already a broken person when she enters her solitary confinement.

The fact that she is a citizen of Ko, the first corporate state, is another indication that the world Segura lives in has gone insane. While it is a staple of cyberpunk to have giant multinational corporations wield enormous power and influence, it is fairly rare to have them treated like independent nations. And Ko seems to serve as an example why. Despite appearing to be a benevolent master, Ko is ruthless and, as one might expect from a corporation, displays almost no loyalty to any of its citizen-employees. In many ways, Ko is a beautiful dystopia, lovely on the surface, but horrible underneath. When a lifelong Ko employee objects to what turns out to be an inhumane project, he is quickly cashiered and his entire family stripped of citizenship to be dumped in an alien land with limited resources and a toxic resume. While the other characters express shock at this development, they all assume this is perfectly legitimate for Ko to take this action - but it highlights how a nation differs from a corporation, a nation cannot simply strip someone of their identity as a member of that nation on a whim. And a collateral question is exactly who controls Ko? Nations have governments, and in many nations the government is selected by something akin to a democratic process, giving the citizenry a say in how their nation is run. But corporations have Boards of Directors, and those Boards are selected by the shareholders. But who are Ko's shareholders? This is never really defined. A further question is exactly what sort of charter does Ko operate under - corporations are creations of law, defined by their Articles of Incorporation that are usually dictated by statute. But if Ko is a corporate-state, where do its articles of incorporation come from? On what base are they rooted?

The meat of the book does not deal with the lunatic nature of the nascent world government, or the inherent contradictions in the existence of a corporate state, but rather the life of a single individual caught in this cheerful dystopian meat grinder that consumes and nearly destroys her. Through a series of coincidences, Segura is at the wrong place at the wrong time and is accused of killing hundreds of people. Ko immediately shows its true callous and ruthless nature, coercing Segura into agreeing to plead guilty to the charges by threatening to ruin her family by revealing that her parents knew of the deception concerning Segura's birth (which Ko was complicit in, but Ko has conveniently doctored the records to hide this fact) in order to appease the Chinese government. And once again the dangers of a corporate state raise their head: Ko provides Segura with a lawyer. When it turns out that all of the exculpatory evidence that might exonerate Segura (and corroborate her version of events) has mysteriously disappeared, Ko pressures Segura to accept a plea bargain, which her attorney (paid for by Ko) also recommends. But Segura's attorney has a clear conflict of interest here: if she is beholden to Ko, and could be stripped of her citizenship and dumped into a hostile country with nothing for going against Ko's instructions, how can she give effective legal advice to Segura if Segura's interests and Ko's interests diverge? And who is going to watch over this to discipline her lawyer if they do behave unethically? In short, Ko's position as both corporation and government creates an almost inherent conflict of interest with respect to Segura's representation, but since Ko also presumably regulates that, they can hand-wave it away despite its readily apparent unfairness.

After railroading Segura, Ko secures her place in an experimental project in which prisoners are "locked" inside their own minds in accelerated solitary confinement. This was, ironically, the project Segura was to work on as project manager had circumstances not transpired to transform her into a non-citizen prisoner (and which the employee who was fired earlier in the book objected to on humanitarian grounds). So Segura exchanges forty years of conventional imprisonment for eight subjective years of solitary confinement, which will only take a handful of months of "real" time. This, it turns out, may or may not have been a wise decision. All of this is set up for the meat of the story: Segura's imprisonment and its aftermath. Despite seeming modestly benign at first glance - since it would allow the prisoner to discharge subjectively long sentences in objectively short periods of time - it seems difficult to come up with a more destructive form of incarceration. The prisoner is locked in complete isolation within their own mind, with no possibility of contacting anyone should the ordeal of being isolated from all of humanity prove to be too much to bear. Once inside the mental prison, the inmate is confined to a grey windowless cell with nothing but a cot, a view screen that plays bland, meaningless scenes, and a self-replenishing cupboard with a small amount of fairly bland food. And this tiny, completely isolated existence is to be endured for days, weeks, months, and years, with no possibility of a respite until the sentence has been completed. And if something goes wrong, there is no help. In short, it is a process almost guaranteed to mentally destroy the prisoner. And, of course, most of these details are concealed from the prisoner when they are asked to decide whether they want to participate in the experimental program (and of course, after they have been placed into solitary mental confinement, it is too late for them to change their mind).

Which leads to Segura's ordeal in prison, which Eskridge tells in a series of vignettes, taking the reader through the stages of the breakdown and reconstruction of Segura's psyche. Despite all of her advantages, Segura enters prison as a profoundly broken person: already cracking under the pressure of her status as Hope, distraught at her role, however innocent, in the death of her closest friends, estranged from her parents, thrown to the wolves by her nation, and even cut off - albeit voluntarily - from her lover. And yet Segura proves to be amazingly resilient when imprisoned, for the most part. Segura turns her training to disciplining her subjective days in order to prevent her mind from decaying out of disuse. And even so, despite her training and her rigor, Segura nearly goes insane and lets the despairing portion of her mind (which she personifies as "the crocodile") destroy and consume her. But Segura eventually overcomes this, and although the experience certainly damages her, it also heals her. Eventually, Segura unexpectedly accomplishes something that becomes her secret, and the thing that keeps her sane: she breaks out of her cell, and finds the island of Ko as her playground. Though it is uninhabited (as it is entirely within her mind), she is able to wander out of the minuscule grey cell she had spent years in to that point. It is this almost miraculous transformation of her environment that proves to be the key element of the remainder of the book.

Because, as with most prison sentences, Segura's ends, and she has to transition back into the real world as felon convicted of a notorious mass murder. But her sentence was also cut short because of unexplained and somewhat mysterious complications that arose (which an astute reader might link back to the objections to the project that led to the firing of the employee early in the book). And also, though it had been more than six subjective years for Segura, it had only been a matter of months for the rest of the world, so the terrible crime which had become attached to her was still fresh in the minds of the public. This means Segura returns from her isolation into a world in which she is ostracized, reviled, prohibited (as a felon) from living or working in most places (even if she could actually find an employer willing to hire her). But she does have something of a guardian angel that allows her to eschew the coercive offer to serve as a human lab rat. Eventually she makes contact with others who had been subjected to the same experimental isolation she suffered in a bar named Solitaire. And it is here that Segura learns that the line between reality and unreality is blurred via the psychological trauma of "aftershocks" which throw her and other veterans of the solitary experiments back into their mental cells seemingly at random. Now calling herself only Jackal, Segura must navigate her way back to real life, establishing herself with a circle of acquaintances that now consists of other criminals, pathetically desperate groupies, and the lover she thought she had lost.

In the end, it all leads back to the beginning. Though perhaps not intentional, the depiction of Ko in Solitaire is a brilliant case study in why corporations should never be accorded the status of nation states, as it acts unethically and inhumanely with no apparent meaningful check on its underhanded, deceptive, and coercive actions. Those who wonder at the mysteries of the events surrounding Segura's conviction are bound to be disappointed. Those who are only satisfied with a book in which poetic justice is served to the wicked will be dissatisfied. Because this book is not about happy fairy tale endings. It is about the harsh reality of an unjust system and an individual trying to find her way through it the best she can. In the end, though many questions remain unresolved, Segura is able to establish an uneasy truce that may allow her to do some lasting good. But even her work, which would be undeniably beneficial in the short term if successful opens the door to wider application of the technology in question, a proposition of dubious morality.

Solitaire is, if such a thing is possible, a beautiful dystopian vision of the future. Though seemingly cheerful and happy at first glance, as one delves deeper, the dysfunctional nature of the world in which Segura lives becomes apparent. Even the title "Hope", a word normally symbolizing something optimistic, is a status that warps and crushes Segura and those around her. The story, much like the name "Solitaire" is multilayered with multiple levels of meaning, and loaded with thought-provoking questions. In many ways, one of the most important elements of good science fiction is posing questions, and Solitaire raises so many sharp and incisive questions that even at the end the reader is left unsettled by how many are left lingering. Though the story is dark and depressing, in a strange sort of way it is cheerfully so. More to the point, it is a brilliant and brutal look at a deceptively happy dystopian world combined with a vivid exploration of the inner workings of a mind isolated from the rest of humanity.

This has been posted to my blog Dreaming About other Worlds.

Book Fourteen: It's Not Funny if I Have to Explain It by Scott Adams.

.

Short review: It turns out it often is funny when Adams explains it.

Long review: It's Not Funny If I Have to Explain It is a compilation of Dilbert comic strips selected by Scott Adams for inclusion. As he says in the forward of the book, he mostly picked those strips that he thought were the funniest, but also included strips that particularly offended some people, or were actually somewhat "naughty" (in Adams' estimation) but somehow slipped by the censors and the morality police. Since this is a Dilbert book, the title has to be somewhat ironic, and it is: each strip also includes commentary from Adams in which he does, in fact, explain every comic strip, often explaining why it is funny. This, despite the name of the book, often turns out to be very funny.

As usual for Dilbert the strips are filled with bitter, incisive, biting, and brutal satire about thew social ineptitude of nerdy engineers, the inanity of clueless bosses, and the evil of household pets. But through it all is the insanity of the modern workplace, which is lampooned and parodied mostly by simply showing the workplace pretty much as it actually is in reality. Okay, Adams' throws on a few flourishes here and there, like having an evil cat as the human resources director, or a megalomaniacal dog as a business consultant. But when one stops and thinks about human resources directors and business consultants, these characterizations don't necessarily seem all that far off.

The full panoply of recognizable Dilbert characters is here: Dilbert (of course), Wally, Asok, Alice, the Pointy Haired Boss, Dogbert, Catbert, and Ratbert. Even Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light makes an appearance, as do the Elbonians. Since the strips are drawn from the entire run of Dilbert up to 2004, when the book was published, almost every topic that has been covered by the strip crops up at least once - Dilbert's strange inventions, Dilbert's clueless dating attempts, Dogbert's schemes to rule the world, Ratbert's empty-headed optimism, the Pointy Headed Boss's constant buffoonish attempts to exert control over employees whose actual jobs he simply does not understand.

But this wide range of strips is also the biggest weakness of the book - because the strips are pulled selectively from the run of the comic, there are no ongoing storylines or common elements that run through any group of strips (except for those that crop up by accident because Adams returned to a particular comedy trope more than once). As a result, all of the strips featured in this compilation have to stand on their own, and the result is somewhat disjointed. Even though most comic strips have runs where all of their strips are stand alone strips, most (including Dilbert) have runs of between a handful to a couple dozen strips that form a single combined storyline. Because of the nature of this collection, this aspect is entirely missing from the strips presented here.

However, this is somewhat of a minor point. In compensation, the strips are almost all among the funniest strips created by Adams, and the commentary which accompanies each strip often serves to enhance them further. In some cases Adams merely states why he thinks a particular strip is funny, points out some quirky minor aspect of a strip, or expresses his amazement that a particular strip got by the editors given its somewhat scandalous content. Adams also talks about how people misinterpreted some of his comics (often leading to angry letter), or simply didn't "get" the jokes (leading to more angry letters), or how often he recycled the same comic idea, or even the exact same joke (which apparently didn't lead to angry letters). In short, Adams gives a small glimpse into the mind of a cartoonist, and in the process, enhances his already brilliant output.

For any fan of Dilbert, or any person who has ever had to deal with the soul destroying ennui of the cubicle farms, or anyone who has worked for a desperately moronic boss, this book is sure to provide hours of enjoyment. The only people who might not enjoy this book are likely Pointy Headed Bosses themselves, and thus immune to humor to begin with. Of course, it will hit so uncomfortably close to home, that most people will find themselves disturbed by how close to their actual workplace Dilbert seems, probably resulting in tears of anger along with the laughter.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

Science News (April 9, 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (March 2011)
Virginia Lawyer (February 2011)
The Economist (April 2nd-8th, 2011)

Book Fifteen: The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games by Michael J. Tresca.

.

Short review: An academic look at fantasy gaming tracing its roots from Tolkien through wargaming, table-top role-playing, CRPGs, MUDs, MMORPGs, and LARPS.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

The Evolution of Fantasy Role Playing Games is an academic look at the development of fantasy role-playing across multiple gaming platforms from its earliest iteration as a variant on table-top wargaming, through pen and paper role playing games (RPGs), to computer role playing games (CRPGs), to multi-user dungeons (MUDs), live-action role-playing (LARPs), and massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). He even delves into the somewhat obscure topics of play-by-mail games and interactive fiction (such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books) As one might imagine, this is an enormously broad range of topics to cover over a fairly substantial period of time. In many ways, the book tries to cover too much, and as a result, is only able to give a fairly perfunctory examination of any one subject.

Tresca starts the book by introducing his primary theme: the idea of role-playing games as a vehicle for playing in the form of a "Fellowship", as described by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring. The major theme of the book is identifying how roleplaying games built themselves upon the idea of a diversified team of individuals of differing backgrounds and disparate skills working together towards a common goal. And to this end, Tresca works his way through the full panoply of game types and assesses each in turn, devoting a chapter to each overall area. But because he devotes only ten to thirty pages of text to each topic, he is only able to cover the history and development of each one in a modestly superficial manner. For anyone who is a gamer already, the treatment given to these topics will probably be only moderately informative, covering material they probably mostly know, and for anyone who isn't a gamer the limited amount of material is likely to flash by so quickly that they won't be able to understand what arguments Tresca is making.

The book has a few other niggling problems. One is formatting, which I hope will be fixed in the final version: there are several references cited in the text, but they are merely cited by author and year, omitting the work that the reference cites to which is quite frustrating. The book also contains a fair number of pages discussing fantastical races and professions in role-playing games (heavily slanted towards the ones found in the Dungeons & Dragons game), which seemed to me like a poor use of the space. This section seemed somewhat unnecessary, and it meant that less space could be devoted to discussing the historical development of role-playing games. It seemed clear to me that Tresca was trying to support his Fellowship theory by including these descriptions to show how the differing roles players could take would complement one another, but the book is too short to fully explore this and give a historical overview of the development of gaming. Either the book should have focused on one or the other, or it needed to be substantially longer to cover such a broad range of topics.

One final weakness, which also turns out to be a strength of the book is the intensely personal nature of much of the experiences related by Tresca. Interspersed throughout the text are anecdotes about his personal gaming experiences or the gaming experiences of people he knows personally. Tresca also includes some fairly extended discussion concerning his experiences with RetroMUD, a MUD that he has participated in as a player and an administrator for several years. This adds a level of immediacy to the text without which might have been a dry and uninteresting experience to read. The drawback is that by relating these very idiosyncratic experiences, Tresca runs the risk of having the reader wonder exactly how generalized the applicability of his observations might be. After all, it is very interesting on a personal level that Tresca has spent many years helping keep a MUD going, but MUDs are fairly rare now, and even at the height of their popularity were not all that common a form of gaming. On the whole, this element enhances the effectiveness of the book, but it does come with some drawbacks.

But these moderate problems do not detract from the fact that the book identifies exactly why so many popular presentations of gaming so completely misrepresent it. By focusing on the element of collaborative play, Tresca has identified and explained the element that makes role-playing games different from so many other endeavors, and what makes them such a valuable experience for so many of the participants. In most popular fiction, where role-playing games are presented, they are usually presented as being turned into some sort of competitive sport - as an example, a scene in The X-Files in which a collection of D&D players were placing wagers on whether one of them could roll a natural twenty on his twenty-sided die - as if the writer could not imagine a game in which the players worked together towards a common goal. This is not to mention those somewhat deluded religious zealots who imagine that the players participate in order to derive some sort of occult prowess, once again the idea that people would play a game in order to work together collaboratively and for no other reason seems to be beyond the ken of non-players.

For anyone who is looking for a definitive history of the development of role-playing games, this book is likely to be a little bit of a disappointment. For anyone looking for a comprehensive treatment of the social aspects of role-playing games, this is also likely to be a bit of a disappointment. This book is neither of those things. It is a kind of hybrid that gives a rough outline of the history of role-playing games, and a brief glimpse of the social framework that these games engender. This book is more the first salvo in the effort to take on role-playing games as an academic subject, rather than the final word. As a launching point for a more complete treatment of either, this is an excellent beginning.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (April 9th-15th, 2011)
The Economist (April 16th-22nd, 2011)
The Economist (April 23rd-29th, 2011)

Book Sixteen: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin.



Short review: In the game of thrones you win or you die. Mostly people die. Oh yeah, winter is coming too, but no one really seems to care.

Long review: Once upon a time there was a writer who was tired of stories that began with "once upon a time" and had a heroic farm boy take up his destiny to save the world from an ancient and dark menace while he rescued the ingenue, restored the rightful heir to the throne, and basically kept everyone interesting alive until at least the final pages of the story, in which case a colorful secondary character might get killed in a glorious manner giving his life for a meaningful purpose. Instead, he decided to look to English history and decided that the War of the Roses was pretty brutal, and had a fairly interesting set of characters. So he came up with a fantasy kingdom called Westeros, threw in some scary winter themes and set out to write a fantasy story that was inspired by history. To make sure the parallel was obvious, he named one of the noble families the Lannisters, to remind them of the House of Lancaster, and the family that dominated the north the Starks, which seemed pretty close to the Yorks, who dominated northern England. Hadrian's Wall was made really large, and the Scots were transformed into dangerous barbarians that had to be kept at bay by a monastic order of warriors. The writer came up with a cast of interesting characters and systematically began having them kill each other off in bloody and nasty ways. And thus A Game of Thrones was born.

Although the book is told from a rotating viewpoint, with each chapter told from the perspective of a different character, generally the primary protagonist for much of the book is Eddard Stark, the Lord of the North and best friend of the reigning King Robert Baratheon. As the novel unfolds it is revealed that Eddard and Robert were instrumental in a rebellion against the "Mad King" Aerys Targaryen which resulted in Robert being crowned king after which all but two of the Targaryen family were killed. Robert was in love with Eddard's sister, but she was killed by the Mad King and instead he entered a political marriage with Cersei Lannister of the powerful Lannister family. The book kicks off with Robert journeying to visit Eddard in his ancestral fortress of Winterfell because his previous "Hand" (which seems to be a title that describes a job we would recognize as "Prime Minister"), their mutual friend John Arryn, died suddenly and Robert can trust no one except Eddard to take the job. And this is more or less simply the introductory back story to the 800 pages of back and forth intrigue and backstabbing that makes up the bulk of the book.

And the reason for the rotating viewpoint that that the book quickly splits into a number of separate stories. In some sense, A Game of Thrones is not really one book, but rather four different books melded together into one volume. In one story Eddard Stark leaves Winterfell to become the Hand of the King in King's Landing and pursue a rather clumsy investigation into the death of John Arryn. In another, Catelyn Stark leaves Winterfell to pursue a second investigation into the attempt on the life of her son, and then clumsily makes some rather foolish political blunders that start a war. In a third, Viserys Targaryen clumsily plots to raise an army on the entirely wrong continent and reclaim the throne of Westeros by marrying his sister off to a war leader among the fantasy equivalent of the Mongols. In yet a fourth, Eddard Stark's bastard son joins the Night Watch who guard the northern wall of Westeros against the eternal winter that lies beyond and discovers his new brotherhood is made up of bastards, thieves, rapists, and other criminals. The Night Watch is also the nicest and most honorable collection of characters in the novel. And even though numerous characters in the book all express how terrible the coming winter will be - in Westeros summers last for years, and winters do too, and, we are told, the snows pile up a hundred feet deep - and how awful the denizens beyond the northern wall are, no one seems to really care, and the Night Watch is understrength, under supplied, and under trained.

One element for which the book gets a lot of praise that I was not overly impressed with was the extensive detail. This is not to say that there isn't a lot of detail, but rather that a lot of the detail is not particularly interesting. At several points in the novel the book seems to devolve into little more than a list of the names of various knights or lords, or an extended description of what everyone is having for dinner. The first is what I would call false depth - it seems like the reader is being introduced to a bunch of characters, but really there is nothing other than a list with no content. And because most of these names are not actually attached to a character that the reader can get to know, the reader simply doesn't care about them. When it is reported that Jaime Lannister killed the Karstark brothers in battle, It seems that we are supposed to be angry with him, but since the Karstark brothers were little more than a pair of names tossed into a list earlier in the book, all I felt was apathy. The second is just tedious when overused, and Martin overuses it. It seems like every couple of pages someone spends a couple sentences describing the dinner they are being served. After a while describing how the characters are eating ribs crusted in garlic and herbs or a suckling pig with crispy flesh and a different kind of fruit in its mouth stops being interesting detail and just becomes clutter.

But these are relatively small complaints, and the worst they do is serve to make the book longer. Because a book that is really at least four books needs some padding. But when one peels away the chaff, what is left is a strong story about powerful but ultimately horribly flawed people doing terrible things to one another, sometimes even intentionally. And it becomes clear that even the central characters in the book are afflicted with numerous failings. The "good king" Robert who replaced the mad king Aerys turns out to be a fundamentally weak and profligate king, dreaming of glories past and undergoing the medieval version of a mid-life crisis in an effort to repeatedly prove just how manly he is. And this leads him to being easily manipulated by his duplicitous wife into engaging in some fairly reprehensible actions, as well as some fairly foolish ones that ultimately lead to his death. In fact, one wonders how he managed to live as long as he had given that when he knew that people had been plotting to kill him in a tournament, he decided to go out and engage in some other highly dangerous play a few weeks later.

Eddard, despite being fundamentally honest and honorable, seems to be fairly slow on the uptake, and his investigative efforts are pretty flimsy. To be fair, his wife Catelyn is pretty much just as sloppy with her parallel investigation concerning the assassin who threatened her son's life, accepting a fairly implausible explanation possible apparently without even verifying if the story she and Eddard are told is actually true before she sets out and starts a war with the father of Queen Cersei. Eddard, for his part, follows an almost invisibly thin trail to a conclusion of politically explosive import. The problem is that the trail of evidence is so invisibly thin that no one in their right mind would be convinced by it, but Eddard is then conveniently helped out when his supposedly crafty political opponent simply confesses the truth when he confronts her. Of course, Eddard is too dopey to make sure he has witnesses when the confession takes place, but that seems about par for the course for him. The Starks are so honorable and so clumsy at intrigue, that one wonders how they managed to hold on to their position in the North against the scheming of their opponents before the events in the book.

And the Stark dopiness extends to the most improbably dumb character in the book, Eddard's daughter Sansa who seems to have been transplanted from another book into this one. One wonders how a child in a noble house could have grown up as insipidly naive as she is throughout the events of the story. Even when it is obvious that events are not transpiring like in the romantic tales she adores, she continues to cling to the idea that they will. But one has to wonder how she got this notion to begin with. Certainly none of her siblings harbor these inane ideas, and even her mother, as as honorably impulsive as she is, is at least not blind to the realities of the world. So how Sansa came to harbor the delusions she does is a complete mystery. One might think that Eddard had simply neglected the education of his daughters, but Arya does not share her sister's moronic outlook. Sansa is selectively not alone in this to a certain extent: while the various knightly warriors in the book are shown to be mostly practical fighting men, in one pivotal scene everyone is taken aback when a mere mercenary is able to best a knight, and the implausible basis for this shock is that a noble knight was defeated by his social inferior. That such supposedly hard-bitten and pragmatic war captains would find this to be an impossibility simply strains credulity.

And this is one of the things that I think people overlook in their rush to heap effusive praise on Martin for the book: in many ways A Game of Thrones is terribly conventional. Yes, no character is safe from getting killed or maimed or tortured in some horrific way, but when he needs an out of place girl with an improbably naive outlook on life to move the story along, he throws her in. When he needs characters to improbably put together the threads of a mystery necessary to keep the story moving, they have an inexplicable "a ha" moment and the story moves forward. When he needs knights who have been ruthlessly practical to become deluded about the fighting capabilities of members of other social classes, they do. In short, the characters in the story are weirdly inconsistent because in broad strokes Martin is telling a fantasy story and he does bow to a variety of fantasy conventions, and the weird compromises he makes to do so stick out like sore thumbs in the book.

This is not to say that the book is bad. It does, however, have many commonalities with most other fantasy stories. The only real difference between A Game of Thrones and standard fantasy stories is the high body count and the fact that pretty much every character in the book is fairly unheroic most of the time. But the deaths come so fast and furious that with only a few exceptions you don't get to know the characters in question before they get stabbed in the gut, or have their arm taken off at the elbow, or their head cloven in two, or whatever other colorfully descriptive way in which they die, and as a result you just stop caring about most of them. And since any character who begins to behave heroically is almost always killed shortly thereafter as a result of their foolishness in thinking they should do something other than the purely self-interested skulduggery, there are few characters to root for. While it certainly makes for bland and predictable fantasy to have characters who are obviously heroes who overcome improbable odds without a scratch, Martin has lurched so far in the other direction that his book becomes tedious at times in the other direction. In short: a book in which everyone is a backstabbing jerk who is liable to get killed a chapter after he is introduced is just as predictable in its own way as the standard fantasy tale.

In the end, Martin has given us a very good fantasy story, albeit a fairly bloated one. Though it is not nearly as stunningly original as many of its most hardcore proponents aver, it is still a compelling and enjoyable book. With a collection of well-drawn (albeit in many cases very short-lived) characters and a collection of mostly independent stories concerning somewhat related events, A Game of Thrones delivers a good fantasy story of brutal political intrigue, shifting family alliances, and creepy walking dead men of ice, all which is wrapped up in a bloody package made of the broken and twisted bodies of characters that in another story would be living happily ever after. So if you and want your fantasy with lots of random death and no heroic farm boys fated to save the world, then this book will be sure to please your reading palate.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (April 30th-May 6th, 2011)
Science News (April 23, 2011)
Science News (May 7, 2011)
National Geographic (May 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (April 2011)

Book Seventeen: Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff.

.

Short review: Joyriding sightseers crash into the jungle. Most die. Survivors aren't harmed by natives, don't lose limbs to gangrene, don't have to live off the land.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

There is a tendency to view major world-spanning events like World War II as a macroscopic clash of civilizations as nations marshall their resources and vast fleets of ships, airplanes, and armored vehcles are arrayed against one another in epic ranks of steel and destruction. But the reality is that a vast world-spanning event is really a multitude of small, personal stories involving people living in some obscure corner of the world doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. And Lost in Shangri-La drives this point home with a mostly forgotten story about survival in the jungles of New Guinea that sparked a media sensation in 1945 during the waning months of World War II.

The story, in a nutshell, involves a group of off-duty U.S. Army Air Corps technical support personnel, including a small contingent of female personnel (in the nomenclature of World War II, these were "WAC"s, because they were part of the Women's Army Corps) who decide to take a day trip to gawk from the windows of an airplane at some natives living in an isolated valley. To get to this isolated valley requires flying in a C-47 dubbed the "Gremlin Special" at high altitude through dangerously treacherous mountain terrain with unpredictable winds. Due to a collection of poor decisions by the commander of the joyride combined with the lousy flying conditions, the plane crashes, killing most of those on board. The survivors are badly injured and must deal with inhospitable jungle and dangerous natives while a rescue effort is mounted by the U.S. Army. After the survivors endure many trials and tribulations among the stone age natives, the U.S. Army manages to get them back to civilization. Despite the subtitle of the book that includes the phrase "a plane crash into the stone age", the survivors are located so quickly, and air drops of supplies established so swiftly, that it really should have been called "a plane crash into lots of airlifted goodies".

Well, sort of. One of the interesting things about the book is just how a story that is generally as bland as the historical events detailed in its pages managed to become a major media event in a world still wracked with war. The whole book is filled with explanations of what might have happened that would have been bad for the survivors, but it turns out didn't actually happen. After they crash, Zuckoff describes how difficult it would be to locate the survivors under the jungle canopy, but they find a clearing and get located within a couple days. Zuckoff writes about how they might have been threatened by the warlike natives, but the natives turn out to be welcoming and friendly. Zuckoff writes about how the survivors' infected and gangrenous wounds might have resulted in amputation of the affected limbs or even death if medical help didn't arrive in time, but then medical help arrives in time. Zuckoff describes how dangerous the parachute jumps of the rescuing party would be, but then everyone lands safely. Zuckoff details everything that could go wrong with the plan to extract the survivors from the jungle, but then everything goes well and everyone gets home safely. Over and over, the repeated theme of the book is just how dangerous things are for the survivors, but then everything turns out fine.

But what is not really dealt with much in the book is the openly racist attitudes of the Americans, and the racist and sexist overtones of the media coverage. Zuckoff deals squarely with the racist coverage with respect to the Filipino paratroopers sent on the rescue mission. But the racism inherent in the American attitudes towards the natives is only given a moderately passing acknowledgement. And the fact that it appears that it became a huge media story almost solely based upon the racist and sexist attitudes of the day. The fact that Margaret Hastings, the lone WAC survivor, was a pretty blond white woman almost alone in a trackless jungle surrounded by dark skinned natives who just stepped out of the stone ages and who were presumed by everyone to be savage headhunters. The obvious implication was the supposed danger this fair-haired damsel in distress was in from these horrible natives who clearly could only be barely restrained from raping her. Adding to the media hoopla were the lantern jawed blond heroes whose job it was to protect Hastings' virtue from these terrible savages, but it seems fairly clear that they are only important because of their supposed role as protectors. Never mind that from context it seems pretty apparent that Hastings (and many other WACs) were sexually active, the media clearly wanted to project the idea that Hastings was a demure virgin who only remained unmarried due to her intense patriotic devotion. Also never mind that most of the heavy lifting in the rescue effort was done by the Filipino paratroopers and medics, who the media completely ignored. The Filipino medics in particular who made the most dangerous jumps of all the rescuers in order to be closer to the survivors and be able to treat them more quickly, were shamefully ignored by the American media.

But this only highlights the confused relationship the media seems to have had with this story. Hastings became a media sensation because of her obvious attractiveness, but given the mores of the era, her chastity was assumed and impliedly threatened by barbaric natives, which enhanced the salacious nature of the story. Most of the rescuers were Filipino, and thus would have been considered barely more than barbarians themselves, and thus they were left out of the media reports entirely. The attitudes towards the natives of the inaptly named "Shangri-La" valley were similarly confused. In the minds of the the American aircrews and support personnel (and thus to the world at large) the valley was mistakenly assumed to be an idyllic, peaceful enclave of natives living primitive peaceful lives. But they were also at the same time described as giants, cannibals, headhunters, and worse. In short, if there was a stereotype that could be applied to the natives, then it was. Even if it contradicted some other randomly selected stereotype. But this is only given limited attention in the book, whereas the fact that the valley had actually been discovered years before by a man named Archbold, and that Archbold's expedition had had a deadly encounter with the natives. The shooting death of one of the natives by the Archbold expedition is used in the book to provide some tension, as Zuckoff implies that the inhabitants of "Shangri-La" might have been impelled to seek revenge for this killing, but like all such dire foreshadowings in the book, this does not actually result in any additional difficulties for the stranded survivors.

Except for the crash itself, which resulted in numerous deaths, the events surrounding the crash of the gremlin Special and the subsequent rescue of the survivors don't seem to be all that exciting. Zuckoff does a good job at cataloguing all of the various interesting backgrounds of the people involved: the colorful colonel who organized the rescue effort, the paratrooper whose father was a guerilla leader in the Phillipines, the brave and committed Filipino paratroopers who followed him into the jugle on the rescue mission, a filmaker who was a former actor and petty jewel thief who parachutes into the jungle drunk, and of course the survivors - a pretty independent-minded WAC, a tough and brave officer whose twin brother was killed in the crash, and a terribly injured sergeant who shoulders manfully on through his pain. But the problem is that the colorful and interesting characters are much more interesting than the story they inhabit. Some joyriders crashed, a few survived, the Army organized a successful rescue operation that went according to plan.

Although Zuckoff's treatment of the material is thorough and comprehensive, I was left wanting more. The story of the Gremlin Special survivors, despite Zuckoff's best efforts, is, save for the crash, a fairly uneventful tale of a successfully executed Army Air Corps operation. Even the natives, who were the subject to much contemporaneous speculation and fascination, turn out to be only moderately interesting insofar as they affect the story itself. More interesting is the story of the media reaction to the news, but here it seems that Zuckoff opted not to evaluate the media frenzy from a modern perspective, and instead simply chose to report the facts without editorial comment. There is purity in that approach, but it left me thinking there is another book to be written about this aspect of the media coverage in the 1940s that delves into the changed media and social landscape. On the whole, Lost in Shangri-La is a strong, informative piece of reporting, that relates in fine detail the facts surrounding the crash of the Gremlin Special, the interactions of the survivors, natives, and rescuers, and the events that resulted in bringing the three survivors to safety.

This has been posted to my blog at Dreaming About other Worlds.

****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****

when I read A Game of Thrones a month or so ago... I knew (from reading a few reviews) that Martin liked to kill off his characters. So I was expecting it... in fact I was expecting it far more often than it actually happened. So far as I recall, only one main introduced character, in this book at least, died. That's not exactly profligate is it?

oh wait.. I remember a second one, but surely nobody was surprised or sorry about that one.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (May 7th-13th, 2011)
Poets & Writers (May/June 2011)

Realms of Fantasy (April 2011)
Stories included:
A Witch's Heart by Randy Henderson
The Sacrifice by Michelle M. Welch
Little Vampires by Lisa Goldstein
By Shackle and Lash by Euan Harvey
The Strange Case of Madeline H. Marsh (Aged 14 1/4) by Von Carr

Book Eighteen: The Veiled Web by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short review: Lucia explains what the Internet is, gets married by accident to a Muslim millionaire, gets involved in intrigue over who controls the world.

Long review: The Veiled Web is one of Catherine Asaro's few novels not set in her Skolian Empire series. It is a frustrating story that has flashes of brilliance in a somewhat sprawling tale that seems almost too big for a single novel. The story is a mashed up agglutination of cyberpunk, techno-thriller, and romance elements. As a result, it is somewhat less than focused, as it tries to cram too much into its pages, veering from sweet love scenes to cultural conflicts, software development sequences, and car chases and gunfights. Further hampering the novel is the fact that the male romantic lead seems to be a misogynistic douche bag. Despite these flaws, the novel is still quite good, with an enjoyable techno-thriller story about control over developing technology.

The main characters of the story are Lucia del Mar and Rashid al-Jazari, a Catholic professional ballet dancer and a Muslim multimillionaire software developer. The novel opens up with Lucia completing a special performance at the White House before attending a special reception and dinner where the cast of characters is introduced; a Colonel with a mysterious job in military intelligence, some luminaries in the field of software development, and the mysterious Rashid who has a conversation with Lucia that flusters her before the events of the official function separate them and she ends up being politely interrogated about him by her Colonel friend. It turns out that Lucia, despite having little formal education, is fascinated by computers and the Internet, and everyone at the dinner is talking about a rumored new "virtual reality" way to access the Internet called the "Duke's suit", although no one knows any details about it, or even who the "Duke" is.

The novel moves on and Lucia heads off with her dance troupe to Italy. It turns out that Rashid is a smitten fan who more or less stalks Lucia until she leaves a poorly progressing rehearsal and "accidentally" runs into him on the street. I say "accidentally" because Rashid later reveals that he had been following Lucia around like a puppy hoping that he would run into her. And when she does he asks her to dinner and offers her a ride back to the rehearsal. But then the techno-thriller plot intersects with the romance plot and the two get drugged and kidnapped. As part of their escape, they get married without Lucia really realizing that is what is happening, and she ends up sequestered in Rashid's father's home with Rashid's extended family.

The novel consists of two intertwined stories. On the one hand there is a cross-cultural interfaith romance in which Rashid and Lucia attempt to reconcile their differences and come to some sort of arrangement that will allow them to stay together as man and wife. On the other is a story about the development of a revolutionary new software and hardware package and the intrigues surrounding the attempts by nefarious forces to control it. The second story is pretty good, although somewhat dated. The first story isn't a bad story, but it is marred by the fact that Rashid is, for most of the story, such a misogynistic jerk that it is difficult to understand what Lucia sees in him, or for the reader to want the two to reconcile their differences and end up together.

The primary difference between Lucis and Rashid is religious - she is Catholic and he is Muslim, but each also comes from fairly different cultural backgrounds as she grew up in rural New Mexico with parents of Spanish descent while Rashid grew up wealthy in Morocco. This religious and cultural clash between the two forms the core of the love story, but time and again Rashid proves himself to be entirely unsympathetic. He brings Lucia to his family home, where we learn that the women are all sequestered from the world in a Harem, a particularly reactionary social arrangement even by Moroccan standards. When the women leave the house once a week, they must all veil themselves. This serves to isolate Lucia with Rashid's mother, older female relatives, a group of young girls and Rashid's sister-in-law Khadija, the only woman who is similar in age to Lucia. And Khadjia is a particularly sad character, since she so desperately craves female companionship from a woman her own age, but the isolation imposed upon her by Rashid's reactionary family has prevented her from maintaining any healthy adult relationships. At every turn Lucia finds herself restricted by Rashid's disapproval, from her "provocative" dress to her desire to continue her dancing career to her wearing of a crucifix to symbolize her own faith. Although Rashid talks about his vision of cultures and religions meeting at a crossroads and working together, it is clear that he doesn't actually feel the need to put this into action in his own life, as he is singularly unwilling to compromise on almost any point in his relationship with Lucia.

Time and again rashid uses the lame excuse that these limitations on women are simply "part of his culture". But it seems clear that for the most part the extreme restrictions that Rashid expects Lucia to live under are not part of his culture, and to the extent they are, are rapidly being eroded. Rashid has two sisters who are referenced in the story, but both left the family house and live lives as independent and modern women. As he admits, the harem-based isolation of the women in his family is unusual even in Morocco. And so on. But even if it were part of Rashid's culture to isolate and control women, why would that make one sympathetic with him? The men in Rashid's family are certainly free to do whatever they choose to do, and Rashid was perfectly willing to ogle Lucia in her skimpy outfits when she was a professional ballet dancer. However once he is married to her his attitude changes completely, as he disapproves of her wearing anything more revealing than an ankle length neck-high dress even around the family home. Presumably his brothers would lose control of themselves if they saw her in anything more revealing. This double standard makes Rashid seem entirely unlikable, and throughout one wonders what Lucia sees in him that makes him attractive as a potential mate other than his handsome face. Granted he is wealthy and a computer genius, but Lucia clearly has had many opportunities to acquaint herself socially with men who have those qualities and chose not to avail herself of them. As a result, Lucia seems quite shallow, swallowing a pile of restrictions because a handsome man has stalked her and then married her.

And we learn that Rashid had been previously married and divorced to a fellow student when he lived in Britain to earn his advanced degrees in the study of computers. In his previous marriage his wife apparently did not accept the restrictions Rashid seeks to impose on Lucia, and Rashid did not attempt to impose them upon her. But Rashid also says they fought constantly. Rashid also says he is unsure around women, and inexperienced. And it is at this point that the reader understands the source of Rashid's creepy controlling behaviour: he and his male relatives are terrified of women. A woman who is independent and has a mind of her own is simply too frightening for them to deal with. So they hem the women they allow near them in with restrictions and limitations. And Rashid is spectacularly inflexible, refusing to allow even small deviations from the accepted rules, and even refusing to consder a compromise where they would live part of the year in Morocco and part of the year in the United States. In short, through the novel Rashid behaves like a petulant spoiled child, and one wonders why Lucia wastes any time even considering staying married to him.

Running in parallel to this dysfunctional romance is the story of Rashid's creation Zaki. It turns out that Rashid is fabulously wealthy, at least in part because he designed the interactive web browser software known as "websparks", which is widely used, and in fact used by Lucia at the start of the book. Websparks seems to be a learning piece of software that adapts itself to its user's preferences by learning from what the user does and guiding the user through the Internet. As an aside, the elements of the book related to the Internet reveal the dangers of writing a science fiction book set in the near future, as they have become horribly dated. At one point the narrative explains to the reader what the World Wide Web is, an explanation that was probably only marginally necessary in 1999 when the book was published, and seems almost ridiculous now. The book dates itself even more when explaining how Lucia cruises around the web linking up with long-dead services CompuServe, Prodigy, and GEnie even though the book is ostensibly set in 2010. Not being able to predict the future is not a failure on the part of an author, but it does make the book age poorly, and in this respect this book suffers in that regard.

Once Lucia awakens at Rashid's family compound, she discovers that not only is he the fabulously wealthy developer of websparks, but that he has been working on a new sort of interactive web interface software that provides an artificial intelligence to act as a virtual tour guide for the user coupled with a virtual reality suit to insert the user into an artificially created web reality. It turns out that Rashid, through a bit of rhyming slang, is the "Duke", and Zaki is the software that is supposed to power the "Duke's Suit". Unfortunately, Zaki is also unstable, making the Duke's Suit unusable and consequently unmarketable. While Rashid jaunts off to take care of family business on a regular basis, leaving Lucia isolated in the al-Jazari harem, Lucia sneaks into his computer laboratory and tries to figure out what is wrong with Zaki that causes the program to collapse intermittently. But Lucia's efforts reveal more about Rashid, and what is revealed does not make him seem any more attractive.

One reason for Zaki's stunted growth is apparently that Rashid has limited the access the program has to the Internet. This has prevented Zaki's self-learning program from assimilating the information necessary to develop properly. But because Rashid is apparently a control freak, he seems to have not considered turning Zaki loose on the web on his own. It is up to Lucia, bored out of her mind while stuck living in the claustrophobic confines of the harem, to circumvent Rashid's disabling of Zaki's access to the web and allow him to develop towards becoming a fully functional artificial intelligence, or at least towards being a self-learning web browser that doesn't routinely crash. Apparently it takes Lucia, a self-taught computer aficionado with no formal training to figure out the problem that has stumped Rashid, supposedly a computer genius with a doctorate in the study of artificial intelligence, which seems mostly explainable by Rashid's inability to give up any control at all. This dovetails with Rashid's character traits revealed in the romance storyline, but it also raises the question as to whether Rashid is the sort of person that one would want to have this sort of technology.

And this is an important question, because the intrigue portion of the novel involves mysterious forces trying to seize control of Zaki and use him for nefarious ends. But despite his lip service towards harmony and understanding, Rashid seems less than capable of actually putting those ideals into practice. And his controlling nature, combined with his culturally driven misogyny makes him seem like a less than appealing character to be the person who influences the entire web. Lest one think that these factors don't really matter, it is clear that Zaki has internalized Rashid's own prudish medieval attitudes towards women, refusing to work with Lucia until she convinces him that as Rashid's wife, she is essentially his mother. But if Zaki internalizes an aversion to working with women on his own, this would seem to severely limit his usefulness as a web browser, or tour guide for half of the population of the world. And if exposure to Rashid has caused Zaki to internalize this sort of reactionary attitude towards women, one wonders what other less than desirable character traits the program had also picked up. And as a result, when the shadowy villains show up to try to wrest control of Zaki away from Rashid, it doesn't have quite as much impact as one might think, because in the back of the reader's mind, one is wondering whether they are any worse than Rashid would be.

One might think that a story in which the male lead engenders such ambivalence would be a poor book. One would be wrong. Despite the fact that for much of the book one is rooting against Lucia and Rashid ending up together, mostly because it is clear that he is clearly a poor choice for Lucia as a partner, The Veiled Web is a well-written exploration of cultural conflict and how that affects both interpersonal relationships and the potential interconnected world that the web might create. Though I think that Asaro was trying to show what a world in which Western Christianized culture and Middle-Eastern Islamic came to a mutual compromise to forge a future in which the two sides could coexist successfully, she portrayed the reactionary and objectionable nature of Rashid's viewpoint so effectively that I was left wondering why any woman would willingly consent to living in a draconian regime like the one endured by his mother and sister-in-law, and which he seeks to persuade Lucia to accept. In the end, Rashid has something of an epiphany, but is seems unconvincingly motivated, and even the compromise he comes to accept seems to be hypocritical at best, and impinge upon what should be the norms of how women are treated in a modern society. The intricacies of the romance is coupled with the fight for control over the future of the web to demonstrate just how critical the parameters of what is socially acceptable truly is - if Lucia and Rashid, who are falling in love, must navigate a minefield of cultural differences and misunderstandings before ultimately coming to what I regard as a dangerously reactionary compromise, then it is apparent how critical it is that the rest of us preserve our rights in the face of those who hold views inimical to them, and who might seek to limit our freedoms, both the obvious, such as the villains of the story, and the subtle, such as the superficially benign Rashid. Asaro has highlighted that whoever controls the culture that drives access to the Internet will determine the culture of the world in the future, a potentially frightening thought. Like most good science fiction this story raises a multiplicity of questions, but provides very few answers, resulting in a troubling but quite interesting reading experience.

This has been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Nineteen: Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 120, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2011) by Gordon van Gelder (editor).



Stories included:
Home Sweet Bi'ome by Pat MacEwen
The Bird Cage by Kate Wilhelm
The Bogle by Albert E. Cowdrey
The Ghiling Blade by Matthew Corradi
Long Time by Rick Norwood
Canterbury Hollow by Chris Lawson
Christmas at Hostage Canyon by James Stoddard
The Whilrwind by Jim Young
Paradise Last by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg
12:02 P.M. by Richard A. Lupoff
Ghost Wind by Alan Dean Foster

Science fact articles included:
Science: Seeking Glorious Transits by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy

Long review: Pending.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (May 14th-20th, 2011)
The Economist (May 21st-27th, 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (May 2011)

Book Twenty: Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short review: An evil genius creates the next stage in human evolution.

Long review: Sunrise Alley is a near future cyberpunkish romance featuring cybernetics expert Samantha "Sam" Bryton and recently dead human-machine hybrid Turner Pascal as the focal couple. The story follows two broad and mostly intertwined plots, the first involving Turner's flight from and conflict with the shadowy villain Charon, and the second involving Sam and Turner's budding romance which is complicated by the fact that Turner may not be human, and at many turns clearly does not behave like a human, points that are clearly difficult ones for Sam to overcome. Connecting the two plots is the question of whether Turner is a human or a machine - is he merely property, as Charon regards him, or is he a sentient and free-willed individual with the right to be treated as such, as Turner himself insists.

The story starts with Bryton living in semi-isolation in her cabin and its beach front property, having given up a high paying job as a developer of AIs and EIs ("Artificial Intelligences" which are capable of independent thought, but are not sentient, and "Emerging Intelligences", which are independent and at least plausibly sentient) over ethical concerns. While she is walking on her beach, a half-dead unconscious man washes by, who she promptly rescues. She quickly learns his name is Turner Pascal, and he was not merely half-dead, but he had recently recovered from being wholly dead. And then she learns that he was reconstructed as a cyborg human-machine hybrid by an insane and cruel genius Pascal can only identiy as Charon, and that Turner intentionally sought Sam out after escaping from his imprisonment because she had been publicly sympathetic to the rights of EIs in the past.

But Turner insists that he is neither an AI or an EI, and is not a human-form android, or, in the vernacular of the story, a "forma", but is rather a human and fully entitled to all of the rights of a human. After some negotiating, Sam agrees to try to get Turner to safety and first contacts an academic friend of hers with expertise in EIs as well as an Air Force General who has been a kind of surrogate father to her after her own father's death and who happens to be in a command of the Air Force that is tasked with dealing with issues related to artificial intelligence. But no sooner than they leave to travel to the airport in Sam's souped up car, but they find themselves pursued by unknown forces, presumably working at the behest of Charon, who Turner is convinced can track the entire world "mesh" (a sort of advanced form of internet that permeates the daily lives of just about everyone on the planet) and thus was able to locate him as soon as Sam began making calls about him. Much of the tension in the book is driven by the unknown nature of Charon - neither Turner nor Sam know who Charon is (in fact, Sam has never heard of him, which surprises those she comes into contact with, and becomes a minor, although not very convincing plot point later in the book), and neither know exactly how long his reach is. Because of this, Sam and Turner never know who to trust, as anyone they try to seek aid from could be the nefarious Charon, even those that Sam thinks are her closest friends.

Though Charon is a background menace for much of the book, lurking in the shadows and operating through others, it is his relationship with Turner, contrasted with the developing relationship between Turner and Sam that drives the interesting question of the book. Turner is legally dead. Much of his body has been replaced by cybernetics. His vastly increased power needs are satisfied with an implanted microfusion reactor. His brain has been replaced by a distributed network of neural circuitry. In short, just about the only parts of Turner that remain "Turner" from before his death are his memories. So the obvious dilemma is how much of a man can be replaced before he is no longer a person? Charon seems to consider Turner to be property, whereas Sam in interacting with Turner comes to regard him as not merely a person, but as a potential partner. The only real weakness in this storyline is that Sam's infatuation with Turner seems somewhat less than convincing - other than the fact that Sam thinks Turner is pretty, and he makes for a fascinating science project for her, there seems to be little connection on a romantic level between the two characters.

And in a world in which we can already implant devices to keep our hearts going, and replace lost limbs with electronic ones responsive to nerve impulses these sorts of questions are likely to loom large. I have no idea if we will ever be able to replace a human brain with a copy that has been placed into some sort of computer driven memory, but it is not entirely implausible. And then those who believe in qualia or other theories of transcendent consciousness will have the dilemma of whether someone whose claim to identity rests upon the stored memories of a person is still that person, or whether something irreplaceable was lost in the transition from biological machine to electronic machine. And of course, that's exactly the situation Turner is in Sunrise Alley. Complicating matters is the fact that in the transformation Turner has acquired some decidedly non-human characteristics: he is able to transform himself, and goes so far as to reform his hand into an eight-fingered metal interface early in the book. But this change is only the outward manifestation of what is a more significant change - Turner chose to reform his hand into an eight digit member because he was more comfortable thinking in hexidecimal. Over and over again the change in Turner is highlighted, and throughout Turner insists that he is still himself despite these changes.

The story draws the reader along, exposing the changes in Turner step by step, peeling back each layer of the differences between Turner and a natural human progressively. And each step of the way Asaro reveals just enough to allow Bryton (and thus the reader) to become comfortable with the idea that despite his changed nature Turner is still human. Eventually, Turner and Bryton seek refuge with "Sunrise Alley", a mythic organization of escaped and "free" EIs, bringing them into an environment made by machines for machines, with no reference to any human concerns, extending the question of what constitutes a person to its furthest possible point. But even this refuge is fraught with danger, both because it is possible that it exists merely as a front for the evil Charon, and because even if it is not, a paranoid inhuman intelligence afraid of being discovered may not be kindly disposed to the human Bryton and the presumed human Turner. But at the same time, the story makes the case for even this possibly malignant, completely machine driven intelligence, being a sentient being that should be treated as a person.

The story progresses towards its multiple resolutions - Charon is confronted, Sam and Turner's nascent relationship develops, the question of Turner's status is brought to the fore, as is the status of the now-revealed Sunrise Alley. And each of these elements intertwines with the other, some in interesting ways: Charon's claims to ownership of Turner are somewhat ironic given the revelations of Charon's own nature that come to light. And Turner's claims to autonomy and personhood form a stark contrast to Charon's - while Turner shows he can at least manifest the appearance of empathy and love, Charon seems to be incapable of either, raising the obvious question of which one is more human. But even after the thriller portion of the plot is resolved, the characters don't ride off into the sunset to a happy ending - Asaro then brings the very real questions concerning the legal status of the characters into focus.

Sunrise Alley is an interesting look at the nature of what makes someone human. Exactly how much of a person can be replaced and have the result still be regarded as that person? With the exception of the somewhat weak nature of the romantic storyline and a wholly unconvincing and mostly extraneous memory-loss subplot that crops up late in the book, the book is well-executed, with a strong story full of intrigue, dramatic tension, and a fascinating exploration of what counts as human, or more broadly, what counts as a person.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (May 28th-June 3rd 2011)
National Geographic (June 2011)
Science News (May 21, 2011)
The University of Virginia Magazine (Summer 2011)
Mason Spirit: A Magazine for the George Mason University Community (Spring 2011)
Renovation: Progress Report Four (April 2011)

Book Twenty-One: Alpha by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short review: Charon is gone, but Alpha remains. But is Alpha sentient or merely a machine? And will General Wharington fall in love with her or be killed by her, or both?

Long review: Alpha is a sequel to Sunrise Alley that follows directly after the events of the first book. The primary characters are Alpha, an autonomous forma (as humaniform androids are called in Asaro's fictional future) created by Charon to act as his primary lieutenant, super soldier, and sex toy and General Thomas Wharington, an Air Force General who is part of the military command tasked with dealing with issues related to Artificial and Emerging Intelligences. Both Alpha and Wharington appeared in Sunrise Alley as secondary characters, but in Alpha they are promoted to the focal point of the story, with Alpha becoming the title character. As with Sunrise Alley, the story features high-intensity action and a romance that highlights questions concerning the personhood of one of the participants. Whereas Sunrise Alley asked how much of a man could be replaced and have him still be considered human, Alpha takes the next step and poses the question of whether a wholly artificially created individual can be considered human, or is merely a machine.

In Alpha, Alpha, the presumed to be masterless forma, is being held by the Air Force, which is trying to figure out what to do with her. The decision is complicated by the fact that Alpha has seemingly imprinted upon the handsome Wharington (who she says reminds her of Charon), and she will only work with him. Meanwhile, the senior members of the Air Force want to dismantle Alpha, a prospect that horrifies Wharington and raises the central question of the novel: is Alpha a person, or is she property? Alpha is more or less a male fantasy. Beautiful, deadly, and hypercompetent she was designed by Charon to act as his most trusted aide and to service him sexually. Wharington, for his part is a handsome and manly seventy year old Air Force pilot still full of idealism and patriotism with a healthy sense of honor and duty. He is a widower with a strained relationship with his adult children and a genius granddaughter that he dotes upon. He also has heart trouble, underwent rejuvenation therapy to reduce the impacts of aging, and is a surrogate father to Sam Bryton, the female protagonist of Sunrise Alley.

With Charon presumed dead following the events of Sunrise Alley, Alpha is taken into custody by the Air Force, which regards her as a valuable source of intelligence about Charon's operations and plans. Alpha, for her part, insists on working solely with Wharrington, but refuses to provide any information, asserting that she is bound by her programming to act in accord with Charon's wishes, but hinting that Wharington might replace Charon as her master. Wharington, for his part, urges Alpha to think for herself and make the leap from being an AI to being a free willed EI capable of transcending her programming and making decisions unfettered by the desires of her creator. Alpha's intransigence, however, is frustrating to Wharington's superiors who push to have her dismantled and her neural net examined directly for intelligence - which would both destroy Alpha (obviously) and result in far less intelligence gained concerning Charon's plans, but would have the advantage of providing at least some information immediately.

This is all more or less just background, including Wharington's interactions with his granddaughter who proves to be remarkably precocious and a cameo appearance by Sam Bryton in which she talks about AI psychology and how brilliant Wharington's granddaughter is (a subplot that doesn't really go anywhere). The story really gets going when Alpha escapes from custody and attempts to kidnap Wharington and his granddaughter, leading Wharington to make a rather futile attempt to resist her resulting in a broken leg and a heart attack. The heart troubles and the broken leg serve to hamper Wharington for the rest of the book, which I suppose was necessary to explain how a seventy year old man could be kidnapped by an engineered super soldier when Alpha shows up for a second time and forces him into a privately owned incredibly technologically advanced warplane and flies him off towards Africa.

Circumstances force the pair to land on a tiny uninhabited island in the Atlantic that happens to have a conveniently placed abandoned bungalow for the two to shack up in. Once there, a sort of odd romance begins to bud between the forma and the General as Wharington attempts to persuade Alpha to overcome her programming and develop desires of her own and Alpha continues to lust after Wharington because of his vague resemblance to Charon. The nascent romance focuses the book on the central question of Alpha's humanity as Wharington wrestles with his attraction to Alpha and questions whether one can have actual feelings towards what is quite possibly nothing more than a very finely crafted machine, and whether Alpha herself could actually have feelings for him. Though the romance is packed with philosophical questions, it is the weakest element of the book, since Wharington's desire for Alpha seems to be founded on little more than the fact that she is incredibly sexy and he lusts after her. Wharington's background - his patriotism, his duty, his honorability, his love for his family, and so on - provides numerous obstacles in the path of his realization of his feelings for Alpha, but there is little that explains his attraction to her other than the fact that she is beautiful and can kick his ass without breaking a sweat.

Eventually Alpha and Wharington consummate their relationship with a little bit of late night android-human sex. In an unrelated turn of events, Wharington suffers another heart attack and while he is being nursed back to health by Alpha the supposedly dead Charon shows up to reclaim Alpha's loyalties. At this point the story gets somewhat implausibly silly as Charon emulates a James Bond type villain by trying to kill Wharington in "sporting" ways that, of course, allow Wharington to survive and work against Charon. Given that Charon is supposed to be a ruthless mastermind capable of building a globe spanning empire of wealth and power that is a threat to the entire world order, this sort of cackling villain who sets death traps for his enemies instead of just shooting them in the head seems out of place. This sort of behavior seems to transform Charon from a criminal genius to an insane lunatic who just got lucky. I suppose that this could be explained by the fact that Charon has been copied so many times that the current version is just a degraded imitation of the original, but that isn't mentioned in the book, and no one, including Alpha, seems to think that Charon's behavior is out of character.

After Charon is defeated, Wharington freed, and Alpha turns sentient, Alpha offers Wharington the choice to be her remanufactured immortal lover in blissful exile or return her to Air Force custody. Given that Wharington is described throughout the book as being an intensely honorable and patriotic soldier, there isn't any real doubt as to which choice he will make, but he does go through some obligatory agonizing first. Though the story in the book is interesting, as one might gather from these elements, it is not particularly surprising. The hero defies death and escapes. The villain is defeated. The potentially sentient AI actually does become sentient and free-willed. The honorable soldier acts honorably. And so on. (I wonder how many science fiction stories that feature the potential of evolving machine intelligence making the leap to free-willed sentience have story lines in which the machine does not become sentient. I don't recall any.) Once back in the comfortable arms of the Air Force, Wharington urges Alpha to seek the aid of Sunrise Alley, which she proves reluctant to do. This leads to an appearance by a Sunrise Alley representative in which all is revealed, a last gasp by Charon's organization, and a relatively tidy ending in which everyone lives happily ever after.

Alpha is a relatively decent "machine becomes sentient" story interlaced with a good action adventure story and a fairly dull romance story. While the questions related to the legal status of machine intelligence are well done, and the story is thematically the logical next step in the path begun in Sunrise Alley, both Alpha and Wharington are so bland as characters that their romance is not all that interesting. Further hampering the novel is the cartoon-like nature of Charon as the primary villain and the somewhat predictable nature of the plot. Despite these flaws, the fundamental question of the story concerning who is entitled to be treated a person as opposed to property is presented in a strong enough manner that the book as a whole remains quite good.

This has been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Please stop reading so many magazines and read more BOOKS! Loving the long reviews--your review of the George Martin perfectly captured my ambivalence toward the book, and I love the review of The Veiled Web and am waiting your long reviews of the the other Asaros impatiently. I've read a few of her early Skolian books.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (June 4th-10th, 2011)
The Economist (June 11th-17th, 2011)

Book Twenty-Two: Barcode Booty by Steve Weber.

.

Short review: Buy crap cheap and sell it for a profit on line.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: Barcode Booty is a short but informative guide that outlines how to use a variety of price comparison applications available for smart phones like the iPhone and the Droid to scout for material to sell on Amazon, eBay, and similar websites. Though most of the book is dedicated to evaluating, comparing, and explaining these sorts of applications, the book also gives pointers on what to do with the stock one acquires. As the book is fairly short with only 150 pages of text plus an index, the advice is fairly basic, giving little more than an outline of how to set up a home-based online sales business.

The advice contained in the book boiled down to its essential message is simple: find and buy things cheaply that are in high demand on the internet and resell them for a profit. The wrinkle in the book is that it advocates using a variety of smart phone applications like scandit, pic2shop, or RedLaser to scout for products, comparing the price they can be found for at discount retailers with the price they can be potentially sold for online. This methodology, Weber explains, allows the online reseller to be assured that they will be able to make their investment back and turn a profit as well.

The book starts with Weber talking about his own personal experiences as an online reseller, kicking off with an amusing little anecdote about shopping with his son in tow and then explaining how he got started selling used books online and then branched out to other products. Then the book evaluates a number of popular barcode reading applications, explaining their individual attributes and explaining their individual usefulness - one element that becomes clear is that an online reseller who relies upon one of these applications exclusively is probably missing out on useful information and hampering their efforts unnecessarily.

The book proceeds to warn readers about potential scanning pitfalls, including the potential social pitfalls, and then discusses what sorts of other uses these sorts of devices can be put to. The book goes on to describe some more advanced devices and applications that could be of use to the dedicated reseller, evaluating the various resale platforms that are available, how to use options to outsource fulfillment (and when outsourcing your fulfillment would be a good idea), suggestions for where to hunt for inventory, and a basic outline of legal issues that are associated with running a home-based business of this type.

Weber has three other books on the market, all focused on reselling items online: Sell on Amazon, eBay 101, and The Home-Based Bookstore. I have not read any of them but if they are as straightforward as Barcode Booty they should be fairly informative for anyone interested in engaging in internet arbitrage. The only question that this raises in my mind is whether Weber's success is more the result of reselling items on eBay or his ability to sell "how-to" books to people who aspire to resell items on eBay. This does raise one cautionary element though - reselling products online is not a new idea at this point. Books like Weber's are useful to someone interested in the business, but they also serve to increase the volume of competition.

While much of the information contained in this book is probably old hat to anyone who has engaged in reselling products online, for anyone who is interested in trying to get started this is probably as good an introduction as one might find. One thing Weber makes clear is that this is not a "get rich quick" scheme. While there appears to be money to be had, there is clearly considerable work involved. Anyone who is inclined to attempt to engage in online arbitrage should be prepared to spend considerable hours hunting through discount stores, library book sales, and other locations locating bargains to convert into resale opportunities. But for anyone who is willing to put in the work, Barcode Booty clearly and concisely outlines a basic path that should prove to be potentially lucrative.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Twenty-Three: Cobb's Legion Cavalry by Harriet Bey Mesic.

.

Short review: A detailed history of a single Confederate cavalry unit with a definite editorial slant.

Long review: Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Cobb's Legion Cavalry is a detailed unit history of a single unit of Confederate cavalry that served mostly with the Army of Northern Virginia during the U.S. Civil War. The level of detail included in the book is impressive, with an almost day by day recounting of the activities of the unit, a roster of all the officers and enlisted men who served in the unit giving as much of their prior history, service record, and life following the war as could be found., and various other sundry details concerning the unit. Unfortunately, the book is marred by a pervasive and relentless editorial bias that renders many of the glowing tributes paid to the men in the unit seem hollow and forced.

About half of the book is taken up with a detailed account of the doings of Cobb's Legion Cavalry during the U.S. Civil War. Originally raised as part of a combined arms unit under a theory that was quickly discarded, the cavalry portion of Cobb's Legion, officially designated the Ninth Georgia Volunteers, was quickly detached from the artillery and infantry portions and combined with the rest of the Confederate cavalry in Virginia. The book first discusses the recruitment of the soldiers and the Confederacy's process of equipping them with horses and appropriate gear, or rather, the Confederacy's process of asking them to provide their own horses and its struggles to provide firearms, ammunition, and rations. The details her illustrate one of the primary difficulties faced by the Confederacy - the lack of an effective quartermaster system, which plagued the Southern forces from the beginning of the war throughout the conflict until its bitter end. This inadequate supply is cited as evidence of the heroism of Confederate soldiers, but what it really demonstrates is the dysfunctional nature of the Confederacy. After detailing the unit's organization, the narrative launches into a detailed accounting of the actions of the cavalry, reporting on every movement and engagement, including a regular casualty report listing which those members of the unit who were wounded, captured, or killed on that particular day or handful of days described in the given entry. This form of narrative is somewhat interesting, as it gives a view of the flow of history from a very specific viewpoint - confined to the actions of a single unit, but it also contains some limitations, being both to large and too small. To large because it is difficult to get a feel for any individual member of the unit making it difficult to generate empathy for them, and too small because it is easy to lose track of the larger events of the war amidst the details, and consequently many events lose necessary context. Even so, the level of detail provided is impressive, even though it is quite possible to easily get lost int he details if one is not familiar with the broader events of the military actions in Virginia, and later, in the Carolinas.

Following the detailed unit action report, the book contains a comprehensive listing of all the members of Cobb's Legion Cavalry complete with a thumbnail biography of each individual. The first appendix contains biographical information about the various commanding officers who led the unit, followed by a listing of every known individual who served in any capacity at any time with this cavalry, and then a listing of all of the original members who joined when it was originally formed. Also included are lists of those members who were surrendered at the end of the war, those who were killed in action, those who were taken as prisoners of war, and those who were listed as deserters. The sections that are primarily of interest are the first two giving biographical data about the members of the unit, because the remainder are simply lists of names, and are probably of limited interest to anyone not specifically tracing the fate of a particular soldier. The biographical data generally includes the particular soldier's enlistment date, his rank, what the unit records say happened to him, and in many cases a brief bit of background information about that soldier's life before and after their time serving with Cobb's Legion. This section boasts a wealth of detail, but as it is simply an alphabetical listing of the soldiers, there is no real way to get a feel for the structure of the unit, or the connections between the men. Anyone looking for the records relating to a particular soldier, such as a descendant seeking information about their forebear, will likely find this section quite useful. For most other readers it will likely be little more than a curiosity as a source of exacting detail.

But all of this wealth of detail is rendered somewhat less useful by the obvious editorial bias that runs through the presentation of the book. There are few issues in U.S. history more contentious than the U.S. Civil War. But the primary reason for the contentiousness is Confederate apologists trying to salvage some sort of honorability for their preferred side in the conflict. Mesic is no exception to this - from the outset she describes the men who served in Cobb's Legion as "fighting for Southern freedom from Northern tyranny". But this is just an attempt to divert attention from the fact that the side they were fighting for was tied to a repugnant cause. Confederate apologists have tried to argue that their forebears were fighting for something noble and idealistic, but the bare fact remains that when the Confederacy was formed, its Constitution only differed from the U.S. Constitution insofar as it enshrined ironclad protections for slavery. In short, the men of Cobb's Legion, like the men of all Confederate units, were fighting against a "tyranny" that sought to compel them to eschew treating other human beings as chattel. They were fighting for "freedom", but a freedom so narrowly defined that it removes any moral claims they might have had to fighting "civilized war" (even though those claims were somewhat dubious to begin with). Fighting in favor of slavery is inherently uncivilized. Supporting an army fighting in favor of slavery is inherently uncivilized. Complaining that your property has been destroyed when you seek to hold others as property is a stance that is hypocritical in the extreme. Confederate boosters try to argue that their cause was for "States Rights", but the brute fact remains that the only right they chose to advocate for was the right to hold other men in bondage.

For the most part, Mesic's litany of Confederate apologetics are a fairly standard set. J.E.B. Stuart's Chambersburg Raid is lauded as an example of gallantry and daring. Never mind that militarily it was mostly a failure because they were unable to destroy the Chambersburg rail bridge. Never mind that one of the major accomplishments of the raid was capturing unarmed civilians to hold as hostages. Because it was Confederate cavalrymen, they were dashing and brave and it was a brilliant maneuver. One suspects, given the descriptions given the Union cavalry movements that a similar effort on the part of the Federal troops would have been described as a futile waste of lives. Confederate frontal charges are described as bold and gallant. Union frontal charges are described as useless and costly foolishness. The blundering errors made by J.E.B. Stuart during the days leading to and during the Battle of Gettysburg are glossed over and recast as brilliant strategic decisions. By the end of the recounting of the events of the War, Mesic is reduced to lauding the brilliance of an excursion forced upon the Confederate cavalry to steal cattle to supply the starving Southern troops.

Mesic saves most of her opprobrium for Grant and Sherman, who Confederate apologists loathe, mostly because, as Mesic demonstrates, they still don't understand how these two men served as the agents of the destruction of their beloved Confederacy. Mesic consistently disparagingly refers to the large casualties suffered by the Union during Grant's Overland Campaign, but fails to place them in context. For example, she refers to the Confederate troops as the "victors" of the Battles of Wilderness and Spotslyvania Cout House, and from a very technical tactical standpoint one could argue that they were, but by focusing on this narrow technical definition one misses that the "victories" were meaningless. In the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House the Union suffered 18,399 casualties and the Confederacy 13,421 and "held the field". In raw terms, this seems to show that the Confederacy got the better of the engagement, but as a percentage of their forces the Union casualties amounted to 17.5% of Grant's forces, and 22.4% of Lee's. And Lee couldn't afford the casualties. When one looks even more closely, the figures are even more disastrous for the Confederate cause - broken down the Union losses were 2,735 killed, 13,416 wounded, and 2,258 captured or missing while Confederate losses were 1,467 killed, 6,235 wounded, and 5,719 captured or missing. Union losses were mostly men wounded, many of whom would recover and return to the ranks, Confederate losses were mostly permanent losses. The "missing in action" figures are the most telling: despite the steady drumbeat of Confederate propaganda that the boys in grey were willing to fight no matter the odds, it is clear that they were surrendering or deserting in droves. With the exception of the Battle of Cold Harbour, most of the battles of the Overland Campaign had similar results - the Battle of the Wilderness for example, resulted in 17,666 Union casualties (16.8% of the Union force), and Confederate casualties totaled 11,125 (18.5% of the total). Grant beat Lee on the battlefield because Lee burned his forces faster than Grant, despite what Confederate apologists will tell you. More to the point, despite "holding the field", the Confederate victories did nothing to stop the Union advance into Virginia, rendering their supposed accomplishments hollow and empty.

But Mesic completely misunderstands the nature of Grant's campaign when she discusses his eventual crossing of the James River. She notes that the Army of the Potomac had suffered 60,000 casualties by then, whereas Grant could have placed his forces in that position via ship transport without suffering any casualties. This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Union strategy assuming that positioning the Union army to threaten Richmond was the primary goal of the Overland Campaign, as opposed to the destruction of the army of Northern Virginia. Grant certainly could have repeated McClellan's maneuver and landed his troops on the banks of the James River by sea, but he would not have bled Lee's army in the process. He also would not have occupied Lee's troops, preventing the Confederacy from transferring troops to confront Sherman's advance. In effect, Grant's action in Virginia allowed Sherman to gut the Confederacy by locking the bulk of Confederate troops into the defense of Richmond. One hundred and fifty years after the fact and the proponents of the "Lost Cause" don't understand what went wrong other than to say they were overwhelmed by superior numbers - which, given the advantage defenders had in the Civil War era, weren't all that overwhelming after all.

But why is this sort of editorial bias an issue? Because when one starts to notice that the author is shading the truth in favor of their preferred historical figures, it calls into question the reliability of other statements made in the text. And because of this, all of that wealth of detail that is packed into the book becomes less than useful, because one has to fact check those details for oneself, which more or less defeats the purpose of having those details in one place. And when information is presented without context in order to slant the reporting, it causes the reader to wonder what else has been left out. For example, Mesic complains frequently about how the Union troops failed to follow the rules of "civilized warfare", but overlooks, for example, that the Confederate use of mines to try to slow Sherman's advance, or the habit engaged in by Cobb's Legion Cavalry "Iron Scouts" of wearing Union uniforms were also violations of the accepted rules of civilized warfare of the time. The editorializing even bleeds into the biographical data provided: Matthew Calbraith Butler's post Civil-War legal career is described as being dedicated to opposing "cruelties" imposed upon Southerners. But Butler is most known in the post-Bellum era for his involvement in the Hamburg Massacre, a race-riot in which seven people were killed, mostly black militia men who were captured and executed for the offense of drilling in a public area. The fact that the "cruelties' imposed upon Southerners mostly consisted of trying to compel white Southerners to treat black Southerners like human beings is not merely glossed over, it is completely ignored.

It is difficult to figure out what to do with a book like Cobb's Legion Cavalry. On the one hand it is clear that the book is a labor of love that required an enormous amount of effort to produce. On the other, it is clear that it should not be regarded as anything other than an advocacy piece. Given that the primary intended audience for the book is likely the descendants of the members of the Ninth Georgia Volunteers, a certain amount of cheering for their accomplishments is to be expected - after all who would want a book that described their ancestors as evil defenders of slavery? But at a certain point, such cheer leading seriously damages the credibility of such a book as a source of historical information. Cobb's Legion Cavalry appears to have crossed that line. As a result, while the book is an interesting window into the day to day experiences of a Confederate unit, the fact that it shades the truth to advocate for a particular viewpoint means that book cannot stand on its own as a historical source.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

Woodberry Forest Magazine and Journal (Fall 2010/Winter 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (June 2011)
The Economist (June 18th-24th, 2011)
Science News (June 4, 2011)
Science News (June 18, 2011)

Book Twenty-Four: Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short review: The Rhon are all that stand between the Traders and dominance, and now the Traders have a Rhon of their own.

Long review: Sauscony "Soz" Valdoria possesses a special power that grants her superior abilities as a combat pilot. Her enemies feed upon that power, and should they ever get their hands on her they will torture her because that enhances their enjoyment while they mentally and physically rape her. Soz discovers that the only suitable genetic mate for her is one of these enemies. Add in the complicating factor that she and her potential mate are both highly placed political figures in bitterly opposed nations. Throw in some fairly imaginative, but well-supported science speculation about faster than light travel and artificial intelligence and you end up with Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion.

Primary Inversion was the first novel written by Catherine Asaro for her Skolian Empire series, which now spans thirteen novels. Sauscony Valdoria, is a Jagernaut, which means that she is also a telepath, as only telepaths have the mental abilities necessary to mentally meld with their squad mates and act as one during the chaotic and stuttering form of space combat imagined by Asaro. Among the Jagernauts she is a "Primary", essentially the equivalent of an admiral, but even more, she is an Imperial Princess, potentially in line to succeed to the throne of the Skolian Empire. She was also abducted and used as a "provider" by an Aristo some years prior to the events of the book while she was conducting a covert operation.

Which leads us to the Aristos, who are the implacable enemies of the Skolian Empire. Asaro lays out the components of telepathy in her fictional reality, with some humans possessing the ability to send out an empathic or telepathic signal, and others possessing the ability to receive such signals, and some few who are true telepaths - able to send and receive thoughts. Soz and her fellow Jagernauts, as well as a small number of others in the Skolian Empire fit this final category. But the ruling elite of the 'Traders" (or more fomally, the Eubian Concord), who are dubbed "Aristos" can only receive, and only are able to empathically perceive thoughts such as fear or pain which gives them pleasure. The Aristos covet empaths and telepaths as "providers", seeking to enslave, rape, and torture them to fill the need they have to experience the pain of others through their ability to receive emotions empathically. Aristos also have a stranglehold on political power in Eubian Concord, as all other inhabitants are regarded as slaves who exist to serve the whims of their masters.

Given this background, one would be unsurprised at Soz's bafflement when, while on leave on the neutral planet Delos, an Aristo approaches her and behaves civilly, and is even clumsily friendly. Circumstances lead Soz to conduct an impromptu raid on the mysterious Aristo's rented residence, where she learns an array of explosive secrets: the Highton is named Jabriol, is a critically important Eubian political figure, and also turns out, for plot specific reasons to quite possibly be the only man who Soz could have a satisfying personal relationship with, a fact obviously complicated by their respective political allegiances, but also by the fact that Soz had established a personal relationship with a member of her squad. But during her raid she also learns potentially explosive information about the Eubian plans for the inhabitants of the rebellious planet Tams. One interesting element of the story is that although the reader, seeing the world through Soz's eyes, is likely to consider her cause righteous and the Eubians to be truly evil, Jabriol is not so easily convinced, making a patriotic case for his nation.

After a brief detour through the Delosian legal system following her breaking and entering spree, during which she happens upon a mostly closeted telepath (an interesting wrinkle in Asaro's fictional future is that the neutral Allied worlds don't acknowledge the existence of telepathy), Soz sets about acting on the military intelligence she gleaned as a result of her late night foray. And this leads Asaro to throw in some more exposition, explaining how the much smaller Skolian Empire is able to resist Eubian might - through the reliance upon the psiberweb to allow for swifter than light communication. But this also reveals the Skolian weakness: the psiberweb is powered by the mental abilities of the Rhon, powerful telepaths all of the heretofore known examples of which are members of Soz' own immediate family, and who are nigh irreplaceable. In effect, the psiberweb is powered by the overpowering telepathic capabilities of a single family of telepaths, who consequently wield almost unassailable political power within the Skolian Empire, but whose powers also make them the most coveted prizes of the Eubian Aristos. The very power that makes the Rhon capable of providing the Skolian Empire with the means to resist the Eubian threat is what makes them such a tempting target for Eubian aggression. Because the Eubian's consign their telepaths to the lowest rung of society to serve as sex slaves for their elites, they have no hope of establishing a similar communications web of their own.

Nor can the Eubians create soldiers like the Jagernauts capable of communicating during the heat of space combat, as Asaro explains the mechanics of space travel in her imagined future by invoking imaginary numbers, and interesting mathematical concept that is given a central place in how the Skolians and Eubians manage to exceed the universal speed limit of the speed of light using a process called "inversion". But traveling faster than light comes with drawbacks, and these drawbacks can only be overcome by psions working together. But even the psiber edge enjoyed by the Skolians is not always enough, which is amply illustrated when Soz leads her squad into a desperate battle with Trader forces in the space over the planet Tams with millions of lives at stake. A battle that also results in some fairly devastating personal consequences for Soz.

Which leads to the second portion of the book in which Soz is sent to recuperate from her ordeal by teaching at the military academy on the planet Forshires. And this "down time" allows Asaro to explore the psychological consequences of the enormous amounts of stress she has piled upon her heroine. As one might guess, as a former provider and an empath who has been required by circumstances to kill and who has seen her own squad mates maimed and killed, Soz is a mess. It is in this section where Asaro seriously focuses on what her books are known for - melding strong science fiction with romance, as Soz takes halting steps towards establishing a relationship with a lover to replace the relationship smashed by the events of the first section of the book. It is also in this section that we meet the various members of Soz's family, including her imposing brother Kurj, the Imperator of Skolia. And it is in this portion of the book that Asaro reveals that she isn't going to let her heroes off the hook - an inhabitant of Forshires that Soz comes across suggests that the Skolian Empire may not be as altogether benevolent as Soz believes, and makes a strong argument for that position. And Kurj's actions with respect to a pretty young hospital worker seem to show a disturbing parallel to the behavior of Aristos. Granted, he isn't going to torture her, but he doesn't seem to care that her desires might or might not coincide with his own, nor does he care about the consequences his actions have upon her. The point is made fairly subtly, but it seems that Kurj may not be all that different from those he despises. And that the Skolian Empire may not be all that much better of an option than the Eubian Concord.

All of this builds to a head in the third section of the book as political obligations and personal desires collide - and Soz is forced to choose between her patriotism and ambition and what may be her lone chance at finding a compatible life partner. In effect, Soz must choose between her country and her lover, and whichever choice she makes will have potentially explosive consequences. Once again, Asaro doesn't let her heroine off the hook with an easy choice, or an easy path to the choice she makes. But the choice she makes, though difficult to make, seems natural when made. And then Asaro turns the story from an exploration of Soz's emotions and ramps up the intrigue and action to a high pitch as Soz tries to make her choice reality. In the end, she gets help from an almost entirely unexpected source (actually two fairly unexpected sources), and ends up with an ending that, while not exactly perfect, is at least good enough for Soz to live with.

In the end, Primary Inversion turns out to mean something different than one would have thought at the outset of the novel, being more of a descriptive play on words than a description of a fictional faster-than-light technology. This was Catherine Asaro's first published novel, and it is clear that she hit the ground running. Asaro created two interesting opposed camps, and despite the temptation to make the good guys all good, she didn't shy away from the implications of having an elite few possess such unique powers that they also control the levers of politics, and how this would be resented (unlike, for example, the Lensman universe, where most people seem happy to have a super powered elite run the show). Although it seems a bit mystifying why the Traders would exalt what seems to be a genetic defect as a symbol of their rule, it does make the source of the conflict clear, and gives what could have been a bland set of wooden villains a clear motivation for their perifdy. With a strong character driven story, a little bit of romance and intrigue all backed by well thought-out science fiction elements placed in an interesting setting, Asaro's story delivers an enjoyable read. As a bonus, the novel has enough loose ends and interesting wrinkles to provide fodder for a number of interesting stories to follow.

This review has been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

National Geographic (July 2011)
The Economist (June 25th-July 1st, 2011)
Poets & Writers (July/August 2011)

Book Twenty-Five: Catch the Lightning by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short Review: Tina finds a man from space who falls in love with her. Then her troubles begin.

Long Review: Impoverished and orphaned, a seventeen year old Latina named Tina works as a waitress while dreaming of going to college and escaping her gang-dominated neighborhood. Tina was abandoned by her father, lost her mother to circumstances and her protective cousin to drugs and gang violence, leaving her alone to dodge the local criminal strongman. And one night she comes across an imposing but seemingly friendly stranger on her way home from work. And her life changes. And the fate of three interstellar nations changes as well.

Although Catch the Lightning was the second book published in the Skolian Saga, the events depicted in its pages take place near the end of the long story arc of the series. This only becomes clear as the story unfolds, and a reader who has read Primary Inversion will notice that many events described by the main character in Catch the Lightning don't seem to connect well to the events from the first book in the series, which can be disconcerting until one realizes that most of the books in the Skolian Saga take place in between these two stories. In this regard, it seems that Asaro drew from the same well that J. Michael Straczynski often did when writing Babylon 5, showing the reader how the story ends, but not really showing how the story got there. Which highlights that the critical element in many stories is not the ending, but the journey to the ending.

In addition, the story is told as a recollection as Tina recalls the events after the fact, letting the reader know that she survives to the end. But once again, the interesting question is not whether Tina survives or not, but rather what happens to her on the way and where she ends up. And it all starts when she meets Althor, a mysterious man in a black sleeveless outfit, under a streetlamp in Los Angeles in 1987. He seems friendly, but strange, especially once she notices his gold skin, purple hair, and double-lidded eyes. And this, coupled with his odd attire, which she mistakes for gang clothes, makes her question his proffered story that he was on his way to a formal reception with the President and got sidetracked. Of course, his story turns out to be absolutely true, which is just the first revelation that turns Tina's expectations upside down.

One of the recurring themes in the book is the confounding of expectations - both of the reader and of the characters. Tina is frightened by Althor's imposing appearance, but he turns out to be entirely unlike what she expects. His alien appearance and manners (including his blue colored blood) belie his humanity, but at the same time, at times he seems to be more machine than human. Althor is at the same time, a man, a machine, his ship, and himself. Althor's ship is Althor, and yet also not Althor. The story starts in Los Angeles in 1987, which results in the reader making certain assumptions - assumptions that on several points prove to be ill-founded. People that seem untrustworthy turn out to be reliable, and old friends turn out to be enemies. Time travel turns out to not actually be time travel, but instead Reiman sheet transitions. Tina has no measurable power as a telepath, but is able to establish a telepathic connection with Althor and his ship and turns out to be the key to reviving a fading empire's hopes of survival. Over and over again, the novel flips the reader's expectations, leading to a story that is continuously changing, and even though one knows that Tina survives, almost everything else seems to be up for grabs.

That said, the novel follows a more or less predictable pattern, first establishing a fish-out-of-water story with Althor navigating Tina's world of gangs and CalTech students in the first half, and then Tina forced to deal with Althor's world of shifting interstellar alliances and dynastic politics in the second half of the book. And though their courtship is established at a break neck pace, and is to a certain extent genetically predetermined, it doesn't seem forced. And even though the reader pretty much knows what Tina will do when presented with the choice to go with Althor to an uncertain and alien future or stay with her familiar life and a relatively safe alternative, the choice she is presented with is a real choice - differentiating the story from many other romantic story lines in which many present the main character with the false choice of a good choice and a second clearly inferior alternative. Despite the knowing which path Tina will take the reader can see that the choice is not an easy one, which makes the subsequent struggles she faces that much more poignant.

Because despite returning to a world in which Althor is not only an elite warrior, but also a prince, they face an uphill struggle. As one might guess, when one has more authority, one has bigger enemies, and Althor's enemies loom large. And once again Asaro doesn't let her characters off the hook, because even though the penultimate villain in the second half of the book is misguided, foolish, and probably insane, his rage at Althor and the regime that Althor represents is justified. As she did in Primary Inversion, Asaro doesn't pretend that those living on the low end of the totem pole under a government that exalts the elite and effectively disenfranchises the rest of the populace will be happy with their lot, no matter how necessary exigencies may make such a system. It is this refusal to make the opposition wholly evil that separates Asaro's book from lesser works, because even though the ultimate villain is, as with most Traders in the Skolian Saga, an irredeemable monster, the dissent that underlies the actions of those that deliver Althor to him gives the story a depth that merely having a collection of wooden villains would lack.

As it is presaged in the opening pages, it will surprise no one that in the end Tina ends up ensconced deep in the advanced technological civilization that Althor hails from. But what matters is the path she took to get there, and the layered story that Asaro provides detailing that path is well worth reading. Even the end where Tina ends up on a desert planet with sword wielding bodyguards (and why do sword-wielding desert dwellers show up so often in science fiction) contains a few unexpected twists that keep the reader guessing. Overall Catch the Lightning accomplishes the difficult task of being both a good second book and a good concluding volume to the multibook Skolian Saga epic.

This review has been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

Realms of Fantasy (June 2011)
Stories included:
The Ground Whereon She Stands by Leah Bobet
Escaping Salvation by Josh Rountree and Samantha Henderson
The Economy of Powerful Emotion by Sharon Mock
The Good Husband by Thea Hutcheson
The Equation by Patrick Samphire
Wreathed in Wisteria, Draped in Ivy by Euan Harvey
The Tides of the Heart by David D. Levine

Book Twenty-Six: The Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman.

.

Short review: Dream sets out to confront Lucifer, but finds the Prince of Hell has resigned and left him with a problem.

Long review: In volume four of the Sandman series, Gaiman reaches back and pulls at a thread that he first established back in Preludes and Nocturnes: Dream's less than successful love life, and his less than compassionate nature. Dream is, after all, one of the Endless, and indifferent at best to human concerns. Season of Mists uses as its backdrop one of the largest possible mythological venues possible: Hell. Despite a tale that deals with the rulership of the infernal domain, ultimately the story is one of personal choice and personal redemption.

But Dream is apparently not immune to human emotions and human pettiness. Because once long ago he fell in love with a woman named Nada, and she doesn't reciprocate. Or at least not in the way Dream expects that she will. And Dream's response to being spurned was to cast his lover in to Hell, a fact alluded to in Preludes and Nocturnes and expanded upon later. And so in this volume the Endless Destiny, spurred by a meeting with the Grey Ladies, calls upon his siblings to gather together: Death, Dream, Despair, Desire, and Delirium so they can meet and talk about nothing in particular. And this meeting results in Dream deciding that perhaps condemning his former love to millennia of torment in the depths of Hell was possibly uncalled for and a may have been mite unjust. This determined, Dream sets out to free his condemned lover from Lucifer's grasp, despite Dream having earned the Prince of Hell's animosity recovering one of the badges of his office in Preludes and Nocturnes.

On his way to Hell, Dream stops off and visits his one friend Hob who we first met in Dream Country. As he is Morpheus, he visits his friend in a dream, and Hob toasts him, with a slightly prophetic toast that gives this volume its name. This meeting blurs the line between dream and reality in a way that unsettles Hob, showing that even a man who has lived for centuries is not so jaded as to be blase when dealing with one of the Endless. Prepared for confrontation, Morpheus enters Hell, but finds it strangely quiet. He does not find Nada. He is instead met by Lucifer who tells the Dreamlord that he has tired of ruling Hell and is closing the place down. Having ejected all the condemned souls and demons from its environs, Lucifer takes Dream to close the last remaining Gates of Hell before asking him to sever his wings, an act that demotes Lucifer from the ranks of angels (or even fallen angels) and terminates his reign as ruler of Hell. But as he travels about Hell ejecting the last few heoldouts who refuse to leave and locking the remaining gates, Lucifer expounds upon theology, absolving himself of responsibility for the sins of mankind, and placing the blame squarely upon humanity's own shoulders. In this, it seems, Gaiman posits a decidedly humanistic vision of the world. And in one scene it seems that Gaiman is making a statement concerning the self-aggrandizement of humanity. Finally, Lucifer gets his revenge on Dream by handing the Key to Hell over to him. Dream, it seems, must choose the next ruler of Hell.

And Lucifer's gift to Dream does not go unnoticed as he is almost immediately beset by numerous suitors hoping to claim the now-vacated real estate. But first Dream speaks with his sister Death. She has little to say concerning his predicament, but she does reveal something of ominous import: the dead are returning to the Earth. And it only takes a second for the reader to realize it is not all the dead. Just those who had formerly been confined to Hell, a situation that certainly does not bode well for the living. Once again, Gaiman demonstrates his mastery of storytelling by delivering information to the reader subtly, and letting the reader put the pieces of the puzzle together rather than spelling everything out. Gaiman trusts his readers to understand subtlety, and as a result, his storytelling is that much more powerful. But soon the gods and powers arrive on Dream's doorstep: Odin recovers Loki from his underground torment and recruits Thor to keep Loki in line, the angels Duma and Remiel journey from the Silver City, and the demons Azael, Merkin, and Chonizon set out hoping to win their home back. They are joined by the Egyptian gods Anubis and Bast, the Japanese god Susano-o-no-Mikoto, Kilderkin the Lord of Order, Shivering Jemmy, a Princess of Chaos, and eventually Cluracan and Nuala of the Faerie Court. And each seeks the key to Hell, and each, it seems, has an offer to make to Dream.

But first the story returns to Earth to tell the story of a single unremarkable boy named Charles Rowland. In the midst of the tales concerning the disposition of Hell amidst the schemes and machinations of angels, gods, and demons, the story of an English schoolboy living a sad and lonely life as the only student left behind in between terms seems trivial and unimportant. But Charles Rowland is tormented by the spirits of the dead who returned from Hell and had nowhere else to go other than return to the boarding school where they taught, worked, or studied. And with nothing better to do, they repeat history, tormenting and killing Rowland just as they tormented and killed one of their own classmates a hundred years earlier. And it is this that drives home the true impact that Lucifer's abdication of his responsibilities has. When the damned are free to walk the Earth, they are free to inflict chaos and misery upon the living. The true cost of Lucifer's petty revenge upon Dream is shown in this seemingly unimportant interlude.

But the action then shifts back to Dream's domain, and the banquet he has offered his guests while he contemplates the disposal of the Key to Hell. And the reader gets treated to a view of the representatives of the various factions rubbing shoulders with one another; a hugely muscled, crude, and drunken Thor sloppily hits on the finicky Egyptian goddess Bast, Prince Cluracan of Faerie offers his sister Nuala as a gift to Dream and then stumbles off to a sexual encounter with one of the Egyptian delegation's servants, and all the while Loki observes all the other participants with a watchful eye, as do the two angels sent from the celestial city. Eventually, of course, each presents themselves before Dream to make the case that they should be handed the Key to Hell.

But what is more interesting than the threats, offers, and pleas is the background of events. As usual in the Sandman books, the things happening in the interstitial spaces of the story are the most interesting - the dinner's entertainment is the recurring character Cain, performing a magic act with his brother Abel in which he yet again kills his sibling. And turns him into sausages. Merkin and Azazel betray their companion Choronzon. Susano-O-No-Mikoto admits to petitioning Dream on his own, without the support of his pantheon. And in a single panel aside one of Dream's servants, a human experiencing Dream's realm in a dream-state, tries to connect with another. And so on. Each of these threads is not a part of the main story line of Season of Mists, but as usual with Gaiman's writing, one can be assured that most of them will become critical elements in later installments of the series.

And in the morning, we get a resolution of sorts. And as is often the case, the events happening in the background seem to suggest more than the main story. Nuala is awakened by her brother and in an aside says that all she hopes for is a good night sleep before chewing up some paper. Nuala's entire demeanor speaks of someone who has been sexually abused, with the implication that Cluracan may be the abuser. After wandering the halls of Dream's mansion and overhearing snippets of conversation from some other factions, Nuala comes to Dream's great hall and we see that the factions we have seen in the story make up only a portion of the petitioners seeking the Key to Hell (with the noted exception of the Greek gods, who apparently declined to attend). In the end the rule of Hell is determined, but not exactly as one might have foreseen. And once again Gaiman returns to the question of what purpose does Hell serve, and what role it's ruler must play - casting Lucifer once again in a sympathetic light and throwing doubt upon the justness of his exile. And Gaiman also makes a commentary on the nature of Hell, and why sometimes love is worse than hate.

But as usual, the important element of the story is not really the disposition of the Key to Hell, but rather the changes to the lives of the characters. And what the idea of Hell means. The faerie princess Nuala is surprised to learn that she was not merely a bargaining chip, but an unconditional gift to Dream. And we learn of Dream's dislike for illusions. As the representatives of the various pantheons depart, it turns out that at least one of them is not who he seems, and one ends up owing Dream a favor, a development that is certain to feature later in the series. And the story of Nada is resolved, although in a somewhat bittersweet manner, and with Dream once again tangling with one of the powers of Hell in the process.

Although by setting the story against the backdrop of the question of who gets to rule Hell, Gaiman runs the risk of the smaller and more important elements getting lost, I think that it allows him to highlight these story elements all the more. Because the stakes are so high for the various factions that desire the Key, they lay all their cards on the table and we are able to see what their fears and desires are, and everything that they would have to offer Dream. And we also get to see just what Dream does and does not care about - which often seems to surprise his petitioners as well. And we also get a glimpse of how this conflict affects the lives of the mere mortals who live in the shadows of the doings of the gods and the Endless, and this is, in my opinion, the touch that makes this series so good. It would have been easy to deal with the sweeping issues of the series, but it brings the events into much sharper focus to show what effect the doings of the mighty have upon the meek, and how petty and unfair the actions of the mighty seem when this is shown. The story, as a result, seems epic, but only until the implications of the squabbling of the players is shown, which makes this volume so much more compelling to read. Overall, Season of Mists is the strongest volume of the series thus far, and definitely worth reading.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (July 2nd-8th, 2011)
The Economist (July 9th-15th, 2011)
Science News (July 2, 2011)

Book Twenty-Seven: The Generation Starship in Science Fiction: A Critical History, 1934-2001 by Simone Caroti.

.

Short review: An examination of the generation starship in science fiction, and by extension, the entire body of science fiction.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: Science fiction is full of stories of humans traveling to the stars by various means. To enable people to traverse the vast interstellar distances, science fiction writers have imagined various means of traveling faster than the speed of light - warp drives, hyper drives, inversion drives, and even the silly bloater drive. Or they have imagined means of extending human lifespans, or allowing humans to sleep in suspended animation for the duration of the long journey while traveling at less than the speed of light. But these stories all require the author to do violence to the known laws of physics or postulate as yet undiscovered technologies. Of all the methods imagined for going to the stars, the only one for which humans currently have is to imagine massive arks in space in which entire generations of people would be born, live their lives, and die while wandering the dark void between the stars: the generation starship.

As the only posited form of interstellar travel that amounts to nothing more than an engineering challenge coupled with a requirement of an investment of will and resources, the generation starship is a template upon which science fiction writers have imprinted the fears and aspirations of their era. And this template serves as the conduit by which Simone Caroti examines the history of science fiction, and as a result the popular thinking of the twentieth century. Starting with Bernal, Tsiolkovsky, and Goddard's proposals that were grounded in scientific speculation, and proceeding through the Gernsback era, the Campbell era, the Space Age, the New Wave, and the Information Age, detailing the science fiction stories produced by each period. The Generation Starship in Science Fiction is more or less an overgrown dissertation, but despite this, it offers a comprehensive look at how the generation starship story has evolved through the last seven decades. And as a result, it highlights how science fiction as a genre has evolved as well.

After explaining the roots of the idea of the generation starship, Caroti discusses how each successive generation imbued the idea with the ideas that were foremost in their minds. So in the Gernsback era the stories like The Living Galaxy imagined humanity perfected by technology and stories like The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years evince a bold optimism coupled with the growing fears of what might happen if the distinctly American values represented by the protagonist are allowed to fall out of favor. Then in the Campbell era, the stories reflect the distinctly Campbellian attitude that all problems are conquerable by the application of intelligence and effort - and the placement of the extraordinary man to at the heart of the narrative as in stories like Robert A. Heinlein's Universe and Common Sense (now compiled together under the title Orphans of the Sky). And as one can see, this mirrors the line of thought that dominated science fiction writing of those eras, merely transferring the thinking of the era to the generation starship setting.

And this pattern of transferring the main body of then-current science fiction thinking (which reflected the main body of then-current popular thinking) into the generation starship setting means that discussing the generation starship in science fiction is tantamount to discussing science fiction as a whole. So when popular culture began to be rife with the fears of a worldwide apocalypse followed by societies living in the ashes of a dead world, the generation starship stories reflected that and posited ship-wide disasters followed by bizarre post-apocalyptic societies picking through the remains. Or the stories posited the idea that an iron will could save humanity even after the disintegration of society, such as in Frank M. Robinsion's novella The Oceans Are Wide. And as society moved on, so did the generation starship story. And Caroti traces these developments all the way to the most recent stories, ending with Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun that seems to encapsulate everything that went before into one enormous comprehensive exploration of the subgenre.

The Generation Starship in Science Fiction offers the serious science fiction aficionado a detailed look at this particular subgenre. Though the account can be a bit dry and technical at points, it is comprehensive and thorough. For anyone interested in understanding science fiction as a whole, this book is an excellent guide. If you love science fiction and everything that it represents, and you are interested in learning how it evolved from its roots to the present day, then this book should be on your to read list.

This has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

How did I miss this?

Book Twenty-Eight: Fundamentals of Statistics, 3rd edition by Michael Sullivan, III.

.

Short review: What can I say? It's a basic statistics textbook.

Full review: This book was used as the text for a statistics course I recently took (Statistics 251 for those who are curious), so my thoughts on the book will inevitably be colored by my experiences in that class. To a certain extent, it is impossible to separate the efficacy of the professor from my impressions of the book. Fortunately, the course was quite good and the book was a large part of making it so.

Fundamentals of Statistics covers the basics of statistics starting with sampling methods and ranging through to inferential tests such as tests of independence, homogeneity tests, and least-squares regression models. Each topic is covered in a straightforward step-by-step approach - each concept is broken down into relatively bite-sized chunks, each portion is explained and then followed by a couple of examples illustrating the subject in use. Finally, each segment is followed by a generous helping of exercise problems in which the reader can apply the concepts that had just been taught.

The writing in the book is clear and direct, which is what one should expect from a good textbook. The examples given are varied in subject matter, and often reasonably interesting. This is an improvement on some other statistics textbooks that I have come across in which the bulk of the examples involved drawing different colored marbles from a jar. Like the examples, the exercises are varied and interesting, and are quite effective at illuminating the concepts being discussed. The book also comes with a CD that has a number of preloaded sets of data for use with Minitab that tie to a number of exercises in the book.

Overall, Fundamentals of Statistics is a very good text for a beginning statistics student. It covers the basic mechanics of statistics quite well and presents them in a clear and effective manner. While it is difficult to make a textbook on statistics truly interesting, this book does about as good a job a one could do in that regard.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Books Twenty-Nine: The Last Hawk by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short review: Another heir to the Skolian Empire gets lost and finds Rhon where no one thought to look before.

Long review: In the third book of the Skolian Saga, Catherine Asaro takes up the story of Kelric, the youngest brother of Sauscony from Primary Inversion, and the uncle of Althor from Catch the Lightning. Like all the other members of his family that we have seen who are not members of the Triad that power the Psiberweb, Kelric is a cybernetically enhanced Jagernaut, and it is this profession that leads him to crash land his critically damaged starship on the restricted planet of Coba, leading to decades of exile among a tradition bound matriarchal society that has forgotten most of what it once knew. And Kelric acts as a wild card, upsetting the careful balance of Coban politics and driving what was a stable albeit primitive and reactionary culture to the edge of self-destruction.

As The Last Hawk opens as Kelric, Jagernaut, Rhon telepath, and youngest member of the Imperial family of the Skolian Imperialate, finds himself in a dying ship following an battle against the forces of the Eubian Concord. Desperate to find a planet to set his disintegrating spacecraft down upon, he sets course for nearby Coba. Unfortunately, Coba is a restricted world, off-limits for reasons that are not entirely clear. No matter the reason, Kelric is in dire enough straits that he simply doesn't care and heads there anyway, which results in a sharp change of course for both his life, and the lives of most of the inhabitants of Coba.

Because Coba is restricted due to a deception played by the inhabitants upon the Imperial representatives who visited the planet years before. Unwilling to sacrifice their independence and become part of the Skolian Imperialate, the inhabitants convinced the Imperial emissaries that there was some sort of danger on their planet and earned restricted status, resulting in the Imperial presence being confined to a single isolated space port. And this background element raises some questions - how does this comparatively primitive world manage to acquire their information about the nature of the Skolian Imperialate? One also wonders how they managed to acquire this information quickly enough to organize a planet-wide conspiracy sufficient to fool a more technologically advanced civilization replete with telepaths. The asymmetry of information - with the primitive Cobans apparently well-informed about Imperial politics, but the Imperialate in the dark about Coba, seems somewhat implausible, and is unexplained in this volume. And because Kelric is in the line of succession to the Imperial throne, a fact that the Cobans discover quite swiftly, he is not permitted to travel to the spaceport despite serious injuries that require off-world medicine to correct, and is held instead as a somewhat coddled prisoner. Kelric's situation becomes even more dire when it becomes apparent that the Coban environment is slowly poisoning him.

As one might expect, Kelric attempts to break free of his imprisonment, which inexplicably seems to surprise his captors who apparently expected him to accept being held against his will with equanimity. This may be due to the fact that Coban society is a culturally rigid matriarchy, and thus being held in splendidly comfortable captivity seems reasonable to the powerful women of Coba. And in the course of his escape attempt, Kelric's fundamental humanity results in his taking an ultimately self-destructive course of action to save the lives of his captors. Because his captors don't understand him at all, or understand what he did, they condemn him to a lifetime of imprisonment in their penal colony.

But even this turns out to be a temporary condition. Because it turns out that Kelric is a genius at the game of quis. This sounds less impressive than it actually is supposed to be, because quis means everything on Coba. Politics, economics, science, and every other aspect of life is centered on, and dictated by quis. Disputes between rival estates are settled by quis matches. The culture of entire cities can be affected by the patterns embedded in the quis played by its inhabitants. The emotional states and personal histories of the participants are revealed in their quis patterns. And, eventually, it becomes apparent that quis can be used to uncover the theoretical underpinnings of scientific thought and guide the development of engineering applications based on those principles. In short, quis is a universal language that can be used for anything, and is the underlying framework upon which Coban society is built.

What is strange is that quis underlays the matriarchal society of Coba, but it is formulated primarily by men because each estate (which is the basic political unit on Coba) has a Calanya populated by men kept in a splendid cage cloistered from the outside world. These men, called Calani, are charged solely with playing quis to try to create patterns that can be inserted into "wild" quis that would prove advantageous to the estate they are sworn to serve. And members of the Calani can only be men. Indeed, the husband of the manager of each estate must, by tradition, be chosen from the ranks of her Calani. Consequently, each estate is dependent upon men who are, as a class, treated as second class citizens. Coba is technically run by women, but apparently guided by small cliques of pampered men.

This dichotomy seems like it would be prime real estate for exploration, but it seems to be mostly overlooked in this book. The first element that hampers examining this is the blandness of the reverse sexism of Coban society. Coban matriarchal sexism is just standard patriarchal sexism turned around. Men have fewer rights. Men are expected to be chaste. Women are expected to be sexually aggressive. Men wear sexy clothes, or in some parts of the world, men must wear the equivalent of the hijab. Just imagine some element of sexism on Earth and reverse it, and you will have a good idea of sexism on Coba. This creates an uncomfortable environment for Kelric to adjust to, as a man used to a more male dominated society, but it is only mildly interesting as a story element in itself. Flipping the sexism in a story isn't that much more interesting than including standard sexism in a story. And as one might expect, a number of men in the story chafe at their devalued status, but the Calani who object to being treated this way don't think to use their ability to affect the language of quis to plant the ideas of equality, and the one who does only does so in the most half-hearted way possible. The one interesting part of the reverse sexism story seems to be that the men who are ostensibly subservient in this system don't want it changed because they prefer it to equality, which if reversed would be a somewhat surprising commentary on the subjugation of women.

But there are other things about the quis culture that seem to make little sense that go more or less unexamined in the book. Or elements that at least point to Coban culture unintentionally hamstringing itself. First off, the Calani are sworn to never read anything, for fear that they would contaminate their quis with unoriginal ideas. And the ranking of a particular Calani is determined by how many different estates he has worked for. This is supposedly because they can learn quis from different sources and add what they learned elsewhere to their new Calanya's version of quis. So a "first-degree" quis player has been in one Calanya, a "second-degree" in two, and so on. Third-degrees are rare, and fourth-degrees are almost non-extant. Fifth and sixth-degrees are unheard of. But if cross-pollination of ideas makes a Calani better at what he does, why shut out all other forms of knowledge? (One also has to question whether moving from Calanya to Calanya would actually make a Calani better at quis: this is a little like saying that a math professor who went from Northwestern to Tufts to Oberlin would become a better math professor at each stop, a proposition that seems dubious). As it turns out, the secrets of chemistry, physics, and the other sciences are contained in quis, and it seems relatively obvious that if we isolated scientists into small cliques, prevented them from studying the work of their predecessors, and only allowed them to see the work of their contemporaries via second-hand patterns in a game, that the progress of science would be seriously hampered. And that is exactly what happens on Coba. Because quis serves as both a political tool and a source of scientific knowledge, on Coba the two are inextricably intertwined, preventing the development of Coban knowledge. It seems that Asaro is subtly saying that politics and science make poor bedfellows, and also subtly making a point about the inherently rigid nature of Coban culture.

And this is made apparent once Kelric's influence on Coba starts to be seen. First placed in the Dahl Calanya, then after a period of imprisonment into the Haka Calanya, then to the Bahlva Calanya, the Miesa Calanya, the Varz Calanya, and finally in the Karn Calanya, Kelric's innate skill at quis coupled with his hitherto unheard of status as a sixth-degree Calani disturbs the careful balance of Coban politics and culture. But some elements of the story just don't seem to add up. Kelric perfects his skills at quis on his own while kept in solitary imprisonment by a vindictive rogue jailer, but those who play against him are still able to read his patterns clearly. But if his patterns have been developed without reference to the outside world, using rules he made up by himself, how are others able to read them? As described, quis seems to be a consensus derived language of patterns, which makes it strange that a set of patterns derived independent of the consensus would be so easily read. In any event, Kelric's influence seems to drive Coban science into overdrive while at the same time destabilizing Coban politics, in part due to his mere presence as the most influential quis player on the planet and apparently, most sexually desirable male.

And because this is a Catherine Asaro book, the romance is a critical element of the story. Kelric is seen as exotically beautiful by every one of the most powerful women of Coba, and the story for the most part involves his being passed from one powerful woman to another in brokered deals, sometimes for his quis abilities and sometimes for his sexual attractiveness. And in a pattern that has emerged in the first few books of the series, Kelric finds a heretofore unknown pocket of people carrying the Rhon telepath genes, and manages to have children with two of them, expanding the range of genetic variation available to prevent further inbreeding of the Imperial family. After his one attempt at escape, Kelric involuntarily travels about Coba, passed from estate to estate and claimed by various women, some willingly and some not. Through it all, Kelric seems to adopt a passive role, allowing events to take control of him. Despite resenting more than one of the situations he finds himself in, Kelric doesn't take any action or use his mounting influence in quis to try to better his own position except indirectly by accidentally destabilizing the entire planet and sparking a continent-wide war.

Using quis as a metaphor for war, politics, and science is an interesting idea. Adding in a rigid matriarchy in which men are second class citizens is a modestly interesting wrinkle. At this point, having a third member of the Imperial family find yet another undiscovered population that carries the vanishingly rare Rhon genes is starting to seem a bit too serendipitous. If this continues to happen, the series will start to move from improbability to implausibility on that front. The novel's exploration of Coban culture and politics is interesting, but Kelric's impassive nature seems odd for someone who is supposed to have been a highly trained space combat pilot and the scion of a family that presides over an interstellar empire. Even so, the interpersonal relationships established in the novel, which seem to turn full circle, make for a compelling story.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Thirty: The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King.

.

Short review: Emer was an abused Irish child turned pirate in the 1600s. Saffron is a poor girl in Pennsylvania now. In between there are 100 lives as a dog.

Long review: The Dust of 100 Dogs is a novel split between two protagonists, each living centuries and a hundred dog lives apart. Or perhaps there is only one protagonist who has crafted an imaginative internal fantasy life to cope with her awful family life complete with a drug-addicted sibling and parents who are at turns demanding and intrusive and neglectful. Dust is a young adult novel, but it is not the sort of young adult novel that pretends that because the protagonists are teenagers that their problems are superficial or trivial, but instead treats its characters are real people facing real nightmares.

Saffron, the first of the two central characters in the novel, is a precocious young woman, the youngest child in a poor family with a mother who is an alcoholic, a father who is emotionally destroyed by his service in Vietnam, and a collection of older siblings who range from indifferent to hostile. She demonstrates her intellectual gifts at a young age, and from that point forward her mother invests all her hopes and dreams into her, banking on Saffron's future success to serve as her ticket out of poverty and despair. But Saffron harbors a secret as well - her apparent intelligence is the result of being the reincarnation of the 17th century pirate Emer Morrisey, who was cursed and condemned to live one hundred lives as a dog before being reborn as a human.

Or so Saffron believes. And there is no reason not to believe that this is entirely true. But there is also some reason to regard Saffron's memories of being an abused Irish girl, sold unwillingly into marriage who escaped to the Caribbean and turned pirate, as anything other than the fantasies of a neglected but bright child desperate to escape the poverty of her life and the crushing expectations her otherwise neglectful parents place upon her. And the story leaps back and forth between Saffron's life in modern-day Pennsylvania and Emer's life first in rural Ireland, then in Paris, and finally in Tortuga, Jamaica, and other Caribbean locales. With the exception of the opening scene, the stories of both women are told more or less in order, interwoven as the narrative moves back and forth between the 17th and the 20th centuries.

Of the two, Emer's life is clearly the harsher one - first Cromwell destroys her village and in the process kills her family, then she is taken in after a fashion by her cowardly and abusive uncle who eventually sells her against her will into an arranged marriage with a wealthy Frenchman despite her being clearly in love with an Irish boy. Emer refuses to accept her fate, and after a taste of life as a vagabond on the streets of Paris heads to the Caribbean lured by the promise of a husband. Once again betrayed, Emer is raped instead, and disguises herself as a man to take service as a sailor, eventually turning pirate. She channels her rage into her efforts, and returns to the needlework she had learned as a child, sewing ever more elaborate capes to wear while plundering Spanish ships.

Running parallel to Emer's story is Saffron's story. Born in Pennsylvania and saddled with an intellect that creates expectations and a family that seems to live solely to pressure Saffron to fulfill those expectations so they can escape their own self-inflicted misery, she plots her escape. Saffron lives in that desert netherworld with parents who mostly neglect her because they simply do not understand her, but when she displays any form of independence from the plan they have laid out for her (for their own benefit) they smother her. Meanwhile her drug-addicted brother fights, steals, and otherwise slides into criminal oblivion, a situation his parents ignore. Caught in this confusing and unpleasant life, teenage Saffron remembers herself as Emer, killing those around her in inventively violent ways while planning her escape to recover the treasure she hid in the sands of Jamaica centuries earlier.

Linking the two are brief interludes, titled "Dog Facts", in which the lives of a few of the dogs that Saffron remembers living are used as case studies for how to raise dogs. Of course, the dog facts are mostly metaphors for Saffron's current life, illustrating how her parents emotionally abuse her and her brother, just as dog owners emotionally abuse their pets. And this raises the interesting question of the novel - is Saffron actually Emer reincarnated after living the lives of one hundred dogs? Or is she merely imagining that she was a vicious pirate in a previous life in order to escape her current life? Though the events of the story seem to confirm that Saffron is indeed the reincarnation of Emer, there is enough ambiguity that she might just be fantasizing. And what teenager who felt miserable and alone has not imagined horrible deaths for those who torment them, or imagined a more colorful past for themselves? And in this way A.S. King ties the story to the lives of teenagers and draws the reader into the story. Because despite apparently having lived the lives of a Irish pirate and a hundred canines, Saffron is in many ways very much a typical misunderstood teenager who is both highly intelligent and weighted down by expectations.

Eventually, Saffron does what Emer could not, and negotiates a peace with those around her and is finally able to break free of her oppressive family. But she must also break free of Emer's past, and that requires she confront Fred Livingston, a creepy island inhabitant who apparently has lain in wait for her since the fateful day of Emer's death. And in describing Fred Livingstone's virulent personality and behavior, A.S. King exposes the ugly side of humanity, far worse than anything Emer had ever done despite her piratical ways. But Saffron figures out how to do what Emer could not, and breaks what could have become a vicious cycle of repetition to set herself free of her past.

In The Dust of 100 Dogs A.S. King has crafted a coming of age story that captures all of the hurt and pain and anger inherent in growing up and finding your own place in the world. Though it seems to tell two stories, Dust really tells one: to move to the future, you have to shed the demons of your past or they will drag you back to where you were before. Emer's past consumes her, while Saffron, with the perspective of a hundred lives behind her, is able to defy her past and see a hopeful future. Although it seems odd at first glance, mixing the story of an Irish pirate, a dirt poor Pennsylvania girl, and a collection of facts gleaned from the lives of dogs results in a compelling tale that examines abuse, neglect, and the struggles of a bright child saddled with poverty and the burden of stifling parental expectations. Just as Emer flays the skin off her enemies, A.S. King peels back the layers to expose the raw core at the heart of adolescence and delivers a fantastic book.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

National Geographic (August 2011)
Science News (July 16, 2011)
Science News (July 20, 2011)
The Economist (July 16th-22nd, 2011)

Book Thirty-One: The Sandman: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman.

.

Short review: A dream world threatens the life of a young woman, the dead talk, travelers enter the dream realm uninvited, and a trapped spirit yearns to break free.

Long review: After you create a story in which the disposition of Hell itself is at stake, what do you do to follow it up? Once you have Lucifer hand over the keys to Hell and all the supernatural powers of the universe vie to claim them with the fallout from that struggle washing over to affect the lives of the mundane, one might find it difficult to keep the reader's interest. If you are Neil Gaiman, you write A Game of You, a tale in which you invert everything about Season of Mists and create a story in which the internal struggles in the dreams of a single person become a threat far beyond what one might expect.

The central characters in the story are Barbie, last seen in The Doll's House, but now having shed her shallow and abusive boyfriend; and her neighbor Wanda, a woman who wishes she could actually be a woman but whose biology has betrayed her. Barbie, now living in a run down apartment in New York, is surrounded by a colorful cast of characters: the lesbian couple Hazel and Foxglove who also live in the building that Barbie and Wanda inhabit, the homeless lady terrified of dogs who lives just outside the building, the cryptic woman Thessaly, and the creepy man who lives on the top floor. In what seems to have been an almost conscious decision to restrict the universe the characters inhabit to a single building.

But those aren't the only characters in the story. On the flip side of sleep, Barbie finds a collection of dream characters: Prinado, Luz, and Wilkinson. But it seems that all is not well in Barbie's dreams, and her dream characters begin to invade mundane reality, in the form of the dog-like Martin Tenbones. And from there, the events in the book begin to spin out of control as Barbie's dream reality begins to affect the mundane reality more and more profoundly. Barbie is drawn into her dream world (when she falls asleep), where a cast of characters that inhabited her childhood dreams look to her to save them from the Cuckoo, while at the same time her friends in the real world deal with the impact the struggle inside Barbie's dreams is having upon their lives. And the struggle inside and outside the dream world turns brutal and bloody quickly.

Effectively, the struggle faced by Barbie is purely internal, but around her the struggle takes place in the real world. The Cuckoo has a real world agent, and Wanda, Foxglove, and Hazel have to deal with him with the assistance of the mysterious Thessaly. After some fairly gruesome and bloody information gathering, Thessaly decides that the women in the group need to go on a rescue mission to assist Barbie via a fairly dangerous path - a choice that results in even more negative real world repercussions. Everyone follows their assigned path to the conclusion of the story, at which point all of the threads reunite, Dream makes his presence felt, and the mystery of the Porpentine and the Cuckoo is finally unraveled.

But one of the themes running through the story is built upon the idea that dreams have very real consequences in reality, and the story doesn't end without punching that point home. And this being a Gaiman penned story, the resolution also weaves in the other thematic element of the story and deals with gender directly - both in the crisis that threatens to tear apart Hazel and Foxglove and Wanda's struggle to assert her own identity to the very end. As one would expect, both of these stories tie thematically to the story of the Cuckoo - a creature struggling to be born and assert its own identity. What at first glance seems to be a collection of disparate elements, in the end turns out to be a tightly interwoven set of powerful themes.

From a certain perspective, A Game of You was set up to be something of a disappointment following directly after Season of Mists. However, despite being more subtle in its telling in some ways, it manages to avoid this fate. By focusing on the consequences of one person's dreams run out of control, Gaiman manages to craft a story that is both substantially different from the previous volume, and yet follows on to it quite perfectly.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Thirty-Two: Introduction to Computer Information Systems by Geoffrey Steinberg.

.

Short review: A very introductory textbook about information technology systems.

Long review: I used this book as the text of a basic computing class I took to satisfy an admission requirement for graduate school. Because I earned my undergraduate degree almost twenty years ago, I had never taken a formal course in computer information although I have been using computers since I was twelve. Introduction to Computer Information Systems is a basic general text about information technology. It is not a programming guide, and it doesn't give much more than a basic working knowledge of how computers, computer networks, and other technology related issues.

Because I have been using personal computers since I was in sixth grade, I was familiar on an informal basis with most of the concepts presented in the book. But most of what I know I had learned on my own via trial and error. Some of the information provided in this volume is so basic that it will probably only be useful to someone who has never even pressed the "on" switch on a PC. That said, the information is presented in a systemic manner that will probably fill in the gaps that being self-taught leaves for most people who have never studied the subject in an organized manner.

The book starts with the basics - introducing what information systems are, giving a brief explanation of what computers are and then moving on to an overview of the internet and World Wide Web, explaining in very basic terms how they are structured and how they work. The book then moves on to a description of basic computer hardware, software, and computer network structures. Later chapters start to get into applications: systems analysis, the rudimentary basics of programming, database management, and HTML. Most of these sorts of technical aspects of the book are fairly well-done, although the subjects are treated at only the most basic level. Later chapters on topics like e-commerce, security, ethics, and privacy, and the societal impact, are much less useful. In most cases, the basic nature of the information presented coupled with the rapidly changing nature of the subject matter results in a chapter that is not particularly informative and likely to become outdated in short order.

These quibbles aside, Introduction to Computer Information Systems is a serviceable text that will do an able job of informing someone new to computing about the basics of the field. While much of the information contained in the book will likely be material that someone who has bought themselves a PC and ventured out into the internet will already know, having it all presented in a comprehensive manner will probably still be useful for filling in the knowledge gaps of people who know the broad strokes already.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Thirty-Three: Fundamentals of Computing, Third Edition by Kamaljeet Sanghera.

.

Short review: A companion book to Introduction to Computer Information Systems full of practical exercises.

Long review: Pending.

Between the last book and this one I read: The Economist (July 23rd-29th, 2011).

Book Thirty-Four: The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman.

.

Short review: A collection of short tales involving Dream, Death, and the other Endless. One lesson - making deals with the Death is risky.

Long review: Fables and Reflections is the sixth installment in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and is made up of nine stories that are at best loosely connected to one another, but which serve primarily to comment on the nature of what dreams are and what they mean, as well as emphasizing just how alien and inhuman Dream truly is. One exception is the three part story Song of Orpheus that retells the mythic fable of Orpheus and Eurydice, but roots it in the unique reality of the Sandman universe, interjecting Dream, Death, and the other Endless into the narrative, filling in grey areas from the original story. Another exception is the tetrology of the four "emperor" stories, each telling the tale of a different ruler, and which speak to how dreams both create and limit the power of those who hold power.

The first story in the volume is Fear of Falling, a brief tale about how dreams can limit us or force us to reach greater heights. Although this story is quite short, it serves as a thematic framework for the stories that follow, showing the palpable power of human dreams to shape our lives. In large part, this book serves to answer the question of why one would focus on Dream, rather than some of the more obvious Endless such as Death, Desire, or Destiny. The answer is made clear in these tales: Because the dominion of Dream is what makes humans what they are, and what makes humans aspire to be more than that.

The hidden power of Fables and Reflections lies in the thematically linked stories concerning how dreams and ambition connect to those who would rule over others. The first three of these stories walk backwards through time, from nineteenth century United States to eighteenth century France and then to first century Rome, before reversing their flow and moving ahead to eighth century Baghdad. This jumping about in time, and at times, telling a story backwards, is a means by which it seems that Gaiman emphasizes the timelessness of Dream. As one of the Endless, Dream is immortal, and as a result, time has little meaning to him, a meaninglessness that is reflected in the story structure. But in addition to this overarching structural message, each story contains it own commentary on the nature of political power.

Arranged in two thematically linked diptychs, the first pairing Three Septembers and January with Thermidor, showing opposing scales of power and morality. Three Septembers centers on Joshua Abraham Norton, an actual historical figure who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Gaiman's story places Norton at the center of a challenge issued by Despair to Dream. Norton had once been wealthy, but lost all of his fortune speculating in Peruvian rice, whereupon the story imagines that he contemplated giving in to despair and committing suicide. Despair needles Dream, suggesting that Dream is powerless to save Norton from her embrace, so Dream gives Norton a crazy and insane dream. Norton obviously has no actual power as the self-proclaimed emperor of the United States, but his version of the world is a better place than the one he actually lives in. He helps Sam Clemens when he has writer's clock. He is kind to Chinese immigrants. He is dignified with tourists, although he does object to the word "Frisco" being used as a designation for his beloved "San Francisco". As an encounter with Pain sent as an emissary from Desire shows, Norton is content with what he has, and as a result, his "proclamations" and actions are inherently unselfish. He wants nothing for himself, because he is satisfied with his own dream, so he uses his "authority" to try to shape the world in a better direction. Dreams, the story says, can save our lives and make us want the world to be a better place, even if they might make us insane as well.

Emperor Norton's story is sharp contrasted by the tale told in Thermidor, set in revolutionary France when the country was under the sway of the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre's vision of a new society. Dream contracts with Johanna Constantine, asking her to recover an object for him. Soon she is in France, transporting a severed head in a bag. An encounter with a couple of loutish soldiers leads to her capture and imprisonment in the Luxembourg, where it becomes clear just how much Robespierre is willing to sacrifice in the name of the revolution. While questioning Johanna on her way to and in prison, St. Just and Robespierre off-handedly reveal how inherently unfair the system has become, and how it has consumed even its most ardent adherents. Thomas Paine makes a brief appearance to be mocked by St. Just and to condemn how the revolution has twisted and mutilated his words. Presaging the story in The Song of Orpheus, Johanna's quarry is the severed head of Orpheus, an artifact of myth and legend that Robespierre wants to destroy so as to better enable him to usher in a new age based entirely on reason. But reason, in this case, is a world without history and without dreams. In contrast to Norton, who has no power and desires nothing more for himself, Robespierre has almost unlimited power and craves nothing but to acquire more. In Norton's dreams, it seems that power is to be used to serve humanity, while in Robespierre's vision, humans are subordinated to the dictates of power. Norton's empire is built on nothing but dreams, while Robespierre wants to extinguish dreaming altogether.

The second set of political stories consist of August set in imperial Rome during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Ramadan set in Baghdad during the suzerainty of and Caliph Haroun al-Rashid. The two tales illustrate the differences between a love for a time and a city, and a hatred for them. In August, the Imperator hires a dwarf named Lycias to help him impersonate a beggar, as he does once a year. The story is mostly a dialogue between Augustus and Lycias, or rather, an interview, as Lycias peppers the off-duty Imperator with questions and Augustus opines upon the nature of power, the gods, history, and the future of the city. It seems that Augustus had found two sets of prophecies, one heralding perpetual glory for Rome, while the other predicting its decay and destruction. Augustus selected the future he wished to come to pass, and had all references to the other destroyed. The story only features Dream for a brief portion of its length, and then only as a guest in Augustus' mind to tell him how to deal with his nightmares. And so Augustus takes one day a year off to pose as a beggar in order to hide from the gods, including divine Julius who Augustus so despises, and make his plans out of their sight. Augustus loathes Rome even as he builds temples to beautify it, because he loathes its architect. The story shows how dreams of vengeance can consume an entire civilization and bring it to its knees, causing its glory to wither and fade to dust.

On the flip side is the story Ramadan, featuring a ruler who loves his city more than anything else. Caliph Haroun al-Rashid also disguises himself to walk the streets of his city, not to plot its demise, but rather to revel in its glories. Like Augustus did, al-Rashid realizes that no city can last forever. Unlike Augustus, al-Rashid fears this coming to pass, because, unlike Augustus, al-Rashid loves Baghdad. So, in the style of Arabian Nights, al-Rashid takes a special key and walks through magical doors leading to and through vaults filled with sometimes fabulous and sometimes oddly mundane treasures until he finds a chip he hopes he can use to bargain in exchange for everlasting fame for his city. After drawing Dream's attention, al-Rashid first tries to blackmail the Endless into doing what he wants, and after that fails, they go to the city market and haggle. al-Rashid realizes that Baghdad is at its height, and worries that it will fade from memory and become nothing but another forgotten relic. Instead, he wants Dream to take the city, or at least its essence, into his realm so that it will remain the stuff of nighttime fantasies forever.

The centerpiece of Fables and Reflections is the story Song of Orpheus, told in three broad strokes, with a sad little epilogue. In the first section we meet Orpheus on his wedding day as he is about to be married to his love Eurydice. Orpheus makes the mistake of bringing his friend the satyr Aristaeus to the nuptials, but before the tragedy plays out we are introduced to Orpheus' aunts and uncles the Endless: Depair, Delerium, Desire, Destruction, Destiny, and of course Death, although the story uses their Greek names. Orpheus, in Gaiman's telling, is Dream's son by the muse Calliope, a shift from mythology to fit the story into the Sandman series. The first hint that there will be trouble at the celebration is when Death reveals that she is not merely in attendance as a guest, but also because she has work to do there. Aristaeus, overcome by drink, attempts to rape Eurydice, and as she flees she is bitten by a viper and dies. The second portion of the story details Orpheus' famous attempt to recover his wife from Hades. He first begs his father to help him, but when Dream refuses, stating that all things come to an end, Orpheus disowns his heritage and rejects Dream as his father. In a development that perhaps Orpheus should have thought more about, his uncle Destruction offers to help him visit his aunt Death to bargain with her for the return of Eurydice. Death makes a bargain with him to allow him to travel to Hades and return alive: She agrees never to take him to the underworld, a bargain that has dire consequences, as all bargains with Death seem to. Following the classic myth, Orpheus travels to the Underworld, charms Hades into allowing Eurydice to leave, and then allows his doubts to condemn her to death again. In the final chapter, Calliope visits her disconsolate son where we learn that he has tried to kill himself in his despair, but because Death had promised never to come for him, he could not. Orpheus is then set upon by the Bacchante and his flesh consumed, leaving only his still living head for Dream to find in the epilogue. The story closes with a conversation between the two that shows just how much Dream cares, but also how cold and inhuman he truly is. But the reader already knew how Orpheus ended up, having been shown his animated severed head earlier in the book, and yet later in time. And we've also seen Calliope before in the series and later in time as well, wrecked by her relationship with Dream. This is the inside-out storytelling that runs through the series, many times showing the effects prior to showing the cause, demonstrating the timelessness of the Endless via the disjointed nature of the narrative.

The remaining three stories range from pure fantasy to merely the intersection of history and fantasy. The Hunt is framed as a story told by a grandfather from the old country to his granddaughter, raised in the new world of television and music videos. While his granddaughter interrupts and complains, he recounts how a young boy named Vassily, one of "the people", encounters a gypsy woman in the forest and acquires a locket with the picture of the Duke's youngest daughter from her. He falls in love with the image of the Duke's daughter, and after he later finds the gypsy woman dead in the forest, he takes her pack of treasures, that she said included the heart of Koschei the Deathless, the cloak of night, and the Drum Inescapable, as well as a book and sets out to win the girl for himself. His journey takes him on a few adventures, but most importantly he crosses paths with a woman of the people and also with Dream's servant Lucien who wants to acquire the book he carries. Vassily demands the girl as his price for the book, which Dream eventually consents to, but once he finds her, Vassily realizes that a woman being the object of your dreams is insufficient, her dreams must also match your dreams.

Soft Places sees the return of Fiddler's Green, a personified place of dreams that a very young Marco Polo meets while he is lost in the Desert of Lop. Also joining them is Rustichello, the man who far in Polo's future, will help cowrite Polo's autobiography while they are sharing a Genoese cell. This juxtaposition of two people from different times continues with the book's theme that the dream world is not bound by ordinary notions of time and space. In the end, Polo is saved by an act of generosity towards a freshly released Dream, which is yet another subtle indication that the ordinary strictures of time and space don't apply to Dream as it was established in Preludes and Nocturnes that the Sandman was released from his captivity in the twentieth century and yet here he is in the dream of a fourteenth century traveler suggesting that he is weak from imprisonment. As the title suggests whole story occurs within one of the "soft places" of the world, where the realms of dream and reality intersect and where history and fantasy interact.

The remaining story, A Parliament of Rooks, is more of a collection of shorter stories than it is a single story. Daniel Hall, the infant son of the previously introduced Hippolyta Hall, wanders into the dream realm and runs across Matthew the Raven and then Eve before being taken to visit with Abel. While Abel is busy getting everyone tea (and getting Matthew a decomposing rat), Cain shows up and everyone begins to tell stories, or in Cain's case, a mystery. The stories told by Eve and Abel are self-referential - Eve's story is about Adam's three wives and Abel's is about how he and Cain came to live in the dream realm (and features Dream and death as children), while Cain's story concerns a gathering of rooks and seems to explain why it is called a "parliament". The mundane nature of Cain's story contrasts with the mythic grandeur of Eve and Abel's, but because it presents such a tantalizing secret it still resonates, at least until Abel spills the beans, leading to Cain's somewhat predictably murderous response. The tale illustrates the cyclical nature of dreaming, these figures in the dream realm are the stuff of legend, both the source of dreams, and then as the subject of dreams. Myths are created by our dreams, but then they influence our dreams, changing the myths, resulting in a perpetual cycle of feedback.

The whole of Fables and Reflections feels like an interlude between larger stories. Each of the short tales says something, whether it is commentary on the nature of political power or discussions of the intersection between family and legend. Given that this is a collection of Sandman stories it should be entirely unsurprising that they focus on how our dreams shape us, and in turn, how we shape the world as a result. And although this volume is more or less just a link between larger stories, what it says about the connection between our myths, or dreams, and our reality. But Gaiman also shows how dreams don't follow our normal understanding of time, giving us glimpses of myths completed before he actually tells the stories of those myths. By frequently telling the stories out of temporal order, and by ignoring the mundane constraints of distance, Gaiman gives the entire series of stories a jumbled dream-like quality that intensifies the moody and atmospheric effect of the stories themselves and the characters who inhabit them resulting in a volume unified by its commentary on the nature of dreams themselves.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

Science News (August 13, 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (July 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (August 2011)
The Economist (July 30th-August 5th, 2011)
The Economist (August 6th-12th, 2011)
The Economist (August 13th-19th, 2011)

Book Thirty Five: Some of My Best Friends Are Monsters by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Stuart's life is complicated. His best friend is a ghost only he can see, the camp bully picks on him and turns into a monster, and he's being chased by a walking mummy. Just a normal summer at Camp Haunted Hills.

Long review: In Some of My Best Friends Are Monsters Coville continues the story of Stuart Glassman's sojourn at Camp Haunted Hills, a summer camp for kids that is run by the famous movie director Gregory Stevens which teaches kids film making, picking up where How I Survived My Summer Vacation left off. This installment continues the kitchen sink approach to storytelling that seems to be de rigeur for this series, with the campers joined by Roger the Ghost, a walking, talking Egyptian mummy, and a formula that transforms people into monsters. But the main story of the book is Glassman's conflict with the camp bully Lucius Colton, who seems to have taken an instant dislike to the nerdy and bespectacled Glassman.

The main conflict of the book is fairly simple: Colton hates Glassman and acts like a jerk - pushing him around, dumping food on his head, and destroying his property. Glassman explains that he's tried reasoning with Colton, fighting Colton, and otherwise getting Colton to get off his back, all to no avail. Roger, well-meaning but kind of dumb, tries to help by pulling a prank on Colton which more or less backfires, resulting in a mess that embarrasses Glassman's favorite counselor Harry Housen and that Glassman and his Brenda Conners have to clean up. And of course, despite being the result of good intentions on Roger's part, it does nothing to slow down Colton's persecution of Glassman.

Having a ghost who can go anywhere without anyone seeing him as a character allows Coville to throw in some story elements out of left-field, and he does. Roger tells Stuart and Brenda that a delivery made to Gregory Stevens' home was a real Egyptian mummy, and that one of the delivery men stole something from the mummy's case. Coincidentally this story is related to Stuart and Brenda immediately after they find a mysterious gold bug-shaped object on the ground near the trail to Stevens' house, although neither of them make the fairly obvious connection.

Because the book is only 106 pages, the story hustles along quickly . Colton tries to get revenge on Stuart by turning the tables and playing the trick Roger played on Colton earlier on the entire camp. Colton's plan is plan to let Stuart take the blame for the initial disaster and at the same time save everyone himself and get the accolades of being a hero. Through the application of some quick thinking, film special effects technology, and the unexpected intervention of a walking mummy, Colton's plan is foiled, Stuart saves the day and everything turns out okay.

Well, sort of. Some of My Best Friends Are Monsters is the middle book in the series, and it shows in several ways. The most notable is that by the end of the book, the conflict between Glassman and Colton has resulted in a temporary triumph for Glassman, but remains unresolved. The book does not even include a message about being friends, or being nice, which makes it quite unusual for a Coville story. As a result, the book feels somewhat incomplete, and not much more than some funny filler in between How I Survived My Summer Vacation and The Dinosaur That Followed Me Home.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (August 20th-26th, 2011)
The Economist (August 27th-September 2nd, 2011)

Book Thirty-Six: Aliens Ate My Homework by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Rod Albright is a nerdy clumsy kid afflicted by bullies. Then the aliens show up.

Long review: Rod Albright is a kid with the typical troubles that afflict a lot of kids. He's overweight and clumsy, leading to his nickname "Rod the Clod". He is bullied by the class bullies Billy Becker and Arnie Markle. His single mother is overstretched in her commitments, meaning that he has the responsibility of watching his younger twin siblings Little Thing One and Little Thing Two. And he has a science project due. And then an alien ship crashes through his bedroom window, destroying his science project and handing him a whole collection of decidedly atypical troubles.

Having a spaceship crash through your bedroom window sounds pretty catastrophic, but in the case of the Ferkel, the ship is only two feet across, so other than a broken window and a crushed paper mache volcano, Rod's bedroom is mostly unscathed. After running afoul of Grakker, the ship's irritable two-inch tall captain, Rod isn't quite so lucky, getting a tiny hole in his ear. Once the Ferkel's diplomatic officer Madame Pong shows up, things get a little less tense. Rod learns that his unexpected guests are members of the Galactic Patrol on the trail of an interstellar criminal. Rod also finds himself involuntarily accorded the status of deputy and ordered to assist the crew of the Ferkel in their efforts to apprehend the fugitive.

After meeting the rest of the ship's crew, breaking regulations, and watching helplessly while the aliens carve up his volcano for fuel and food, Rod carries the Ferkel to a nearby field in order to allow the crew to use their size-altering technology to return the ship (and its crew) to their normal size. But when this doesn't work, Rod finds himself acting as an involuntary depurty again as part of the Ferkel's crew set about repairing the ship while Rod and the rest - Grakker, Madam Pong, and the ship's mental officer Snout, set off for Rod's school to try to get information about the criminal they are pursuing. Why Rod's school? Because in a massive coincidence, it turns out that the BKR, the criminal they are pursuing, is someone Rod knows.

Once at school, Rod runs into trouble with Arnie and Billy again, as Arnie spots the aliens Rod is carrying in his backpack. Mistaking them for toys, Arnie appropriates Grakker as his own. Grakker, being an alien and not a toy, returns to Rod's desk while the class is at lunch, and being hungry himself, eats Rod's math homework - which spawns the title of the book. of course, it also spawns more ire from Arnie directed towards Rod. But when Arnie tries to make Rod pay for the crime of Grakker disappearing from Arnie's desk, Snout comes to Rod's aid and Arnie ends up getting the worse end of the exchange. Through this section of the book, two themes common to Coville's books begin to come through clearly: (a) bullies will keep being bullies unless stood up to, and (b) the human race is cruel and barbaric and alien society is better.

But the story moves on as the crew of the Ferkel close in on their quarry. Well, they don't so much close in on their quarry as go stright to his house, discover who their real target is almost immediately, and then spend the rest of the book trying to apprehend him in zany action scenes. Along the way, Rod gets captured, shrunk to two-inches tall himself, has to deal with the kidnapping of his two siblings, and gets captured again. He also gets a tour of an alien ship, some new friends, and helps save the day. He also gets some help clearing up a few problems that he has had stemming from his interactions with his schoolmates.

In the end, almost every plot thread is wrapped up and everyone is happy (except, of course, for the villains). In fact, there is only one plot thread left hanging, which turns out to be the connection between Aliens Ate My Homework and the rest of the Alien Adventures series - and that plot thread is downplayed by the characters. It almost seems like Aliens Ate My Homework was originally conceived and written as a stand-alone book that was later revamped into the beginning of a series which makes it sort of like The Hobbit. As a result, while the book does kick off a really good series, it also serves up a very strong and enjoyable story on its own.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (September 3rd-9th, 2011)
The Economist (September 10th-16th, 2011)
Science News (August 27, 2011)
Science News (September 10, 2011)
The University of Virginia Magazine (Fall 2011)

Book Thirty-Seven: I Was a Sixth Grade Alien: I Lost My Grandfather's Brain by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Someone is feeding stories to the newspapers about Pleskit. Everyone suspects Tim and Pleskit thinks its a good idea to bring his grandfather's disembodied brain to school.

Long review: I Lost My Grandfather's Brain is the third book in Bruce Coville's I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series. Like the previous books in the series, the story is told in an alternating viewpoint format with the alien sixth grader Pleskit and his human friend Tim narrating alternate chapters. As usual for a Coville book, there is a certain amount of editorializing about the superior nature of alien society, but it is not too heavy-handed.

Like most of the books in the series, the main plot element is given away by the title of the book, so it should surprise no one that Pleskit loses his grandfather's brain. Those who have read the earlier books in the series know that Pleskit's grandfather, or in alien vernacular "grandfatherly one" is a disembodied brain kept alive in a vat of chemicals. Stories clearly based on inside information obtained from someone at school featuring Pleskit begin turning up in a tabloid, prompting Pleskit to seek the advice of his grandfather. His grandfather, annoyed at being cooped up inside the alien embassy and ignored, helpfully suggests that Pleskit take him to school and let him try to figure out who has been leaking information to the press.

Adding further complications to the story line, circumstances result in suspicion falling upon Tim as the information source for the newspaper articles, driving something of a wedge between Tim and Pleskit. Because of the shifting viewpoint form of storytelling we know that Tim did not actually betray his friend, but we do see Pleskit's more or less understandable doubts come into play. Seeing things from Tim's perspective as well gives us a window into his confusion and frustration as he struggles to find a way to clear his name and reassure his best friend that he didn't sell him out for a quick buck. During their estrangement, Pleskit engages in a somewhat odd quasi-friendship with Jordan, the class bully who had spent the previous two books pushing Pleskit and Tim around. This storyline lets Coville address one of his favored "messages" as Pleskit is able to learn a little bit about the value of true friendship as opposed to phony friendship.

The series of unwelcome newspaper articles featuring Pleskit allows Coville to do his usual moralizing about the superiority of alien society as Meenom (Pleskit's "fatherly one") is outraged to discover that on Earth (or at least in the United States) there is no restriction on printing newspaper articles about children. One might consider such a restriction to be a good idea, but all of the human characters at hand feebly talk about their helplessness to change the law, but no one offers any kind of defense of the idea of freedom of the press. As seems fairly typical, Coville has a bone to pick with modern society and sets up a strawman to attack. I'm not saying Coville's position on this issue is obviously wrong, and I'm not saying he's right either, but one would think Coville would make a better case for his position if he treated the opposing arguments more seriously than he does. On the other hand, this is a book aimed at young readers. That said, I don't really think that is an excuse for doing little more than painting a caricature of the other side and knocking it down.

To solve the mystery of who is sending stories to the newspapers, Pleskit brings his grandfather to school, who proves to be a big hit among his classmates. Unfortunately, during a bomb scare, the container holding Pleskit's grandfather is left in the classroom, and then stolen. Through a series of events the Grandfatherly One's brain is recovered and the newspaper source is uncovered while both the Grandfatherly One and Tim prove to be heroes in their own fashion and everything turns out well. In typical Coville fashion, the story has a lot of action, a little intrigue, and some moral lessons about friendship and the superiority of non-human civilization. In short, any young reader who likes science fiction will probably have a good time if he opens the pages of this book.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

National Geographic (September 2011)
Poets & Writers September/October 2011)

Book Thirty-Eight: I Was a Sixth Grade Alien: Peanut Butter Lover Boy by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Peanut butter affects Pleskit's brain chemistry, but some people don't believe in brain chemistry. So Tim and Pleskit set out to teach them a lesson.

Long Review: The fourth book in Bruce Coville's I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series, Peanut Butter Lover Boy departs from the alternating first person viewpoint format of the previous three books and has a single third person narrator telling the story. This change is announced in the opening pages of the book as part of a letter supposedly written by Pleskit, although there appears to be no particular reason for the change. That aside, the story is a pretty typical Coville tale about the value of friendship packaged with some silly adventure and a message concerning mental illness.

The story itself starts off fairly innocuously with Tim and Pleskit at lunch where they decide to make the common schoolboy trade of their lunch. Tim ends up with an egg-like thing that he is supposed to smash against his hand and lick, while Pleskit gets a peanut butter sandwich. And from there the problems begin, because when Pleskit sees Linnsey walking by, he declares his undying love for her and charges off to kiss her. This causes some consternation and McNally has to restrain Pleskit until he comes back to his senses. After some investigation, Tim and Pleskit figure out that peanut butter causes this reaction in Pleskit. And at this point the message concerning mental illness comes into play.

It turns out that Linnsey's mother Mrs. Vanderhof suffers from a chemical imbalance in her brain, and takes medication to control her condition. And when it is confirmed that Pleskit's behaviour is changed by peanut butter, she gives a basic explanation of brain chemistry and how it is treated. But neither Pleskit's father Meenom or the new school principal Mr. Grand think that brain chemistry has any effect on behavior. Mr. Grand accuses Pleskit of trying to evade responsibility for his actions with a silly made-up story. This brush-off incenses Mrs. Vanderhof, and she and the boys try to figure out how to show that brain chemistry is real.

Into this gap steps Beezle Whompis, Meenom's new assistant, an energy being with a mastery over alien science. After Beezle examines the human brain, he concocts a substance that transforms an ordinary human mind into a monkey-like state. With the assistance of McNally and Mrs. Vanderhof, the boys plan to smuggle the substance in to a PTA meeting and have Tim eat the stuff and show how something you consume can affect your brain. One plot hole here is that this seems like a pretty obviously stupid plan - while we the readers know that the substance actually makes Tim think like a monkey, for all people like Mr. Grand know Tim could just be play acting his monkey behavior. Fortunately, events conspire to make the plan work out much better than that, and all ends well.

Woven through the main story is another more serious story involving exactly what Meenom's purpose on Earth is. When they make their initial lunch exchange, Tim has second thoughts and tries to get Pleskit to trade back. Pleskit is perturbed by this request, and when Tim presses him regarding why this bothers him so much, Pleskit explains that the basis of alien society is mutually beneficial trades, and trying to back out of a deal is a mark of a barbaric uncivilized society. It turns out that Meenom is attempting to open trade with Earth, and if his mission fails he will be replaced, potentially by an alien representative much less sympathetic to human concerns. Unfortunately, as of the beginning of the book Meenom has yet to find an Earth product that anyone else in the galaxy would value. This conundrum is solved in a modestly unusual manner that dovetails nicely with the main plot of the book.

Peanut Butter Lover Boy is another strong installment in the I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series. It retains all of the silly adventure of the previous books in the series, and adds just enough of a discussion about serious issues like mental illness to convey a moral lesson without being heavy-handed about it. The story also opens up a tiny window on the wider alien society that Meenom and Pleskit represent, and gives the first real indication of what might be at stake for Earth. Overall, this is a book any science-fiction loving kid will probably enjoy reading.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Thirty-Nine: I Was a Sixth Grade Alien: Zombies of the Science Fair by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Pleskit and Tim need science projects. Pleskit's science project is supposed to make Tim smarter so Tim can do his science project. Instead, Pleskit makes zombies.

Long review: Zombies of the Science Fair, the fifth book in Coville's I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series sees Pleskit and Tim preparing for their upcoming school science fair. The books abandons the third party narration of Peanut Butter Lover Boy and goes back to the original format of alternating viewpoints, switching between Tim and Pleskit as the narrator in each chapter, and throwing in a chapter narrated by their mutual friend Linnsy too. As with previous installments in the series, the story is full of zany adventure, a dash of moralizing about the value of good friends, and introduces a concept seen in other Coville books - that humans have vast amounts of wasted potential.

Tim and Pleskit view the prospect of completing a science project for the impending fair very differently. Pleskit sees the science fair as a wonderful event - an opportunity to come up with and complete a project that will show off his love of science. Tim also sees this as an opportunity to come up with a project that will show off his love of science, but fears that as with previous years he will (a) put it off to the last minute, and (b) embark on an endeavor so overly complicated that he cannot possibly complete it with his available resources and technical skills. Given this history, it seems natural that Tim would view the prospect of doing a science project with a mixture of joy and trepidation.

Given this set up, it comes as no surprise that one week before the science project is due that Tim has still not managed to even come up with a viable idea. What is surprising is that Pleskit also has not come up with a usable idea. Granted, Pleskit has completed three science projects by that time, but the first proved too technical to be understood by technologically backwards humans, the second involved using agricultural materials forbidden to be revealed to humans, and the third proved too controversial. So when Tim calls Pleskit about his problem getting a science project started, Pleskit has an idea that will help both of them: for Pleskit's science project he will make Tim smarter, and then the new smarter Tim will be able to come up with a project he can complete. Given the history of plans concocted by these two, it should surprise no one that this is a recipe for disaster.

It turns out that humans are actually much smarter than they seem, so all Pleskit has to do to make Tim smarter is to unlock the wasted potential in Tim's brain. The idea that humans have massive untapped potential wasting away in our brains is a theme that has shown up in other Coville books - notably the My Teacher Is an Alien series. Pleskit decides to make a suggestibility potion that will allow him to simply tell Tim to be smarter. And because Tim has untapped intelligence lurking inside his head, this works. Unfortunately, it also has to effect of making Tim subject to almost any command given by the person who administered the potion, a situation that has some fairly obvious potential downsides.

But the potion does have a big upside and Tim is able to make a viable science project. In the meantime, Pleskit comes up with an antidote, just in case. And this turns out to be a good idea because class bully and recurring villain Jordan (who everyone assumes simply had his wealthy father pay for someone to complete his science project) taunts Tim into dosing himself with the potion, leaving him paralyzed and unable to do anything. Even worse, a plot against Pleskit's father's mission comes to fruition during the actual science fair, resulting in everyone in attendance being turned into a suggestible pseudo-zombie (hence the title of the book). As usual, things look dire but quick thinking by Tim and Pleskit plus some heroics by Pleskit's bodyguard McNally wind up saving the day.

Zombies of the Science Fair is a typical Coville book: a nice message about the value of friends and an optimistic take on human nature wrapped up in a silly, funny adventure. Building on previous books in the series, a little more is revealed of the mysterious shadowy conspiracy that seems determined to foil Meenom's mission to Earth and replace him with an agent inimical to Earth's interests. Overall, Coville strikes the right balance between silly preteen antics, moralizing, and interstellar conspiracy, and winds up with a fun and interesting book.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Forty: Into the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Cara and her grandmother are chased by a mysterious stranger, and Cara ends up in a magical land where unicorns are real. But this new world is still dangerous.

Long review: Bruce Coville loves unicorns. I don't think there is any doubt about this. So it should surprise no one that when Coville sat down to write a more or less "serious" fantasy series, unicorns would be prominently featured. I've said before that I don't particularly get the love for unicorns - they are basically just a horse with a horn on its head, some healing powers and a penchant for virgins. However, with Into the Land of the Unicorns Coville seems to have taken the mythology of unicorns and launched a series that does about as much as one could do with it.

The story wastes little time getting started - Cara and her grandmother are out walking one evening when Cara spots a mysterious man following them which leads to a furious chase ending with Cara's grandmother thrusting a mysterious amulet into her hands and instructing her to leap off of the top of a church tower at the twelfth strike of the bell and deliver a message once she got to where she was going. And suddenly Cara finds herself in a strange land being assaulted by a dwarf-like delver who incapacitates her before she is rescued by the half-man half-bear Dimblethum. While recovering from her injuries in Dimblethum's cave, Cara meets the unicorn Lightfoot who heals her and informs her she is in Luster, the land of the unicorns. She also meets the diminutive squirrel-like Squijum, an excitable and like the Dimblethum, also a unique creature.

Or at least the land where the unicorns fled to when they abandoned Earth. Apparently unicorns were being ruthlessly hunted to extinction when they opened gates to this alternate world and withdrew to there. Cara was able to travel between worlds using the amulet her grandmother gave her - one of the "Queen's Amulets", of which there are only five. This, of course, raises the question of what her grandmother was doing with such a valuable object. And when Lightfoot hears the message Cara was instructed to deliver "find the Old One and tell her the Wanderer is weary", he declares that they must visit the Queen of the Unicorns (who he identifies as the "Old One") as quickly as possible. So, with the Dimblethum and Squijum accompanying them, they set out to cross Luster and visit the royal court, although both Lightfoot and the Dimblethum have some reservations about going to the royal court.

Before long this odd group of four come across Thomas, one of the few human inhabitants of Luster. Thomas is a tinker who pulls a big handcart around with him everywhere he goes and turns out to be a little more than one might think at first glance. Thomas spontaneously decides to join the little band, and they head out towards Grimwold's home. Grimwold is the "Keeper of the Unicorn Chronicles" who maintains a repository of all stories involving unicorns and their allies. By having Cara pick up various companions along the way, Coville is able to fill Cara (and thus the reader) in on the basic conflict of the series. In the distant past, unicorns acquired an undeserved reputation as vicious beasts. Through a combinations of misunderstandings, a unicorn is violently interrupted while trying to heal a small girl named "Beloved", and the tip of his horn breaks off in the girl's chest, leaving her in a continuous painful cycle of injury and healing. Prevented from dying by the horn embedded in her flesh, Beloved vows to take revenge upon the unicorns for the wrong she perceives they have done her, and her descendants become the "Hunters", who pursued the unicorns so relentlessly that they fled from Earth to Luster. Cara, with her amulet, represents an avenue into Luster for the Hunters, and so she is pursued.

And the unicorns weren't the only creatures to flee from Earth to Luster. There are a handful of transplanted humans and there are also the delvers and dragons, all of whom originally came from Earth and have little love for humans. We also find out that the delvers have been hunting for Cara to get her amulet, but that some delvers, nonplussed at the idea that humans might try to follow her into Luster are willing to offer mild assistance in her quest to warn the Queen of the imminent danger. After this unexpected assistance, the intrepid band of travelers turn to their next problem, which is that they must also traverse through the territory of Firethroat, one of the seven dragons in Luster.

The plot comes to a head in Firethroat's territory, as the shadowy threat that has been looming over Cara shows itself, and turns out to be somehow both surprising and completely predictable. Some quick thinking manages to turn the tables on her adversary, and some generosity results in a fairly substantial thank you gift. As with most Coville books, the lesson conveyed is that making friends is a good thing, and that being nice results in good things happening. These are fairly simple and straightforward life lessons, but they are packaged quite well here, and flow organically from the story.

Into the Land of the Unicorns is a pretty standard young adult fantasy story featuring mostly pretty standard fantasy elements: unicorns, dragons, goblin-like delvers, magical amulets and gates between worlds, the wise wizardly dwarf Grimwold, and of course, an evil immortal villain. But the story is engaging and Coville throws in just enough curves - such as the Dimblethum and the Squijum - to keep the fantasy elements from being stale. On the whole, this is a decent beginning to what promises to be a good, albeit fairly conventional, fantasy tale.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Forty-One: I Was a Sixth Grade Alien: Don't Fry My Veeblax! by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Goaded into bringing his shapeshifting pet to school, Pleskit sparks another incident, this time pitting insane women's rights activists against insane animal rights activists.

Long review: As one might guess from the title of the book, the story of Don't Fry My Veeblax! focuses heavily on Pleskit's pet shapeshifter. The story also features a media frenzy driven by sensationalism and half-truths as well as a collection of vocal activists gone wild. But at its heart the story is about a pair of twelve-year old friends from different planets at the center of yet another interstellar diplomatic incident.

The plot kicks off with a visit to Tim and Pleskit's sixth grade class from local poet Percy Canterfield, who apparently comes every year to teach the kids poetry. he proposes the kids write poems about their pets, and that the kids should all bring their respective pets to school. This proposal leads to one student named Larrabe Hicks announcing that he has the most unusual pet in the class: a woodchuck named Harold. Eventually Pleskit brings up his own pet - the shapeshifting Veeblax, which the strangely popular class jerk Jordan immediately dismisses, announcing to everyone his opinion that Pleskit is just making up stories. This goads Pleskit into vowing to bring the Veeblax to school the next day.

(As an aside, this sequence seems odd. Pleskit is a purple alien with a tentacle like protrusion growing from his head whose language includes burps, farts, and smells. Pleskit is known to be from a distant planet and lives in a flying saucer hanging from a coat hanger. In previous books he has displayed technology that changes people's size, makes them think like monkeys, and transforms them into suggestible zombies. Given this background, exactly what is so unbelievable about a shapeshifting pet that everyone in the class would essentially side with Jordan on this? And why does Jordan continue to be so popular and influential among the other students when it has been shown over and over again that he is an ignorant jackass?)

In any event, Pleskit is determined to bring his Veeblax to school. Unfortunately, his father Meenom proves to be too busy for Pleskit to talk to in order to obtain permission, so Pleskit sneaks the Veeblax out of the alien embassy and takes him to school on the sly. (Another open question is that it seems entirely unclear how obtaining permission would have changed subsequent events. The only way Meenom could have "helped" would have been to simply forbid taking the Veeblax to school, a prohibition Pleskit probably would have ignored anyway). Once at school, the Veeblax proves to be a big hit with the other students, although Larrabe's pet woodchuck Harold seems to be overly interested in the Veeblax chow.

Trouble begins brewing when Pleskit's classmate Misty, desperate to have more attention focused on her, demands that the Veeblax pay attention to her, which it seems disinclined to do. This comes to fruition later during recess when Misty calls to the Veeblax who, in an uncharacteristic action, leaps onto her, wraps its limbs around her, and refuses to stop clinging until Pleskit stuns it with his sphen-gnut-ksher. Though Misty is uninjured, the incident is captured by long range cameras and becomes a media sensation. Misty's interviews with the media become more and more fanciful, progressing to tearful confessions of her fear at being attacked by the vicious alien creature, and opposing camps of protesters appear at the gates of the school. Women's rights activists appear to protest Misty's "sexual harassment" (which seems weird - if a dog jumped up on a girl, would that be sexual harassment too?), while animal rights activists appear to stick up for the Veeblax. One protest sign demands "Fry the Veeblax!", giving the book its name.

As the situation quickly spins into a diplomatic incident, Meenom acquiesces to a request to have the Veeblax taken for study, a prospect that fills Pleskit with dread. Fearing that his Veeblax will be dissected if he is turned over to animal control, Pleskit packs up his pet and runs away from home. Obviously, a purple alien twelve-year old with an orange shapeshifting pet is going to have a hard time hiding out on Earth, so Pleskit heads to his friend Tim's house. With government agents looking for him hot on his heels. After a narrow escape (in a sequence that shows that assuming an alien runaway child would be limited to the abilities a human runaway would have is not particularly smart), Pleskit turns to Percy Canterfield for assistance.

Canterfield, being an open-minded and somewhat rebellious fellow agrees, but Pleskit soon becomes remorseful about endangering him and his daughter with his presence. Soon he is on his own again, and as a result of a series of decisions predictable enough that Tim figures out where he is, Pleskit, with a big assist from Linnsy, meanders his way to the resolution of the mysteries that have arisen in the book. Of course, Tim and Pleskit team up for some zany hijinks along the way and everything turns out more or less okay in the end, especially for Tim who gets an unexpected bonus.

Don't Fry My Veeblax! is the most Pleskit-centered story in the I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series, but oddly the actual heavy lifting in the plot is done by his human friends. While most of the story revolves around Pelskit's attempts to evade the capture and examination of the Veeblax, it is Linnsy who actually figures out what happened on the playground, and Tim who figures out how to find Pleskit and help him out. While Pleskit is clearly smart, he still exercises poor judgment throughout to the book, leaving his human friends to pull him out of the fire. This is a welcome change of pace from the typical Coville story in which the superiority of alien intelligence is extolled, and helps make this an even better book than Coville's usually quite good offerings.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

Science News (September 24, 2011)
The Economist (September 17th-23rd, 2011)
The Economist (September 24th-30th, 2011)

Book Forty-Two: I Was a Sixth Grade Alien: The Attack of the Two-Inch Teacher by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: Class jerk Jordan needs to be taken down a peg. Pleskit and Tim come up with a plan to shrink him to two-inches tall. Nothing could go wrong with this plan could it?

Long review: The Attack of the Two-Inch Teacher is the second book in the I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series, following directly on the heels of the events described in the opening book I Was a Sixth Grade Alien. The story picks up with Tim and Pleskit returning to school after foiling the attempt to discredit the freshly established alien embassy on Earth. Of course, having foiled an attempt at interstellar chicanery the boys turn to the much more pressing problem of dealing with the class bully Jordan. As with I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, the story is told from an alternating viewpoint that switches back and forth between Tim and Pleskit.

After visiting with Pleskit and deciding he needs to dress more like an Earth kid in order to get along better in school, Tim seeks the help of his neighbor Linnsy in picking out some "cool" clothes for Pleskit at the local mall. This intention is looked upon rather distastefully by Mrs. Buttsman, the newly hired "protocol officer" who is somewhat horrified to learn that Pleskit would like to fit in with the other kids. (Overall, Mrs. Buttsman's character seems to exist to provide a stupidly fussy human adult who can offer advice that is wholly useless for a sixth grader). Given Pleskit's status as a rather polarizing figure threatened both by xenophobic bigots among the human population and having been a target of an alien conspiracy, this visit requires some rather substantial security precautions. Once at the mall, Pleskit muses on the differences between human commerce and what he is used to, which is the one point in the book where Coville allows a little bit of his usual editorializing to sneak into the story with the relative niceness of alien society being touted by Pleskit, especially when he is confronted by a video game arcade - prompting him to wonder if this is what humans do for fun in public, what are they capable of in private. The trip ends with the purchase of some blue jeans for Pleskit and the alarming news that Jordan is returning to class.

Jordan picks up exactly where he left off, harassing Tim and Pleskit, leading Pleskit to suggest consulting with his Grandfatherly One for advice on how to deal with a bully. Pleskit's Grandfatherly One is somewhat crotchety, which is somewhat understandable given that he is a disembodied head that doesn't get as much attention from his family as he thinks he should. But he dislikes bullies, so he gives some advice after a fashion, which leads Pleskit to conclude that he should abscond with a piece of technology from his father's office and use it to shrink Jordan down to a tiny size to teach him a lesson. As one might guess from the title of the book, this plan goes somewhat awry, and instead of Jordan, Pleskit accidentally shrinks Tim and their teacher Ms. Weintraub.

Pleskit presses his bodyguard McNally into service as an emergency substitute teacher to cover for Ms. Weintraub's absence while Ms. Weintraub and Tim hide in a drawer in Ms. Weintraub's desk. It turns out that while McNally is quite skilled as a bodyguard, as a substitute teacher he's fairly ineffective, resulting in some fairly humorous sequences. One wrinkle to the shrinking process is that while the size of an object is shrunk by the process, it's mass is unchanged, meaning that despite being a mere two-inches tall Ms. Weintraub and Tim still weigh just as much as they do when they are full size, leading to more than a few mishaps. Things come to a head when Mrs. Buttsman accompanies the federal school inspector Mr. Tommakkio, and someone turns out to not be who they say they are. This leads to a hostage situation as Pleskit's life is again threatened, which is only averted by some quick thinking on the part of Tim and Pleskit.

As this is a Coville book, the the heroes save the day and villain is foiled, although the heroes do get in trouble for their shenanigans. However, because their shenanigans resulted in foiling yet another plot against Pleskit and the credibility of the alien embassy, they get off lightly. One question that does spring to mind is exactly how McNally keeps his job, since he was more or less complicit in the boys' plan to shrink Jordan, and that would seem to be wildly inappropriate behavior for a Secret Service agent regardless of the beneficial nature of the outcome. On the other hand, the book is aimed at elementary school aged readers, so this sort of thing can be overlooked (along with the fact that a "protocol officer" as clueless as Ms. Buttsman would never be able to keep her job). Focusing mostly on the adventure, and downplaying the typical Coville editorializing about the superior virtues of alien civilization compared to ours, The Attack of the Two-Inch Teacher is a fun tale of silly grade school hijinks layered with some science fiction that adds up to a good book.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Forty-Three: Song of the Wanderer by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: The message from Book One has been delivered. Now Cara has to find the Wanderer and bring her home.

Long review: Song of the Wanderer is the second book in The Unicorn Chronicles, and picks up shortly after Into the Land of the Unicorns ended. Whereas the first book was mostly a "run from the pursuers and deliver a message" story that mostly focused on giving the broad outlines of the fantasy world of Luster and the ancient conflict between the unicorns and the Hunters, this story begins to fill in the details. The book also deals with the relationships between parents and children - notably between Lightfoot and his father, and Cara and hers, as well as between Cara and her grandmother and Cara's father and Beloved.

At the outset of the book, Cara, the youthful protagonist from the previous installment of the series, is ensconced in Summerhaven at the court of Arabella Skydancer, Queen of the Unicorns resting from her journey across Luster to deliver the message "the Wanderer is Weary". Having delivered her message, Cara has been sitting around waiting to be told what to do next, and the Queen soon fills her in. It seems that "the Wanderer" is none other than Cara's grandmother Ivy Morris, and Cara has to go and get her and bring her back to Luster. There is a scene in which Cara is formally charged with the quest, and some companions are chosen for her - three unicorns: Moonheart, Finder, and Bella. Moonheart, it turns out, is Lightfoot's father, and there is substantial tension between father and son. Bella is the fiercest member of the Queen's guard, and Finder is an explorer. I always find these sorts of scenes in which characters are ceremonially charged with pursuing a "quest" to be kind of silly, and almost always find them horribly pretentious. And the scenes in which Cara and the companions selected for her have the quest to find and return with the Wanderer laid upon them are no exception. In addition, of Cara's traveling companions from the previous volume, only the diminutive Squijum and the tinker Thomas join her for this journey. Lightfoot and the Dimblethum, due to as yet unexplained conflicts with members of the unicorn royal court, are unable to join them.

Cara's task is made both sad and urgent: Arabella Skydancer is waiting for the Wanderer to return so that she can die, and as unicorns "fade away" when they die, the Queen's impending death is fairly readily apparent to anyone who sees her. But before Cara can actually set out to find the Wanderer, she is told that she must first go to see M'Gama the Geomancer and have her determine which magical gate Cara must use to cross over from Luster back to Earth. So the troupe heads out to the Geomancer's house - a person who apparently doesn't much like the unicorns either (one starts to wonder if there is anyone in Luster who doesn't hold some sort of grudge against the unicorns). And in the meantime, the book points out how ragged and dirty Cara has gotten wearing the same clothes for days of cross-country travel, and how matted and ratty her hair has gotten from not being washed or combed in the time. This is kind of interesting, as it is one of the few times in a fantasy "quest" novel that I have seen addressed the gritty and dirty reality of walking all day followed by sleeping on the ground at night for weeks or more.

The group finds M'Gama in short order, and she's a pretty typical fantasy wizard: at turns cryptic and imperious, and at others unexpectedly friendly. M'Gama also has a dwarf bodyguard named Flensa who is gruff but kind of lovable too. As one would expect, M'Gama does her magic stuff and comes up with a path for Cara to take to the proper gate to take her to the Wanderer, and also a time limit she has to get there. But first she has to take a bath, wash and comb her hair, and get some new clothes to replace the jeans and t-shirt she had been wearing since arriving in Luster. She gets fitted out with some typical fantasy travel gear, and handed a sword to go with her new outfit. This strikes me as an odd decision even though there is no question that Cara is going in to danger. But does anyone really think that handing an untrained twelve year-old a sword is a good idea? It seems to me like this weapon would be more dangerous to Cara than to any enemies she might encounter. Because M'Gama is a fantasy wizard, she also gives Cara a green jeweled ring, cryptically telling her she will figure out what it is for later.

But M'Gama is pretty clear on where Cara and her companions need to go - they have to go through a forest that is easy to get lost in, enter the lair of the dragon Ebillan, who doesn't like people, and go through the gate located in a cave in the the back of his cave to get to Earth. And they have a time limit. So after all the personal grooming is done, the crew heads out. Along the way they pick up some additional companions - first they come across a troupe of entertainers, and one turns out to be an elderly tumbler named John and in an example of serendipity, he turns out to be Ivy's fomer husband, and possibly Cara's grandfather. Later, Lightfoot and the Dimblethum show up, saving the group from an attack by some delvers. Then they run across Grimwold, the Keeper of the Unicorn Chronicles who escorts them part of the way through his underground tunnels and tells them a story about Ivy Morris, which reveals that she has a somewhat unusual background. Grimwold also hands over a gift to Cara for her to trade with Ebillan - a huge red gem the size of a duck egg. And this ball hands Cara a new and unexpected mystery, giving he a vision of a woman in a red tree that she assumes is her mother, a vision that later turns into a nightmare vision of Beloved.

The group gets one last companion along the way when Cara ignores M'Gama's advice in the enchanted forest and leaves the marked path in the middle of the night after being spooked by a vivid nightmare apparently sent by Beloved. She hears a sound in the dark, and naturally investigates where she finds the gryphon Medafil caught in a trap set by hunters. She frees the beast and it offers to help her find her way back to the path in the morning, but first it takes her back to his eyrie where we find out that he also has a history with Ivy Morris. One starts to wonder if there is anyone in Luster who is not on a first name basis with Ivy. Because everyone also seems to hand out gifts to Cara when she stops by, Medafil hands over a size-changing globe that lights up when Cara holds it, and a shell that has the voice of her grandmother singing The Song of the Wanderer magically implanted in it. All of this gift-giving does raise some questions though - Cara acquires pretty much everything she has through the stories as gifts handed to her by people she meets. Luster appears to have no actual functioning economy. Through Cara's travels she has met a record keeper, a tinker who fixes watches, a bunch of acrobats, and a Earth wizard as well as a collection of fantastical beasts such as unicorns, dragons, and griffons. But she has not met any farmers, craftsmen, or anyone else who produces much of anything useful (other than watches, and you can't eat those). One wonders where the food that the acrobats, chronicle keepers, and Cara herself eat comes from. I suppose that in a fairy tale story aimed at young readers, the mechanics of growing food and compensating those who do so is not something that one would expect the narrative to focus on, but given the focus on the details of personal grooming, leaving out where the food comes from seems a little odd.

Despite disliking dragons, Medafil decides to join the eclectic band heading to Ebillan's territory, and before too long Cara is negotiating with the dragon for passage. Ebillan is less than enthused to have three humans, four unicorns, a man-bear hybrid, a squirrel-like thing, and a griffon show up on his doorstep. He is even less enthused when he learns they want to pass through his lair and go through the gate to Earth. Oddly, even though everyone else has handed out gifts to Cara throughout the book, Ebillan demands payment for allowing her to traverse his territory, insisting that she give him something valuable for the privilege. But this makes one wonder: how can these things be valuable if they have been handed out like party favors? What Cara ends up trading has subjective value to her, but is it really valuable to anyone else given that it was just handed off to her in an almost off-hand way earlier in her journeys? To a certain extent, it seems that the items in the story simply exist to provide object lessons for the reader, which is somewhat less than satisfying.

Finally Cara gets to her destination, and in a twist that isn't all that surprising, finds that Beloved got there first with a group of hunters, including Cara's father Ian. In a scene with numerous twists and turns, we learn the truth about Lightfoot and why he is estranged from Moonheart. We also get an interesting twist to the relationship between Ian and Cara, and something of a family reunion when John shows up on the scene too. (Actually, the whole fight is a family reunion, because Cara and all of the Hunters are descended from Beloved, and Cara's unusual heritage ties her to the other participants in the fracas). After the fight with Beloved winds down with (it turns out) something of a Pyrrhic victory, Cara finds that her grandmother is in some sort of deep sleep, whereupon the mysterious green ring M'Gama gave her comes in to play (one other thing about all the gifts handed over the Cara is that they all end up being uniquely useful) and she recovers the Wanderer. In the end, the Wanderer is returned to the Queen who, as predicted, dies shortly thereafter, and a moderately unexpected replacement is put in charge and, as one would expect, things end more or less happily.

Song of the Wanderer is a strong follow-up to Into the Land of the Unicorns that wraps up many of the immediate conflicts while leaving open several others. In doing so, Coville performs a difficult balancing act of making the story seem complete while also providing enough fodder for future volumes in the series, and in this case, he balances the two goals quite successfully. Despite the heaping helpings of serendipity that are liberally ladled into the story, it retains enough coherence to hold together. With well-integrated themes about the value of friendships and family relationships, the book rises above the typical young adult quest fantasy, and delivers very worthwhile read.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

National Geographic (October 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (September 2011)

Book Forty-Four: The Measure of Magic by Terry Brooks.

.

Short review: Lots of people with names that start with "P" mill about to foil the plans of trolls and a demon.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: I have a large collection of Terry Brooks' Shannara books sitting on my bookshelves. It is one of the more popular fantasy settings around, and one that I have always intended to delve into, but for one reason or another it always got pushed off until later. Consequently, The Measure of Magic is my first exposure to Brooks' writing, and even though the second book in a prequel series might not have been the best option, it is still a very good post-apocalyptic fantasy story that was interesting, engaging, and filled with fun action.

The story of The Measure of Magic starts, unsurprisingly for a second book in a series, in media res, with the central character of the previous book dead, one character picking up the pieces after his death, another lost and hunted by trolls, and a third accused of murdering her own father and imprisoned. In a strange editorial decision, all of the main characters (and a couple of the secondary characters) all have names that start with the letter "P": Pan, Prue, Phryne, and so on. as a storytelling matter, this doesn't change the characters, but it does make it easy to confuse who is who at times. This is somewhat beside the point however, as the real main characters in the book are the black staff that Pan inherits, and the Elfstones that are Phyrne's birthright.

The catalyst for the broad sweep of the story is the impending invasion of a valley that has until recently been magically sheltered from the outside world by a unified army of trolls. From the snippets I gathered the previous book in the series (Bearers of the Black Staff) focused on Sider Ament's efforts to rally the inhabitants of the valley to oppose the threat. However, but the beginning of this book, Sider is dead, his staff has been passed on to Pan, Pan's friend Prue is trapped by a band of trolls, and the elven princess Phyrne is imprisoned after being accused of royal patricide. Meanwhile, the various agents of such authority as exist in the valley seem to be only modestly interested in dealing with the troll army, and are more focused on their own internal power struggles, which seems to be somewhat shortsighted.

The story is told with a rotating viewpoint, mostly focusing on Pan, Prue, and Phyrne, but also telling the tale from the perspective of the antagonists and a few bit players. And the primary antagonist is the demon simply known as Ragpicker who influences most of the events in the story. In this he is opposed by the heroes, but also by the mysterious and supernatural King of the Silver River, although their involvement is mostly centered on the story line featuring Pan and Prue. And in this regard, Pan's story line is somewhat less interesting than Phyrne's. While Phyrne's story has plenty of magic, the villainy, and the heroism, is derived from ultimately mundane sources. But Prue is endowed with magical insight by the King of the Silver River, and much of the problems that are caused in Pan's journey are the result of the malevolent influence of the demon. In short, there is a supernatural problem, and while the mundane heroes have to have the courage to face it, they are armed with extra bonuses by a supernatural benefactor. This, to my mind, detracts from the power of the story: having a mystically super powered being swoop in to save the day and cryptically hand out special powers to the heroes essentially says that they could not have opposed the problem on their own, diminishing them.

Further, while most of the characters in the story are interesting, the primary supernatural agents: the demon and the King of the Silver River, are fairly bland and boring. The demon has only one goal, and pretty much no personality other than that. The King of the Silver River's motivations are entirely unclear, and he appears to exist in the story merely to serve as a boon bestowing agent. The mundane villains in the story: the troll prince Arik Siq, the usurper elven Queen Isoeld, and the Seraphic Skeal Elie are all much more interesting characters than the demon because they have complex motivations and goals, and have to actually work to accomplish them in an environment where a misstep on their part would mean disaster for their plans. The demon, in contrast, has but one goal, and really has nothing that can threaten him for much of the book. Consequently, the demon is malevolent, but dull.

But the characters are likable, and the paths of the three main protagonists intertwine through the book - although interestingly all three of them never end up in the same place together. First Prue finds Pan, then Pan finds Phyrne, then Pan finds Prue again. The story sets up a kind of gentle love triangle that is resolved in a somewhat tidy way (although not particularly happily). Interestingly, all three of the main characters wield magical power, but none of them have any understanding of the powers their wield, which makes them seem like passengers along for the
ride through much of the story as they simply follow the magical cues they are handed rather than actually formulating plans and taking proactive action. In fact, the only characters that seem to actually take initiative are secondary characters - the waif Xac Wen, the brothers Tasha and Tenerife, and Aislinne. Lacking in special powers they are forced to actually make decisions based upon their known capabilities rather than following the mysterious prodding of magical artifacts or elusive colorful birds. In many ways, these secondary characters seem more real than the main characters because of this.

In any event, all of the interweaving stories wind towards a satisfying, although not entirely pleasant conclusion, with the caveat that although they are related stories, they don't all tie up together. Despite the fact that several of the featured characters seem to simply drift through the story to some degree, the book moves along as a rapid clip and shifts between them often enough to keep the reader engaged. Even though the ultimate villain is boring, the rest of the antagonists are an interesting bunch whose plots make the action interesting. Despite a bit of a deus ex machina element to the resolution of one story line, the book is still a fun read for any fan of fantasy fiction in general, and certainly a must read for any fan of Shannara specifically.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (October 1st,-7th, 2011)
Science News (October 8, 2011)

Book Forty-Five: Dark Whispers by Bruce Coville.

.

Short review: A collection of characters mill about and accomplish not much of anything. And the unicorns' enemy is closer than they think.

Long review: Dark Whispers is the third book in the four book Unicorn Chronicles series, and as seems to happen to Coville in the third book in four book series, it is something of a let down. This seems similar to the let down that took place in The Search for Snout, the third volume in Coville's four book Alien Adventures series. The book has lots of movement, but it seems strangely disjointed and seems to be little more than filler holding the space between the actual stories contained in Song of the Wanderer and The Last Hunt.

Picking up where Song of the Wanderer left off, Cara and the newly installed unicorn Queen have to deal with the fact that at the end of the last volume Beloved obtained an amulet that will allow her to open a gate from Earth to Luster and invade with her hunters on a mission to eradicate the unicorns. Griswold finds a couple of apparently deleted passages in the Unicorn Chronicles which point towards a possible solution, and another human living in Luster (in fact, the oldest human living in Luster) cryptically recites an ancient poem and asserts that the centaurs know the rest of the story. This, of course, forms the basis for the main story of the book which sends Cara, Griswold, M'Gama, Lightfoot, Finder, Bella, and the Squijum off to the Valley of the Centaurs to ask the centaur King Chiron to fill them in. As usual, the centaurs apparently hold some animosity towards the unicorns who seem to be unable to get along with any of their neighbors.

Because a quest to get a story from recalcitrant centaurs apparently doesn't provide enough meat for a book, there are a number of other story lines in the book that are more or less connected to Cara's quest. Cara's father Ian is on the hunt for the entrance to the Ruby Prison to find and free Cara's mother. In another story line the delvers are busy trying to fulfill the wishes of their insane king who is under the influence of a mysterious voice. And in a third thread the Dimblethum seems to have issues with the same mysterious voice. Complicating matters is that as the story moves along, Cara's group fragments as well, sending M'Gama off in one direction, Bella and Finder off in another, and Lightfoot in yet another. One of the consequences of having more than a half-dozen adventures all happening simultaneously is that not much happens in any of them, which is the primary problem with the book. Not only that, most of the various story lines don't even really come to a conclusion, simply being put on hold in the middle of the action with their resolution tabled until The Last Hunt.

And it is this lack of resolution that makes this installment of the series seem like little more than filler. Certainly Cara is able to figure some stuff out, but even finding out the answer to the mystery she was assigned to unravel doesn't seem to lead much of any where. Ian's quest leads him on an extensive journey during which he pays a substantial personal cost, and in which he is linked up with some new and interesting companions, but he seems to have had no plan concerning what to do once he reached his goal. Similarly, Cara seems to have had no plan as to what to do once she reached her goal, a condition that seems to afflict several other characters in the book. In fact, the only character who seems at all clear about what they intend to do and how they are going to accomplish it is the villain Beloved, which may explain why the heroes always seem to be flailing about uselessly while the villains seem to get things done.

This is not to say nothing happens in the books: the good guys suffer some notable casualties, information is uncovered that is likely to be of use in later books, and most everyone actually finds what they were looking for. As serendipity seems to be a common element in the stories, the various individuals that the main characters run across in their travels all seem to be more important than they might appear to be at first glace. The unicorns who aren't featured in the story seem to be oddly passive though - as do the rest of the inhabitants of Luster. Once would think that given their common antipathy towards humanity, the dragons, centaurs, and other mythological creatures would be making a common cause to try to repel the pending invasion, but if this has been happening, it goes entirely unmentioned in the book.

While The Unicorn Chronicles as a whole is a fun and interesting series, Dark Whispers is the weakest book of the bunch. While a lot of elements critical to the eventual denouement of the story are introduced and developed in this book, the book on its own is little more than a bridge between other, better books. Dark Whispers begins in the middle of the story, and ends in the middle of the story, and thus would be almost impossible to read on its own. As such, while it is an integral part of The Unicorn Chronicles, it simply does not hold up on its own as anything more than a mediocre book.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Between the last book and this one I read:

The Economist (October 8th-14th, 2011)
The Economist (October 15th-21st, 2011)
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field (October 2011)

Book Forty-Six: The Radiant Seas by Catherine Asaro.

.

Short review: After fifteen years and four children Soz and Jai are found and the galaxy goes to war. Really big war. And this time Soz is not messing around.

Long review: The Radiant Seas is the fourth book in Asaro's Skolian Saga series, but it is the direct sequel to Primary Inversion, the first book in the series. After diverting the series to stories featuring other members of Sauscosny's extended family, the Saga returns to the two heirs to rival empires who faked their own deaths and fled to a deserted planet no one else is supposed to know about in order to be together. And although all they want is to be left alone, it should come as no surprise that pretending the rest of the universe doesn't exist is not sufficient to make the rest of the universe pretend you do not exist. And before too long the story has massive fleets of starships facing each other in bitter battles while cybernetically enhanced commandos launch surprise attacks on secret installations.

The first section of the book follows three mostly independent but linked stories. In the first, Sauscony and Jaibriol set about making their home on the planet they share together, and start a family. In the second, Kurj, Sauscony's brother and Imperator of Skolia, tries to decide the question of who will succeed him now that Sauscony is thought to be dead, and at the same time manage the herculean task of running an empire that is under siege by a more powerful adversary and seems to depend upon his micromanagment. Finally, the elder Emperor Jaibriol, ruler of the Eubian Concord, continues to plot against the Skolian Empire while attempting to navigate the snakepit of treacherous plots that seems to be the norm for Eubian politics.

The two critical turns of events in this segment when the Eubians are able to attack the weak link in the Skolian infrastructure: the rare and valuable Rhon telepaths. The first occurs when the Eubians employ a new weapon that interferes with the control portions of the Skolian ships and allows them to capture Prince Althor. For the Eubians, capturing Althor is a double coup as he is both of critical military value, and because he is a powerful Rhon telepath, and therefore the ultimate "provider" for a Eubian Aristo. Since the Eubians are, by nature, brutal and accomplished torturers, Althor is subjected to horrible treatment in an effort to wrest information out of him, which finally culminates in the revelation of information that reveals the location of Soz and Jai. But this information is made critical by the second turn of events, where the Eubians, via a piece of intelligence provided by an Earth Senator, ambush the Skolian Imperator Kurj in an effort to capture him, relying upon the same technology they used to expedite their capture of Althor. But in the interim the Skolians had come up with a counter, and Kurj is able to both foil his own capture and decapitate the Eubian government by killing its Emperor.

But with the Eubian government in disarray, and the now dead Emperor's widow feeling insecure in her position, recovering Jai as the legitimate heir of the Eubian throne to be installed as her puppet becomes critical. And while Jai's return makes sense as a matter of Eubian internal politics, it exposes one of the oddities of the Eubian Aristo's as villains that bothers me. Jai proved to be Soz's perfect soul mate because he was a Rhon telepath, a fact that he has to hide from all of the other Highton Aristos for fear that they will regard him as a subhuman "provider" and subject him to a life of torture. But being a Rhon telepath is established as being an incredibly valuable asset - the existence of Soz's family of Rhon telepaths is what allows for the existence of the psiberweb, the only technology that allows the Skolian Empire to hold its own against the much larger Eubian Concord. The backbone of the Skolian military is made up of telepaths, giving the Skolians a much-needed military edge. The Eubians, on the other hand, relegate telepaths to the bottom rung of their society, and abuse them horribly to the point that Skolian military telepaths prefer to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner. And the reason they do is the Highton Aristos that sit at the top of the Eubian heap are born sadists who feed off of pain inflicted upon telepaths. In short, a hugely valuable asset is wasted by the Eubians in the name of the sadistic pleasure of its elite

This waste of the potential of telepaths wouldn't be such a perplexing element if the Aristos weren't so incredibly rare, which makes their iron grip on control of their Empire almost inexplicable. The Aristos essentially have no particular special powers that make them anything other than parasites on actual telepaths, and yet a few hundred of them can command an empire of billions. Not only that, oppress an empire of billions, as everyone in the Eubian Concord other than the Aristos are slaves. While the brutality of the Aristos is explained by their particular genetic heritage, their ability to retain power seems somewhat implausible. The Aristos are certainly villainous - born purveyors of cruelty - but whereas we are told that Rhon telepaths are naturally brilliant and possessing of mental abilities that are critical to the survival of their nation, the Aristos essentially seem to have no particular common characteristics other than their depravity. The Jedi in Star Wars have their force powers. The Lensmen in the Lensman series have their psychic abilities. In those cases, even if the elitist message bothers the reader, it is understandable how this political system came about. But the Aristos don't seem to have anything special about them other than their dependence upon actual telepaths for pleasure. And as a result, it is hard to figure out how the Aristos, essentially parasitical psychic vampires, rose to dominate the largest known space-faring nation, and how, despite systemically criminally wasting one of their most valuable assets, they manage to stay there.

Leaving the question of Eubian politics aside, once Jai has been located and seized by the Eubians and installed as their unwilling Emperor Soz has to return to the position of authority and responsibility that she abandoned to be with Jai. And with the two lovers installed as the heads of state of the two nations, what had been a long running mostly cold war explodes into a hot war. The war escalates the ongoing technological arms race that was started with the development of quasis interference generators that caused ships to lose control of parts of themselves, countered by hiding Klein bottles inside Klein bottles, and then moving on to the Eubians pressing their "providers" into service to try to counter the Skolian use of telepaths in their military forces, and finally to the hiding of entire fleets inside Klein bottles. The odd element is that the last development takes the most effort, but seems have the least usefulness, since once the "Radiance Fleet" encounters the Eubian forces they "decloak" and engage in a pretty standard battle formation.

Unfortunately, it is when the book focuses on the war between the Skolian and Eubian forces, it loses focus. While it makes sense that in a war between star spanning empires the confrontations would be between thousands of ships manned by million of personnel, but once the numbers get to that scale, it becomes very difficult to relate to the action. At a certain scale, when 750,000 ships face off against 500,000 ships the numbers detract from the story rather than add to it. As has been famously observed, "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic". By ramping up the numbers to presumably realistic levels, Asaro transforms the tragedy of a massive war into a counting exercise. It is only when Soz separates herself from the massive fleet she leads and pursues a commando raid with a handful of soldiers that the war feels real.

And at its core the story is of the star-crossed lovers seeking to be reunited. Soz's raid into the heart of Eubian space is thought by everyone around her to be a foray intended to recover her brother Althor, but is actually the efforts of a lover seeking to recover her beau. This is intended to be wildly romantic, but to go on her crusade, Soz has to leave her children behind in the hands of a trusted friend on Earth for the duration of the war. And knowing her children have been left behind, her decision at the close of the novel seems not so much heroic or romantic, but rather irresponsible and almost callous. Granted, it does set up the political conclusion that forms the emotional peak of the book, but it seems out of character for someone who moved an entire nation to recover her lost husband to be willing to essentially abandon all of her children to go into self-imposed exile.

In the end, the book closes with everything changed, and in another sense nothing changed. Two Empires that have always been at war, go to war again. Two lovers have been thought dead, found, separated, and then reunited, and then are thought dead once more. The action starts with a secretive group of telepaths hiding in exile, and ends with much the same situation in place. But at the same time the war results in nations being decapitated, and a multigenerational plan that was conceived to topple one ends up neutering the other. Despite the somewhat wooden nature of the villains, and the dizzying scale of the conflict, it boils down a ferocious warrior seeking her lost love. The end result is sweeping space opera romance that moves the Skolian Saga in interesting directions.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds

Between the last book and this one I read:

Science News (October 22, 2011)
The Economist (October 22nd-28th, 2011)
The Economist (October 29th-November 4th, 2011)
Mason Spirit (Fall 2011)

Book Forty-Seven: L. Ron Hubbard Present Writers of the Future, Volume XXVII by K.D. Wentworth (editor).

.

Stories included:
The Unreachable Voices of Ghosts by Jeffrey Lyman
Maddy Dune's First and Only Spelling Bee by Patrick O'Sullivan
The Truth, from a Lie of Convenience by Brennan Harvey
In Apprehension, How Like a God by R.P.L. Johnson
An Acolyte of Black Spires by Ryan Harvey
The Dualist by Van Aaron Hughes
Bonehouse by Keffy R.M. Kehrli
This Peaceful State of War by Patty Jansen
Sailing the Sky Sea by Geir Lanesskog
Unfamiliar Territory by Ben Mann
Medic! by Adam Perin
Vector Victoria by D.A. D'Amico
The Sundial by John Arkwright

Articles included:
How to View Art by L. Ron Hubbard
Making It by Mike Resnick
Creating Your Own Destiny by Robert Castillo

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: Short story collections are prevalent in speculative fiction - much more so it seems than any other publishing genres. As a result, someone who reads and reviews science fiction is often going to find himself reviewing one of these collections, which can be problematic. Many collections have a defined theme, or are the collections of the works of a particular author, or a particular time period, and so you can try to look for some sort of unifying theme to them. But the Writers of the Future theme is simply this: writers of speculative fiction who entered the Writers of the Future competition and have not previously been professionally published. As a result, this particular collection is more or less a grab bag of whatever fiction happened to be the best in the submission pile that quarter.

That said, there are a few commonalities to the stories, which is only natural given that they were all evaluated by the same panel of judges. A couple of stories seem to evoke an older era of science fiction are the hard science fiction stories The Unreachable Voices of Ghosts by Jeffrey Lyman and Sailing the Sky Sea by Geir Lanesskog, both of which evoke the kind of engineering fiction of the early works of Asimov, Heinlein, and Niven. The Unreachable Voices of Ghosts envisions a future in which desperate or nihilistic individuals set out into the Kuiper Belt in tiny ships to hunt for miniature black holes in voyages that last for years, and for those who don't find their elusive quarry, are one-way. Against this backdrop Lyman builds a cozy love story between two people who had both given up hope of having a human connection again. The story is not bad, but a bit formulaic and the romance feels a bit forced. In Sailing the Sea Sky the protagonist finds himself having to figure out a way to rescue himself from falling into the heart of Uranus after the floating platform he had been working on was destroyed by a surprise attack. He picks up some unexpected help along the way, and as each problem comes up, he and the group he falls in with manage to buy themselves just a little more time even though it never seems to be quite enough to get them to safety. The story wraps up fairly well, and is one of the better crafted stories in the volume.

While the focus of the Writers of the Future contest seems to be mostly science fiction, there are a handful of fantasy stories in the volume as well. The first, Maddy Dune's First and Only Spelling Bee by Patrick O'Sullivan, is a kind of paranormal mystery with a youthful protagonist who participates in a magical contest despite some fairly obvious prejudice against her species. The contest serves as a framing device for the real story, involving a strange competitor in a cabinet, but the story is just a little too mysterious and never really seems to come together. The second fantasy story, An Acolyte of Black Spires by Ryan Harvey, seems more like a snippet of a much larger story than a story on its own. All in all, Harvey seems to try to take on too much to reasonably accomplish in the space he has to tell the story. An alien culture, an alien political structure, a strange alien racial curse, all of which are crucial to the plot. So much background has to be explained in the story that little actual action takes place, and what does happen seems to leave so many unanswered questions that the resolution is somewhat unsatisfying. The final fantasy story, The Sundial by Joan Arkwright, is a tale of love and death set against the backdrop of the U.S. Civil War built upon Egyptian mythology. The story takes a bit to get going, but it is the best of the fantasy stories in the volume.

The volume has two stories featuring humans trying to understand an alien culture, which is fairly well-trodden science fiction territory, and consequently both seem more or less formulaic. The first, The Dualist by Van Aaron Hughes, is about an envoy sent to a planet by a humanity seeking to obtain resources from an alien planet, but also charged with preventing one of the resident alien races from killing the other resident alien race. The difference between the two factions basically boils down to a theological difference that seems so slight to human eyes as to be negligible but is clearly a huge issue for the aliens. After stumbling about, the envoy solves the conflict by essentially ignoring the cultural mores of both alien races, leading to a fairly cliched resolution. The other, This Peaceful State of War by Patti Jansen, also revolves around a human envoy trying to make sense of an inexplicable conflict between two alien species. There is also a religious element in the story, but this time it comes in the form of meddling humans who think they know what is good for the aliens based upon little more than their own prejudices. The mystery of the alien conflict comes to a head in a way that won't really surprise most science fiction fans - the source of the "conflict" was fairly well telegraphed - and makes one wonder how stupid the human characters really are and as a result just didn't work form me.

In a post 9/11 world coupled with the undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism that runs through a lot of science fiction, it is almost de rigeur to include stories about plucky hero confronting a vast government conspiracies. The Truth, from a Lie of Convenience by Brennan Harvey features a washed up reporter covering the memorial observances on the tenth anniversary of a horrific terrorist attack that sparked Lunar independence. As the story unfolds, our hero uncovers a sloppy cover up that unravels almost immediately. The story is very reminiscent of the sort of tales told by the fringe lunatics that go under the label of "9/11 Truthers", with the distinction that in the imagined reality of the story the people ranting about a shadowy conspiracy are actually right. The story proceeds in a fairly linear fashion to a mostly predictable conclusion. The other conspiracy story is Vector Victoria by D.A. D'Amico, a tale set in a dystopian cyperpunkish future in which the heroes are covertly spreading a counter-virus to counteract the evil viruses the government is spreading among the populace. They run across a government agent, and through the rest of the story the confused viewpoint character (and the reader) learns that what they thought was true may not actually be the real story. The story ends on an ambiguous note and is thoughtful and thought-provoking.

In addition to Vector, Victoria, the collection has a few other explicitly cyberpunk style stories, including Bonehouse by Keffy R.M. Kehrli, a cyberpunk story about what happens to the bodies of those who jack into cyberspace permanently. The story delves in to how those who are left behind react to their loved ones being sucked into a world that they don't approve of or even necessarily understand. The protagonist is ostensibly acting on the right side of the law and on behalf of concerned loving families, but as events unfold it becomes clear that the law, and the protagonists profession, may be out of step with where they should be. But only maybe, because Kehrli doesn't make either side of the issue clearly correct, which is one of the marks of a strong story. The other cyberpunk style story in the volume is In Apprehension, How Like a God by R.P.L. Johnson, featuring a murder mystery at an institution run by a group of monastic academics who maintain the information net that underpins civilization. The story is filled with interesting ideas - the biggest of which is that the information net is actually an outgrowth of the Higgs field, and consequently anything that exists in reality is incorporated directly into the next as long as someone takes the time to do it. Against this background the murder investigation is fairly mundane, and given the identity of the killer seems a bit too easy to unravel. On the other hand, once the murderer is uncovered, it becomes clear that there is no reason for the murderer to fear exposure, and one doubts the security of humanity's future. It is an unsettling tale, even if it is executed somewhat blandly.

Unfamiliar Territory by Ben Mann is a space based mystery involving a protagonist working for a space salvage company tasked with guarding the engineers who actually do the salvage work. Our hero is teamed, to her dismay, with a rookie engineer. Despite the fact that this element is harped upon a fair amount in the story, it turns out to have almost no impact on the actual plot. Ships start mysteriously turning up derelict, and our hero is sent to investigate. The story meanders along until there is a dramatic but poorly explained turn of events and the story ends. The story seems promising, but it appears the author tried to pack a story that should have been larger into a short story format, and it just doesn't work very well. Finally, Medic! by Adam Perin is a fairly standard tale of military science fiction featuring a medic pressed into service in a war against an alien race. It turns out that the protagonist was given a choice to enlist or go to prison had been given a quota of lives he had to save before he could go home. In the story he is coming to the close of his term of service and desperate attempts are being made by the military hierarchy to get him to reenlist, but all he wants to do is go home to the love of his life. The "twist" ending at the end is horribly predictable, and on the whole, the story is nothing particularly memorable.

The handful of essays in the volume are fairly bland. The reprint of How to View Art, an essay written by L. Ron Hubbard, is mostly noteworthy for the worshipful and unintentionally hilarious introduction that claims that at one point Hubbard's name was "virtually synonymous" with American popular fiction. The essay itself is pretty bland, but I suppose it might be of use to someone who had never thought about art before. Making It by Mike Resnick is about the process of getting your writing into print, and Creating Your Own Destiny by Robert Castillo is about taking control of your creative life. Both are serviceable, but neither was particularly noteworthy.

Many short story collections are decidedly uneven in quality. Coupled with the fact that this volume is comprised of authors unified only by the fact that this is their first professional sale, this is very much true with respect to this collection. While none of the stories are great, a number, including Bonehouse and Sailing the Sky Sea, are quite good, and the rest are decent despite some niggling problems. The only really subpar elements of the volume are the essays, which are mostly bland and uninteresting. One has to wonder if the other uninspiring essays contributed by contemporary writers were chosen for their blandness so as not to expose the utter banality of Hubbard's included essay. Given the limited number of venues for finding debut speculative fiction these days, for anyone interested in seeing new writers it is always worth picking up the annual volume of Writers of the Future, and this year's edition is no exception.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Forty-Eight: Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein.

.

Short review: Hardball politics result in a lifelong deception of epic magnitude.

Long review: After the debacle of the 1955 Hugo Award being handed out to They'd Rather Be Right, the next year the ship was righted and in 1956 the award was handed out to Heinlein's Double Star, a work of political science fiction featuring a kidnapped politician, an actor pressed into service, and a lot of discussion about the dirty business of parliamentary politics.

The story is fairly straightforward. Lorenzo Smythe, an out of work actor is approached by a spacer named Dak in a bar with what he thinks is a routine proposition for work. When he goes to meet his contact, he finds himself involved in a high stakes game of political intrigue in which the participants are willing to play to the death. Due to the exigencies of culture and politics, John Bonforte, the leader of the Empire's loyal parliamentary opposition, must appear at a specific event or his political career will be ruined and discord possibly resulting in substantial loss of life will ensue. Knowing this, and seeking to derail his political faction, unknown forced have kidnapped Bonforte. Due to the similarities in appearance between Bonforte and himself, Smythe finds himself part of a plan to replace Bonforte with a double to fill in for the event and stave off political disaster, with Smythe in the role as Bonforte's double. Soon one event becomes two, and as the story progresses circumstances seem to conspire to keep him in the role of Bonforte for longer and longer periods, until finally Smythe ceases to exist and all that is left of the man formerly known as Smythe is a reborn Bonforte.

Double Star is quite brief, my copy only runs to 128 pages. But in that handful of pages, Heinlein is able to describe a Solar system spanning empire, two alien races (although one is described in a very cursory manner), an entire political system, all in addition to the specific details that make up the plot of the novel. Heinlein accomplishes this, as he does in many of his novels, by mostly eschewing explanation until absolutely necessary. When a Martian shows up early in the book with a "life-wand", Heinlein doesn't stop to explain what a life-wand is, or what it can do. He just has the characters react to it as an element of their world and trusts the reader to pick up what it is from context. By doing this throughout the book, Heinlein is able to move the story along at a rapid clip and avoid getting bogged down while characters spend time doing the equivalent of explaining to one another how a combustion engine works.

One interesting thing about the story is that there's not a whole lot to it that really had to be science fiction. The particular psychology of the Martians is a plot point, but that element could have been transferred to a non-science fictional one without too much difficulty. Just about everything else about the book could have easily been moved to a contemporary political thriller without any substantial effort. Mostly the book is an excuse to talk about politics and the psychology of campaigning and governing. By using Lorenzo Smythe as his lens into the story, who is both a capable actor and student of how to influence human emotion as well as a political neophyte, Heinlein is able to introduce the reader to his take on the political process one step at a time. And while one might not agree with Heinlein's take on politics, he does lay out his positions and the reasoning behind them clearly (including his explanation for why having a Constitutional monarchy can be justified).

The only real weakness the book has is that it was written in the 1950s, and it shows. Despite imagining a government that covers Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and beyond, Heinlein, like most other writers of his era, completely failed to anticipate the advances in computing that the next few decades would bring. As a result, he imagines people calculating election result probabilities with slide rules, vast archive vaults full of millions of rolls of tape, and a system for keeping track of other people comprised of piles of manila folders stuffed with typewritten sheets of data - all of which make the book feel very dated. The typically sexist attitudes of the 1950s also poke through - Penny, the one female character in the book, is Bonfort's secretary (and consequently, Lorenzo's secretary) who we later learn is both highly educated and a member of the Imperial parliament. But in Bonfort's office she is only qualified to serve as a secretary who is hopelessly smitten in-love with her boss. I suppose it is somewhat progressive that Penny is a member of parliament at all, but then again, the FDR administration had a female cabinet secretary already, so one might consider Penny's position to be par for the course at the time. In addition, several of the other member's of Bonfort's staff, who are all male, are also members of parliament (and some, quite pointedly, are not), so Penny holding a mundane staff position while serving in the government is not unique to her.

From a certain perspective it seems somewhat odd that a book with so little science fiction in its plot would win the Hugo award. On the other hand, political science fiction is one of Heinlein's most common topics, so from that perspective it seems fitting that this was the first of his four best novel Hugo's was for Double Star. Although elements of the book are dated, the novel still holds up as a fine example of Heinlein's better work, and is well worth reading.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

You write some great reviews!

63: Thank you!

Book Forty-Nine: Dancing With Eternity by John Patrick Lowrie.

.

Short review: In the future no one dies, families are a forgotten artifact of the past, and space travel is accomplished by thinking about it. So why go to the most dangerous planet in the galaxy?

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: In the future no one dies. Well, hardly anyone dies. And no one is born. Except on one planet. Instead, people are hatched to work as indentured servants for massive interstellar corporations for their first lifetime, after which they can be "rebooted" for a second life. And then a third. And a fourth. And theoretically as many times after that as they want to. Marriage and parenthood are are almost forgotten concepts. Everyone is connected to the 'net, and if their body dies unexpectedly, they can upload their consciousness to its ether and be rebooted as good as new. Because everyone is interconnected, it is possible to know intimately the perspective of anyone you meet who is willing to share their viewpoint with you, and as a result, violence is almost unheard of. And interstellar travel via a weird "perspective parallax" process akin to magic is possible.

Science fiction is a hard genre to write. It is probably harder than most people who read science fiction realize. Not only does the author have to assemble some semblance of characters and plot, but he has to define a setting for the reader. But the element that is the most difficult is for an author to convey the point of view of a character from a society alien to the reader. Granted, many science fiction authors don't even try, creating futures in which there are faster than light starships, galaxy-spanning civilizations, and other technological and political differences, that are populated by people who seem to have stepped out of the 1950s (or the 1970s, or the 1930s, or whatever decade the book was written in). Sometimes this works well in the hands of a skillful author, such as Delany's Triton or Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline. In the hands of a less skillful author, it is far less effective. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, Lowrie is simply unable to make the alien viewpoint of his nigh-immortal 40th century characters seem real to the reader, and as a result, the story of Dancing with Eternity just never seems to gel.

The protagonist of the story is Mohandas, referred to as "Mo" by the other characters. He starts the story down on his luck, unable to pay the taxes assessed for getting scales as part of his most recent body sculpting job - in the future people can choose to reshape their bodies almost any way, but most seem to choose to have cat fur, or look like historical celebrities, or something similarly dull and mundane (in contrast to the radical body sculpting people indulge in in much older science fiction works like The Ophiuchi Hotline, or The Golden Globe) - and he's stuck on a backwater planet, cut off from the 'net, working a crappy job and drinking in a crappy bar every night. While drinking away his sorrows he's approached by "Steel", a beautiful woman with cat eyes and fur who asks him to join her starship crew to join in on a mission the particulars of which she cannot divulge. Because she's really beautiful, Mo agrees.

Which brings up some of the problems in the book: first. the characters keep doing wildly impulsive and dangerous things with little motivation, and second, most of the information about the plot is hidden from Mo (and thus the reader) for large chunks of the book. It turns out that the mission Mo signed on for is to visit the most dangerous place then known. This is revealed pretty early. But big chunks of information is held back from the reader for most of the book, presumably to create a feeling of suspense. But when critical chunks of the plot are held back from the reader for more than half of the book more or less "just because", it doesn't build suspense, just annoyance. And when a plot point is held back that long (or longer in some cases), it builds in the reader the expectation that when the secret is revealed it will be that much more stunning in importance.

Which brings me to another problem with the book: no matter how important are strange a concept or an event seems to the characters, unless you effectively convey the strangeness or importance to the reader, the reader just won't care. And despite his best efforts, Lowrie just wasn't able to get me to marvel in wonder at the fact that people once had "mothers" or that Mo was once "married". The main problem is one that plagues science fiction: if you make the characters in your imagined world too alien, then the reader can't really relate to them. And Lowrie hurts his cause by frequently not following up on the implications of his changed world: in a sequence that is supposed to be pivotal, a drunk character recounts his experiences in the last war a thousand years ago - an event that seems mostly to have been included to allow for some didactic commentary on gender relations - in which female commandos working for a feminist regime attacked his unit and singled out the female unit commander as a "gender traitor". But Lowrie had already established that technology was developed enough at the time to allow for people to change genders if they wanted, making the whole issue of gender disputes seem kind of pointless in the first place, and rendering the idea of a "gender traitor" kind of silly.

This isn't to say that Dancing With Eternity a bad book. There are some interesting ideas here, but they never seem to add up to anything more than an adequate story. We learn early that Mo is extremely old, even by the standards of the 40th century, but this never really amounts to much more than a curiosity. Steel's plan involves going to the most dangerous place known in the galaxy to try to solve the problem of why people need to reboot every so often, but the "plan" is more or less wishful thinking. And once they reach their destination, Steel, who is supposed to be smart turns out to be a complete idiot about research. And the rest of her crack crew, supposedly with hundreds of years of experience behind them, seem to be little more than dilettantes when it comes to scientific inquiry. And when the big secrets of the book are revealed, they turn out to be pretty uninteresting. And in large part, mostly irrelevant to the story.

I suppose the most common emotion the characters themselves have in the book is one of boredom. Because they live so long, they can take decades to perfect and implement their personal plans, a world element that is supposed to make Steel's rush to get her project done seem remarkable. But once again, while it may seem remarkable to the other characters that Steel would be in such a "rush" (with a project that takes months to execute), for the reader it just isn't that stunning, despite the author repeatedly telling us it is so. Dancing With Eternity is a book that wants to be about big ideas and big decisions, but because the characters are at the same time so alien and so pedestrian, it never rises above adequacy.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds

Book Fifty: The Ring by Danielle Steele.

.

Short review: Arianna must survive the horrors of World War II. But its okay, she's got elfin beauty so everyone she meets wants to help her out.

Long review: I have always been of the opinion that Danielle Steel was an inexplicably popular mediocre romance novelist. So I was asked to read her novel The Ring, because then I would see that her books were actually quite good. Now that I have read the story of Kassandra, Ariana, and Noel, three generations of Germans who live during Hitler's ascent to and fall from power and beyond, I am of the opinion that Danielle Steele is an inexplicably popular mediocre romance novelist.

The novel is told in three broad parts. In the first, Kassandra, a wealthy and beautiful German woman married to a much older banker has an affair with a dashing young author in the 1930s. Against the backdrop of Hitler's ascendancy, it is revealed that Dolff is Jewish. Even though Kassandra's improbably tolerant husband knows about her affair, he is sympathetic to Dolff, and advises her to tell him to leave Germany before things get really bad for the Jews. Dolff, of course, won't hear of it, asserting that he won't be driven out of his country by thugs. This ends rather predictably with Dolff getting killed, Kassandra's affair getting exposed by the Nazi's, and her suicide. This part of the story is more or less a paint by the numbers tale of Nazi evil and Jewish persecution. There's nothing wrong with that, but the resolution is pretty much telegraphed from the beginning. The problem with this part of the story, and the problem that runs throughout the rest of the book, is that the central character Kassandra seems to have no personality other than "dumb and incredibly beautiful". She's mostly passive - she falls into an affair with Dolff because he takes her for long walks to break up her dull high-society life. She doesn't have a hand in the raising of her children because she's told not to. She pretty much does nothing on her own for her entire sojourn in the book, and then she dies.

And after Kassandra dies, the story shifts a couple years forward and her daughter Ariana takes center stage. Ariana is much like her mother - almost entirely lacking in personality, but stunningly beautiful and fragile looking in a way that makes people want to take care of her. She seems smarter than her mother, which seems like kind of a low bar, but for much of the book is almost as passive - getting imperiled, getting rescued, having men fall at her feet, going along with doing what she is told to do, and so on. Of course, she and her family are "good" Germans who despise the Nazis, but they passively keep their heads down hoping the regime and the subsequent war will pass over them until their hand is forced by the impending draft of Ariana's younger brother. Ariana's father takes her brother to Switzerland, promising to return to get her and flee with her as well. And predictably, he is unable to, leaving Ariana to face down the Nazi establishment that wants her father's money and her brother's service. And so the story continues in predictable fashion.

But the truly annoying thing about the book is that one gets the sense that were Ariana not pretty and dainty, her life would have turned out much less well. For much of the book she doesn't actually do anything but inspire men to rescue her. Far from being the master of her own fate, she is simply buffeted along by the winds of fate and occasionally having a man swoop in to hand her some help and send her on her way. One has to wonder, however, what would have happened to Ariana if he had been an unattractive girl instead. When she is set to be sent off to be a forced concubine for a lecherous Nazi general (and all of the "true" Nazis in the book are greedy, lecherous, and sadistic) , a "good" German officer swoops in to save her and take her to live with him, with perfectly honorable intentions. Later, we are off-handedly told that another girl was sent to mollify the jilted general when Ariana became unavailable. So because of Ariana's ethereal beauty, she was saved from being repeatedly raped by a German general, but another girl was not so lucky, and got to live a life of torment because Ariana lucked out. In short, one starts to despise Ariana for her undeserved fortune, and wonder what plucky but unattractive women who might have actually taken some initiative would have done if they hadn't been swept aside to horrible fates in Ariana's pretty but vapid place.

The book really falls apart once the war is over and Ariana makes her way to the United States as a refugee. She is taken in by a Jewish family, who assume that because she is a refugee from Germany, she must be Jewish. Passively, she refuses to correct them, eventually marrying their obviously available son. But one wonders how a girl who seems to have never actually even met a Jew before would be able to impersonate one well enough to fool a Jewish mother. But this is only the first of the implausibilities in the final stages of the book, as serendipitous coincidences pop up left and right. A big confrontation looms, and then it dissipates away. People are reunited in improbable ways. The story gets wrapped up at the end in a big bow. One sort of gets the impression that Mrs. Steele got tired of writing the story and rushed to tie up all the loose ends in the last forty or fifty pages.

In the end, The Ring is a fairly bland and inoffensive book with nothing much to recommend it. With nonentities as heroines, a predictable plot, and cardboard villains, it isn't a bad book, but there's not much that is memorable to it. In short, this book did nothing to change my opinion of Danielle Steel as a writer, or get me to want to read any of her other books.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Fifty-One: Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier.

.

Stories included:
Bottle Party
De Mortuis
Evening Primrose
Witchs Money
The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It
Three Bears Cottage
Wet Saturday
Squirrels Have Bright Eyes
Halfway to Hell
The Lady on the Grey
Incident on a Lake
Over Insurance
Old Acquaintance
The Frog Prince
Season of Mists
Great Possibilities
Without Benefit of Galsworthy
Back for Christmas
Another American Tragedy
Midnight Blue
Gavin O'Leary
If Youth Knew if Age Could
Thus I Refute Beelzy
Special Delivery
Little Memento
Green Thoughts
Romance Lingers Adventure Lives
Bird of Prey
The Steel Cat
In the Cards
Youth from Vienna
The Chaser

Long review: In 1952 Fancies and Goodnights became the second book to win the international Fantasy Award for best fiction book. That this book won is an indication that genre fiction awards were in their infancy, because in later years the awards would be subdivided more finely than in International Fantasy Award's two broad categories of "best fiction book" and "best non-fiction book". As it is not a novel, but rather a collection of short stories, Fancies and Goodnights would likely not have even been eligible for an award as a whole, which would have been a shame, as it is a very readable collection of dark and macabre stories.

Fancies and Goodnightsis also somewhat unusual in that only a handful of the stories in the collection can properly be classified as "fantasy" in the broad sense (which, given the works of fiction that won the award includes science fiction within its ambit). The bulk of the stories are entirely mundane (although twisted) stories of spouses murdering spouses, or nephews plotting to kill rich uncles and claim their fortunes, or greedy villagers killing passers by for their presumed fortunes, and so on. The stories that might be classified as fantasy in the book are reminiscent of tales like Robert Louis Stevenson's The Bottle Imp, or Rudyard Kipling's The Monkey's Paw, insofar as they take place in a world that is almost exactly like our world, just with a fantastical twist that shows up to bedevil the protagonist.

Perhaps it is a consequence of reading them all together, and not as part of Sunday paper one at a time, many of the twists of the stories tend to become pretty predictable. In De Mortuis, when a pair of friends suspect a murder that hasn't happened, they spark an actual one. Or in Three Bears Cottage when a husband tries to poison his wife, it is fairly obvious that she will be the one to poison him. In Over Insurance, when a happy couple invests too heavily in life insurance for both of them, it is predictable that their happiness will be destroyed by their resulting poverty. Some stories have less obvious endings, such as The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It, but for the most part venal characters pursue their venal ends and the twists are not really twists so much as obvious plot developments. One might call them cliches, but when Collier was writing his stories most of the turns his stories took probably seemed fairly fresh to his readers. On the other hand, most of the titles of his stories give the "twist" away for the astute reader, so it seems clear that hiding how the story was going to end was not a priority for Collier.

There are just enough stories with a fantasy edge to make this a viable choice for the International Fantasy Award, although most of them follow a similar formula to the mundane stories, just with a supernatural element thrown in. So, in Bottle Party, when a man buys a bottle containing a genie that can grant him any wish he desires, the reader just knows that this will not work out well for him. Or when, in The Lady on the Grey, a caddish Englishman gallivanting about Wales responds to a summons from his caddish buddy and comes across a beautiful woman with a skittish dog, the reader figures out what sort of trouble the protagonist is in for almost immediately. When a father dismisses his son's imaginary friend in Thus I Refute Beelzy, the reader can feel the tension mounting as the story proceed to a fairly inevitable and messy end. On the other hand, in one of the creepiest stories in the volume - Evening Primrose - Collier imagines a shadow world that lurks under our noses, and crafts a story that is creepy and unpredictable. In a completely different way, the dreamily macabre story Green Thoughts drifts to its strange story and somewhat unexpected denouement, proving that Collier could, if he wanted, craft a story that was not entirely predictable.

And even though it is the fantastical stories that drove this book to being awarded, some of the best and most disturbing are the entirely mundane, such as Witchs Money, in which foolishness and ignorance cause an entire village to conspire in a shocking act of violence. Or The Steel Cat, where greed drives a man to betray what might be his only friend. Or one of the best stories in the book, Youth From Vienna, in which a jilted lover gets revenge upon his former intended and her new spouse in a most inventive and subtle manner. This is not to say that the supernatural tales like In the Cards (which I believe was later made into an episode of Tales from the Crypt) don't share this twisted and dark sensibility. Some, however, are darkly humorous, such as Halfway to Hell, in which a man kills himself, and then connives to trick the Devil out of his soul.

Although the stories are very British, and in many ways quaintly old-fashioned, they remain engaging and interesting to the modern reader. Because Collier's stories tend to deal with universal themes: quarreling spouses, greedy charlatans, jealous lovers, and so on, his writing has aged well, even though the specifics of his stories are now well out of date. For anyone who likes their stories to be tinged with a touch of creepy malevolence, Fancies and Goodnights and excellent collection of quality stories.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Fifty-Two: Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture by Stephen H. Segal, Genevieve Valentine, Eric San Juan, Zaki Hasan, and N. K. Jemisin.

.

Short review: Geeky movies, books, and comic books provide the lessons that shape the lives of geeks.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: Geek Wisdom is a cute and funny book that takes quotes from movies, television shows, books, songs, video games, and even internet memes loved by geeks and then expounds on the greater meaning that these snippets have for those in geekdom. Or at least the greater meaning that the quote has for the contributor who penned that particular entry. The material the quotes draw from runs the gamut from the classic to the contemporary, ranging from referencing the genius of 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla to the villainy of the 2007 video game character GlaDOS. Each quote is given a half-page to a page write up describing the context of the quote, and some moral lesson the author draws from it.

The quotes in the book are sorted into six loose categories: wisdom about the self, relationships, humankind, conflict, the universe, and the future, each with an associated "master quote" used to title the second. For example, the section about "wisdom about the future" is titled with the Carl Sagan quote "Billions and Billions" while the section on "wisdom about the future" is titled with the Zager & Evans lyric "In the Year 2525". There appears to be little rhyme or reason for why particular quotes were selected other than "the contributor thought is was a cool quote and it vaguely fit the category", but for the most part the quotes are memorable and the essays about them are interesting. The essay quality is somewhat uneven, however, which I suppose is par for the course for a book that resulted from a five way collaboration. The essays are not attributed to individual authors, so it is difficult to determine whose contributions were consistently good, and whose might have been regularly sub par. As an added bonus, most of the essays have a little footnote attached that gives a snippet of information tangentially related to the subject matter of the post. Given the typical geek's love of nerdy trivia, this little feature indicates that the writers certainly know their audience well.

The one problem I have with the book is that "memorable" doesn't necessarily mean familiar. Although the book is titled Geek Wisdom, and the references are all ones that I knew, for anyone who is not roughly my age (and thus not steeped in the geek culture contemporary to me), many of the references are likely to be outdated and alien. Aside from references to pop hits from the late 1960s, the book also has references to movies like Ghostbusters, a movie released in 1984, and Highlander, a movie released in 1986. While a good chunk of the current geek community is reasonably familiar with these movies (and the many other references from the 1970s and 1980s), these movies are twenty-seven and twenty-five years old. How long will it be before they fade into memory and geeks are not able to recognize quotes from them on sight? How long before a reference to Phil Hartman is met by the response "Phil who?" Will anyone remember Quantum Leap in the future, or will it be consigned to oblivion like Automan? And as a result, while this book is funny and interesting now, it seems to me that there is a good chance that substantial chunks of it will result in nothing more than head-scratching in ten years. On the other hand, references to I, Robot, and The Left Hand of Darkness are older than references to The Karate Kid, and are probably not about to fade from the collective geek consciousness any time soon, so maybe this concern is overblown.

While anyone expecting to get truly deep and profound insights out of Geek Wisdom is likely to be disappointed, the book does offer a collection of fun and witty commentary pieces about topics that are certain to be near and dear to a geek's heart. And of course, being geeks intensely interested in such things, there are sure to be debates and arguments over why certain quotes or references were not included, complete with Comic Book Store Guy griping. As a book written by geeks, for geeks, Geek Wisdom hits most of the right notes, especially if you happen to be the right age for all of the references. Overall, this is a great book for any geek to have on their bookshelf to turn to whenever they need just a little bit of inspiration.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Book Fifty-Three: Seven Wings and the Bleeding Twin Flowers by T. K. Francisco.

.

Short review: I'm not sure the world is waiting for a good Christian post-apocalyptic science-fiction time-travel story, but if it is, it is still waiting.

Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Long review: This book presents a dilemma for me. The author seems reasonably nice, and is definitely earnest. She was nice enough to send me a review copy of her book, which she is obviously proud of and put a lot of work into. The problem is, that the end result is a really awful book.

And it is a book that is bad on just about every level. The story is a Christian post-apocalyptic science fiction time-traveling tale about seven (actually five) time travelers sent by God one hundred years into the future to stop the anti-Christ that rises to power in the present. Why they have to go into the future to do this isn't really explained, the characters just get prophetic dreams and a bunch of heavy-handed signs that tell them they have to do this, and like good Christian soldiers they put their heads down and obey. And while the basic framework of the story is merely bland, what makes the book an unreadable mess is the laughably bad science in the science fiction, the wooden and almost interchangeable characters, the mustache twirling villains, and the almost clockwork occurrences of deus ex machina events to get the heroes out of the predicaments they find themselves in. Throw in some really weak puzzles to be solved, random out of left field superpowers, and a Xanatos plot that doesn't make any sense at all, and you have a book that fails on almost every level possible. Even the writing is mediocre at best, as the author indulges in a steady stream of Tom Swiftly style flourishes and a didactic delivery style.

The most obvious, and egregious, problem with the book is that it tries to be a science fiction book, but the author clearly has difficulty with basic science.

"This guy theorized that time traveling at the speed of light, which as we know to be 372,000 miles per second, makes each second the equivalent of one year in time. Astronauts have traveled hundredths of a second into the future by moving around the Earth in the same direction as its rotation. The opposite is true when traveling backwards in time."

This sort of passage is littered throughout the book. And it is both meaningless technobabble and laughably wrong. The one concrete fact in the passage - the speed of light - is simply wrong. And not wrong by a little bit. The speed of light in a vacuum is actually 186,282 miles per second, a fact that is easily Googled. But neither the author, nor the editor, nor anyone in the author's writing group bothered to take the ten seconds needed to fact check this. Further, the language belies the author's attitude towards how science is done: "this guy" is supposedly a physicist named Francis Kirkland "theorized" a whole pile of things about time travel. And it is clear in the book that by "theorized", the author means "made a wild-ass guess" because she never talks about anything that has been done to test any of Kirkland's guesses, or any data that he relied upon when making these guesses. He apparently just sat up one day and thought "time traveling at the speed of light makes a second equal to a year!" for no real apparent reason. Later, when talking about time paradoxes, the author has the same character say that physicists have yet to "posit" answers to these questions. Apparently the author thinks that the phrase "posit answers" means "come up with a definite conclusions about something", as opposed to the actual meaning which is "put forward" or "propose", because physicists (and generations of science fiction authors) certainly have proposed answers to time travel paradoxes.

"Astronauts have recently recorded what they believe to be the seventh wormhole or black hole in outer space. According to their observations, each one of Earth's seven continents has one of the seven wormholes located directly above it. In summary, each wormhole will allow you to travel in time to a particular region or continent."

I must admit, that reading passages like this made my brain hurt. The author has previously indicated that she in fact knows that the Earth rotates. So one has to wonder how each of the continents (which all rotate with the Earth) has a black hole directly above it. Are the black holes in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth? If so, this would place them about 42,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, which is basically right on top of us. One has to wonder how we have managed to somehow not detect black holes that close to Earth. I suppose the black holes could be in highly elliptical geosynchronous orbits, but then they would vary between 1,000 kilometers and 70,000 kilometers from the Earth, and once again, would be close enough that our not having already detected them would be ridiculously implausible. Further, when our breathless informer continues "in summary", one has to wonder "in summary of what?", because they haven't given any information that would need to be summarized. Perhaps she meant to say "in conclusion", but the leap from "there are black holes orbiting the Earth" to "you can time travel to those continents" is a huge leap with no foundation at all. The author doesn't even think it necessary to provide us with any kind of groundwork for why this would be so, we are just told "there are wormholes above the continents, therefore, time travel to them".

"Kirkland believes that he and his colleagues may need to look deeper into numerology, the study of numbers, for possible answers in relation to time travel. I don't need to point out that it may not be coincidental that there are seven wormholes, seven continents, seven main planets in the zodiac, seven wonders of the world, seven colors in a rainbow, seven seas on Earth, seven thrones, seven churches, seven seals, and the list goes on and on."

And this is where you realize that Francisco not only didn't bother to check some basic facts before writing her book, but simply doesn't understand how science works at all. It seems that she thinks that science is some sort of magic process where you feed in random thoughts on one end and get technological devices on the other. Of course, the whole list of "sevens" is a fairly ridiculous list - Antipater chose his famous seven wonders not because they were magically significant, but rather because they were sights that tourists would want to see: in short, the "wonders" were basically nothing more than a tourism guide. And not only that, the seven wonders were not uniform from list to list (even Antipater's list changed at least once). There are seven continents because the Greeks differentiated between Europe and Asia, a sensible distinction based upon their knowledge of the world, but one that makes little sense when you know the true nature of the Eurasian land mass. The "seven seas" is such a flexible concept that there have been a myriad of different lists with literally dozens of different bodies of water listed on them. Pretty much all of the sets of "sevens" listed are meaningless nonsense, in many cases the list of "seven" isn't even a list with a set roster of items on it. Most of all, numerology is just hokum. It isn't the "study of numbers", it is an attempt to ascribe magical meaning to random coincidences. No physicist looking for answers to the problem of time travel would suggest looking at groups of "sevens" because some sailors in the middle ages thought that the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Arabian, Black, Caspian, and Red Seas, plus the Persian Gulf were important bodies of water.

The truly depressing thing about this is that all of the quotes thus far have been drawn from pages twenty-two and twenty-three of the book. The ridiculous science, however, pervades the book. A nuclear weapon is destroyed by a lunar installation that "draws solar gases" and focuses them into a solar beam, causing one to wonder how one gets solar gases, which can only be found in the solar atmosphere, on the moon. A nuclear explosion knocks the Earth off its axis somehow, which somehow causes the average temperature of the Earth to go up so much that the heat rises to 115 degrees in Michigan in September. Left unexplained is how a change in the axial tilt of the Earth would cause a worldwide rise in temperatures. Later an asteroid three miles across falls into the Atlantic Ocean, causing "mountain high tsunamis". Left unexplained is how a three mile wide asteroid that crosses the Earth's orbit went undetected before. Later, when the heroes of the book reach the future, they are informed that there are hybrid mutations that run rampant over the Earth as a result of genetic changes made by injecting genetic material into test subjects, which is a method that simply wouldn't work. And so on. Time and again, ridiculous events take place based on facts and processes that are not just speculative, but are simply contrary to known science.

For example, late in the book, after all the volcanoes on the Earth simultaneously erupt at once, the ash expelled makes normal methods of communication technology useless, so the heroes try to set up a communications laser to link to NASA's satellite network. But their laser isn't powerful enough, they decide they have to get "more laser power" to make it work. And so they set out get gather more lasers. At first, one wonders exactly where they are getting more lasers in rural Michigan, and how this will help. But later the when they are looking for that last little boost of "laser power", one of the characters remembers a cache of key chain laser pointers that he had stashed away. And at this point the reader realizes that the author thinks that one makes a more powerful laser by taking a bunch of tiny lasers and pointing them in the same direction or something. Not only that, one realizes that the author didn't even bother to do enough research to find out that key chain "laser" pointers aren't actually lasers at all. In many ways, it seems like the author had a series of buzzwords - genetic engineering, solar beams, lasers, and so on that she felt she had to include to make it a "science fiction" novel, but wasn't willing to do the research necessary to understand how these elements worked.

The truly sad thing about the ridiculous science fiction that is in the book is that it wasn't really needed because the story is riddled with out and out fantasy. At first the fantasy elements consist of prophetic dreams and signs, but before too long the story includes visits from guardian angels and the acquisition of divinely provided super powers. It is when the five members of the "Seven Dreams" crew reach the ice-covered future (and acquire the final two members of their cadre) that the reader starts to wonder why the author bothered to include the pseudo-science about how time travel works, or anything else that transpired before. After they pick up some hover craft with futuristic "camouflage paint", the heroes wander about looking for MacGugffins, getting their bacon saved by guardian angels, and gaining the ability to shoot laser beams from their eyes, change reality with their imaginations, teleport from place to place, see the future, and other magical superpowers. Guardian angels carry messages back in time to warn the relatives the heroes left in the past about evil doers, which makes all of the efforts to manufacture and preserve a functioning time machine seem kind of pointless. More to the point, it makes pretty much everything the characters in the book do seem pointless if they are going to get saved at every turn by a deus ex machina.

And so the book pretty quickly falls into a fairly predictable and unexciting pattern. Each chapter opens up with a couple of verses of poetry that describe what will happen in the chapter. Then a character has a prophetic dream that describes what will happen in the chapter. Guided by the prophetic dream, the characters head off to find the next MacGuffin, an exercise that seems pointless, as all these MacGuffins do is tell the heroes where to find the next MacGuffin in a kind of cosmic scavenger hunt. On the way the heroes get themselves into trouble whereupon a guardian angel shows up and magics the trouble away. Finally, the guardian angel bestows magical powers on one of the members of the team. The "Seven Dreams" are color coded, having been given special badges before they set out to time travel, and their powers are supposed to have some sort of mystical connection to their color. Adding this to numerology, there seems to be no New Age woo that Francisco won't incorporate into her book. The color coding doesn't make much difference other than to allow the reader to keep track of the otherwise mostly indistinguishable characters by their particular color coded superpower. The individual "Seven Dreams" really don't matter much anyway, since they don't do much themselves other than following the directions given to them in prophetic dreams and then getting saved by angels.

Which highlights a problem that I have found in most Christian fantasy fiction I have read: the characters don't really do much of anything for themselves. In a book like Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly, which is more or less realistic fiction, the characters, although guided by their faith, operate in a fictional reality in which God's plan for them is not clear. But when God is sending prophetic visions and intervening directly into the story - to the extent that the hand of God literally reaches down from the heavens with a quill to write "I will prevail against all evil!" - then the characters aren't characters so much as they are chess pieces being moved about a cosmic chess board in which the game is rigged for God's side. This may seem theologically pleasing for certain evangelical brands of Christians, but it makes for a dull story. After all, if God is telling the heroes what to do and sending them direct assistance, a feeling of inevitability takes over the story. While we expect that usually a protagonist in a book will succeed, the dramatic tension in the story derives in large part from the possibility that they might fail. But when a deus ex machina isn't just a dramatic final turn of events, but rather a regular occurrence, failure becomes a non-factor, and the story becomes a dull process of following characters about as they do preordained tasks that they are preordained to succeed at. For example, the back cover blurb of the book says "{b}ut thanks to the forethought of their eccentric grandpa, the Stravos family has a chance of surviving this catastrophic disaster..." But their chance of surviving is not because of their grandpa's forethought, but rather because he had been bombarded with prophetic dreams for a decade and a half prior to the start of the book. Grandpa didn't do anything but follow instructions.

But this is more or less natural when one realizes that despite the extensive Stravos family tree near the opening of the book, the characters are mostly an undifferentiated mass with no individual identities. The characters who stay in the "present" quickly divide up into "grandpa", "the guy from NASA", "the other men", "the women", and "the children". The characters who travel to the future are mostly interchangeable except for their divine super powers, and quickly become little more than "the girl with laser eyes", "the guy who can read minds and control thoughts", "the guy who can teleport", and "the guy who can see the future". As an aside, I note that one does have to pause and wonder why any other members of the "Seven Dreams" are needed when one character is bestowed the ability to change reality with his imagination, a power that seems to encompass all the other Dreams' super powers and more. Any character who is a nonbeliever (and therefore might be an interesting counterpoint to the firmly devout main characters) is quickly shown to be a fool, and either immediately converts or gets killed. And why wouldn't they in the face of God hammering them over the head and shoulders with events too obvious to be called by the subtle name of "signs"? There is also a fair undercurrent of sexism in the book - while the men go out and get stuff done, the women stay home and take care of the children, cook for the menfolk, and tend the underground garden in the bunker. There is a plucky young heroine on the "Seven Dreams" team, but before the end of the book she is teamed up with an obvious future husband. Perhaps to cover up this lack of character development, the book is replete with Tom Swiftly's, the characters rarely "say" anything. Instead, they "intone", "report", "exclaim", "shout", or otherwise deliver their lines using a thousand different synonyms for "said".

One has to wonder sometimes if Christian fiction writers think their readers are dumb, because they seem to feel the need to spell everything out, just to make sure the reader doesn't miss it. To make sure the reader knows that the protagonists are properly devout, she makes sure to tell you early that they listen to Christian rock stations. The characters consult God (or are "in dialogue with God") over every decision, large or small. When grandpa is leading the family in prayers at a picnic they hold during the apocalypse, he pointedly invites anyone who has doubts to shed them and pray for guidance, a passage presented in bold text just in case the reader didn't understand that this is an important moment. Even the puzzles the characters face as they wander pointlessly about the snowbound Michigan landscape are obvious. Each MacGuffin is supposed to be something of a mystery, but the "mysteries" are as mundane as the characters getting a vision that they have to find something that says "WOLLOH PMAC" on it, and then when they find it and see its reflection they realize that they are meant to go to Camp Hollow. Apparently writing things backwards is enough to confound the devout.

I suppose this sort of dimness on the part of the heroes is okay, because the villain, former U.S. Vice-President turned World Dictator Victor Shesh has a plan so convoluted and nonsensical that having God send his chosen representatives on a pointless scavenger hunt seems brilliant in comparison. We learn that Shesh and Iranian intelligence operatives conspired to have an Iranian bomb destroy the Dome of the Rock, so everyone would get mad at the United States and attack with nuclear weapons, prompting a global catastrophe that would cause the leaders of the seven most powerful nations in the world to convene at a meeting in FEMA's secure site in Michigan. Because of the ongoing disasters, all of the leaders have to be transported to the meeting by the black helicopter squads, and as soon as they start the meeting, Iranian intelligence agents who had infiltrated the black helicopter squads break in and kill all the world leaders except for Shesh. And this plan makes sense because it is obviously easier to do all this rather than wait for these same people to meet in their regular annual meeting of the G7 and kill them there. Pardon me while I roll my eyes. Once in power, Shesh's plans don't make much more sense, because he rounds up all the scientists in the world and has them inject genetic material into people and various animals seemingly at random in an effort to create a way to make him immortal. And along the way, create a collection of hybrid monsters to serve him. But they serve him because he has microchips implanted into their heads, allowing him to exercise mind control, so one wonders why he need wolf-man hybrids, bat-man hybrids, fly-mosquito hybrids, and the completely pointless bat-mouse hybrids, and a plethora of other agglutinated creates to serve him rather than just implanting microchips into the heads of ordinary people. The various mutated monsters are supposed to be the result of immortality experimentation, but it seems odd that one would come up with a mosquito-fly creature as a result (even leaving aside the idea that injecting genetic material into creatures would work at all). But the most baffling part of this plan of Shesh's is that in the end it is revealed that Shesh is actually Satan, which makes you wonder why he needed some sort of immortality serum at all. Not only is this part of Shesh/Satan's villainous plotting convoluted and nonsensical, it seems completely pointless as well.

And I haven't even gotten to the subplot involving the hemophilia of the male protagonists, and the genetically engineered flower that will cure both their bleeding disorder and all cancer, a subplot that doesn't make any more sense than anything else in the story. or the strange "Afterward" that isn't actually an afterward, but is actually a plot summary of the book. Needless to say, Seven Wings and the Bleeding Twin Flowers is a mess. While the idea of a post-apocalyptic Christian science fiction story might have some promise, the bad science, the bad science fiction, the heavy handed divine intervention, the stilted and wooden characters, the completely bizarre nature of the antagonist's plots, and the convoluted, albeit divinely ordained, path the heroes follow to try to foil him, make the book simply excruciating to read.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Love the Danielle Steele review, and am waiting with bated breath for your review of book #53. :)

Book Fifty-Four: Tintin in America by Herge.

.

Short review: Tintin comes to the United States to face down the Chicago mob and the Blackfeet.

Long review: Tintin in America wasn't the first Tintin book written, but it is the first book that has anything resembling a Tintin story. Granted, the story is fairly bare bones and doesn't make much sense, but unlike Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, which are little more than a series of gags, there is a story. There is a reason that on the back cover of each of The Adventures of Tintin the first two are left off and this is the first book that gets listed. On the other hand, the story that is contained in the book is disjointed and nonsensical, making this one of the weakest of the Tintin books.

The book opens with Tintin coming to visit the U.S., and the gangsters who run Chicago get together to make a plan to keep him from ruining their business. Apparently Tintin foiled the diamond smuggling operation of one of their number in Tintin in the Congo and they don't want him to do the same thing once he arrives in the Windy City. This is the start of one of the odd things about the Tintin series: Tintin's job is ostensibly "journalist", but for the most part he more or less acts like his job is "amateur detective and righter of wrongs". In fact, fairly early in the book the mobster Bobby Smiles offers to hire Tintin to help him take on Al Capone. Tintin responds that he "came to Chicago to clean the place up, not to become a gangster's stooge." But this isn't anything like what an actual a journalist's job would be. I could see Tintin saying he is coming to Chicago to investigate and report on organized crime, and having the mob resent his poking his nose in, but saying he's there to "clean the place up" is just silly.

Of course, Tintin doesn't do any actual investigating either, but that's mostly because the mob is run by idiots. Rather than waiting to see if Tintin's investigatory skills lead him anywhere, they try to kidnap him the minute he sets foot in the country. Of course, they botch the attempt (and all their subsequent attempts to bump our hero off), but in doing so, they spur Tintin's investigations. Essentially, without the mobsters in the story constantly trying to get rid of him, Tintin wouldn't have anything to do. He doesn't seem to have a clue as to how to even begin to foil the mob on his own, merely reacting to their constant bumbling attempts to kill him by turning the tables, tying them up, and turning them over to the police. In short, if the gangsters just left Tintin alone, he'd never have been able to catch them.

But the mobsters do come after Tintin, and as a result, he has a series of adventures that more or less consist of mobsters trying to kill him, and then Tintin capturing them. There is a brief bit where Tintin captures Al Capone, but the police officer he tries to alert to this doesn't believe him. This little sequence is a bit odd, as it seems that Hergé thinks the only reason no one had caught Capone is that they simply didn't know where to find him. Those who expect to see Tintin pull off daring escapes and use his wits to foil the villains will be disappointed, as he is usually saved by the incompetence of his opposition: they use the wrong gas when they try to gas him to death, they tie him to wooden weights when they try to sink him in Lake Michigan, when a lynch mob tries to hang him the rope breaks again and again, and so on.

Eventually Tintin tangles with fictitious mobster Bobby smiles, of the "Gangster's Syndicate of Chicago". When Bobby Smiles takes off for "Redskin City" (apparently just a short drive from urban Chicago) Tintin moves from Al Capone territory to the Old West where he obtains a cowboy outfit and acts like he is in a John Wayne movie. One has to wonder where in 1930s Illinois or Indiana a collection of cowpokes and native Americans could be found, but Tintin finds them, and sets off on a series of fairly hackneyed western adventures involving bank robberies, train heists, lassoing horses, and because there's no Captain Haddock, an uncontrollably drunk town sheriff. Once again the format boils down to a string of disjointed sequences in which Tintin gets into trouble and then finds his way out as he pursues Bobby Smiles.

Hergé does take the opportunity to include a little bit of social commentary in this section, as Tintin accidentally discovers oil on an Indian reservation. After being offered tens of thousands of dollars for his well, Tintin reveals that the land belongs to the Blackfeet Indians, whereupon the tribe is forced off their land by soldiers and a city is built in their place within a day. However, this just barely makes up for the embarrassingly racist depiction of the Blackfeet tribe contained in the preceding several pages. The current edition of the book was rewritten to tone down the racist elements that were in the original, excising some less than savory depictions of African-Americans and altering some other elements of the story. Even this alteration is somewhat controversial, as there is some indication that these changes were made at the behest of publishers who were leery of having minority characters included in the book at all.

Even so, this is a Tintin adventure, and as a result, it is a fun book to read. That said, this is a bare bones Tintin story. None of the familiar cast of regulars have been introduced yet - the adventure consists of Tintin and Snowy gallivanting about with no sign of Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thompson and Thomson, or even Bianca Castafiore. Despite this, the story is silly fun, even if it is little more than a linear series of gag set ups and ensuing pratfalls. Although this volume isn't up to the standard of later Tintin adventures, it is still a worthy opening for the series.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.