Tillabooks: Will's Book Blog

2011-10-11T23:14:00.001-07:00

Darcy and Fitzwilliam: A tale of a gentleman and an officer by Karen V. Wasylowski

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I couldn't make myself finish this book. I read about 1/3 of it, and just couldn't take any more. I'm a sucker for novels inspired by Pride and Prejudice, and I'm willing to try almost any of them I come across, but I'm almost always disappointed. In this case, the author makes zero attempt to recreate the classic Regency style of the original. The tone does not match at all. She has Darcy and his cousin, Fitzwilliam, using foul language to each other (out of the hearing of the ladies, of course, I'll grant you that) and Fitzwilliam routinely calls Darcy "Brat;" it seems to be his pet name for Darcy. None of this rings true to the original. I just can't imagine the characters in Jane Austin's book talking this way to each other.

And even more disappointing is the plot. What kind of a plot do I want for a sequel? I don't know, but I haven't found it yet. It has to be some version of ". . . and they lived happily ever after" but still have something in it to keep one's interest. This one definitely isn't happily ever after! Instead, we learn that Darcy had a brief sexual fling with Caroline Bingley long before he ever met Elizabeth, and now he makes the horrible mistake of confessing this to Elizabeth after their marriage, which naturally causes her to become insanely jealous.

But as if that weren't enough, Darcy is tricked into spending a night alone with Caroline at the Bingley residence, where she attempts to seduce him, and we just know that all of this is going to create havoc in Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship. I'm sure all will be well that ends well eventually, but I just couldn't put myself through any more of this soap opera plot. This is NOT what I want from a P & P sequel. Definitely NOT recommended.

View all my reviews

Elegant Enigmas by Karen Wilkin

2009-11-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

Elegant Enigmas: the art of Edward Gorey by Karen Wilkin. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2009.

This is a book for avowed Edward Gorey fans. If you're not one of those, or worse yet, if you've never heard of the guy, don't read THIS book, go read some of Edward Gorey's own books.

This book is essentially the exhibition catalog for an exhibition of original drawings by Gorey which was apparently held at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. For the Gorey aficionado, it provides a rare glimpse of some of his preliminary sketches, and other previously unreleased materials, such as some wonderful illustrated envelopes Gorey created and mailed to his mother while attending Harvard.

There are also bits and pieces from many of his books, but not enough to give more than the flavor. These are rewarding for those already familiar with most of the books, but the newbie won't get but a taste.

Highly recommended for all Gorey fans.

Devil's Trill by Gerald Elias

2009-11-26T11:50:00.000-08:00

Devil's Trill by Gerald Elias. New York: Minotaur Books, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-312-54181-1

A great mystery with classical music as its primary focus and background milieu. Reading books with a musical backdrop is one of my favorite reading pleasures, so this book was great fun!

The only downer is the crusty misanthropic nature of the primary character, an over the hill, nearly blind, chain-smoking violin teacher, who (at first glance) seems to hate teaching, hate his life, hate his pupils, pretty much everything. But eventually you warm up to him, since he does have the proverbial heart of gold, sort of, maybe.

Definitely recommended for anyone who, like me, likes musically oriented fiction.

Changes to this blog

2009-08-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

Hello to anyone reading this blog:

This has been my "books I've read" blog for the past six years. Starting in August, 2003, I began writing blog entries, brief (and sometimes NOT so brief) reviews of EVERY book I read. Which is and has been a pretty major undertaking, since I'm an inveterate bookworm, always reading, often reading half a dozen books at any given time. I almost never go anywhere--even to the grocery story--without a book in hand.

So, it has always been a challenge to keep up with my reading here on the blog. Taking the time to not just say something quick or facile about each book, but to try and say something that I had thought through, and that might be helpful to someone else considering whether or not to read that book. I'm not sure I even managed to accomplish that goal on a regular basis, but that was my intent.

In the past year or so it has gotten even harder, and frankly, I just plain haven't been able to keep up. There are too many other things vying for my time. I've been struggling just to get the library books I've read blogged before they charge me for the book, since I've had it out so long. Luckily my library has never charged fines, but coming this fall, they're going to start, so there's another reason. Plus, any books that I actually own, or that friends or relatives have loaned me, and that I've read, simply pile up on the floor in front of my desk, waiting to be blogged--waiting, waiting, and still waiting. I don't think I've gotten any of those blogged for well over a year now.

Consequently, I've made the difficult (for me, at least) decision to abandon the notion of blogging every book I read, at least for now. Instead, I plan to blog a book once in a while, books that made a particular impression on me, or that I think are especially worthy of my taking the time to write about for one reason or another, or maybe just because I think I have something in mind that I'd like to say about the book, and all I have to do is sit down and hammer it out.

In the meantime, I'll be keeping track of my reading over on Goodreads.com. You can follow my recent (and some not so recent) reading here: http://www.goodreads.com/tillabooks. Why do I keep using "Tillabooks" as the name for my online book sites? Because I started the Tillabooks book blog while I was living in Tillamook, Oregon, working for the library there, and I just liked the word "Tillabooks" which I thought up one day.

So hop on over to my Goodreads page to see what I've been reading lately, and also to see a list of all the stuff I've read over the past year or two that hasn't made it onto the blog here yet. Anything I've finished lately will have a "read" date attached to it. The rest is all older stuff.

And once in a while, I still hope to post a review here as well. We'll see how that goes!

Longitude by Dava Sobel

2009-08-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel. New York: Walker, 1995. ISBN: 978-0802713124

This is one of those nonfiction popular scientific books that have become so ubiquitous in recent years. It's been on my “to read” list ever since it first came out, but the old “so many books, so little time” paradox has kept it unread by me until now. It's a relatively easy read. Even in the large print edition that I happened to pick up from a display at my local library it is under 200 pages.

The title really tells much of the story. The problem of ships at sea knowing just where they are was one of the major scientific conundrums for centuries. A very real problem, it lead to the loss of many ships, lives, fortunes, and even wars and kingdoms. The solution? A clock that could keep accurate time at sea. Although a parallel solution was also under development and came to fruition at about the same time, involving extremely complicated calculations, based on plotting of the path of the moon against the stars.

The conflict comes from the fact that astronomers were in charge of awarding the huge prize that the British government had promised to whoever could solve the problem. And naturally, they tended to favor the astronomical solution as more “scientific” than a mere clock.

It's a fascinating story, and Dava Sobel is a thorough if not always scintillating storyteller. Definitely recommended.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

2009-08-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. ISBN: 978-0-14-200028-1

This is one of the best self-help books I've read, which probably isn't saying much, since I don't generally read in that category very much. But David Allen does have what sounds like a pretty good plan for organizing your life, and freeing up your brain for creative and thoughtful approaches to pretty much everything you need to tackle.

At the root of his method is the notion that you need a system to capture everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that you're involved in. Get it all down (on paper, or on your computer), and then put it through a process that organizes it into manageable categories, and forces you to make decisions about how to handle it. Once you're confident that your system is in place, and that it really does capture EVERYTHING in such a way that nothing will ever fall through the cracks again, supposedly your mind will be freed from the routine anxieties and stress that plague you now, and make it difficult for you to concentrate and do your work and live your life. I can't describe in one paragraph what Allen takes entire chapters to describe, so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, you'd best read the book for yourself.

If I have any complaint at all about the book, it's that the author's system relies much too heavily on paper, writing things down on pieces of paper, setting up a filing system for organizing your paper, and just plain using too much paper. Handling paper is one of my least favorite things in all the world. The inability to make filing decisions is a big part of my personal organization problem.

I'd be much happier with a system that allowed me to go entirely electronic. I want to just scan all my pieces of paper, and use an advanced OCR and indexing system to convert everything into machine-readable format that I can keyword search. In the modern age of computer searching, everything is (or could well be) miscellaneous, to coin a phrase. I wish some computer-savvy individual would work with Allen to co-write a completely computerized version of his plan.

Oh well, short of that, this IS a good plan. The problem? I'd need about a month of uninterrupted time to put it into practice. And where am I going to get that month? Still, I do recommend this book to anyone who is looking to get better organized, and reduce stress over unfulfilled obligations or intentions.

The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King

2009-07-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King. New York: Bantam Books, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-553-80454-6

Hooray! Another Laurie King Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell novel! This was some of the best and most entertaining reading I’ve done all year. And in what has to be (I think) a first for this series, we get a “to be continued” at the end of the book, when we realize that the villain has escaped alive, and will undoubtedly return for a second round.

In this truly original take on the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, we learn that Holmes has a son, now grown, hidden from his knowledge all these years by Irene Adler, the boy's mother, and the one woman that Holmes truly admired back in the original canonic tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She also appears to be the only woman and one of the few adults, period, that proved herself to be Holmes’ intellectual equal as well, besting him in the battle of wits between them, and successfully keeping his parentage a secret from him.

Of course, we are supposed to believe that Holmes was particularly vulnerable in this particular area, misogynist that he was. That is the one (and only, in my view) serious flaw in Laurie King’s hypothesis, that Holmes would not merely treat as an equal, but actually marry a young woman 20 years his junior, which is the primary premise of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series of novels. King makes it believable enough when it happens, and I don’t find that it stretches my innate sense of disbelief when I’m actually reading her stories, only when I sit back at a distance (like now) does it seem rather unlikely.

But back to the story: Holmes’ son is naturally more than a little bitter towards his father. When he finally decides to let Holmes into his life, it is on a fairly limited basis, and only on his own terms.

But very quickly Homes and Russell become involved initially in the disappearance of their new daughter-in-law, and eventually of the son and granddaughter as well. They are apparently (or not so apparently, at least so far as Scotland Yard is concerned) caught up in a somewhat bizarre religion which involves blood sacrifices in or on various of the mystically sacred spaces around Great Britain, ancient collections of standing stones and the like.

All told, it leads to a dramatic finale, with Russell flying in horrific weather to the far north of Britain, risking her life and that of her pilot, to try and reach a specific location where she suspects another ritual death may be planned, perhaps even the death of Holmes' young granddaughter.

Some people have complained that since changing publishers, King has been pressured to up her page counts, and that as a consequence, her recent books have been too long, even plodding, at times. To that I can only say, pshaw! Who cares? To me, the longer, the better. I'm still a rabid fan, devouring every page with pleasure. Just give me more! Highly recommended.

Dragon Harper by Anne and Todd McCaffrey

2009-07-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

Dragon Harper by Anne McCaffrey and Todd Mccaffrey. New York: Del Rey, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-345-48031-6

This is the newest (but one) of the new Dragons of Pern novels, written in collaboration between the progenitor of the series, renowned science fiction and fantasy author Anne McCaffrey, and her son, Todd. Diehard fans of the series will definitely want to read it.

Counting myself among their number, I have done so. While I have no regrets about that, I do have to say that Todd doesn’t have quite the deft touch of his mother when it comes to characterization, plot development, and the like.

His story lines are compelling enough. This one being an example: a flu pandemic sweeps throughPern and kills one in three or so of the general population, hitting the young and active the hardest. The dragon riders are only able to provide limited assistance, due to the imminent arrival of threadfall (well, only a decade or so out), so that they cannot afford to lost a third or so of their numbers, which would leave Pern unprotected.

So there is plenty of drama and angst in the story line. But when reading one of Anne’s books, every aspect of the story as it develops seems almost fore-ordained, completely logical, as though it couldn’t possibly happen any other way. You don’t get that feeling in Todd’s writing. At times things that are happening seem a bit confused, and even arbitrary.

Likewise with character development. With Anne’s characters, you invariably relate to them, and identify with them almost immediately. With Todd, it takes longer. You do eventually get there, but it takes time.

There is also one major plot flaw (in my view). Why is our hero, young Kindan, immune to the flu? Why is he the only major character who never catches it? There is no rationale provided for this so far as I could tell, other than pure chance. That hardly seems fair, when almost everyone else we care about succumbs.

Even so, I probably shouldn’t complain. If I didn’t have the master storyteller, Anne McCaffrey, to compare with, I’d probably be perfectly happy with Todd’s writing. Fans of Pern will definitely find this worth the reading.

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl

2009-06-25T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl. New York: Ballantine Books/DelRey, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-345-47021-8

This is one of the most congenial SciFi novels I've read in a long time. Meaning it's just a pleasant read (for the most part, anyway, with only a couple of minor exceptions, such as the period where poor Ranjit, our hero, is mistakenly locked up and “interrogated” as a suspected terrorist), entertaining, and intriguing all at once. Not to mention that it's the first, last, and only collaboration between these two science fiction greats, grandmasters both. This alone makes it essential reading for all serious science fiction buffs, such as myself.

Much, even most of the story takes place on the island of Sri Lanka, Arthur C. Clarke's chosen home for many decades. Unfortunately, he had passed on by the time this book made it into print.

Our primary protagonist is a brilliant young mathematician, who lives an eventful, but satisfying life. Among his accomplishments is finally solving Fermat's Last Theorem, one of the perennially classic mathematical challenges. In fact, he actually comes up with with the proof while in prison, suffering from those currently infamous “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

That wouldn't be enough on its own for a good SciFi story, though. What makes the novel more interesting is the fact that we (the human race, that is) have inadvertently and unknowingly come to the attention of the galactic civilization, such as it is, and they have decided that we are likely to be dangerous, and should be quickly snuffed out. There are interesting scientific developments going on here on earth, as well, such as the construction of the first “space elevator,” an actual cable stretching into earth orbit territory, which makes it possible to lift large masses of material into space much less expensively than with rockets.

How these various elements come together into a satisfyingly happy ending keeps you guessing all along the way. Definitely recommended essential reading for SciFi aficionados.

Fortune and Fate by Sharon Shinn

2009-06-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

Fortune and Fate by Sharon Shinn. New York: Ace Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-441-01636-5

The last book I blogged was the fourth in Mercedes Lackey's “500 Kingdoms” fantasy series. This is the fifth book in Sharon Shinn's “Thirteen Houses” series. And both series have quickly become favorites. Not only that, but I think this is the best book yet in this series. Initially, I probably wouldn't have thought so, since the main character is not one of the primary characters from the other volumes (although they get significant space also), but rather, the one King's Rider who chose NOT to become a Queen's Rider.

Wen is her name, and she no longer feels worthy to be a Rider, one of the elite corps of royal guards that are more than a cut above the regular soldier, and are willing to give their lives to protect their monarch. That's the problem, you see. Wen was standing next to the king when he was killed. The Riders were literally overwhelmed by hundreds of off-island assassins, who came over the walls of the royal palace totally without warning.

Wen feels that for the king to be dead, and she to still be alive, represents a complete failure on her part, and she is no longer worthy to be a Rider. Even though the Riders were vastly outnumbered, and the assassin who killed the king came through the dead rider on the other side of the king, not through Wen. Nevertheless, she left the royal court, and began aimlessly wandering throughout the kingdom of Gillengaria, utterly and completely depressed, caring not whether she lives or dies.

Unexpectedly she rescues the daughter, now heir, of the very man, head of a noble house, who was one of the prime instigators of the uprising against the king. Against her will, and with extreme reluctance, only because she sees a need, she agrees to become the captain of the sixteen-year-old girl's guard, and, mind you, only temporarily, until a suitable replacement can be found.

The tale of how she gradually becomes involved with this family, formerly enemies of her sovereign, is truly heartwarming, in only the way that this classic “romance” plot element can be when used at its finest. By that I mean the person who initially dislikes someone or something, but gradually, over time, has a change of heart.

Only here, the romantic element (woman meets man, woman gets man) is peripheral to the plot; the romance that we get caught up in, is Wen's gradual acceptance of herself as a person worthy to be alive, and with an important role to fill, a role that she comes to value, as she comes to value herself.

Highly recommended, and probably OK to read, even if you haven't read the rest of the series, but the story will make more sense if you have read the others. They are Mystic and Rider (2005), The Thirteenth House and Dark Moon Defender (both 2006), and Reader and Raelynx (2007). Since there are thirteen houses, do you suppose there will be thirteen novels in the series? I don't know, but I certainly hope so!

The Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey

2009-06-03T21:46:00.000-07:00

The Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey. New York: Luna, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-373-80265-4

The latest in the “500 Kingdoms” series by Mercedes Lackey, the undisputed master (or would it be sexist to say “mistress”?) of the fantasy novel for adolescent girls (and boys, and men, and women). Previous novels in this charming and delightful (overworked, but still apt adjectives) series include The Fairy Godmother (2004), One Good Knight (2006), and Fortune's Fool (2007).

So what's the scoop on this latest entry? The Ice Queen is actually a good witch, a benevolent spirit, but further up into the fastness of the north, someone is wickedly impersonating her, and luring handsome young men to their doom. And so the Queen teams up with the latest victim's betrothed and a village witch, plus a couple of blacksmith type wizards to set things aright.

Lots of romantic adventures ensue, to the eventual delight of all.

Only now have I belatedly realized that Luna is a trademark of Harlequin Books! Who knew? Frankly, who cares? Light but vastly entertaining is my enthusiastic verdict. Highly recommended, as were all of the previous instances of this series.

Vivaldi's Virgins by Barbara Quick

2009-05-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Vivaldi's Virgins by Barbara Quick. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-06-089052-0

This book may be more for women and girls than for men and boys, but I enjoyed it, nonetheless. It's also for music lovers, set as it is, in the girl's school in eighteenth-century Venice where Antonio Vivaldi, the so-called “Red Priest,” served as Maestro extraordinaire.

The story centers around one of the orphan foundlings, growing up as a gifted violinist, but constantly hungering for knowledge of her family, and her missing mother. Who might they be? Why was she abandoned on the steps of the school? Will she find love? Will she find her family? Will she be allowed to take her musical gifts out into the wider world?

It's a passionate story set in the lush, gilded Venice of the time. Not great literature perhaps, but definitely worth a read.

The Last Secret of the Temple by Paul Sussman

2009-05-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

The Last Secret of the Temple by Paul Sussman. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005, ISBN: 978-0-87113-972-6

If thrillers with a religious background are your thing, à la The Da Vinci Code, then this book is definitely for you. Much of the action takes place in Israel or Egypt, and the current conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a major theme.

The crux of the story, however, revolves around an ancient Jewish artifact, supposedly the very Menorah, the golden candlestick that graced Solomon's temple, somehow preserved through all the centuries, and now the object of desire for both the enemies and defenders of Israel.

Of course, the very notion that the original Menorah had survived into the second temple era (where the prologue to our story takes place) is preposterous, and without any historical foundation that I'm aware of. The furnishings of Solomon's temple were carried off to Babylon, and I've never read or heard anything to suggest that any of them were ever returned.

Not to mention that the true object of Jewish devotion, the center of their faith, and the holiest object of the first temple was NOT the Menorah, but rather the Ark of the Covenant, a fact which this book conveniently ignores, giving to the Menorah, this golden candlestick, the pride of place, the sacred significance, even the supernatural power (the Menorah's light never goes out, you see, and its oil never needs replenishing, for all those centuries from then until now) that rightfully belonged to the Ark.

Then one of the crusaders supposedly finds a great secret, and transports it back to France. Was it the Menorah? Apparently Hitler's archaeologists thought so, and they hunted down this treasure and hid it in one of the mountain mines in the last days of the Third Reich.

Oh well, all of the symbolic inaccuracy aside, the book is a real thriller, a true page turner. There is plenty of action, and lots of twists and turns to the plot, with enough surprise endings to keep anyone entertained. Definitely not fiction of the top caliber, but you won't be bored.

Identity Theft by Robert J. Sawyer

2009-04-23T22:58:00.000-07:00

Identity Theft and Other Stories by Robert J. Sawyer. Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Red Deer Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-88995-411-3

Here we have another collection of short stories, in this case by Canada's preeminent Science Fiction author, Mr. Robert J. Sawyer. These are good stories, by and large, well written and entertaining. In addition to working as SciFi, some are also mysteries, some lean a bit in the horror direction, and some (at least one) are just plain jokes.

Several of the mysteries take place on Mars, a barren, desolate Mars where everyone mostly lives in one big domed city, but people go out on the regular surface hunting rare Martian fossils, from a brief period of life eons before. The other twist on these Martian stories involves transferring one's complete memory matrix into android bodies, and the complications that ensue for the private eye who has to untangle them.

In another story, the man left behind after such a transfer has a change of heart, and wants his life back. Unfortunately, he is no longer a legal entity, with no rights or standing whatsoever, beyond the right to live out his life in seclusion, in luxurious surroundings as a nonentity. He resorts to drastic action to attempt to persuade the powers that be, including his android replacement to reverse course.

Another story involves the first Catholic priest on Mars, who resorts to a miracle to enhance his status. And yet another is a sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. And yet another, “Immortality,” is from an anthology of tales by different authors based on Janis Ian songs. One brief humorous bit is a setup for classic awful pun based on the name of a very famous and prolific golden era SciFi author.

And that's just a taste of what's in store for the reader of this fine little collection. While I wouldn't probably call any of the stories here masterpieces, they are more than worth the time it takes to peruse them. Definitely recommended for all SciFi aficionados.

Unholy Business by Nina Burleigh

2009-04-22T21:52:00.000-07:00

Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, & Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh. New York: Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-06-145845-3

In 2002, a very old ossuary, presumably found in or near Jerusalem, basically a box for bones, containing an inscription, came to light, and was widely publicized in the mainstream media. The box was in the possession of a collector, who had purchased it from a third party, and it was presumed to have come from an illegal excavation, something which happens all too frequently in the “Holy Land.”

The box would not have been of much import, except for the text of the inscription, which was translated to read as “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” Of course, all three of those names were fairly common in the time period in question, but even the possibility that this inscription might be the first physical evidence of the actual existence of Jesus, was enough to create a sensation.

The larger story involves other ancient artifacts that also purport to establish the historical authenticity of some part of the Bible. Most of these artifacts being brought to light from collections, not proper excavations carried out by reputable archaeologists. This poses a significant problem, for without the evidence of the object's original location, it is very difficult to judge the authenticity of the items. Were they real? Were they forgeries?

The ossuary was eventually deemed to be a forgery by most of the experts involved, although what made it particularly tricky was the fact that almost certainly, at least SOME of the inscription WAS original to the piece, and the very clever forger probably altered the original inscription to make the reference to Jesus.

This book, entertainingly written by a seasoned journalist, provides a fascinating look into the world of so-called Biblical archaeology, collectors, scholars, and other assorted characters who surround the antiquities market in Israel and Palestine. Biblical archeology comes with lots of baggage, obviously, since so many believers have a vested interest in the results, wanting to see the Bible proved to be historical. Which is not, of course, the interest of a true scientist, who simply interprets the evidence, without presupposition or preconceived ideas or beliefs.

Definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in the topic.

Deluge by McCaffrey and Scarborough

2009-04-21T21:48:00.000-07:00

Deluge by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Book Three of The Twins of Petaybee. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-345-47006-5

OK, so now we have two completed trilogies in this series. The first trilogy consisted of Powers That Be, Power Lines, and Power Play. This second trilogy includes Changelings, Maelstrom, and now, Deluge. The basic plot line, you may recall, involves a sentient planet that works to protect its now indigenous human population, which it recognizes as its useful ally in preserving the natural nature (how's that for a repetitious redundancy?) of the world, while working against any humans that come with the intent of despoiling or exploiting the natural resources found there.

One of the leading humans on the planet, named, Petaybee (which name comes from pronouncing aloud the initials of the words “Powers That Be,” i.e. PTB), Sean Shongili, just happens to be a silkie, a human being who turns into a seal, once he enters the water. And the second trilogy, The Twins of Peytabee, focuses on the adventures of his children, who inherit the silkie shape changing ability. Their mother, Yanaba Maddock-Shongili, was formerly a colonel in the enemy Company Corps, was won over to the side of Petaybee in the very first novel in the series.

In this tome, the twins are off to another planet, traveling with the alien water city that gradually came to light in previous volumes. Off they go, trying to drum up support for Petaybee off world, since the Company and its private army, keep on trying to interdict and conquer the native population. They end up on a Company prison world, which, a little too coincidentally, just happens to turn out to be the original home world of the aliens. Many adventures are had along the way, but a happy ending is had just in time.

If there is any complaint about these stories, it is that everything is a little too pat, too trite, and too nice. The bad things that happen along the way are too obviously temporary, and we are never in any real state of alarm or worry about how it will all turn out. Still, entertainingly written, this latest book is definitely recommended for anyone who has been following the series from its inception. And it seems very likely that more volumes will follow, which I will probably also read, should it prove convenient to do so. Which is to say, I might not go out of my way to read more of them, but if I see them at the library, I probably won't try to resist.

The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson

2009-04-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism by Geoff Nicholson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-59448-998-3.

That subtitle is a little ambitious for a book of only 275 pages, and the book fulfills that expectation only lightly, and casually, certainly not in any encyclopedic or even systematic fashion. Rather, it is a series of loosely linked essays and perambulations through its topic, organized somewhat informally around the three major cities where the author has done much of his walking, namely Los Angeles, London, and New York.

In between we do get a nice historical summary of some of the more famous walkers of the past and the present, people who became celebrity walkers, and some who even made their living by walking. Another chapter discusses the obvious sound track for walking, famous songs about walking, with numerous anecdotal bits about musicians, composers, musical genres, and any relevant connections to walking. Another chapter takes on the topic of walking in nature, and particularly, in the desert, while yet another focuses on the propensity of folks to walk and take photographs.

All in all, a nice compendium, informally and entertainingly written, devoted to nothing more profound than walking. And walking is both profound and prosaic, all at once. As someone who does a fair amount of walking in my current life, it was a welcome chance to reflect on not only the deeper meanings within this most human of activities, but also to revel in the lore and trivia of other walkers, including the author himself.

If you love to walk, and you love to read, how could you not enjoy this book?

Drood by Dan Simmons

2009-04-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

Drood by Dan Simmons. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-316-00702-3

I realize it's been over a month since I posted any book reviews here, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading in all that time. Quite the contrary. The problem has been finding the time to write any reviews. I've got a whole stack of books piled up waiting for their reviews to be written. Now I'm getting desperate, because the library wants some of them back, and has actually charged my account until I return them!

OK, so let's get on it with it. I'm a big fan of Dan Simmons as a science fiction author, and you'll find reviews of two of his SciFi novels, Ilium and Olympos, on the blog. But Drood is definitely NOT science fiction.

So what is it? It falls into a category of fiction that I am calling “derivative fiction,” although I didn't coin the term myself. One of these days I'll put together an index of the examples found on this blog, and there are quite a few. By derivative fiction, I refer to books that are either sequels to, or somehow based on the work of a famous author from the past, whose works are now generally available in the public domain.

In this case, of course, the author is Charles Dickens, but also Wilkie Collins, a contemporary and “friend” of Dickens, largely unknown today. The title of this book, Drood, refers, of course, to the final novel Dickens wrote, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished at the author's death.

But in this story, Drood is the name for a sinister, underworld (quite literally) character of Egyptian origin, who may or may not exist, or who may or may not be a figment of the narrator's opium and laudanum induced fantasy. Or perhaps, he is the result of a post-hypnotic suggestion administered by Dickens, himself, on his “friend” Wilkie Collins.

Because Collins is the narrator of the novel; it is told entirely through his rather jaundiced perspective. Wilkie Collins is not a very nice person, especially in the way he treats women and servants, and he becomes increasingly jealous of Dickens as the story progresses.

Which takes a LONG time, I must say. Only because I'm such a fan of Simmons's previous work, and because of the literary and “derivative” nature of this work, did I give it the benefit of the doubt and continue reading it to the end. It is a massive tome, nearly 800 pages long, and it takes over 400 pages before the book begins to take on some of its more fantastical elements. It is in Chapter 25, page 426, that the book takes a sudden turn into horror. Which, previously unbeknownst to me, is a genre that Simmons has also explored.

So, what is my recommendation regarding Drood? If you're a confirmed Dan Simmons fan, you'll probably want to read it. And if you're intrigued by the idea of a novel at least loosely based on the last few years of the real life of Charles Dickens, then you'll probably want to read it. But you've got to have patience, and perseverance. This is not a journey to be taken lightly.

Bent, Bound & Stitched by Giuseppina “Josie” Cirincione

2009-03-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Bent, Bound & Stitched: Collage, Cards and Jewelry with a Twist by Giuseppina “Josie” Cirincione. Cincinnati, Ohio: North Light Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-60061-060-8

I'm a sucker for collage books. Thankfully I'm generally able to satisfy my desires through my local library, as with this book, which I had seen advertised, or reviewed somewhere, so I checked my local library catalog, found it, put a hold on it, and waited patiently until it showed up at my local branch for pickup.

Don't get me wrong: the book has a lot of great ideas and creativity sparking suggestions in it, replete with lots of intriguing pictures and images. But most of the projects are too complicated for me personally. Just the supply list alone was enough to tell me that, especially when it contains items like wire, sheet metal, brads, eyelets, and screws! I prefer to stick to paper, thank you very much. I'm not interested in bending and twisting wire, and the projects that involved those kinds of techniques looked way too complicated to me, and besides they just didn't pique my interest.

There was only one project in the book that really grabbed me, to the point that I had to try it out, and that was “Signed and Sealed,” in which the author shows how to make envelopes from pages taken from vintage magazines. For larger cards, she says, “try using atlases; the oversized pages easily accommodate odd-sized cards.” Since I just happen to have several old atlases lying around as part of my accumulated stash of collage supplies, this worked perfectly for me.

The only problem: instead of the card stock she recommends, I used pieces of cardboard rescued from emptied cereal boxes. I think these were too stiff and clunky. Consequently the envelopes I made seemed bulky and awkward. I will really have to give it another try actually using card stock as the author recommends, and see if they turn out any better.

So, the success of the envelope project? As yet undetermined. But hopeful. As for the rest of the book? Lots of pretty pictures, and clever projects, too clever by far for me. But for anyone into paper arts and crafts, you'll enjoy looking at the pictures, and who knows? You might even get sufficiently inspired to try making one of them!

Steampunk edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

2009-03-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

Steampunk edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-892391-75-9

This sub-genre-driven collection contains a brief preface by the editors, a more detailed introduction by Jess Nevins, in which he traces the roots of the genre in areas that are probably relatively unfamiliar even to most modern practitioners, and concludes with two bibliographical essays, the first of which lists instances of steampunk in modern culture, including online on the Internet, in gaming, especially role playing games of the D&D variety, on TV and in film, and the second of which surveys “the genre within the comic book medium.”

In between are 13 steampunk stories, the first and last of which are excerpts from larger works. Their copyright dates range from 1971 to 2007. So what is steampunk, exactly? Basically, it's science fiction set in the Victorian age, with marvelous machines, often (but not nearly always) steam driven, and frequently alternate universes or worlds in which such advanced technologies existed in an earlier era than in ours.

The Jess Nevins introduction describes The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling as “still the finest expression of the genre yet written,” an assessment with which I must sincerely agree. The Difference Engine is a must read for anyone interested in science fiction at all, and is canonical within the sub-genre. It's quite simply a wonderful book, not to be missed.

As to the rest of the examples provided here, well, I could live without many of them. They offer sometimes intriguing, sometimes less than intriguing views of various steampunk universes. There were many entertaining moments along the way as I read my way through this collection, but no epiphanies, no discoveries of writers or stories so amazing or wonderful that I felt compelled to seek out more of the same.

If, on the other hand, steampunk is your thing, you'll find much to admire here. I think my favorite stories were Michael Chabon's “The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance” and Stepan Chapman's “Minutes of the Last Meeting,” although the both had (in my view) unsatisfactory endings. The first just sort of trickles off (one charitably assumes it's just the first part of a much larger saga), and the second ends altogether too dramatically, in a denouement that makes the entire story up to that point an exercise in futility.

Still, this collection is recommended for anyone interested in exploring this fascinating, albeit (in my view) ultimately dead-end sub-genre within the larger science fiction universe.

Spook Country by William Gibson

2009-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

Spook Country by William Gibson. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-399-15430-0

The only subject heading that (presumably) the Library of Congress bothered to assign to this, William Gibson's new novel, is Intelligence Officers—Fiction. And that's hardly what the book is about. It involves one or two (intelligence officers, that is), or perhaps wannabees or has beens, but they are only peripherally what the book is about. So what is it about?

It's about a new form of conceptual, virtual geo-referenced art. Art that is only visible if you're wearing some form of virtual reality gear. Virtual art that only exists (virtually) in a particular place and perhaps, time.

It's about a shipping container, one of those big rectangular, railroad car sized containers that travel around the world on container ships. This particular container is being tracked by various individuals for reasons that don't become clear until almost the end of the story.

It's about people playing espionage games in New York, then suddenly, near the denouement, moving abruptly to Vancouver, British Columbia. Which is where the various plot streams, and disparate characters all finally come together in a dramatic, and action-paced finale.

This latest Gibson tome is honestly more of a suspense novel, than it is science fiction, since most of it could be happening right now, in today's world. At least, for me it's hard to tell where the current reality ends, and any science fiction elements begin. But that's OK.

The book works. At the beginning, as is often the case with Gibson, it's hard to tell what's happening, where it's going, what the point is. The disparate characters are each leading their disparate and often bewildering lives, and you're not at all sure what the point of it all is. But knowing Gibson, you know that there IS a point, and that all will eventually become—if not entirely clear—at least clear-ER. Definitely recommended, especially for fans of previous Gibson novels. Must reading for all science fiction aficionados.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers

2009-01-25T22:13:00.000-08:00

Unnatural Death: The Dawson Pedigree by Dorothy Sayers. New York: Avon, 1964 (originally copyright 1927). ISBN: 0-380-00794-0

Dorothy Sayers is one of my all time favorite mystery writers. Some people like Agatha Christie, but I prefer Sayers. I got started quite a few years ago when I was first learning to play handbells, and to direct handbell choirs. Someone mentioned The Nine Tailors, a Sayers mystery which features English change ringing, which is practiced using handbells, I found and read the book, and was hooked.

After that I eventually read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and some of Sayers other work as well, although it's the Lord Peter books that I enjoy the most, and which I reread from time to time. My wife and I also enjoyed watching all of the PBS Mystery series that featured Lord Peter, and I have plans to see them again sometime—it's been years since they were on.

My favorite Lord Peter story remains The Nine Tailors, which I've read several times, and plan to read several times more during my life, given the opportunity, and also the last few books which detail Lord Peter's courtship and marriage. But this is a different book entirely. Here, Peter works with his pal, policeman Charles Parker to solve a murder that was never reported as such, and was only suspicious to the murdered old lady's doctor. But later, a young woman is also found dead, and only Lord Peter and his friend put the two together. The local authorities are looking for much simpler and more straightforward explanations.

We also get a good dose of Wimsey's occasional assistant, Miss Climpson, who helps with the investigation by temporarily moving to the town in question, and fitting in among the church ladies and local gossips, to learn whatever she can about events, reporting back to Lord Peter, of course. Miss Climpson, a middle-aged spinster, has a way of talking (and writing, although one has to wonder about that, because surely she can't hand write—or type—italics!) in which key words are emphasized. Here's a sample of her speech:

“Well, now, so am I, Mrs. Peasgood,” rejoined Miss Climpson promptly, “and that is what I said to Mrs. Budge at the time. I said, 'Do I understand that there was anything odd about the old lady's death?—because she had spoken of the peculiar circumstances of the case, and you now, I should not at all like to live in a house which could be called in any way notorious. I should really feel quite uncomfortable about it.”

One of the things I like most about the Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries is that you are at once enveloped in a world far different from our own, the world of Britain between the wars, a world of tea cozies, and trains to London, and church ladies at Evensong, and country lanes, and . . . well, you sort of get the picture.

And you get charming Lord Peter, too, with his manservant, Bunter; Murbles, the solicitor; Miss Climpson, policeman Parker, who eventually marries Peter's sister, Mary; Peter's mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, and more delightful characters. Not necessarily all in the same book, or story, of course, but over time you get to know most of them well.

At this point, for me, at least, rereading a Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter mystery is like visiting an old, dear friend. Definitely recommended.

Juggler of Worlds by Niven and Lerner

2009-01-18T19:02:00.000-08:00

Juggler of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. New York: Tor, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1826-8

Must reading for any fan of Niven's “Known Space” universe, a collection of short stories and novels, set in a future history of Niven's devising. Although Niven has allowed many other writers to contribute through the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies which he edited.

However, most of the plot/story line in Juggler of Worlds will be old hat, known territory, to Niven fans. That's because they are essentially the Beowulf Shaeffer stories retold from the perspective of Sigmund Ausfaller, paranoid ARM agent, and less often from the perspective of various Puppeteers, the aliens whose influence Ausfaller is constantly fighting.

Only the final few chapters (don't ask me how many exactly) provide any new plot developments, new to me, at least. I can't guarantee that even they are truly new, but I don't recall having encountered them before. Still, it's still a must read for Known Space fans; I won't change that opinion.

So what is the ARM? It stands for Amalgamated Regional Militia, and it is the action “arm” (pun obviously intended) of the United Nations, the primary earth-based government body once human-kind has made it out into the stars. Why is Ausfaller paranoid? Because that's part of his occupational toolkit. He happens to have been born that way. ARM agents that aren't dope themselves into a paranoid condition when they're on the job. Natural paranoids like Ausfaller are chemically corrected when they're NOT on the job.

This is not the place to try and fill you in on Known Space background, history, and timeline. For that, visit the Wikipedia article on the topic, or The Incompleat Known Space Concordance, or perhaps, Niven's own Known Space web site. Or better yet, just go read the books. You won't find (in my view), any better science fiction, anywhere.

Dependent as I too often am on what happens to show up on the new book shelf at my local public library, or what I encounter in various periodicals and other sources, I wasn't aware (or was at best only casually aware) that Niven had already co-written a previous new Known Space novel with Lerner, titled Fleet of Worlds, and released in 2007. The name rings a vague bell, so I guess I must have seen it somewhere, but haven't gotten around to reading it, obviously. This is an oversight I must try and remedy soon! Meanwhile, Juggler of Worlds is highly recommended.

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard

2009-01-11T22:17:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Pierre Bayard, Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-59691-605-0

This book is passing strange. Interesting, yes, but definitely strange. The author makes a pretty good case for his contention that Holmes got it wrong in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I'm not unconvinced that his solution is more likely, more elegant, even, than that of the famous detective, as chronicled by the equally fictitious Dr. Watson, all through the real pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And right there you have in a nutshell, part of the problem I have with this book. Some of the time our author, Bayard, acts as though Holmes and Watson are real people, capable of their own actions, volitions, and intentions. He states, in fact, as a general rule, that since the author invariably depicts for us only part of any character's life, that

"This uncertainty is closely linked to an essential point that will be discussed later on regarding the special mode of existence of literary characters. These characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both to the writer and the reader.”

Patent nonsense! I say, though not entirely impossible or implausible. I can believe this kind of nonsense, only if I suspend my sense of disbelief even more than normally required for enjoying any work of fiction.

At other times, Bayard steps back, and analyzes the real author, Conan Doyle. The level on which his analyses work is never constant, but jumps back and forth. He makes a great deal out of the fact that by the time Conan Doyle wrote this book, he not only resented his character, Sherlock Holmes, but actively hated him. And consequently, subconsciously, at least, was perfectly capable of allowing him to come to entirely incorrect conclusions about the case.

He justifies much of this through a lot of claptrap about how fictional characters can become more real than real people, and inhabit our world as much as we inhabit theirs. Here's how he sums it up (p. 114):

My tolerance toward fictional creations can be explained by two chief notions. The first is the certainty of a great permeability between fiction and reality. There is no point in trying to patrol the borders between these worlds, for passages between them occur constantly, in both directions. Not only, as we will see, can we inhabit one fictional world or another, but the inhabitants of that world also at times come to live in ours.

The second notion . . . is my profound conviction that literary characters enjoy a certain autonomy, both within the world in which they live and in the travels they make between that world and our own. We do not completely control their actions and movements. Neither the author nor the reader can do so.

So long as he is talking about the realm of the subconscious, and the realm of the imagination, I suppose I can give some credence to this notion, although I find it a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, if you are a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, you may want to read this book. On the other hand, depending on the nature of that fanaticism, you may find the very notion of this book heretical. I'm certainly not going to tell you who Bayard thinks is the real murderer, completely contrary to the solution that Sherlock Holmes comes up with. It is, frankly, the only real suspense that will keep you reading through this often times tedious book. Marginally recommended for those who can't bear not to read it.

The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil

2009-01-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil. New York: Hyperion, 2001. ISBN: 0-7868-6603-9

Calling all bibliophiles, librarians, and lovers of bookish books. Here's a really fun book, especially for librarians, but also those who love books, puzzles, antiquities, and the like. The main character is a typically obsessive librarian, who apparently works in some sort of rare books library. He has a lovely French live-in artist lover, but by the time our story opens, they are increasingly at odds with one another, increasingly over our librarian's fixation on helping, then working for, an eccentric bibliophile who is hunting for a very valuable, stolen watch, which at one time, seems to have hung in a case of curiosities he owns, and naturally wishes to complete.

If this all sounds wonderfully (or pedantically, take your choice) complicated, well, I need only to refer you back to the title of the book. Things are not as they seem, however, and just about everything our heroic librarian thinks he knows about this venture eventually turns out to be wrong. But not before we go with him on numerous investigatory adventures, both literary and real.

A delightfully entertaining romp of a story, even if it does put our heroic librarian in a less than ideally situated light, especially from a psychological point of view. But then, what do we expect? Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys this sort of convoluted bibliophiliac kind of tale. Try it, I bet you'll like it!

The Valley-Westside War by Harry Turtledove

2008-12-28T22:13:00.000-08:00

The Valley-Westside War by Harry Turtledove. New York: Tor, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1487-1

"A Novel of Crosstime Traffic," proclaims the cover. I've read and reviewed all but one of the previous books in this series, Gunpowder Empire, Curious Notions, The Disunited State of America, and The Gladiator. The only one I've missed is In High Places, which comes between Curious Notions and The Disunited.

To remind you of the series premise, in our future, scientists have learned how to cross between alternate realities, and set up incognito trading franchises in many of them, which invariably involve families, including one or more teenage kids. Making these books great YA (Young Adult) novels, likely to be enjoyed by young and not so young (like me) readers alike. In this volume, we visit an alternate timeline in which the U.S. and Soviet Union didn't manage to keep the cold war cold, but destroyed one another's civilizations in a nuclear war, which seems to have knocked the entire world back into a pre-industrial civilization.

Our young heroine, Liz by name, gets involved, somewhat against her will, with a young man named Dan, who is a foot soldier in an all-too-real war between local warlords. Dan likes Liz, but Liz doesn't particularly reciprocate the attraction. Liz spends her spare time in the UCLA library, what's left of it, reading old news magazines, trying to help her dad figure out why in this timeline, the cold war turned hot. Her dad has a grant from the UCLA history department back in the home timeline.

There's just one giant hole in the plot, in my view. Our timeline traveling family has a secret room in their house, equipped with modern amenities like a refrigerator, electric lights, and the like. The room is very carefully hidden, and only opens by password. Liz (and presumably her family) use the famous Mellon "speak friend and enter" password from Tolkien's Ring trilogy as their password, because she knows those movies were made after the break in the two timelines.

What she doesn't know is that the books predate the break, and her "friend" Dan has read the books. But the hole in the plot? The idea that they would use a mere password to control entry to their hideaway. Surely they would have used voice recognition! It makes no sense to use something as simplistic as a mere password for somthing this important. Nor would it work as well. It's a lot harder (I would imagine) for a machine to recognize anyone saying a particular word, then it would be for the machine to identify the precise voice prints of those programmed into its memory.

Nevertheless, it's a good yarn, told as well as Turtledove usually manages, although there is a fair amount of excess verbiage that doesn't really contribute to forwarding the action. A quick and easy read, recommended for anyone who's been enjoying the earlier books in the series.

The Brethren by John Grisham

2008-12-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

The Brethren by John Grisham. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ISBN: 0-385-49746-6

Another entertaining yarn from the legal beagle of storytellers, one that apparently I missed when it first came out. The plot is pretty implausible, but amusing. Three bad judges, locked up in jail, are running a scam. They put personal ads in gay publications, pretending to be a young man looking for an older sponsor. When they hook someone in, they blackmail him.

But oops, unbeknownst to them, one of the fish they've landed is a U.S. senator, being secretly groomed for the presidency by the head of the CIA, who plans to manufacture some serious crisis or other to help push him to power while running on a strong defense platform. And the spooks don't take kindly to the possibility of their guy being outed as a closet gay.

That's the part that doesn't really ring true, to me at least. Sure, other people have written similar stories in the past, imagining some kind of coup taking over the U.S. government, but in Grisham's case, we know it's all just for fun, just part of the entertainment package, designed to keep us turning the pages. And it works, but we know it's not real.

The most disappointing aspect of the book is the ending. The young alcoholic lawyer on the outside, who acts as mailman for the judges on the inside, gets bumped off by the CIA for no apparent reason, except that he knows a bit too much, while the judges get away scot free, and live out their days in Rome, where bored, they apparently start running their scam again. It's all just a little too pat, and the story just kind of peters out with a bit of a thud.

Recommended for Grisham fans, but not in his top class, in my view. Certainly not in the same league as such previous efforts as The Client, or The Firm.

Woman of a Thousand Secrets by Barbara Wood

2008-12-17T22:15:00.000-08:00

Woman of a Thousand Secrets by Barbara Wood. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-312-36369-7

First and foremost, be it known that this book is a romance novel. I could tell that from the cover painting, and subsequent reading certainly bore it out. The woman and her putative lover are kept separate for as long as possible (a standard element in many a romance genre plot). First they dislike, even hate each other, then they come to appreciate, and eventually love each other madly, but numerous twists and turns of the storyline are devised to keep them apart. It is not until page 446 (!) that they finally consummate their relationship with the sexual act.

But this book is a lot more than that, and not merely a romance novel, or I wouldn't have bothered to read it. It's a historical novel of sorts, set primarily as it is in pre-Columbian Mexico. It takes for the culmination of the book, the traditional tale of the founding of the Mexica civilization, also known as the Aztec empire, which is believed to have occurred in the 12th century AD.

Although there is plenty of scholarly debate over how that civilization began, since much of the written record was deliberately destroyed by the Spanish after the conquest by Cortés. The version portrayed here is no doubt fancifully embroidered with lots of artistic license by the novelist, but I'm no expert to judge the authenticity of any of the details as depicted here.

As I've written before in this blog, give me a story set far enough in the past, especially in a very different or unfamiliar culture, and it's almost like reading science fiction. The novelty of the setting provides a great deal of the interest. Add to which the author is a darn good story teller. While I wouldn't class this at the level of the best page turners I've read, it comes close enough. There are always interesting things happening that pull you along and keep you wanting to find out what's going to happen next. Even when you realize you're being manipulated, and that there's no real logic to the events as they unfold.

So, ultimately recommended for anyone who enjoys a big, thick, romantic yarn, entertainingly set in an exotic locale, replete with good folks and bad folks, and bad folks turned good, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum.

Ascendancies by Bruce Sterling

2008-12-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling by Bruce Sterling. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-59606-113-2

The stories in this collection range in original publication dates from 1982 to the present. Some of them fit into series that Sterling has written, including five “Shaper/Mechanist” stories, three “Leggy Starlitz” tales, and three “Chattanooga Stories,” one of which I had read before in some other collection somewhere (I enjoyed it almost as much the second time around; it's a good story). Then there are even larger segments of the book simply lumped together under the headings “Early Science Fiction and Fantasy,” and “Later Science Fiction and Fantasy.”

Amazingly, there is nothing else by Sterling in my blog, which means, apparently, that I've not read any of his work (except in anthologies) since 2003. I know I read some of his cyberpunk stuff back in the 80's and 90's, but apparently nothing recently. It's the old “too many books, too little time” dilemma.

Because Sterling is definitely worth reading, and there are a lot of good stories in this collection, along with the requisite, albeit in this case, quite restrained, author commentary. While many authors feel compelled to unburden themselves given the excuse of a collection like this, Sterling's comments are confined to a paltry five pages at the beginning of the book. After that, he just lets the stories speak for themselves. And speak, they do! Definitely recommended.

Vintage Collage-Works by Maryjo and Sunny Koch

2008-12-10T22:42:00.000-08:00

Vintage Collage-Works: Artful Ideas with Antique Ephemera by Maryjo & Sunny Koch. Produced and Designed by Jennifer Barry. Photographs by Wendy Candelaria. Text by Carolyn Miller. Beverly, Massachusetts: Quarry Books, 2007. ISBN: 1-59253-390-6

This is an idea book for collage artists, or those who would-be such. As such, it has lots of good ideas, and provides inspiration for any number of collage projects, designs, and techniques. These include painting on a collage, using various types of antique papers, such as old letters, envelopes, postage stamps, music (my favorite). Other techniques, such as painting, image transfer, and the use of clip art, are also described.

Of the painting techniques described, scumbling seems the most useful to me. I'm not good at drawing, so I'm afraid the painting of birds and butterflies by hand is not something I'd be good at, or particularly interested in. I see how adding them to a collage can add interest, but I'd be more inclined to find a preexisting picture, and just paste it onto the collage.

While many of the specific projects depicted and described in the book are too cutesy, or too florid and fancy for my taste, they provide lots of inspiration, and ideas for similar collages. My style would hopefully be a little more restrained. Also, the very specific step-by-step instructions on how to create more or less exact replicas of the pieces shown in the book, are not all that helpful.

What I want from a book like this is ideas that spark my own imagination, and techniques explained well enough that I can apply them to my own ideas. And both of those things, this book provides in plentiful supply. Definitely recommended for anyone interested in collage as an art form.

Reader and Raelynx by Sharon Shinn

2008-12-07T22:19:00.000-08:00

Reader and Raelynx by Sharon Shinn. New York: Ace Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-441-01469-9

This is the fourth book in Sharon Shinn's series, "The Novels of the Twelve Houses." In this volume, the civil war that has been brewing throughout the series finally comes to a head. If there is any weakness in the book, it's in the depiction of the battle scenes, which in my view sometimes lacked somewhat in detail or verisimilitude.

To further complicate the story line, Cammon, the likable young mystic, falls hopelessly in love with the princess and heir to the throne. We know it's happening before he does. Lots of other complications ensue, as well. If you've been following the series, by now you've come to know and love the primary group of characters, and are eagerly looking forward to the next chapter in their lives.

Overall, the book does not disappoint. Highly recommended for anyone into the series, of course. But if you haven't read the earlier books, definitely start at the beginning and work your way through them. According to the author's web site, Fortune and Fate, the next book in the series, is already in print.

All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson

2008-12-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson. New York: Berkley Books, 1999. ISBN: 0-425-19044-7

I had read this book before. In fact, I've read everything by William Gibson, I believe, except for his latest (2007) novel, Spook Country. But it had been long enough since I read it the first time, that I didn't remember too much of the story, or what was going to happen next. Reading it again was like a continuous episode of deja vu. I remember this! Yes, and this, too! Ah yes, that's what I remember! But not in advance. So it was basically just as good as reading it the first time.

And Gibson's novels are definitely good, and definitely worth reading, everyone. He was one of the inventors, and best exemplars of the so-called “cyber-punk” movement in science fiction. A seminal thinker, and a great story teller, his visions of how it might be, or almost could be, or might soon be, are compelling and visceral. If you call yourself a SciFi fan, but haven't read Gibson, you're fooling yourself.

So, what's it about? Good question. Maybe it's about the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming human. Maybe it's about a has-been cop, a private eye, in San Fransisco. Maybe it's about some cyber-savvy hacker living in a cardboard box in a Tokyo slum, who senses that some major paradigmatic change is about to happen, and works to influence events. Maybe it's about all of that, but somehow, much much more. Essential reading for SciFi readers.

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

2008-11-30T21:38:00.000-08:00

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. New York: Tor, 1999. ISBN: 0-312-85683-0

What a complicated plot line this story weaves! It would be difficult to distill it into a few sentences. First, there is a human trader empire, the Qeng Ho, that has lasted for centuries, millennia? Individuals in their extended “families” can live for centuries, using a combination of time shifting and cold sleep, as they travel from star to star.

Then there is an anomalous star, one that shuts itself off every few years, then reignites. And, even more amazing, when the Qeng Ho expedition gets there, they find an intelligent race of spider-like creatures there, just on the cusp of their first industrial revolution.

But another splinter human civilization, calling themselves the Emergents, gets there shortly after the Qeng Ho, and barely wins the resulting quick and devastating space war. Now the survivors have to pick up the pieces, and hang on until the spiders can bring their civilization to a high enough level technologically to refuel and rebuild the human fleet of spaceships. But all the while, some of the surviving Qeng Ho are plotting to retake control from the Emergents, who practice a kind of human slavery, and who also plan to enslave the spiders.

It's great science fiction in the best space opera sense, long, involved, convoluted plots, but a rewarding and entertaining read. If I have any quibble, it's that Vinge makes the alien spiders all too human in their thinking and behavior. They just seem like human beings in an alien shape. But that is merely a quibble. Definitely recommended. Incidentally, this novel won a Hugo Award in 2000.

Dreamsongs: Volume II by George R.R. Martin

2008-11-23T19:19:00.000-08:00

Dreamsongs: Volume II by George R.R. Martin. New York: Bantam Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-553-80658-8

I reviewed Volume I back in July, and have finally gotten around to reading and now blogging Volume II. The stories are good. I certainly enjoyed the Haviland Tuf, biogenetic engineer extraordinaire. I suppose I should look up Tuf Voyaging (1986), which is a whole collection of Tuf stories, published as a novel.

Less successful, in my view, are the TV scripts. TV is for watching, not reading. Since these for the most part, never got made, this is admittedly the only way to experience them, but they're not worth the effort, in my view.

The "Wild Card" stories were better, almost (but not quite) good enough to make me want to read the series, either the original, or the revived versions, in which Martin invites lots of other writers to the party.

The final group of stories is a mixed bag. Even Martin admits that some of them are difficult to classify. SciFi? Horror? Fantasy? Who cares? They're stories! “The Hedge Knight” is still my favorite, even though I've read it at least twice before, once in its original Robert Silverberg Legends anthology, and once somewhere else.

Finally, the book ends with a bibliography of Martin's writings, compiled by Leslie Kay Swigart. If you're a fan of Martin's work, you'll want to read this collection. If you're a fanatical fan, you'll want to consult the bibliography, for sure. Recommended for both those fans, and anyone who enjoys a good story or two.

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling

2008-11-16T20:14:00.000-08:00

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling. New York: Tor, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1489-5

More and more authors seem to be writing fiction that blurs the traditional lines between science fiction and fantasy. In this novel, Stirling imagines an alternate universe in which scientifically advanced aliens terraformed Mars and Venus, and planted humanity there. Mars, apparently, had an advanced civilization when intelligence had yet to evolve on Earth. Now Earth's science has developed enough to visit those planets.

This is the tale of a couple such travelers, and their adventures on an Edgar Rice Burroughs style Mars, replete with swords and sorcery. Well the former, at least, if not the latter. While traveling around in the Martian outback, they make friends (and one of them falls in love) with a Martian princess who is about to come into her own. It's an entertaining yarn. Definitely recommended.

Mixed Emulsions by Angela Cartwright

2008-11-09T22:12:00.000-08:00

Mixed Emulsions: Altered Art Techniques for Photographic Imagery by Angela Cartwright. Beverly, Massachusetts: Quarry Books, 2007. ISBN: 1-59253-369-8

This is an idea book for artists. The author has an interesting idea: take a black and white photograph, color it with various types of paints or inks, mount it onto some sort of substrate, and then create an artwork around it, using various painting and materials techniques.

Some of the examples are quite evocative, but many of them are too messy looking for my personal taste. I enjoyed the collage elements of some of the examples, but am not comfortable enough with painting techniques to personally try many of the ideas suggested here. Still, for artists looking for tips and tricks, and ideas to get them started, this book is definitely recommended.

Take a Nap! Change Your Life

2008-11-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

Take a Nap! Change Your Life by Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D. with Mark Ehrman. New York: Workman Publishing, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-7611-4290-4

The authors present the latest sleep an nap research suggesting that humankind evolved to take naps. We are all aware of our natural circadian rhythm, and the tendency for a drop in energy in the afternoon, typically between 1 and 3 PM. This book makes the scientific case for napping, and attempts to explain how the right length of nap at the right time can make a significant difference in just about anyone's life. Dr. Mednick provides a “nap wheel” on her website which helps determine the right time for “the ultimate nap.”

Definitely an interesting book, and without having put it into practice (yet, anyway), I will admit to being a willing believer in the efficacy of naps. Less convincing to me was all the hullabaloo about different lengths of naps for different effects, including increased creativity, improving memory, and other specific intellectual or physical activities. All the details get too complicated to easily remember.

Here's the easy takeaway, however: even a 20 minute nap can make a big difference. 60-90 minute naps are about the limit; any more, and you're likely to wake up feeling “groggy.” This book is recommended for anyone interested in the science behind napping.

Sacred Stacks by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell

2008-11-02T22:02:00.000-08:00

Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell. Chicago: American Library Association, 2006. ISBN: 0-8389-0917-5

For many librarians, myself included, our motivation for joining this profession went well beyond a mere desire for a job or a career. No one (to my knowledge) ever got rich working as a librarian. Most of us chose this career because of a combination of factors including a love of books and reading, and a desire to be part of a helping profession, one where service is almost a kind of higher calling.

That is the point made explicit in this book. In the modern secular age in which we find ourselves, many look for the sacred in places other than churches or synagogues, and libraries are often one of those places, and justifiably so, as Maxwell points out. In great and lengthy, and often overly great detail, unfortunately. It's a valid, even valuable insight if only it were made more carefully.

Maxwell wrote a short article-length version of the book for American Libraries, the journal of the American Library Association, and frankly, that was probably enough. To spin this one small (albeit useful) idea into a book-length manuscript, even as short a book as this—140 pages—well, the idea just doesn't justify the treatment, in my view. Or maybe it would, if the treatment weren't so heavily flawed.

Take the author's penchant for making carelessly unjustified categorical assertions, PLEASE! Example: “Christians must put ashes on their foreheads once a year to remind them that they are but dust” (p. 48). Only some Christians do this, primarily those with “high” liturgical traditions, like Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans. Many other denominations and most modern nondenominational churches do not utilize this practice.

Here's another: “Regardless of the form or format, all library help is free (p. 67). This one is patently untrue. Many libraries charge for certain forms service. If she had just said “most help is free,” she'd have been fine. This type of overstated generalization is unfortunately all too common throughout the book.

And then there are the just plain errors of fact. On p. 31 she attributes the idea behind the common expression “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish ; and you have fed him for a lifetime” to one of Jesus' parables, which it most certainly is not.

On p. 17 she states “If prayer is connection to the past, that form of sacred communication is exactly what one does in a library.” Well, whoever said that prayer is a connection to the past? Where did that definition come from? I guess from her own previous statement that “When God is imagined as a connection to history, every person perusing the . . . 910 section of their public library could be seen as praying.” Other than the author, I'm not sure who imagines God as a connection to history. Plus, isn't 910 in the Dewey Decimal System “Geography and Travel?” How does that fit? 900 in general is “Geography and History,” not 910.

Finally, I have to doubt the basic literacy of someone who can make the unforgivable grammatical error (and how it got past ALA's editors is more than I can imagine) of using the word “loose” in place of “lose.” And this egregious solecism occurs not once, but TWICE in the book, on page 15, and again on page 129, where she not only makes the mistake, but attributes it to Nancy Pearl, which I find totally unbelievable.

This book makes a valid and even valuable point, but does so in such an overblown, excessively drawn out, error prone manner, that it seriously weakens the effect. Only marginally recommended for librarians and those who love libraries.

The Resurrection by Geza Vermes

2008-10-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

The Resurrection by Geza Vermes. New York: Doubleday, 2008. ISBN: 978-385-52242-7

I picked up this book because Geza Vermes is one of the authors David Boulton summarizes in his book, Who on Earth Was Jesus? which I reviewed last July. Here Geza examines all of the evidence about what most Christians regard as the central tenant of their faith—the resurrection of Jesus. And then draws what conclusions seem warranted.

In the end, Vermes discusses and rejects as unsatisfactory, six theories that could conceivably explain the resurrection. He rejects the two extremes that he says “are not susceptible to rational judgement,” namely the “blind faith of the fundamentalist believer, and the out-of-hand rejection of the inveterate skeptic.” The six theories are

The body was removed by someone unconnected with Jesus
The body was stolen by his disciples
The empty tomb was not the tomb of Jesus
Buried alive, Jesus later left the tomb
The migrant Jesus (in this variation on number 4, Jesus leaves the area, perhaps traveling to India or Rome)
A spiritual, not a bodily resurrection

Vermes states that none of these theories “stands up to stringent scrutiny.” Instead, he puts forward an alternate solution, which is that Jesus is alive in the hearts of men (and presumably women). And that perhaps this is all that matters.

For anyone interested in a modern scholarly approach to Christianity and its beliefs, this book is definitely recommended.

Sacred Paths for Modern Men by Dagonet Dewr

2008-10-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Sacred Paths for Modern Men: A Wake Up Call from Your 12 Archetypes by Dagonet Dewr. Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7387-1252-9

I was going to try and write four quickie nonfiction entries, but a couple of them (not this one so much, but some that are to follow) kind of got away from me. I find it difficult to stop short on these kinds of more serious books. So I'm going to post them individually.

This first one continues in the tradition of Iron Men, which I reviewed almost a year ago. However, this book takes the specific viewpoint of a modern pagan, someone who believes “Magick,” and witchcraft as a religion. Each section of the book includes a ritual, liturgy—if you will—for embracing some stage in a man's sacred and emotional development.

The 12 archetypes that the book describes are the divine child, the lover, the warrior, the trickster, the green man, the guide, the craftsman, the magician, the destroyer, the king, the healer, and the sacrificed one.

Even if you aren't a pagan, professing or otherwise, the wisdom of these archetypes can speak to you. If you are sympatico with the “Mankind Project,” interested in exploring the “Divine Masculine,” or if you appreciated Iron John, you will probably find much of interest here as well.

Four more quickies

2008-10-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Iron Tongue of Midnight by Beverle Graves Myers. Scottsdale, Arizona: Poisoned Pen Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-59058-232-9

This is “A Tito Amato Mystery,” and “The Fourth Baroque Mystery” by Myers. The sleuth is an 18th century opera singer, who just happens to be a castrato (if you don't know what that means, look it up!), who nevertheless is happily married. My assessment: fairly light and frothy. If you like mysteries with historical, musical background, this might be for you, but it's no literary masterpiece. Marginally recommended for those thrive on this kind of fare.

World Without End by Ken Follett. New York: Dutton, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-525-95007-3.

This is, of course, the highly successful sequel to Follett's acclaimed Pillars of the Earth, a historical novel set in medieval times, and focusing on the building of a cathedral. This tale takes place two hundred years later, and involves descendants of the original story. Essential reading for anyone who enjoyed the first book, the basic story line is not quite as compelling as the original, but equally entertaining. Once you get into it, you'll love the good guys and hate the bad guys just as intensely as the original. Highly recommended.

Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures by Walter Moers. Translated from the German by John Brownjohn. Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press, 2006 (The original was copyright 2003 by Piper Verlag GmbH, München, 2003). ISBN: 978-1-58567-725-2

A note on the title page says “A novel in two books illustrated by the author,” and the book does contain imaginative and delightful illustrations throughout, which appear to be black and white pencil and/or pen and ink drawings. This is a truly fanciful fantasy, in which dogs that learn to walk upright and speak are known as Wolpertings, often fearless and ferocious fighters. They inhabit a universe in which fantastic creatures, both good and ill, abound. Rumo, our own heroic Wolperting, goes through a series of adventures that can only be described as fantastic. Charmingly written, this fantasy will appeal to adults and teens alike, especially dog lovers.

The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7635-1746-9

“A Company Novel,” says the cover, and so it is. Is it the LAST company novel? I suppose that only time will tell, but it could well be, given the way it ends. You shouldn't read this book unless you've read all of the previous Company novels, several of which are reviewed elsewhere on this blog (see the Science Fiction index), and a listing of earlier titles in the series is available in my review of her fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World.

Suffice it to say that this novel FINALLY gets us past the date in 2355, the future date which has featured prominently in all of the Company novels, the date past which no time traveler can go, and beyond which no one knows what the future holds. Now we get to find out what happens. Essential reading for anyone following the series, but it probably won't make much sense to anyone who hasn't. Start at the beginning, and work your way here for a truly rewarding time travel series par excellence.

Three by Jack McDevitt

2008-10-25T22:59:00.000-07:00

Well, except for the lighthouse field guide I just posted, it's been several months since any new book reviews have been posted here. But that doesn't mean I've stopped reading in all that time. Far from it! Bookworm that I am, I can no more stop reading than I can stop eating or breathing or sleeping.

No, I've just gotten overwhelmed with the other activities in my life, and I haven't found the time to write about the books I've been reading. So, to get caught up, I'm going to resort to a succinct listing of the books, with just brief comments or recommendations regarding them. So here goes:

Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt. New York: HarperPrism, 2000. ISBN: 0-06-105123-3

Chindi by Jack McDevitt. New York: Ace Books, 2002. ISBN: 0-441-00938-7.

Polaris by Jack McDevitt. New York: Ace Books, 2004. ISBN: 0-441-01202-7

Now this is science fiction—really hard science fiction—as it should be! Jack McDevitt is one of my new favorites, and this is my first stab at catching up on everything he's written so far. Chindi is another Academy (Priscilla Hutchins) novel. Polaris and Infinity Beach are both set much further in the future, a thousand years or so, when human-kind has spread throughout the stars. But people are still people! And they still behave in human ways.

This trio of novels share two overlapping themes. Chindi and Infinity Beach are both exciting adventures on the quest to find another nonhuman sentient race, another civilization out there among the stars. And both Infinity Beach and Polaris are science fiction mysteries. In Polaris the passengers on a luxury space yacht just disappear. What happened to them? Were they abducted by aliens? In Infinity Beach, four missing persons, a mysterious explosion, and a an ill-fated search for aliens some years before lay down a baffling set of clues that may lead to an alien encounter.

All three of these books are highly recommended for all science fiction fans. Any mystery readers who don't mind a SciFi setting will probably enjoy them as well.

The Field Guide to Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast

2008-10-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

The Field Guide to Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast: California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawai'i by Elinor De Wire. St. Paul, Minnesota, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-7603-2466-0

This delightful little book has a page or two devoted to every lighthouse of the Pacific Coast, as described in the title. In addition to a picture or two of each lighthouse, and a brief history, there are directions, hours of operation, and other information as to whether the lighthouse is open to visitors, or private, etc.

My only complaint about the book is that not all of the photographs are new. While the majority are in color, a few are in black and white, and some even appear to be quite old historical photographs. While this would be fine as a secondary picture, the book would be nicer if ALL the pictures were current, and in color. A minor complaint.

If your goal is to visit a lighthouse or two on your vacation, or on a Sunday afternoon excursion, this book is a great resource to have along. If you want to refer to it as a reference book, you don't necessarily have to buy a copy of your own, as your local library undoubtedly has one for you to check out. So check it out!

Acorna: The Unicorn Girl . . . and more

2008-08-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

Acorna: The Unicorn Girl (1997) and Acorna's Quest: The Adventures of the Unicorn Girl (1998) by Anne McCaffrey and Margarget Ball, and Acorna's People: The Further Adventures of the Unicorn Girl (1999) by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBNs (paperback editions, respectively): 0-06-105789-4, 0-06-105790-8, 0-06-105983-8.

I had read some of the Acorna books shortly after they were published, but then I hadn't kept up with the series, which now runs to 10 volumes, if you include the new “Acorna's Children” series. So when I ran across the first three volumes in a friend's library, I couldn't even remember for sure how far in the series I'd gotten. So, thinking I ought to catch up with the series, I borrowed the first three, and read all of them. Frankly, a mistake. I now realize (again) why I abandoned the series in the first place.

The basic story idea is cute, don't get me wrong. Little unicorn girl is found in the vastness of space, and is raised by two space rats, rough and ready asteroid miners with the proverbial hearts of gold. But it's the REST of the story that depresses me, or worse yet, bores me. The milieu in which they supposedly live and operate. Here's this planet full of oppressed and abused children, forced to slave away in the mines, and in other horrible ways, forced into other kinds of slavery as they get older. And Acorna, naturally, becomes their savior. And turns their society upside down, with a little (actually a LOT) of help from her friends.

It's just too hokey, and not very realistic. And what's the point of it all? Then there's one of the miner's rich uncles, who lives a lavish Arabic type lifestyle, and originally wants to add Acorna to his collection of eccentricities and oddities. But becomes her biggest supporter and fan, once he actually gets to know her. All of this side stuff, not directly relevant to the Acorna story I find tedious, irrelevant, poorly plotted, and just plain distracting. It's not really worth putting up with the secondary plots just to get to the primary story line.

I did manage to wade through the first two books AGAIN, just so I could get to the third one, which I hadn't previously read. In that one, she finally finds her own kind, but they turn out to be pretty suspicious, and she, of course, having been raised in human society, doesn't know how to behave or act like one of them. Major cultural adjustment required.

Not to mention that her people are pretty neurotic in many ways. But then, I guess you would be too, if some evil alien race had tried to totally torture, maim, brutalize, and otherwise destroy, your race. The experience of the unicorn people, too, is more than just a little over the top. Not very believable, to be honest.

You know how this entire storyline affected me? Just like I hate the kind of comedy, so often found in sitcoms or so-called romantic comedies, which generate their humor by putting people in amazingly embarrassing situations, so here, I found myself hating to have to wade through the parts of the storyline that are seemingly trying to play on my sympathy, by putting someone (the human children in the first story, or Acorna's people in the third one) in a truly awful, horrible, situation, just so that we can rejoice when they're saved from it.

Not my cup of tea. I don't think I'll bother with any of the remaining books in the series. There's just too much else out there I'd rather be reading than this.

Chasing the Sun by Jonathon Green

2008-08-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made by Jonathon Green. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996. ISBN: 0-8050-3466-8

I started reading this book several years ago, then put it aside, and only just recently took it up again, and finished it. Such that, when I was done, I had to go back and reread the Introduction. I have to confess that the Introduction and the last Chapter, Chapter 15, titled “The Modern World,” are, in my view the best parts of the book, and probably the only parts really worth the effort. I'll try to explain why I think that as I go along.

This book is a truly scholarly history of dictionary making, with a special and primary focus on dictionaries of the English language. However, it starts way back in the Middle Ages, when many if not most written manuscripts apparently were accompanied by glossaries, or lists of the “hard words” found within the text. Often these lists contained many Latin, Greek or Hebrew words, as well as some in whatever vernacular dialect was featured in the manuscript. I'm sure I'm grossly oversimplifying the situation, but if you want more detail, go to the book. You won't be disappointed, as excruciating detail is something it provides plenty of.

The book traces the history of these “hard word” lists up through time, and shows how they were gradually supplemented by other lists of specialized vocabularies, such as the cant or slang of the criminal class, or the jargon of various professions. Purely practical in nature, early word lists saw no point in including the ordinary everyday variety of words, since everyone already knew what they meant! It was only much later that the idea of capturing an entire language by listing ALL of its words, both the easy ones AND the hard ones, came into being.

But that leads us to a very real problem, THE primary problem confronting any dedicated lexicographer. It is patently impossible to completely capture in any one word list, a modern language entire. For by the time you have written down every word known to exist, the language will have inevitably moved on, with new words having been created, and new meanings devised for existing words.

The general public does not understand this, nor particularly care about it. The public, especially in America, it seems, wants a dictionary that it can refer to as a kind of final authority. The expressions “Is it in the dictionary?” or “It's not in the dictionary” have entered the language as part of the common parlance and thinking. Practically every household had a dictionary, even if it was 25 years old, and by no means an unabridged version. And referring to the dictionary had a kind of finality, a kind of authority to it that was, and is, as our author makes clear, entirely unjustified, but no less standard operating procedure, for all that.

Part of what makes the final chapter so fascinating a read is its description of the furor and fury that was unleashed on the hapless editors of Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary (W3, 1961), which differed from the Second Edition in having gone from a prescriptive to a descriptive approach to the language. Here's how the author puts it:

In Britain, where the role of the dictionary is primarily seen as that of a description of the national language, a dictionary passed muster if it offered exactly that, and as substantially as possible. In America, where readers wished to be told, via the dictionary, which words they could use and how best to use them, the dictionary was perfectly acceptable as long as it laid down those laws. However, once one moves beyond the practical, dictionaries take on certain abstract properties, and it is when these are perceived as being tampered with or worse still discarded, that the public, usually so acquiescent, starts to kick up a fuss.

These properties fall into roughly four main categories: the dictionary as a guardian of linguistic purity; the dictionary as a repository of society's collective knowledge; the dictionary as a guardian of absolute and eternal truth; and of the moral and ideological values of society. Once again, in all of these, one sees the lexicographer in priestly mode.

It has been suggested that none of these concepts truly holds water, any more than do the credulous myths that underpin religion. The “real” dictionary cannot come up to the standards that its users with to impart to it. But in the end, that hardly matters: if a dictionary on these lines is more fantasy than fact, it is still the fantasy that attracts the buyers.

Here are a few choice quotes from the remainder of this fascinating discussion of the “dictionary wars” that ensued. “Asked to use their own brains, to make their own decisions, the dictionary buyers and the critics, journalists, and scholars who interceded for them, rebelled.” “It might be suggested that for a large 'unabridged' dictionary such as 'Webster,' with its 450,000 headwords, there should in any case be no place for a pre- or proscriptive word list. The Role of such a dictionary is to display the language to as great an extent as possible.”

It was not, however, what many commentators—typically the amateur, but hugely respected “word men” of the press, some teachers, and certain rival lexicographers—wished to hear. If Webster, the very cornerstone of American lexicography, and thus the repository of every aspect of linguistic yeas and nays, was casting aside its responsibilities, what hope remained? For its critics W3 represented a gross abnegation of responsibility. It was not a dereliction of duty they intended to let go by.

The attacks on W3 began in a piece in the New York Times of October 12, 1961. . . the writer accused Merriam Webster of surrendering to the “permissive school;” eight days later the Chicago Times used the term again, and wondered how a writer could possibly write decent English if “Webster” refused to say what exactly was “good English.” The idea that the writer might be able to make up his or her own mind was not, of course, entertained . . .

The area in which W3 appeared to terrify its critics most was in its dropping of such labels as “colloquial” and “informal” and replacing them by such as “nonstandard,” “substandard,” and occasionally, “slang.” What was especially upsetting was the inclusion of the word ain't, which was noted as being “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers,” even though its definition included the demurrer “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech.”

Philip Gove (W3's chief editor) . . . had no doubts: “For us to attempt to prescribe the language would be like Life reporting the news as its editors would prefer it to happen,” he remarked, . . . and later added, “Lexicography should have no traffic with guesswork, prejudice, or bias, or with artificial notions of correctness and superiority. It must be descriptive and not prescriptive.”

But this did not satisfy the critics. American just weren't ready to take responsibility for their own linguistic decisions. They still wanted (and apparently still want) “the dictionary” to tell them what was right and wrong. Sorry, no can do!

If this linguistic tempest in a teapot intrigues you, by all means read at least the intro and final chapter of this painstakingly researched book. If you truly desire to know the ins and outs of every printed book that led to the current state of dictionary making in the English language, read the book entire. Otherwise, you can probably give it a pass. Recommended for anyone with sufficient interest in the subject.

Hunters of Dune by Herbert and Anderson

2008-07-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. New York: Tor, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-465-31292-1

After writing six tedious and poorly plotted prequels to Dune, Brian Herbert (original Dune author Frank Herbert's son) and his co-author, Kevin J. Anderson, have finally turned their attention to completing the original cycle. If you're not clear on the sequence of all the novels in the series so far, check out the Wikipedia listing. For my comments on the original Dune, unquestionably one of science fiction's all time greatest classic novels, see my review of Frank's completely awful standalone novel, Timeweb.

I'm not sure if I've managed to read all of the prequels. I know I read all of the novels written by Frank Herbert himself, and I know I read the first prequel trilogy. I think I read at least the first novel in the second prequel trilogy, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, but I wouldn't absolutely swear to it. I must not have read the next two, because if I had, they would be on this blog somewhere (I started the blog in August of 2003 and the books were published in 2003 and 2004), and they're not.

So it was with some reluctance that I picked up one of the latest books, Hunters of Dune, and part of my incentive was due to a flyleaf note that indicated that Frank Herbert had himself written an outline of the story, which remained unknown and unseen for years, buried in a safe-deposit box, and only “recently” discovered. So, if Frank himself indicated the direction he wanted the story to go, I decided I owed it to him and to myself to see what he had planned.

And, I will admit that this book was much more readable, more enjoyable, than any of the prequels. I found them fairly tedious going, poorly plotted, and not particularly well written, pretty much a waste of my time as a reader. This book is definitely better. I was kept entertained, at least, and had motivation to keep turning the pages.

Even so, I found some of the plot elements patently preposterous, even if they WERE Frank's idea. Bring back Paul, Chani, Stilgar, Liet-Kynes, Thufir Hawat, Leto, Jessica, Leto II (almost all characters from the original Dune) as gholas (clones), with the intent to restore their memories, and bring them back to full consciousness of their past life, literally thousands of years after they first lived? Ridiculous! Absurd! Almost sacrilegious. But admittedly not without some entertainment value.

There's also apparently an evil Paul Atreides in the works. Another ghola clone, this one under the control of one of the few remaining Tleilaxu masters, and his other resurrected clone, the innately evil Vladimir Harkonnen. So even though it is only hinted at in this book, we get a prescient vision of the “good” Paul confronting the evil one. Have to wait for the next book, though, for it to actually happen.

Some of the other plot elements are almost as bad. First off, let me say that I always thought the “Honored Matres” were silly. I mean, really. It just didn't make any sense to have another group with a name that was a patent ripoff of “Reverend Mothers.” In this story, one of them becomes a Bene Gesserit, and attempts (with limited success) to merge the two groups.

Initially, although herself a Reverend Mother, she can't break through into the memories of her Honored Matres ancestors. Why not? And all of a sudden, halfway through the book, she can! Why? The provided explanation is patently inadequate. Apparently she can because the plot outline says she can. No other satisfactory reason is given.

And why don't ANY of the Honored Matres returning from the Scattering, fleeing from some seemingly invincible Enemy (yes, Enemy with a capital “E”) seem to be able to remember anything about just who or what this Enemy is? That really makes no sense at all. How could they all forget? They got planet-busting weapons from this Enemy, and they can't even remember who or what it was?

And when WE (the hapless readers) finally learn just who the Enemy is, lo, and behold, it turns out to be . . . (well, maybe I shouldn't indulge in spoiling the plot for anyone who hasn't read the book yet). Suffice it to say that I wasn't impressed. It seemed like yet another silly plot decision to me. And this inhuman Enemy is apparently somehow allied with a new, superior breed of face dancers (shape shifters). Things seem pretty hopeless for the remaining worlds of the original “Old Empire.”

But you'll have to read the next volume, Sandworms of Dune, released just over a year ago, to see how it all comes out. Although the authors are promising yet more Dune books to come. How many of these new Dune novels will I read? I'm not sure, but I found this one good enough to go on to the next. I'll keep you posted.

Once Upon an Autumn Eve by Dennis L. McKiernan

2008-07-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

Once Upon an Autumn Eve by Dennis L. McKiernan. New York: Roc, 2006. ISBN: 0-451-46069-3

This is the third in McKiernan's series of seasonal fairy tale-inspired stories. It follows in the footsteps of Once Upon a Winter's Night and Once Upon a Summer Day, and is followed by Once Upon a Spring Morn, which I have yet to read and comment upon. Have you noticed how the times of day so neatly correspond with the seasons? Winter and night; summer and day; autumn and evening; springtime and morning. Cute.

If this kind of adult faery tale is your cup of tea, then you'll definitely want to read this one. It's just as good as its predecessors. Liaze, the Princess of the Autumnwood, is our current heroine. Once again (by which I mean, just as in the two previous volumes), she (like her siblings) is ripped away from her lover by one of the four evil witches, acolytes to the evil wizard, Orbane, who has been banished from faery by Liaze's parents.

Once again, Liaze must go on a solitary quest, though eventually joined by worthy if diminutive companions, aided by a rede (poetic prophecy) from Lady Skuld, also known as Lady Wyrd, one of the Fates. Once again there is but a limited time in which to complete the quest and rescue her betrothed knight, the lusty Luc, and many the trials and riddles to endure and solve ere the inevitable happy ending.

In his “Foreword,” McKiernan expresses the fervent hope that this story will hold us (his readers) enthralled. I'm sorry. The first one did, I think. The second one almost did. But by now, the story is becoming just a bit too pat, too predictable, and the overwhelming “niceness” of it all is becoming just a bit too sweet, too much. Yes, I still thoroughly enjoyed the story, and it's just as well-written as the others, but too much of a good thing can still be just that, too much. I probably would have enjoyed it more had I waited a year or two before reading it, so that my sense and remembrance of the previous stories had dulled just a bit. So I don't think I'll be in any big hurry to pick up the fourth volume. Yes, I do want to read it eventually, but not just yet. I need to get the sweet taste out of my mouth first. Recommended, if somewhat gingerly.

Harpsong by Rilla Askew

2008-07-23T21:08:00.000-07:00

Harpsong by Rilla Askew. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8061-3823

This is not a happy story. Set in the middle of the depression, it features an Okie-style drifter who calls himself Harlan Singer, and his bride, fourteen-year old Sharon, as they ride the rails, subsist in migrant camps and hobo jungles, and witness the bread basket of the country going to hell in a hand basket.

Harlan is a master musician, kind of a Woody Guthrie type fellow, before Woodie Guthrie's time, as the first “folksay” chapter tells it. He mostly played the harmonica, or mouth harp (hence the book's title), as they called it then. But that was because it was the only instrument he could carry around with him, hopping freight trains and the like. He could play most any instrument he got his hands on. And he could make up music that charmed folks like nothing else. He could play the wind, the sounds of the trains, the whippoorwill's song, pretty much anything he'd ever heard.

So while this is not a happy story, it's a powerful one. It has depth, and poetry, and raw feelings, and history, and more, all wrapped up in it. It has the increasing anguish of a poetic soul who sees the world going wrong all around him, and can't help but identify with the hurt but can't see any way to fix it, or himself. It's also a powerful love story between two people who can't help hurting each other, but whose love for one another carries them most, if not all of the way.

And all through it runs the music and the poetry of an increasingly lost and hurt soul. Pick this book up, give it half a chance, and you'll find yourself unable to stop turning those painful pages. All the way to the end. The inevitable end that you know is coming, but that can't be stopped, any more than one of those freight trains can.

According to the title page, this is Volume 1 in the “Oklahoma Stories & Storytellers series.” If any of the subsequent volumes are any where near as good as this one, it will definitely be a series to watch for. Strongly and powerfully recommended.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

2008-07-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt. New York: Ace Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-441-01525-2

I KNOW I've read some other Jack McDevitt books, but apparently not since August of 2003, when I started this blog. Strange. After reading Cauldron, I'm definitely in the mood for more. If only I can find the time. You know how it goes, “So many books, so little time.”

Nevertheless, I was surprised to learn that Cauldron is the sixth novel in “The Academy (Priscilla Hutchins) Novels” albeit, Hutchins is hardly a primary character in this novel. She does have a significant part, but not the most significant by any means.

This story takes place about 250 years from now, in a future in which an FTE (Faster Than Light) drive has been discovered, but, alas, it takes months to cross to the nearest star system. Consequently, humanity is pulling back from the stars, having only discovered a few other civilizations and life forms here and there, and somehow, for some not reasons, not altogether clear to me, has decided that it's too costly, too dangerous, just plain not worth doing any more.

Until, naturally, someone discovers a REALLY fast drive, that can travel to other stars in a matter of minutes, not weeks! And everything changes in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, so to speak. Of course, the drive doesn't work quite right at first, and there is a good deal of suspense over whether enough money will be raised to actually test and put it into practice.

But all is resolved in due course, and an intrepid crew, Priscilla Hutchins among them, is off for an amazing adventure or three among the far-flung stars, and the galactic core. Even though I find some of the premises behind this story a little far-fetched, the tale itself is just too good to be missed. McDevitt has a truly inspired imagination, and the adventures of his motley crew make for very entertaining reading, indeed. Highly recommended for all SciFi fans.

The Sam Gunn Omnibus by Ben Bova

2008-07-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Sam Gunn Omnibus by Ben Bova. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-765-31617-2

So who is Sam Gunn, anyway, and why should we care about him? He's a character in what one hopes might be the near future of solar system exploration. He's a larger than life, entrepreneurial, authority-flaunting, irrepressible, astronautic adventurer. He's a short, feisty, red-haired, freckle-faced, snub-nosed, womanizing rapscallion. He's made and lost more fortunes than he can shake a stick at. Everyone who's ever met him either loves him or hates him.

He was one of the original space station astronauts who goes on to be involved in the first moon colony, the first asteroid mining expedition, the first orbiting hotel, and other firsts too many to mention, including the first human to supposedly travel through a black hole and return to tell about it.

Apparently SciFi grand master Ben Bova has been writing tales about this lovable scamp for quite a while. These stories have been written (or at least published) as early as 1983, and as recently as 1995, but only now have they all been gathered together, together with some new ones, all in one place.

“Featuring every story every written about Sam Gunn, and then some,” according to the blurb on the title page. As is often the case, Bova spins a new tale as a way to tie all of these stories together. A young orphan grows up on the moon, and eventually comes to realize that Sam may be her father. She grows up and eventually becomes a reporter, out to produce a definitive documentary on the life of Sam Gunn. This gives her (and Bova) the excuse for contacting different folks who knew Sam, and getting them to tell her their stories.

Unlike many of these contrived settings, this one actually works. We learn about Sam along with his ostensible daughter, and while some of the stories are pretty preposterous, so is Sam, apparently. This is classic near-future science fiction at its best. Definitely recommended.

Who on Earth Was Jesus? by David Boulton

2008-07-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

Who on Earth Was Jesus? The Modern Quest for the Jesus of History by David Boulton. Winchester, UK ; Washington, USA: O Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-84694-018-7

This book does a superb job of tracking the latest historical research on who Jesus may or may not have been, what he may or may not have said, and what he may or may not have done during his life on earth, if indeed, he was a real, historical person. That, in fact, is but one of the fascinating questions this book attempts to answer, as best it can.

The author is an investigative journalist, not a theologian or a historian. And the experts whose writings and work he reviews are all historians first, not theologians. As he makes clear from the outset, his search is a search for the historical Jesus, not the supernatural, theological, mystical or mythical Jesus. To quote the author:

That, then, is what this book is for: not to offer yet another lay-person's view of Jesus, since we have such books without number, some pious, some polemical, some illuminating, some shamelessly commercial and some plain silly. Instead, I hope to offer the reader a fair account of where some of the best of Jesus scholarship stands in the first decade of the twenty first century.

This is, for me, at least, a fascinating and extremely valuable endeavor. Boulton has done a lot of the heavy lifting for me. He's gone through and explained and summarized the thoughts and findings of many scholars who (like all scholars) frequently disagree, and rarely come to exactly the same conclusions, despite examining and studying essentially the same evidence. So for the layperson such as myself, reading this book is a shortcut, which prevents me from needing to read the many published writings of the many scholars who have considered this question, both in the past, and those currently studying it.

In doing so, he takes us on a truly fascinating journey. It's not a journey that is likely to be enjoyed by the true believer, especially anyone who adheres to a fundamentalist kind of faith. But for anyone with more questions than answers, this is a journey worth taking.

Boulton begins by summarizing the historical search for the historical Jesus, which has its roots as early as the mid-second century scholar Tatian, who produced the first known “harmony of the gospels,” in which he tried to combine the four gospels into a single coherent story. Unfortunately, his work was declared heretical and was suppressed in the fifth century, and has not survived.

The scholarly study of ancient Biblical texts didn't start up again until the late Middle Ages. This type of work naturally expanded greatly during the 18^th century Enlightenment. These efforts led into the 19^th century, and the birth of textual criticism as a discipline which was applied to ancient texts such as the Bible. The discovery, in the middle of that century, of the Codex Sinaiticus, containing the entire New Testament and other books, dating back to the fourth century, provided even more grist for the text criticism mill, since some passages differed significantly from previously known versions.

What Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906, did for the 19^th century, Boulton has attempted to do for us today, almost exactly 100 years later. Since Schweitzer's groundbreaking work, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices have been found, published, and studied. And a new generation of scholars, using the best of modern techniques, have revisited the texts yet again, and again.

He begins by analyzing the sources of information. First, the writings of Paul, which were the earliest written record of Christianity. Then the gospels, both orthodox and “apocryphal,” although that is not a term that Boulton himself uses uncritically. And any other writings that are available and possibly relevant, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, early Jewish references to Jesus, the writings of Josephus, and the earliest Roman and other secular references. Once Boulton has analyzed the source material, he turns to the interpretations and interpreters.

A significant portion of Boulton's book deals with the work of The Jesus Seminar, in which a group of scholars, beginning in the 1980's, began to meet and attempt to arrive at a consensus about the sayings and acts of Jesus, as recorded in the available sources. Beginning with 30 scholars, as many as 200 different people have participated in the Jesus Seminar over the years.

Admission to the group was open to “critical scholars,” defined as those who “make empirical, factual evidence the controlling factor in historical judgments . . . adopt the principle of methodological skepticism: accept only what passes the rigorous tests of the rules of evidence working from the original texts in their original languages . . . practic[ing] their craft by submitting their work to the judgment of peers.” In other words, “those who put dogmatic considerations first and insist that the factual evidence confirm theological premises” need not apply.

The group worked by analyzing each saying and act attributed to Jesus, and then voting on how authentic it was thought to be. Votes could be red, pink, gray, or black, which informally, were described as follows:

Red: That's Jesus!
Pink: Sure sounds like Jesus!
Gray: Well, maybe.
Black: There's been some mistake.

The primary and most significant change in perception of Jesus and his teaching that came out of The Jesus Seminar, compared with the earlier scholarship as summarized by Schweitzer, is that The Jesus Seminar, for the most part, rejected the apocalyptic language attributed to Jesus as non authentic. Instead, they accepted the less frequent “kingdom now” statements as the more authentic Jesus. They think that Jesus was probably eschatological (interested in end times) but not apocalyptic (predicting horrific world upside down final events).

Once Boulton deals with the highly prominent and controversial Jesus Seminar, he goes on to summarize its detractors and critics, from both sides of the spectrum, conservative and liberal. He also spends a chapter summarizing the views of various prominent Jesus Seminar members, since, as independent scholars all, they can hardly be expected to agree with one another on many points, and many of them have written their own books presenting their own unique points of view.

Another chapter summarizes the views of those modern scholars who are not persuaded of the non apocalyptic nature of Jesus, those who think he must have been a preacher of the apocalypse. The next chapter examines what Jewish scholars have to offer in the quest for the historical Jesus, as well as studies of first-century Galilee and its culture and religion. Not to mention the development of the Mishnah and Talmud, which developed during more or less the same period as did many of the early writings about Jesus. Yet another chapter summarizes the views of several scholars who are not convinced that anything historical can be determined about Jesus from the available evidence. Or those that argue that Jesus as we know him, never really existed at all, but was made up entirely out of whole cloth, so to speak.

Finally, Boulton tries to assess the mass of scholarly opinion and evidence he's compiled, to see if we can come to any conclusions. He summarizes what seems to be the consensus of the majority of scholars, namely that the Jesus story (and thus, Christianity) most probably had its origin in a real person named Jesus who was probably born around 4 BCE. He lived in Galilee, and was with John the Baptist in the Jordan wilderness before beginning his own mission of teaching throughout the villages in the area. He preached the “kingdom of God” with memorable, powerful sayings and parables. Healings and other miracles were widely attributed to him in the traditional manner of a holy man or prophet. He attracted followers and made disciples. Around the year 30 CE he went to Jerusalem with his message, where he was executed as a trouble-maker. His followers came to believe he had been raised from the dead.

The list of agreed upon negatives is almost as long: None of the accounts of his words and deeds are considered to be contemporary eye-witness reports. All of the written sources date from a number of years after his death, by which time the various Jesus movement communities were already involved in creating their own versions of who and what Jesus was, said and did.

In his final conclusionary chapter, Boulton tries once again to unravel the apocalyptic question (was Jesus or wasn't he, apocalyptic in his teaching?), by exploring the origins of apocalyptic thought in ancient religions, tracing this idea back to Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Persian empire under Cyrus, who allowed the Jews to return from their exile in Babylon, showing how this influence began to permeate Jewish thought and religion, leading ultimately to the books of Daniel and Revelation, the apocalypses of the so-called Old and New Testaments, respectively.

It is interesting that in the end, Boulton himself seems to indulge in a bit of that ancient tradition and activity that goes back almost to the time of Jesus himself, namely, allowing himself (and by default, his readers) to choose the Jesus they wish to believe in. As cited in a previous chapter, a second-century Jewish scholar named Trypho is quoted by Justin Martyr as having charged that “Christ, if he has indeed been born and exists anywhere is unknown . . . You invent a Christ for yourself.” And this, ultimately, is what each of us is forced to do, whether that is the literal Jesus of the gospels, or some limited version of that Jesus, as extracted by such scholars as The Jesus Seminar. For anyone interested in a scholarly, unbiased, non-theological version of that process, this book will provide an invaluable and useful guide.

The Involuntary Human by David Gerrold

2008-07-09T21:24:00.000-07:00

The Involuntary Human by David Gerrold. Framingham, Massechusetts: NESFA Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-886778-68-9

I haven't read much by David Gerrold, to be perfectly honest. The only thing I can remember ever reading by him was The Flying Sorcerers which he co-wrote with Larry Niven, way back in 1971. I'm not sure when I read it, but I don't think it was quite that long ago, but it was many years ago, to be sure. The Flying Sorcerers was quite frankly one of the funniest SciFi novels I've ever read, before or since. If you've never read it, I HIGHLY recommend it.

But this review is supposed to be about Gerrold's collection The Involuntary Human. I must confess I warmed up to one hidden aspect of his personality just from reading his intro. He likes to write limericks! (As do I.) He wants to publish a collection of them someday (as do I) if only he could get a publisher interested in a volume titled The Satanic Limericks. I'm afraid mine might even be worse. The title I came up with was The World's Most Disgusting Limericks, but that's another story.

So do I have anything to say about THIS book? Well, it starts out with a collection of aphorisms attributed to one Solomon Short. Additional collections are scattered through the book hither and yon. Some of them are pretty darn good. Some samples:

A quote is what you say when you don't have anything of our own to say.

Piss happens too.

A man's speech should exceed his grasp, or what's a metaphor?

Ignorance is bliss? It ought to be painful!

Great minds often think alike. But then, so do mediocre minds.

The first place to look for evil is in the mirror.

And those are all from the first batch of them, mostly chosen because they were short and easy to type. So what about the stories? The very first one is still one of my favorites. Titled “The Martian Child,” it appears to be based on the author's real life experience adopting a child. With a little twist, of course. This story definitely reveals Gerrold's humanity. If I hadn't known who wrote it, I might have suspected Orson Scott Card, because like his stories, it's got a heart, a BIG heart. And since the second story pretty much takes up where the first one let off, it's a favorite too. Way to go, Gerrold.

Then come some more Solomon Short aphorisms, three PAGES of them, mind you. I can't resist providing another sampling:

A little ignorance goes a long way.

Hell hath no fury like a pacifist.

Common sense isn't.

Never justify anything. If it needs justification, it's already wrong.

Bad taste is timeless.

You deserve the gods you worship.

Murphy's law is always a good excuse.

Next comes a Star Trek: Next Generation script which never got produced, which caused the author to leave the series. It's OK, but I'm not very good at doing the mental gymnastics necessary to turn it into a real story. I'd have preferred that he rewrite it AS a story. Then a couple of gimmicky stories, “A Shaggy Dog Story,” (literally), and “The Strange Death of Orson Welles.” OK, but not great. Then more Solomon Short aphorisms. But no, I'm not typing any in here, no matter how good or clever they are, because if I do, I'll never get this review finished.

Gerrold is apparently famous for his "War Against the Chtorr" series, which he describes as his “epic seven book trilogy about an ecological infestation of the Earth . . . “ and here he provides a lengthy excerpt that didn't make it into book 5, but will apparently show up in book 6. Not my cup of tea. I don't believe I've ever read any of the Chtorr series, although I'm not 100% positive, since I was at least peripherally aware of them. But I suppose any fan of that series will want to get a hold of this book to read this story before the next volume comes out.

Here's a sample of the so-called Satanic Limericks:

A limerick of proper proportion
should have meter and rhyme and a portion
of humor quite lewd,
and a frightfully crude,
impossible sexual contortion.

Not a bad definition, that!

“Digging in Gehenna” was the next half-way decent story, and once again, it involves a family. The King Kong pieces were boring. For some reason, all of the stories I liked the best were family tales. “Chester” wasn't a very nice story, but I enjoyed it, again because of the family aspects.

BTW, there have been two or three more Solomon Short “Interludes” by now. Frankly, they became tedious after a while. Even when they were good. They weren't stories, and I had to force myself through them. This collection is a decidedly mixed bag. It has some good stuff, some indifferent stuff, and some lousy (read “definitely not my cup of tea”) stuff. If you've never read any David Gerrold, by all means go read The Flying Sorcerers. If you're a Gerrold fan, well, go ahead and read this, I guess. Otherwise, you probably needn't bother.

That's not really fair. If you like family oriented stories with a SciFi twist, or think you might like them, then this book is also worth checking out (from your local library!).

Dreamsongs: Volume 1 by George R.R. Martin

2008-07-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

Dreamsongs: Volume 1 by George R.R. Martin. New York: Bantam Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-553-80545-1

Once an author becomes (presumably) rich and famous, and publishers are hanging onto his every word—or so it seems, sooner or later the author feels the need to publish all of his or her work, early, late and middle—good, bad, or indifferent, in a collection. Short stories, and some not so short; anyway, the kind of thing that can be readily anthologized. And for some odd and unknown reason, recently I've been awash in these self-selected collections. I've just finished (look back on the blog!) reading and reviewing collections by Orson Scott Card, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and Neil Gaiman. And I've already finished reading, but haven't yet gotten around to blogging a similar collection from David Gerrold.

So here's the first of two, not just one, mind you, from master fantasist, George R.R. Martin, whose “Song of Ice and Fire” cycle has all of his fans twitching in anticipation for the next and fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons, due for release in September. Martin must be extremely and exceptionally prolific in the short story genre, since his “Books by” page lists no less than seven (7!) previous short story collections by him.

This is the first that I've read, I must confess, at least so far as I can recall. At least, none appear on my blog, which covers pretty much everything I've read since August of 2003, including Vol. 4 of the “Song of Ice and Fire,” A Feast for Crows.

What makes this volume interesting is how it showcases Martin's work from its earliest feeble beginnings (said with tongue firmly in cheek, since none of them are particularly feeble), on into his maturing in his craft as a writer. His introductions are an essential part of this journey, explaining as they do how he first got started by telling himself stories as a child, reading the “funny books” (comics), and then starting to write for the fanzines of the early sixties.

Interestingly enough, even these very earliest stories, while admittedly somewhat naive in their conception at times, are well written, and entertaining to read. Even when the ideas behind them are a little on the shallow or trivial side, they still keep you turning the pages. What's amazing to me is that by just the second batch of stories, Martin already pens one, “With Morning Comes Mistfall,” that get nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards! It didn't win, but it got nominated. I'll admit it's a good story, but I wouldn't have thought it was THAT good, personally.

By the third batch, he actually DOES win a Hugo, this time with “A Song for Lya,” which, again, was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo, but only won the Hugo. And it IS a darn good story, even if I knew what was going to happen well before it actually came to pass. Can't be helped, I suppose. This section also has “And Seven Times Never Kill Man,” which is a truly disturbing story. Aliens against human religious fanatics, with an ending in this case NOT anticipated, at least not by me. Martin is really catching his stride with stories of alien worlds, alien artifacts, aliens embracing human religions, humans embracing alien religions, and more.

Next comes a section of fantasy stories, and these are very well done also. I think I actually liked them better than the SciFpi stories. Then come the horror stories, and these I don't like quite as well, but I can't deny their power. I'm just not a horror fan, even though these stories can also be considered fantasy, or in the case of the often-anthologized “Sandkings,” science fiction. I think “Sandkings” is the only story that remember reading before, and probably more than once, but then, it's a story that once read, is not likely to be forgotten. The stories in this section are also some of the longest in the book. “Nightflyers” is another SciFi horror tale, involving as it does, interstellar travel, and a most strange alien lifeform.

Well, I've already written way more about this book than I intended, while probably not saying all that much that is really helpful to the potential reader. I definitely recommend this collection for anyone who is a fan of Martin's work, and for that matter, for anyone who wants to read elegant, evocative, slightly twisted tales of wonder and the macabre.

Keeper of Dreams by Orson Scott Card

2008-07-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

Keeper of Dreams by Orson Scott Card. New York: Tor, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-7653-0497-1

I am a huge Orson Scott Card fan. I’ll read anything he’s written. This collection of short stories being no exception. This is by far and away the best of the several collections I’ve read recently. By definition, and by experience as well.

Card has divided his collection into five sections, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Literary, Hatrack River and Mormon Stories. The Hatrack River stories are the best, of course. Kind of like eating dessert. Anyone who’s read any of The Tales of Alvin Maker will want to read these two stories. In one of them Alvin and Arthur Stuart run into Davy Crockett a-grinning a bear. That one is quite funny. The ending especially, had me literally really truly LOL (laughing out loud).

In the other one they meet up with Jim Bowie, Stephen Austin, and more importantly, Abe Lincoln. According to Card’s comments about the story, which is titled “The Yazoo Queen,” it is actually the beginning (Chapter Zero, so to speak) of The Crystal City, the penultimate book in the Alvin Maker series. But because it was specifically written for Robert Silverberg’s second Legends anthology, and was under exclusive contract for that collection, it couldn’t even be reprinted as part of Crystal City. So it’s definitely a must read for all Hatrack River/Alvin Maker fans.

But I’ve given you the good stuff first (not really) and there are several other stories worthy of a mention. The very first story in the book, “The Elephants of Poznan,” is a very good post-holocaust kind of story, with a totally new and unexpected variant on why and how mankind is vanishing off the earth.

The next story, “Atlantis,” is one of my all-time favorite Card stories. I’ve read it at least twice before, but that didn’t stop me from reading it again here, once I came across it, nosirree. This story purports to tell the true tale of the original Noah, the person, people, and events that formed the basis for all of the ancient flood tales, from the one in the Bible, to the one in the Gilgamesh epic, not to mention all of the Atlantis legends. And it’s a most persuasive version. If it’s not really true, it SHOULD be. If you’ve not read it yet, you’re in for a treat. For those who read all of Card’s stuff, it is worth mentioning that “Atlantis” is connected to his novel, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus.

In the fantasy section of the book, “Dust,” is definitely worth a mention. It’s the kind of fantasy story I always enjoy, in which someone stumbles through an unusual doorway, or portal of some kind, and ends up in fairly land, or some other reality. This one is as good as any of them, incorporating elements of the Fisher King or related stories.

“In the Dragon’s House” was another favorite. It involves one of the more unusual dragons you’re ever likely to meet. It’s also a wonderful childhood to adolescence coming of age kind of story, which has always been one of my favorite genres.

There are two “literary” stories, and “Feed the Baby of Love,” is a bona fide winner, another of the truly outstanding stories to be encountered in this collection.

Finally, Card ends the book with four “Mormon” stories. I’m glad he included them, because they help to show the real man, the person who’s at the heart of all of Card’s writing, and it’s a man you can’t help but respect, even though you may not agree with all of his views and opinions about issues. Not that there is really anything in these stories themselves to disagree with, mind you. That’s not what I meant. One of them, “Christmas at Helaman’s House,” is, indeed, a Christmas card kind of story. As is “Dust,” incidentally, back in the fantasy section. Someday, Card may have to put out a collection of “Christmas Card” stories (pun intended), since the one I recently reviewed on this blog makes at least the third one that I’m currently aware of, and I don’t doubt there may be others.

All in all, this book is a treasure house of stories waiting to be unlocked. I’ve mentioned my favorites, but there weren’t any that I aggressively disliked. Highly recommended for all fans of Mr. Orson Scott Card, long may he live and prosper, and continue to give us excellent stories like these.

Viewpoints Critical by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

2008-06-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

Viewpoints Critical: Selected Stories by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. New York: Tor, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1857-2

Here’s another short story collection by an established author much more known for his novels. In fact, as the author tells us in his brief introduction, “this collection has been a long time in coming,” since “the first story in this volume was published more than thirty years ago.” In other words, it’s taken him a long time to come up with enough short stories to fill up a publishable collection.

Modesitt is a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, but one I have hardly gotten around to reading. I started reading The Spellsong Cycle years ago, and enjoyed the first two volumes very much, but somehow never got around to reading the rest. I don’t know if they had yet to be written and published at the time, or if I just somehow never got around to finding and reading them. Then I reread the first volume recently (link), but my library has no copies of the second volume, so I guess I’ll have to break down and buy a copy. I need to reread it before I go on to the other three volumes.

These are all competently written, more or less entertaining stories. Which is to say that none of them were really that compelling. The best were actually the stories set in the author’s existing universes. “Black Ordermage,” for example, which is set in the Recluse universe, and explains how the character Cassius ended up there. Even though I’ve never read any of the Recluse novels (the more shame on me!), I very much enjoyed this story. Likewise “Sisters of Sarronnyn, Sisters of Westwind” which is another Recluse story.

“Beyond the Obvious Wind” was another story I liked, and it’s the story from which the entire Corean Chronicles originally sprang, even though it goes off in a different direction entirely, according to the author. I have to take his word for it, because, again, I’ve never read any of the novels in question. There are, to misquote that immortal old saw, just too many books, too little time.

So, Modesitt fans will definitely want to read this book, if only for those stories alone. Definitely recommended for his fans; others can take it or leave it, depending on the level of interest and the amount of time available.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

2008-06-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman. New York: William Morrow, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-06-051522-5

I’ve been reading several short story collections recently, and this is just the first of them. Short stories are not my favorite genre, but when the author is someone known to me, particularly someone whose novels I enjoy, and especially in the science fiction and/or fantasy genre, I will generally read their short story collections, not only just to see what their stories are like, but also because they often include some stories based in one or more of their fictional universes that I have already enjoyed.

For example, Neil Gaiman includes a story set in his “American Gods” universe, a story that he originally wrote for one of Robert Silverberg’s justly famous Legends compilations. So anyone who is a fan of American Gods (which I’ve read and reviewed on this blog) or Anansi Boys (which I’ve not yet read or reviewed, but mean to as soon as I get around to it) will want to check out this Fragile Things collection if for no other reason than to read “The Monarch of the Glen,” unless, of course, they’ve already read it in Legends.

As for the rest of the collection, as with nearly every short story collection I read, it’s a mixed bag. Some of the substantial stories, such as “Closing Time,” “Bitter Grounds,” “Goliath,” and “Good Boys Deserve Favors,” I really enjoyed.

Others, not so much. I didn’t particularly appreciate the turn-around ending for “A Study in Emerald,” even though it (the story) won a Hugo award AND got Gaiman inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars. “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire” was just plain silly, although I suppose that was probably the intent. I could complain about some of the others, but to what point? The point is that anyone reading this collection will like some, dislike others.

Some of my favorites were actually some of the shortest, quickest little stories, the ones you can read out loud to someone you’re with, and it will only take 5 or 10 minutes, short enough that they probably can be persuaded to listen that long. Examples include “Other People,” “Locks,” “Instructions,” “In the End,” and “The Day the Saucers Came.” Several of these, some of my favorites, are actually poems. Or at least, written in verse.

So, if you’ve read and enjoyed any of Neil Gaiman’s work, you’ll probably want to read this short story collection as well. You’re sure to like some of them; you may not like some of the others; some of them may be disturbing, annoying, depressing, or even abhorrent, but that’s the way it is when you read a collection like this.

Oh, don’t overlook the introduction, in which Gaiman explains how each came to be written. You may want to read it after the fact or along with each story, but don’t leave it out altogether. Why? Because he actually embeds a very short story into one of the introductory comments, which you won’t want to miss. I have to say, I would have preferred the introductory materials to have been printed with each individual story, instead of grouping them together at the beginning, as that it would have made it easier to read each one with the associated story.

Definitely recommended for Gaiman fans.

Hunter's Run by Martin, Dozois, and Abraham

2008-06-22T18:17:00.000-07:00

Hunter's Run by George R.R. Martin, Garner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham. New York: Eos (HarperCollins), 2008. ISBN: 978-0-06-137329-9

This is nitty gritty SciFi at its best. Our protagonist, one Ramón Espejo is an uneducated, roistering, hard-drinking, hard-living, blue collar kind of a guy who finds himself in an untenable situation, and makes the best of it. He's an independent prospector on the lam from the law, after a drunken spree in which he brutally murders a visiting gringo muckety muck, who while out in the wild unexplored reaches of the planet, stumbles onto an alien secret that is definitely too big for him.

Not only that, but he realizes that he is actually a clone of himself, slaved to the aliens he's discovered, and tasked with finding and preventing his real self from getting back to civilization to report what he's found. By killing himself (his other self), if that's what it takes.

The basic scenario is this: human kind finds itself somewhat adrift in a universe where alien races seem to have the best real estate already locked up. These aliens, at least some of them, are happy to use human kind as their worker bees. Espejo, along with an entire mining crew, ships off to a frontier planet to help in its development and exploitation.

While out prospecting, he inadvertently stumbles onto ANOTHER alien civilization, carefully hidden away, and determined to remain so. Apparently humans are mere pawns in a much larger game of high stakes, in which one alien race is trying to wipe out another, for reasons poor Espejo is not equipped to fathom. But he IS willing to play whatever limited cards he has, in hopes of first surviving, then bettering his situation.

“Gritty” is hardly an adequate description of this story. Suspense there is too, in plentiful supply. Definitely recommended for anyone who enjoys a universe which doesn't assume that humans are always on top, or even remotely NEAR the top in the fight for survival. But still, we humans persist. We struggle on. We refuse to give up, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Influencer by Kerry Patterson, et. al.

2008-06-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-07-148499-2

This book purports to provide a method by which you can change the world, or at least, yourself. It claims to be that lever Archimedes so famously postulated, long enough to shift the entire earth. Is it? I'm not sure. At the end, it all seems to come down still, to talk. Just find the right words, and you can persuade people.

It's a lot more complicated than that, of course. There are six sources of influence which you must master. None of them work alone. All of them are essential to the process. The six elements are presented grid fashion, in two rows of three each.

Motivation

Make the undesirable desirable
Harness peer pressure
Design rewards & demand accountability

Ability

Surpass your limits
Find strength in numbers
Change the environment

The three cross patterns are:

Personal
Social
Structural

In other words, the first item under each of the original two categories, motivation and ability, fits under the personal category, while the next item on each list fits under social, and the final item on each list fits under structural.

The book's many authors tell many stories about masters of this process who have changed entire cultures and made enormous improvements in people's lives. Some examples: eradicating the Guinea worm in Africa (Dr. Donald Hopkins and The Carter Center); helping addicts turn their lives around (Dr. Mimi Silver and the Delancey Street Foundation), preventing HIV infections (Thailand), enhancing literacy in Mexico and elsewhere (TV producer Miguel Sabido), and many more.

Unfortunately, even after reading the book, I had difficulty in seeing how I could (or would) apply its principles to any of the real-world situations in my particular job. I've never been much of a believer in business solution type self-help books, and this one left me unconvinced also. I'm just not much of a “believer,” period. I'm a skeptic. An optimistic skeptic. Now there's a contradiction in terms, for you! But then, I'm also a Libra. A Libra who doesn't believe in astrology. Another contradiction!

The governor of our great state of Washington, Christine Gregoire, was apparently so impressed by this book that she gave out free copies to everyone who attended one of her leadership seminars. That's how I heard about the book, as one of my co-workers attended.

I could also never figure out if this system was supposed to be about changing your own life (like losing weight, or adopting a more healthy lifestyle), or about changing masses of people (like the examples I cited above). Supposedly it's about both, but I never could quite figure out how that works. It may well be that these techniques really do work, but the system is still too complicated for me. Marginally recommended for anyone who needs to change the world. Or themselves.

Touchstone by Laurie King

2008-06-08T18:53:00.000-07:00

Touchstone by Laurie King. New York: Bantam Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-553-80355-6

Ah, another novel from one of my favorite contemporary authors, Laurie King! What a pleasure it is to be caught up once again by her inimitable style and perfect touch. Touchstone is another standalone story, not part of her Martinelli or Mary Russell series. That's its only drawback, if drawback there is to be found here. Fortunately for us, a note at the end of the book informs us that Ms. King is currently at work on the next Mary Russel novel, which will be her ninth. I can't wait!

This story takes place in Great Britain, in that transitional period between the two World Wars. The coal miners are about to strike, and a general strike has been called in sympathy. Labour has the government, but could fall. A decisive clash of ideologies and interests is possible. Will England turn communist? Or fascist? Or will some middle ground of rationality be preserved?

Into this volatile mix comes FBI agent Harris Stuyvesant, seeking an itinerant bomber, a Brit who has traveled three times to the U.S. leaving bombs in his wake, one of which killed Stuyvesant's fiancée, giving him a more than slightly personal interest in the case. He has a suspect, Richard Bunsen, currently high in the strikers' council, formerly a demolition expert in the first World War. And now he suspects that Bunsen's American bombs were mere practice for his ultimate target, the top leaders of Britain, in an act intended to foment terror, and topple traditional British society into anarchy.

Tracking Bunsen takes him into the company of Laura Hurleigh, duke's daughter, and the inner circles of British aristocracy. His “in?” Bennett Grey, who grew up with the Hurleigh's, and was even engaged to Laura, until his injuries in the Great War made it impossible for him to associate with people in a normal fashion. He was almost blown up by an artillery shell, should have been killed, but instead, somehow lived, but with a new kind of sense and sensitivity. His entire nervous system and sense of consciousness was somehow turned inside out. People affect him directly and intolerably. He can read their body language, their emotions, their real thoughts behind what they say, in an almost supernatural way. And this sensitivity is like 10,000 times worse than the proverbial fingernail scratching a blackboard. It is absolutely intolerable to him, and forces him to flee to the very tip of England where he lives in virtual solitude.

Grey's sister, Sarah, works with Laura Hurleigh and Richard Bunsen. Sarah is an attractive young woman, and Harris naturally falls in love with her. All of these lines fall a bit too close for reality, but we're willing to suspend our disbelief at least a little, especially for Laurie King. She makes it all seem plausible enough, if not downright inevitable.

The plot hurries along to its dramatic and ever intensifying conclusion, but not without at least one significant twist to the plot that will most likely catch you by surprise. I've left out some of the complications, but I don't have time to list them all; how Stuyvesant gets "in" with Bennett Grey being one of them. But if you care at all for King as an author, you'll be reading the book for yourself!

As usual, highly recommended!

Empire Rising by Sam Barone

2008-06-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

Empire Rising by Sam Barone. New York: William Morrow, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-06-089246-3

This is the sequel to Dawn of Empire, which I reviewed back in April of 2007. It's a good read, and if you enjoyed Dawn, you'll probably want to read Rising. But it doesn't have the same compelling drive to it that the original did.

In Dawn of Empire, we read about one of the first cities to raise a wall in its defense. This is a civilization-building effort that truly revolutionized society when it occurred, and to encounter a fictionalized account of how that might have occurred makes for truly compelling reading.

In the sequel, there is lots of backing and filling. The city and its leaders are out restoring order in the surrounding area, making their defenses even stronger, and beginning the building of a dynasty which they hope will extend to their children and grandchildren. All very important activities, no doubt, but just not as compelling as the motive behind the original story. It becomes just another story of ancient people going about their lives.

Sure, the author dreams up another attack on the city, this one launched by stealth from inside, and provides plenty of drama and suspense, but this story could have happened to any ancient town in any ancient time period, and there is nothing to raise it to that level of necessity that propelled its predecessor.

So, definitely recommended, especially if you enjoyed Dawn of Empire, but not essential reading, by any means. And don't read it if you haven't read Dawn. It won't make much sense. The author's web site implies, without providing any specifics, that there will be more to come, and I'll probably read those too, just not expecting the same kind of buzz I got from the first one.

Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove

2008-06-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove. New York: Roc, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-451-46174-2

This is another alternate history novel by Turtledove, the acknowledged master of the genre. He imagines a smallish continent, naturally named Atlantis, out in the middle of the Atlantic, sort of halfway between Europe and North America. He tells us the history of this land, from its initial discovery and settlement by Europeans in the 1450's, on down to about the time of the American Revolution, when the British and French fight for dominance of the island, as an adjunct to their American and European wars.

The story is as well-told as any Turtledove book. If you enjoy his style, you'll undoubtedly enjoy reading this book. But my essential reaction was, what's the point? I need more than just another lackadaisical idea to motivate me into reading Turtledove. When he asks INTERESTING alternate history questions, like “What if the South won the Civil War?” or “What if aliens invaded in the middle of World War II?” then I'm interested enough to follow the story for book after book.

But in this case, there's just a new land mass where there wasn't one before. No magical creatures live there, just different ones (kind of like Australia or Zanzibar). The island is uninhabited when Europeans get there, which is improbable in itself. Surely it would have been previously settled by indigenes from somewhere! People from the Americas, if nowhere else.

So, British, French and Spanish settlers colonize the island. There is an interregnum period in which pirates control the western half of the island, and have to be eradicated. Sad. Pirates are always more fun, if more dangerous, than regular society. And then the war for dominance, which the British win, of course. My ultimate reaction? So what? Why should I care? I don't care. So I won't be bothering with any sequels. Sorry Harry. You struck out with this one, so far as I'm concerned.

The Spiral Labyrinth by Matthew Hughes

2008-05-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

The Spiral Labyrinth: A Tale of Henghis Hapthorn by Matthew Hughes. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-59780-091-4

This is the second time I've encountered the doughty Henghis Hapthorn, discriminator extraordinaire. I reviewed a collection of short stories by Hughes, several of which featured Hapthorn, back in July of 2007, not quite a year ago.

This tale is quite a bit more satisfactory reading than were those stories. The novel length format provides a more expansive space and time (both literally and figuratively) for the sometimes hapless Hapthorn to operate within, and for me, at least, this gave the character and his adventures more depth and play, making the reading more entertaining.

Hughes is another of those clever writers who has thought up a way to bridge the gap between science fiction and fantasy. This book is definitely written as science fiction, since initially we find ourselves in a far future milieu, in which hundreds, if not thousands of planets are settled, and starships traverse the interstellar byways.

But our intrepid adventurers find themselves unaccountably thrust into an even much farther and further future, in which some great shift in the cosmos has taken place (it being implied that similar shifts may have occurred in previous aeon's) where magic and will power are the dominant factors, having replaced the technology-based period of the past.

Hapthorn and his inimitable companions find themselves in a seemingly almost hopeless battle against an intelligent and symbiotic organism, a fungus which fills many caverns on a distant, desolate planetoid. Will they ever make it back to their own time, place and space? You'll have to read the book to find out. And it's well worth the journey. Recommended for all SciFi and/or fantasy fans.

Mozart's Sister by Rita Charbonnier

2008-05-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

Mozart's Sister by Rita Charbonnier, translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Crown Publishers (Random House), 2007. ISBN: 978-0-307-34678-0

Now here's an interesting novel! Based on the life of Maria Anna Walpurga Ignatia Mozart, Wolfgang's elder sister, who generally went by the nickname Nannerl, at least within the family circle. Nannerl was a musical prodigy too, though perhaps not quite so precocious as Mozart, although it is hard to know how we'd know for sure. But the earliest travels and concerts featured the two of them, brother and sister.

This novel purports to tell Nannerl's story from her own point of view, starting with a series of letters back and forth between her and a man she loves, but never marries. I found these letters to be a bit too modern and frank in tone, but then, I haven't read the letters between Wolfgang and his father, sister, wife, so I'm hardly in a position to judge. Wolfgang's own letters are notoriously known to be earthy, vulgar, etc. Nannerl's letters as depicted here are hardly that, just frank and forward.

What is more significant is the author's assumption and depiction of Nannerl's reaction to the stifling influence of her father, who will not even admit the possibility of a woman's composing music. No, Nannerl must either find a husband, or teach piano lessons to help support the family's income. She reacts very badly, at times almost retreating from life altogether, and later, turning her back on music completely for many years.

Again, it is hard to know how she really reacted. Was she really torn apart like this? Or was she more a creature of her time, acquiescing to her father's and her society's assumptions about the role of a woman? We have no way to know, but this author's version seems like it is imposing our current values and feelings about the equal rights of women back into an earlier time, where they don't exactly ring true.

Not that I don't completely sympathize with those feelings as they are depicted. I consider myself to be a male feminist, and I find any subordination of women to be appalling and indefensible. So why am I complaining? I don't know. I just know that this book seems to take modern sensibilities and reactions, and force them onto an earlier time, where the reality may have been different. Not that Nannerl wouldn't have resented being forced into her father's version of reality, but I don't think she would have reacted in such a modern way.

All of that quibbling aside, I definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in the subject. I only wish that there were more documentation provided to support or authenticate this version of the story. Did Nannerl (as the author insists) act as a supporter and promoter of her brother's music after his death? I don't know. There doesn't appear to be any book length biographies of Nannerl available. So this hypothetical version is seemingly all we have.

Team Chihuly by Dale Chihuly

2008-05-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

Team Chihuly by Dale Chihuly. Seattle, Washington: Portland Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-57684-163-1

It has always seemed strange to me that Dale Chihuly, the great master artist of glass blowing, has always worked in teams. And that, in fact, for many years, has done very little actual glass blowing, glass handling, very little of the physical act of creation, himself. With so many others actually doing all of the physical work, why does Chihuly get all the credit? Why is he considered the artist, and all of this, his work?

Well, in this book, Chihuly pays homage to the talented teams who have worked with him to create all of his masterpieces. He lists them by name, describes his relationships with many of them, and presents them in pictures, showing them at work with and for and through him. I still don't understand what it is about him that inspires and motivates so many people to work so hard for HIS reputation. But at least he acknowledges their contributions in this book.

He must indeed be a truly charismatic personality, who projects a compelling vision, so compelling that other people willingly subsume their own creativity and efforts to realize HIS reality, and help to create HIS conceptions.

Not that Chihuly hasn't had occasional defectors. In a well-publicized lawsuit, the master accused one of his former team members of making knock-off imitations of his work, and allowing a third person to sell them under his name. Needless to say, this defecting former team member is not included in the alphabetical listing of Team Chihuly found in the back of this book!

Still, any fan of Chihuly, of which I must number myself as one, will probably want to take a look at this book. My only complaint is that it's more about the team than the work. There ARE pictures of the work, but they are definitely playing second fiddle to the team. And that's undoubtedly as it should be, but still disappointing, since it's the work, the glass, that captivates me, regardless of how it was created or manufactured. Still, the book is definitely recommended for anyone and everyone with an interest in Chihuly or his work.

Spy vs Spy 2 by David Shayne

2008-05-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

Spy vs Spy 2: The Joke and Dagger Files by David Shayne. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2007. ISBN: 978-08230-5035-2

I don't usually read comic books or graphic novels. However, I do avidly read the comic page, “the funnies” as we used to call them, every day in the newspaper. And I used to like Mad Magazine when I was younger, and had more time for such things.

Everybody knows Spy vs. Spy. It's been a mainstay of MAD Magazine forever, pretty much. This is apparently the second book-length collection of Spy vs. Spy cartoons. The original creator of the strip was Antonio Prohias, a Cuban expatriate. The first collection, titled Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook, published in 2001, was devoted to his work.

When Prohias finally retired, after almost 40 years of Spy vs. Spy, various in house writers (Duck Edwing, Russ Cooper, etc.) took over, with first Bob Clark and later Dave Manak responsible for most of the drawings. These strips are featured in the first 100+ pages of the book

Then in 1996, MAD was undergoing a face lift. The editors looked for a new look for Spy along with the rest of the mag, and at some point, offered the job to already established artist, Peter Kuper. Kuper brought a new air-brushed look to Spy, and as both a writer and an artist, brought both halves of the strip back into one brain. His creations take us through page 291.

To close out the book, we have a few pages of Spy vs Spy JR, designed for a pre-teen kids version of MAD, plus a few pages of Spy vs. Spy, The Comic Strip, which actually ran (briefly) in syndication in various newspapers.

I've had this book sitting on the floor next to my computer for the past six or seven weeks. It was my “read while waiting” book. If the computer was taking too long to load a web page, or to process a graphics file, or any of the other interminable things that computers make you wait for, I'd grab the Spy book, and read a strip or too. Great way to pass the otherwise wasted time!

My only complaint? Occasionally the jokes are too arcane, too abstruse, too convoluted, even for me. If you don't get it on first look, it's too much. But even I'll admit those were few and far between. Spy vs. Spy continually reminds us of the futility of war, covert or otherwise.

So there you have it—read this book, and you'll be fully up-to-date on Spy vs. Spy, at least through 2007. And all without buying a single MAD magazine. Thoroughly recommended for all Spy vs Spy fans, MAD Magazine fans, and anyone else who wonders what all the fuss is about.

The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code by Robert Rankin

2008-05-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code by Robert Rankin. London: Gollancz, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-57507-0-110

I picked this book up (off the new fiction shelf at my local library, per usual) because of the seemingly musical aspect to the title, and because, according to the flyleaf, the chief character is, indeed, a musician. I'm always on the lookout for fiction with a musical aspect to it, as reading such stories is one of my hobbies, so to speak.

But, I'm sorry to say that I struck out with this one. I just couldn't stomach it. Apparently Rankin is considered a master of a comic, silly style that many people find hilariously irresistible. Sorry. I found it intolerable. I couldn't make it past the first 10 pages or so. So much for Nancy Pearl's Rule of Fifty.

I found the writing style to be incredibly supercilious and smarmy. Reading it was to me like the proverbial fingernails scratching on the blackboard. Life is too short. There are too many other books out there that I want to read to force myself to read something that I found so viscerally annoying. If a blatantly comic style is your thing, ignore my advice and read this book. Otherwise, not recommended.

Rifkind's Challenge by Lynn Abbey

2008-05-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

Rifkind's Challenge by Lynn Abbey. New York: Tor, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-765-31346-1

The entire time I was reading Rifkind's Challenge, it seemed obvious that this couldn't possibly be the first Rifkind book. That's because almost from the beginning, there are echoes of previous deeds, a reputation from before, a traveling back into other lands where Rifkind has had previous experiences.

But you certainly couldn't tell from the front matter in the book itself. There is no listing of any other Rifkind titles. It's annoying the way publishers behave, only listing other Lynn Abbey books, if they are also published under the Tor imprint. So I had to use the ubiquitous Internet to find Abbey's website to learn that there are indeed, two previous Rifkind books, albeit from many years ago, titled Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) and The Black Flame (1980), both now out of print.

Rifkind is the name of a woman who has special powers as a healer, and perhaps as a devotee of the goddess of the Bright Moon. She is also a master of swordcraft and fighting. Now she's leaving her home of many years among the tribes of the plain, along with the son of the chieftain, and her own son, both grown, and striking out for a new life on their own.

Her own son, Cho, is estranged from her. He feels abandoned, emotionally, and mostly resentful. Resentful that his mother has never spared him any time, attention, or training. She's left him to be raised by the tribal chieftain, as a trusted companion and friend to the chief's son Tyrokon.

And yet the chief's son cannot inherit, because he is partially lame. Rifkind has been working to heal him since he was an infant, but she has only been able to bring him along so far. So now he plans to seek another way of life, to become a caravaner. Rifkind goes along to see him settled, but she is feeling the pull of other lands, other pasts. When the caravaner career turns out to be a false lead, a trap or trick of some kind, the boys decide to follow her.

Adventures ensue. This is a well-written, eminently readable swords and sorcery kind of story, with a diminutive but formidable heroine. I would definitely read the two earlier books if they came into my hands. Recommended for any and all fans of this type of fantasy tale.

Resurrection by Tucker Malarkey

2008-05-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

Resurrection by Tucker Malarkey. New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin Group), 2006. ISBN: 1-59448-919-X

I read this book because I'm interested in that alternative branch of religious thought known as gnosticism, and especially in the Christian branches of it. This is a novel based around the original discovery, shortly after World War II, of the Nag Hammadi texts, which included a number of gnostic writings and gospels, including the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, among others.

This is a fictional version of the story, of course, and as such, has as its major characters, people who never existed. Gemma (what a strange name!) Bastian is an English woman, a nurse who has barely survived the London blitz, and whose father was a researcher in Egypt. When she learns of his unexpected and untimely death, she travels to Egypt to try and discover something of what happened, and to deal with his effects.

In the course of this odyssey, she encounters an interesting family of expatriates with whom she stays. The father had been a friend of her father, but they seem to have become estranged. One son is a bitter and disillusioned RAF pilot, who lost a leg in the war, and who begins to fall in love with Gemma, but whose scarred experience seems to have left him incapable of any genuine emotions.

The other brother is, like Gemma's father, a man on the track of these ancient documents, but he treats Gemma superciliously, trying to keep her at a distance, wanting to protect her from the danger that has perhaps killed her father, and several others. Some of his efforts seem genuine, others patronizing, because of Gemma's sex.

Powerful forces are at work, and some of them are sinister. Not everyone wants these old gospels to come to light. And others are simply motivated by greed, determined to capture whatever value the manuscripts may have in the world marketplace.

Gemma, herself, is on a journey of discovery. She is determined to learn whatever it was that drove her father, and to get to the bottom of what may have caused her death. And she is torn between the two brothers themselves, and their growing relationships with her.

Fortunately for us, author Tucker Malarkey (what a name!) has provided us not only with an introductory note, explaining her motives in writing the book, but with an Epilogue, a Timeline, a “Who Is Real” note, and other brief, but telling accompanimental material as well.

At the root of much of what Gemma discovers, in retracing the intellectual and physical steps of her father, is that the Roman Church has put forward its own version of Christianity, a version in which there is almost no significant role for women. The alternative version(s) show that women had an equally important role in other early traditions, and in the life of Christ himself, if these other texts are to be believed.

While I would not describe this book as a great literary masterpiece, it succeeds in retelling much of this important story in an evocative and compelling manner. Definitely recommended for anyone with any interest in this topic, and especially for those who prefer to learn while being entertained by a story, as opposed to a more scholarly approach.

The Music of Razors by Cameron Rogers

2008-05-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Music of Razors by Cameron Rogers. New York: Del Ray (Ballantine Books), 2001, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-345-49319-4

Now this is one of the stranger novels I've read in recent years. About the only thing that surpasses it for strangeness that I can recall reading recently is Hal Duncan's Vellum. Let's see if I can define the premise. It's not easy to do.

One of the angels that fell into darkness has somehow destroyed one of his fellows, and from his very bones, fashioned a set of instruments, not musical, but more like surgical, or psychological. What exactly happened to the angel who did this is not entirely clear, but the instruments themselves seem to have been set loose on earth, and they seem to provide certain magical powers to whoever has control over them.

Much of the story revolves around a couple of the men who have had possession of some or most of these arcane instruments, and some children who get caught up in the transition between owners. It's not entirely clear if the “owners” of these instruments hand them on to someone else, or if they are wrested from them by a successor. Not too much of what happens in this story is entirely clear.

The tale does have its interesting points, and it is not without a certain amount of entertainment value. Certainly the premise is one of the more offbeat concepts I've encountered in fantastical fiction recently. Nevertheless, it's all just a bit too abstruse for my taste. I don't have to have everything handed to me on a platter, but I do appreciate some sense of what's going on, and why.

Marginally recommended for those with a taste for the bizarre and slightly unfathomable.

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson

2008-05-07T20:47:00.000-07:00

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson. New York: Viking, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-670-03844-2

If it weren't for the supernatural elements of this book, I probably never would have read it. First, the title, which suggests something Biblical in nature. Then the cover, which has a crude depiction of a devil's head on it. And then the flyleaf plot summary, which describes a Scottish Presbyterian minister, a good man, albeit an atheist, who is thought to have fallen into a chasm and drowned, but is miraculously raised from the dead three days later, and claims to have seen (and been saved by) no less than the devil himself.

This all made for a premise intriguing enough to grab me, for for me to grab the book and bring it home from the local public library. I'm not sorry I did, although the book is ultimately disappointing. So, the man claims to have seen the devil. So what? This is only fiction, after all. This is the kind of story that would be shocking, were it claimed to be true, but since it isn't (true, that is), it isn't (shocking, that is).

Still, the book is interesting enough, for all that, to not disappoint while one is actually reading it. The author is a master of his craft, and the story quite compelling as presented. Recommended for those who like fiction with supernatural elements.

Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey

2008-05-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey. New York: Luna, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-373-80266-1

This is another in Mercedes Lackey's “500 Kingdoms” novels in which she has fun playing with the fairy tale traditions of various countries or ethnic regions. I'm not enough of an expert in this area to analyze all of the traditions she uses, but the primary story takes place in an Eastern European/Russian kind of milieu, with Russalkas, Baba Yaga, and so forth.

Plus we get an undersea kingdom with tritons, mermaids, mermen and sirens (at least mentioned, if not featured). And a nice little side trip diversion to medieval Japan, while the final, culminating episode includes a djinn from the Arabic tradition. All in all, a nice mixture of various traditional cultural folk elements. All woven together into a delightful romance between a princess of the sea kingdom and the seventh prince of the kingdom of Lud Belerus.

One difference between this story and the ones which preceded it (The Fairy Godmother and One Good Knight) is that the rulers of the kingdoms are keenly aware the “the tradition,” the basic law behind this realm of “The 500 Kingdoms,” which attempts to force everything and everyone into the traditional patterns, the archetypical elements of traditional fairy tales, either for good or for ill, for either happy endings, or equally easily into horrific tragedies with truly awful effects on the people who fall into those bad endings.

In the previous books, or so it seemed to me, only fairy godmothers and other high level magical beings were aware of how the tradition wanted to manipulate the lives and stories of the people in the 500 kingdoms, but in this story, the kings of these two kingdoms, at least, are very aware of the tradition; they have deliberately studied it extensively, and work to the best of their ability to manipulate that tradition to the favor of their kingdoms, and those who live in them.

This story involves Ekaterina, “Katya,” the youngest daughter of the Sea King, who, with his court and all of his children, live magically under the sea. The Sea King has carefully groomed each of his children in a role that suits his or her own proclivities, and Katya is his eyes and ears, his intelligence system. She is the only one of his children who can easily switch between land and sea, and so she is often sent on missions to neighboring land-based kingdoms to check on anything unusual or ominous occurring anywhere on the lands that surround their oceanic home.

Interspersed with her story is that of Sasha, the seventh son of the king of Lud Belerus, who because of his seventh son position, has inherited the role of the “fortunate fool.” In addition, he is a “songweaver,” meaning he can influence events magically by singing songs about them. Not big magics, like killing people or healing them, but small magics like better weather, good harvests, good fishing for fishermen, and the like.

Eventually, of course, the two royal children, Sasha and Katya, meet and fall in love. But before they can get on with things in a proper manner, they have to overcome one more monumental challenge. Which they do, bringing together various elements from earlier parts of the story.

Which brings me to the point that in some ways, this novel is a bit of a pastiche of different tales from different cultures, kind of thrown together to create a whole. But each of the individual stories is entertaining enough in its own right, that we don't really mind, especially since the characters are so endearing, and so charmingly portrayed that we are just carried along, happy to be engaged in "The 500 Kingdoms" again for as long as we can. And Lackey DOES bring elements from each previous story into play in the finale, with everything working together for good, as the “good book” says.

Highly recommended for all readers, young and old alike, especially those with a propensity for fairy tales. BTW, you can read the first three chapters online.

Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell

2008-04-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1507-6

When I picked this book up off my local library's new books shelf, and even when I started reading it, I had no idea that it was a sequel to another book, Crystal Rain, which I reviewed back on March 18 of this year. I guess I didn't notice for a couple of reasons. For one, Crystal Rain was Buckell's first novel, so he was an author new to me. When I picked up this book, I knew I'd read something by him recently, but I didn't pay enough attention to realize this was the sequel, even though it's mentioned in the flyleaf blurb.

But more significantly, when I started to read the book, there was nothing initially that seemed to even remotely connect with the previous story. Crystal Rain took place on a single planet, with humankind fighting against inimical alien control, with the assistance of another set of aliens.

Here, instead, we have a whole region of space, a whole array of galactic locations, joined in a complex, but limited web of wormholes. Referred to as the "Benevolent Satrapy" in the star map printed at the front of the book. When the book opens, we find ourselves in a society in which various alien races are treating humans as pets. A clever woman kills one of them, and escapes. She seems to be a hired gun assassin, a physically enhanced fighter, who narrowly escapes capture, and is on a mission of her own.

Meanwhile the so-called Benevolent Satrapy no longer seems entirely benevolent. It seems to have begun turning on humankind, and beginning a policy of genocide against them. About half-way through the book, we're back on New Anegada, the planet where Crystal Rain took place, picking up the lives of the characters where Crystal Rain left off. Things get complicated, but let's just say that various human factions are not only fighting various alien races, but sometimes each other, in an attempt to better the overall position of the human race.

It's a complicated universe, and I can't say as I quite understand it all just yet, but it makes for a good story line, with plenty of action, and plenty to try and twist your mind around. Buckell is a good writer, even if the universe he's created is a bit more complex than would seem to be required. Recommended for most SciFi fans. BTW, you can read a significant portion of the book online, for free. Of course, you can read it for free via your local public library, too.

A War of Gifts by Orson Scott Card

2008-04-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

A War of Gifts (an Ender Story) by Orson Scott Card. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1282-2

For fans of Orson Scott Card's science fiction, especially his Enders Game (1985) and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead (1986), both of which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, making Card the only author (up to now) to win both awards in successive years, this Ender story will definitely be a "must read." This story will also be of interest to those who enjoy the literary genre of Christmas stories, as it most certainly falls into that category, as well. I have to wonder if he wrote it as a kind of extended Christmas card for someone or other, or for his fans.

Well, anyway, suffice it to say that it's a charmingly sweet story on the one hand, but not without its dark side, on the other. Zeck (short for Zechariah, one assumes), is the 5-year-old son of an ultra-fundamentalist Christian father, who frequently feels the need to purify young Zeck through the means of corporal punishment.

Zeck has a particularly brilliant mind, replete with a perfectly photographic memory, not just for what he reads, but for all words he encounters, spoken or written. He can repeat his father's sermons back, word for word, by the time he's three years old.

When his mother discovers this talent, she cautions him not to tell anyone, because some might think this gift comes from Satan. She tells him that Satan does not give good gifts, so this one comes from God, but that some people look so hard to find Satan, that they see him even where he isn't.

Later, when he's four, his father tells him that there are those who will tell him a thing is from God, when really, it's from Satan. When Zeck asks why they would do this, his father tells him that those people are deceived by their own desires. They want the world to be a better place, so they pretend that polluted things are pure, so they won't have to fear them.

Even at this young age, Zeck understands that each of his parents is warning him about the other. This is part of the terrible conflict that wars inside his young head, and leads him into conflict with his fellow young soldiers, when he is taken to the off-planet Battle School, where the Earth's most brilliant children are in training to fight the Formics, the alien race that has attacked the earth, and against which the entire human race is at war.

Zeck's religious background forces him to become a conscientious objector, and to refuse to participate in the Battle School's mock battles, making him first unpopular, and then a basic nonentity in the society of his fellows. Eventually he subtly attempts to foment a struggle between the various religious elements that still remain in the minds of the child soldiers which are humanity's best and brightest hope for survival.

How this dilemma is eventually resolved naturally involves Ender Wiggen, the most brilliant of all the children. This is a story with real heart at the heart of it. It may make you laugh; it may make you cry; it will definitely touch your heart, if you have one. This is one of the reasons I enjoy Orson Scott Card's writing so much.

Highly recommended, although it will make more sense if you've read Ender's Game. If you haven't, shame on you! Especially if you're a science fiction fan, but even if you aren't, Ender's Game is a book that everyone should read, and that pretty much everyone will probably enjoy. I doubt if you can pick it up without becoming instantly hooked. It's one of those books that if I pick it up even now, years after originally reading it, I'm instantly hooked, and want to read it again.

The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

2008-04-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer. New York: Random House, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-394-53649-1

The last Norman Mailer novel I tried to read was Ancient Evenings (1983), set in ancient Egypt. For me, it failed the Nancy Pearl rule of 50, though if I remember correctly, I may have made it through 70 or 80 pages before giving up on it. The only thing I really remember, aside from the fact that I hadn't been able to discern any semblance of a storyline, let alone a plot, by the time I stopped, was Mailer's enumeration of the Egyptians' reverence toward, and veneration of the seven (as I recall) bodily fluids, or physical substances which come out of a man. There are urine and feces, of course, and semen. Then there are saliva, tears, and phlegm. So what is the seventh one? If you've not read the book, you'll probably never guess: cerumen (more commonly known as ear wax!)

I don't know why, but that has stuck with me all these years since. But I'm supposed to be writing about The Castle in the Forest, which was supposed to be the first in a trilogy, but Mailer died shortly after this first volume was published this past year. Mailer seems to have reveled in controversial or off-the-wall kinds of topics. He wrote “New Journalism” style biographical treatments of people like Lee Harvey Oswald and Marilyn Monroe, although he gave the Monroe book the title Marilyn: A Novel Biography.

Now, in The Castle in the Forest, he tackles the childhood and antecedents of Adolf Hitler, albeit in avowedly fictional format. You know how most novels have some kind of a disclaimer, often printed in small print on the verso of the title page? Something like

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Well, here's what Mailer prints in THIS book:

The Castle in the Forest is a work of fiction closely based on history. A few of the names and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and in those cases, any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

So which events are which? Who knows? I don't have enough personal knowledge of Hitler's parents, grandparents, siblings, and the events surrounding his childhood, to have the slightest clue as to which might be based on fact, and which are entirely fictitious. Do you?

One of the more interesting facets of the book's narration, is that the protagonist, much of the time, is supernatural. He starts out as a member of the Nazi SS, an officer assigned to research Hitler's background and ancestry, to allow the Nazis to cover up any scandal, should any be found. Is there really a Jewish grandfather in Hitler's family tree? Was Hitler the result of incest on one side or the other (or both) of his family? This SS officer fills us in on aspects of his research.

But soon, suddenly, and without initial warning, the protagonist changes, and becomes an agent of the devil, a fallen angel, if you will, a supernatural being actively engaged in the battle against God, and the unfallen angels for the souls of men (and women, naturally). We spend a lot of time inside this supposedly evil angel's head, as he carefully guides the events of Hitler's youth (ha! that pun wasn't intended, but was irresistable). Only later does he explain that he was a fallen angel who had infiltrated and taken over the mind and body of the human agent, the SS officer.

This is one of those books that reads like it SHOULD or COULD have happened just as the author imagines it, even if in fact we have no proof that it actually DID happen that way. And, unlike his Ancient Evenings, this novel has a story, if not a plot, exactly. The macabre nature of the subject is enough to get us started, and Mailer keeps our interest along the way by imagining things in such a compelling manner that we feel compelled to keep turning the pages.

We, of course, know the outcome. We know that this evil angel will succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams in creating one of the great human monsters of the ages. Unfortunately, we haven't really yet seen quite how that is going to happen, when the book ends. Young Adolf is 15 years old, just out of the Austrian equivalent of high school, according to Mailer, although the Wikipedia entry on him states that he dropped out without his certificate. In the book, Mailer has the young Adolf defecate on his graduation certificate in a drunken post-graduation revelry.

So, unfortunately, due to Mailer's less than timely demise, we'll never get to know what he had planned for the remaining books in the trilogy, how he planned to tell the rest of the Hitler story. Still, even if the topic appeals to the more prurient side of your nature, this is probably a book worth reading. Recommended for sophisticated readers (or even those who think they are, or ought to be).

The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax

2008-04-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 2007. ISBN: 978-0-15-101542-9

This novel is loosely, VERY loosely based on the life of Pablo Casals, according to the author's note, printed at the back of the book. In fact, her original thought was to write a nonfiction book about Casals. But she ended up writing this evocative novel instead. Why? You'll have to read her note.

One paragraph in the note definitely spoke to me. So much so, that I feel the need to quote it entire (oops, this is NOT the entire paragraph, but it's the part that counts):

I love collages. (Is it any wonder I found room in this book for Picasso?) I like the look of bits of newspaper and cloth stuck with paint, and violins shaped from torn paper, and familiar items rendered unfamiliar. This book is such a collage.

So why did I have to quote that passage? Because I too, love collages. In fact, I make collages myself. Not very good ones, I'll admit, but it's a lot of fun, whenever I can find the time, which isn't nearly as often as I'd like.

But back to the book. It's about a young boy growing up in Spain who almost accidentally receives an extraordinary gift from his deceased father: a bow. A bow too large for the violin, but perfect for the cello. And so the boy becomes a musician. He later forms an alliance, a partnership of sorts, with a somewhat older pianist, who is only very superficially modeled after the Spanish composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz.

Eventually they add a third member to their performing ensemble, a young Jewish woman, with whom they both more or less fall in love. Events march on, and eventually we inevitably find ourselves in the midst of the Spanish civil war, and all of the madness that it entailed. In one of the more remarkable passages, this now celebrated trio finds itself in the unenviable situation of providing a command performance for a (now famous) meeting between Hitler and Franco.

Unfortunately, things take a tragic turn, as you might expect, and the performance never happens. Neither of them gets the girl, and our cellist ends up exiled in Cuba, from whence he tells his remarkable story.

It's hard to say exactly what this book is about. It's about musicians, more than it's about music. But it's really about friendship and betrayal, love and desire, and being caught up in the sweep of historical events over which one has little or no control. Reading the book is a moving experience, and one that won't soon be forgotten. Definitely recommended, especially for those who enjoy novels with a musical subtext, as I do.

The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley

2008-04-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity by IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman. New York: Doubleday, 2001. ISBN: 0-385-49984-1

I read this book because of an article in American Libraries, one of two general library news publications that I regularly read. It comes as part of my membership in the American Library Association.

The article described the basic innovation strategy, or cycle espoused in the book, and attempted to apply it to libraries, and the projects that libraries undertake to serve their customers, patrons, or users, whatever term you wish to use. Here's that strategy in summary:

Understand
Observe
Visualize
Evaluate and refine
Implement

Each of these steps is fleshed out in the book, with many examples of how IDEO has put that particular aspect of the process into practice. If you're looking for ways to innovate more creatively, to come up with better ways of doing things, to be more innovative in what you and your organization do, and how you do it, this book will give you lots of ideas, lots of things to try, and plenty of suggestions. Recommended if you're interested in, or needing this kind of advice.

The Religion by Tim Willocks

2008-04-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

The Religion by Tim Willocks. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-374-24865-9

I guess everyone's heard of “chick flicks” and the presumably related term “chick-lit,” meaning movies or literature designed to appeal to women. So is there an equivalent form for the opposite sex? Guy-lit? Macho-lit? Whatever the appropriate term might be, this book could be an exemplar of the genre. It's definitely an adventure written by a man for men, and designed to appeal to men.

The only non-sequitur is the title. It's not clear how a book with the title The Religion is supposed to appeal to men, but I guess you just have to get beyond the title somehow. Of course, “The Religion” in this case is how The Order of the Knights of St. John the Baptist, also known as the Hospitallers, refer to themselves. Some call them the Sea Knights, and the Turks refer to them as the Hounds of Hell.

In 1565, the Grande Turk, Suleiman Shah, having already conquered Hungary, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania, the Balkans, and most of North Africa, sets his sights on Malta, the last great bastion of the Knights. The Turks had defeated them in Rhodes some fifty years earlier, and are now determined to wipe them off the isle of Malta, sending the largest armada assembled since antiquity against them.

This is the backdrop against which this historical novel, said to be the first in a trilogy, is played. And although the novel does tell the story of the assault on Malta, like all good historical novels, that story is indeed only the backdrop of the real story, the plot, the tale that is told.

Which in this case involves a woman of nobility, returning to Malta in search of the illegitimate son of her youth. Guiding her is the hero of the tale, one Mattias Tannhauser, as he calls himself, although it is not quite the name he was born with, nor the name he previously bore as a Turkish janissary. It is a tale of love, of heroism, valor, gallantry, dark treachery, romance, and violence.

So why do I describe it as macho-lit? Because it begins with a scene of obscene violence. The Turks are invading Hungary, and their levies brutally slaughter the younger sisters, and rape the living, then dead mother of our young hero, when, at the age of 12, he is engaged in crafting a dagger in his father's blacksmithy. For the third and final quenching of the hot steel, he plunges it into the chest of the invading monster who has just slain his five-year old sister, in the middle of her song.

Because it is seemingly written to appeal to the blood lust and the physical lust so typically attractive to men. The battle scenes are described with the kind of detailed realism, redolent in blood, guts, and gore, which only a physician (as the author is) could probably manage so realistically. And the sex is generally portrayed from the man's point of view. Which isn't to say the book won't appeal to women too, but my guess is that men are more likely to relish it.

When next (after the opening scene) we encounter Mattias, it is 20 or more years later, and he has left the ranks of the janissaries, and has gone independent, a smuggler, a profiteer, a trader, a hedonist, enjoying life to the full, while trying to attain to at least a modicum of wealth. The Knights of St. John want his Turkish expertise and experience for their cause, and they use the previously mentioned woman as bait, tricking him into assisting them. It works, and it makes for a great story, as the uncommitted Tannhauser falls in love (or is it lust, at least at first?), and schemes to get himself and his charges off the island intact, and without loss of too much honor.

It may not be great literature, but it's definitely a great read. If you like historical fiction with plenty of blood, guts and gore, a little torture (not TOO much), plenty of suspense, good guys and bad guys, plus enthusiastic sex, and even a bit of music thrown in here and there, all set in a bona fide historical epic-making epoch, this book is for you. Recommended for guys (or gals) who want to revel in a goodly bit of macho lit.

Harm by Brian W. Aldiss

2008-04-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

Harm by Brian W. Aldiss. New York: Del Rey, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-345-49671-3

Brian Aldiss is another of those classic science fiction writers that I've been reading for almost my entire life. But kind of like Ben Bova, whose novel, Mercury, I panned back in 2006, none of his books every stuck that firmly with me. He certainly never became one of my favorite authors, whose every novel became a must read, to be waited for with anticipation and delight.

Still, his is a name to be reckoned with, and when I saw a new novel by him at the library, I took the time and energy to give it a read. A mistake? Not entirely, I suppose. What's the book about? It's very timely, I suppose. Our unfortunate protagonist is (like Aldiss), a British citizen, but unlike Aldiss, he's Muslim, son of an immigrant.

And now, apparently because he wrote a novel that, in a joking way, has one of its characters suggest that they should kill the prime minister, he's been incarcerated, held without any recourse, interrogated day and night, subjected to physical and psychological abuse, very much in what is probably only a slight extension of what's actually going on in the real world these days.

When he's knocked unconscious, or when he manages to fall asleep, he dreams the SciFi part of the story. He's an immigrant of another kind, a settler on an alien world which humanity has reached after a long interstellar journey. A seemingly, possibly intelligent alien species there has been almost, if not completely wiped out to guarantee the dominance of the newly arrived humans.

Human society there seems to be a parody of life on earth. A monster of a man is the fuhrer-like leader of society, and people, including our protagonist, seem to be mere shadows of regular people. The storyline, plot if you can call it that, of this alternate reality, is simple and fairly crude.

These episodes alternate with the cruel reality of life in a prison, with seemingly completely random and unjustified torture and interrogation continuing. It's a depressing book, not a pleasant or even particularly entertaining read. It does, I suppose, make a statement against our current irrational “war” against terrorism, and the ways in which it has undermined our traditional values and commitment to basic human rights.

The other story, on the alien world, could be seen as making a somewhat similar statement against our exploitation of the natural world, and again, of our cruel treatment of anything not exactly like ourselves. Unfortunately, neither statement nor story was entirely convincing. The book just isn't that compelling a read. Marginally recommended, especially for people interested in a book that is trying to make a political statement.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

2008-03-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

Glasshouse by Charles Stross. New York: Ace Books, 2006. ISBN: 0-441-01403-8

It took quite a while for me to really get into this book. In fact, I almost abandoned it initially. I don't remember if I had reached the Nancy Pearl specified number of pages or not, before I made my decision to continue, but it was a near thing, indeed. The premises on which the book is based are just too bizarre, and not very well explained at the beginning. I don't feel that I have to have everything handed to me on a platter, everything neatly explained from the get-go, but there are limits to what I'll endure for the sake of a story, and this book definitely pushed those limits, strained them severely.

Here are a few terms and concepts one has to deal with in the first few pages. “The body she's wearing is roughly ortho, following the traditional human body plan.” Identity reindexing and rehabilitation. Memory edits and memory surgery. Reintegration. Postsurgical identity prosthesis. Assembler gates. T-gates and A-gates infected by redactionist worms. Orthohuman. Xenohuman drag. A totally foreign time-keeping system that uses measurements like gigaseconds, subseconds, diurns.

I'm not even sure that now, having actually finished the book, and having enjoyed it, I can really give you a very accurate account of the milieu, the universe in which the book is set. First off, it's in the far future, when humankind has long since reached the stars and set up an extensive galactic civilization.

People travel through the previously mentioned gates, which seem to be wormholes of some kind. In so doing, they are apparently disassembled down to the microscopic level, and reassembled at the other end. What's more, these same (I think) technologies can be used to store and dump one's memories, so that if an accident happens, or someone or something kills you, you can be resurrected from the time of your last memory backup.

The story quickly takes a quirky sideline, however, when the protagonist and his new friend both volunteer for some kind of historical experiment, in which they are ported into new bodies, and put into a re-creation of, to them, an almost prehistoric time period. A period which turns out to be sort of like our 1950's or as close to it as they can get. Their knowledge of such ancient times is somewhat spotty, at best, so the reproduction isn't entirely accurate.

But then it turns out that the people in charge of this supposed experiment are actually bad guys, trying to resurrect some horrible computer virus-like terror that caused a recent upheaval and breakdown of intergalactic civilization. And that our protagonist, unbeknownst to himself (or herself, since he finds himself in a female body inside the experiment) is actually a secret agent with his memories edited to protect him/herself, sent to infiltrate and stop this plot. At this point, the story gets quite a bit more interesting, and finally worth the time and effort you've put into it up until now.

So, yes, the book is recommended for SciFi fans, but be prepared to have to work for a while to get to the good stuff.

Judas [a compilation] by Marvin Meyer

2008-03-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends about the Infamous Apostle of Jesus by Marvin Meyer. New York: HarperOne, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-06-134830-3

This is yet another attempt to assist in the rehabilitation of Judas Iscariot, the disciple who famously betrayed Jesus to the authorities. Meyer brings together in one volume all the relevant ancient texts about Judas, allowing the reader to more or less draw his or her own conclusions about the evidence, such as it is. Although not without his (Meyer's) own commentary and views on the various texts.

The book is primarily occasioned by the relatively recent release of the gnostic Gospel of Judas, which turns the traditional story upside down, maintaining that Judas was the disciple closest to Jesus, the only one who truly understood him, and that the betrayal was actually part of Jesus' secret plan, and that Judas was merely following orders.

The bulk of the evidence is against this idea, however attractive it may appear. Still, Meyer points out that the earliest Christian writings, those of Paul, never mention Judas in connection with the death or betrayal of Jesus. Paul merely says of those events that Jesus was "handed over” without naming who was responsible.

See 1 Corinthians 11:23-24, for instance, which Meyer translates as follows: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed over to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was handed over, took bread, and after giving thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in my memory” [emphasis added].

It is worth noting that the two Greek words used in this passage are both derivations of the Greek verb, paradidonai, which although usually translated as “betray” when referring to the act of Judas in the gospels, actually has a broader, more neutral, even positive meaning when used in other contexts.

In other passages, according to Meyer, Paul indicates that it was either Jesus who handed himself over (Galations 2:19-20) or God who handed Jesus over (Romans 8:31-32). Since the four gospels were written some years later than Paul's epistles, Meyer suggests the possibility that they represent a later tradition or addition to the story, as the early Christians attempted to distance themselves from the Jewish faith, and from the Jews.

Judas--the very name is equivalent in sound and meaning to “Jew.” In this theory, the demonization of Judas became part of the anti-Semitic tradition that arose out of later Christianity. This trend is clearly delineated in the later apocryphal writings collected by Meyer. The further away from the actual events you go, the more diabolical and twisted the portrayal of Judas becomes.

The actual Gospel of Judas itself makes for somewhat difficult reading. Much of its gnostic philosophy seems quite alien to the traditional gospels and their message. And even more so are some of the other gnostic writings that are presented here, such as the Dialogue of the Savior, or The Concept of Our Great Power.

More interesting to me, albeit less believable, as Meyer points out, are the versions of the Judas story presented in other, later, apocryphal writings, such as The Arabic Infancy Gospel, the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, the gospels of Bartholemew, Nicodemus, and other similar texts. More interesting, because I'd not read most of them, and it is a valuable exercise to read them all in one collection together, pretty much everything written about Judas in these early Christian writings.

In the end, the evidence is fairly inconclusive. Those who believe in some version of Biblical inerrancy will discount any versions of the story not in accordance with the gospels, while those of a more open mind will be intrigued by the new interpretations of the Judas story made at least possible if not entirely plausible by the ideas presented here. In the end, there is no way to know the definitive truth of what happened, but Marvin Meyer presents a useful compendium of texts, along with intriguing commentary on them.

My only real complaint about the book is that the notes, presented at the end of the volume, should, in my view, have been presented as footnotes throughout the text, instead. The notes are often indispensable reading, and having them right on the pages to which they corresponded would have been much more convenient than constantly having to flip between the page one is reading, and the end notes.

The books is definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in the topic. Others might find it slow going.

Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

2008-03-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Postsingular by Rudy Rucker. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1741-4

This is a wild and wacky SciFi romp through the realms of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. I've not read any Rudy Rucker before, but obviously, I probably should have. He is said to have won the Philip K. Dick award not once, but twice, and this story does justice to that kind of reputation.

The book does have the appearance of having started out as a short story or two, which then get expanded into a short, albeit, novel-length effort. Each chapter introduces new and stranger characters than the previous one. First we have a warped Silicon-Valley type genius (warped because he accidentally killed his best friend when he was 17) who invents the “nants,” intelligent nanobots, which threaten to take over the earth.

Literally take over, as in devour the earth and turn it into billions upon billions more nants, running a simulated earth, that their creator promises will be “a virtually identical simulation of Earth. Virtual Earth. Vearth for short. Each living Earth creature gets its software-slash-wetware ported to an individually customized agent inside the Vearth simulation.” Supposedly no one will notice any difference, except that you now have eternal life inside the simulation.

This diabolical plot is stopped, reversed actually, partway through the process, when another computer programmer, co-worker actually, works with his autistic son to loose a virus on the nants that literally forces them to run the process backwards.

This all happens in the first two chapters, in a mere 36 pages. That's when it starts to get interesting. Next come the orphids. Orphids are like nants, only better. They “self-reproduce using nothing but dust floating in the air. They're not destructive. Orphids are territorial; they keep a certain distance from each other. They'll cover Earth's surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter.”

Further, “Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and they're networked via quantum entanglement. . . And as the orphidnet emerges, we'll get intelligence amplification and superhuman AI.”

Essentially, it's like a virtual Internet that exists everywhere—on your skin, in the air. Everyone connected to everything, all the time. All information that ever existed immediately accessible via your brain. How people actually live and interact within this new paradigm is a good part of what the rest of the book is about. It's very much in the cyber-punk kind of tradition.

Of course, there's also lots of sexual interactions going on at the same time. More lust than lechery, but enough of both to go around. The sex is kind of soap-operish, but it does seem true enough to the kind of characters Rucker is depicting.

And there's a good story line, with a fair amount of suspense to keep you going, wondering if the heroes and heroines will be able to save the world, or if everyone and everything will get swallowed up by the latest attack of the nano-machines.

Definitely recommended, especially for cyber-punk fans. Amazingly, you can read this ENTIRE novel online, if you have the patience to do so, at the author's website.

The Chess Machine by Robert Löhr

2008-03-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

The Chess Machine by Robert Löhr, translated by Anthea Bell. New York: The Penguin Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-59420-126-4

First, let me congratulate the translator, as her work is superb. I never once even noticed, or realized I was reading a translation until now, when I began typing the bibliographic information.

Almost everyone has heard of the “Mechanical Turk,” a chess-playing automaton from the late 18^th century, when automata on a much smaller scale were immensely popular—little twittering birds, dolls, clocks, and other various mechanical figures. The Turk, a larger than human-sized figure, actually played chess, and defeated almost all challengers.

It was a hoax, of course. A human being is concealed inside the cabinet, and operates the mechanical man mechanically. This historical novel chronicles the early years of the automaton, it's maker, the Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, and the dwarf Löhr invents to be its first inside operator. Nothing much is known about this early period in the automaton's existence, so Löhr is free to imagine it as he pleases.

Which he does, very successfully, and inventively. He creates real people, with real emotions, motivations, and interactions, and has us, his readers, completely caught up in the story, which seems almost entirely believable, although the author admits in his note at the end, that von Kempelen probably wouldn't have stooped to covering up a murder just to further his career, as he portrays him doing in the novel. In the story, it is the Turk itself that commits the murder (assisted by his manipulator, of course).

There, in one sentence, I've referred to the automaton as both “itself” and “him.” I'll admit, I did it deliberately, since even though there is no doubt of the Turk's completely mechanical and false nature in the story, the device does manage to take on a kind of personality.

This is not, perhaps, a masterpiece of literature, but it is a good, solid, historical novel, and will be enjoyed by anyone who is interested in mechanical devices, hoaxes, and the like. Definitely recommended.

Quantico by Greg Bear

2008-03-02T20:54:00.000-08:00

Quantico by Greg Bear. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Vanguard Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-59315-445-5

Now THIS is a truly scary novel. Set in the near immediate future, it imagines how a biological terrorist might plan and stage a serious attack. In fact, it purports (fictionally, of course) to tell us who “Amerithrax” was. As you know, they've never yet caught or uncovered the person who mailed Anthrax to various offices in 2001.

But this scare goes much beyond that. Ultimately, a rogue former FBI agent plans to unleash a much scarier threat into the world, a variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease. Only this variant causes memory loss. People who are infected don't remember much of anything from more than a year or two before. They still have their personalities, their language, habits, skills, just no memory of who or what they were.

And, after testing the virus on an unsuspecting small town in the midwest, the terrorist's next target is Mecca at the height of the Haj, the annual pilgrimage that brings hundreds of thousands into the area.

Our heroes are a couple of FBI agents, one just out of the academy, whose father, a veteran agent himself, is one of the first victims of the memory erasing virus, and the other, a battle-hardened weary woman who has been tracking this rogue agent across the country and across the years.

Mix in a political climate in which the FBI is about to literally be shut down and eliminated, so distrustful is the current administration in the White House. Add in various other covert law enforcement agencies all mixing it up to their own advantage whenever possible.

This is not only science fiction, it's a thriller, par excellence. A real barn burner of a page turner that keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Emperor by Stephen Baxter

2008-02-24T21:47:00.000-08:00

Emperor (Time's Tapestry: Book 1) by Stephen Baxter. New York: Ace Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-441-01466-8

All too often I find my reading habits controlled or at least strongly influenced by what books my local branch library chooses to put on the new book display. Whenever I'm in the library, I take a look to see if there's anything of interest there, on that ubiquitous new books shelf. Now, having picked up and having read this book, Emperor, which is the first in a new series by Baxter, I went back and checked the science fiction author index here on my blog, and the last book I read by Baxter was ALSO the first in a series, but a series, the rest of which I somehow never got around to reading. Most likely because they never showed up on the new books shelf.

My eternal lament: so many books, so little time. So I read and blogged Coalescent: Destiny's Children, Book 1 (2003), back in 2005, but I've never read the rest of the series, Exultant (2004), Transcendent (2005), and Resplendent (2006). My, this guy is prolific! And apparently a really fast writer. Here Emperor has a 2007 copyright date listed, although apparently it was actually released in July, 2006 (that's a bit strange, although I'm guessing the 2007 date is the U.S. copyright, and that the July release was in Great Britain, since Baxter is a British writer), and already two of its 3 sequels are in print: Conqueror (February, 2007) and Navigator (July, 2007), with the fourth title, Weaver, scheduled for release sometime this month, and already available for pre-order on Amazon.

Emperor says right on the cover that Time Tapestry is “An alternate history epic,” but so far, I'm not quite sure what's alternate about it. Maybe I'm ignorant, but reading this book, I had no idea what aspects of it, if any, constitute alternate history. I'm familiar with the broad outlines of British history only, and if there are any significant events in this book that differ from how it really happened, I didn't recognize them.

Other than the mysterious prophecy, uttered at the very beginning of the novel by a woman who falls into a trance during labor, a prophecy she babbles out in Latin, a language she doesn't even know. A prophecy which has a direct quote (when translated into English) from the American Declaration of Independence (!). But that seems like no more than local color, to me. Every novel has fictional events in it. That's what fiction is, by definition! Baxter provides no explanation (science fictional or otherwise) for how this prophecy was generated in this apparently supernatural manner.

The rest of the story is the tale of a single family of native Britons, Brigantians by tribe, through four centuries of Roman rule in Britain. One branch of the family makes it all the way to wealth and Rome, returning to Britain several generations later only to be thrown into abject slavery of the worst kind, the prophecy lost. I don't quite comprehend the point or purpose of it all.

Baxter's writing seems a bit facile to me, which is born out at least somewhat by his prolific volume. I haven't read enough of his works to make a definitive assessment, but while eminently readable, so far I'd have to judge them peripheral, not essential reading for current science fiction fans. Reluctantly recommended.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

2008-02-17T20:35:00.000-08:00

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman. New York: Ace Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-441-01499-6

I am continually amazed by the creative genius of artists and writers. Time travel is a venerable plot device in science fiction, running back at least as far as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, first published in 1895. Haldeman's title is even a takeoff on Wells' title, merely inserting the word “accidental” into the title. One might think that all there is to be said on this topic has already been said, many times. But no, here is another time travel story just as fresh and new as any of the others, and more than many.

Since Wells, countless other authors have explored the idea of time travel, with much time spent on the inevitable paradoxes that result. Can one go back in time and change the past? An interesting aspect of both the Wells and Haldeman novels is that the time travelers travel only into the future, not into the past, although Well's traveler does use the time machine to travel back to the point of his original departure.

Haldeman's time traveler, Matt Fuller by name, travels exclusively into the future, his machine not being capable of travel in the other direction. One of his goals as he keeps hopping further and further into the future, is to locate a time period in which the ability to travel backwards in time has been discovered and perfected, such that he can return to his own time and place once again.

Matt indeed discovers his time machine by accident. He is a graduate assistant working for an MIT physics professor. He has built a photon calibrator that is supposed to supply one reference photon per unit of time, but instead, he discovers that whenever he activates it, it moves forward into time. The first time it reappears only a second or so later (in the future). The next time, about 12 seconds. Then a little less than 3 minutes, and then a little over 34 minutes.

So each time the machine is activated, it moves forward into time about 12 times longer than the time before. It also moves slightly sideways in space, so by the time Matt uses it to travel several hundred years into the future, he is moved up into Maine. By this time, society has changed significantly from when he left, having devolved into a kind of primitive Christian post-apocalyptic society, at least in northern New England where he is.

Eventually, Matt is hundreds of thousands of years in the future. His adventures are elucidated in an eminently readable and entertaining fashion. Naturally, he eventually meets a girl, his nearly perfect girl Friday, and together they continue to explore the future. So will they find a way back to where they started? You'll have to read the book to find out. Enthusiastically recommended for all fans of time travel stories. This one rates up there as good as just about any of the myriads of other time travel tales I've read and enjoyed over the years.

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

2008-02-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. ISBN: 0-375-41465-7

This is a “Heart of Darkness” kind of story, only the setting is Burma in the late 19^th century, when the British are still attempting to consolidate their influence over the region and its indigenous rulers.

In the story, a British doctor, living deep within the Burmese territory, is having more success negotiating deals with the natives than is the British army and its officers. He is so uncommonly successful that the hierarchy back in London cater to his every whim, even to the point of shipping a French Erard grand piano all the way from London to his remote outpost in the Burmese jungle, despite the immense hardships and expense this entails.

Naturally, the piano arrives out of tune, and is later damaged by bullet fire. So the doctor sends for a piano tuner, and not just any old piano tuner, but the foremost expert on Erard pianos, one Edgar Drake, living a happy but quiet life with his wife in London. It is Drake's odyssey to the remote regions of Burma that becomes the primary focus of our story.

Drake himself is caught up in the mystery and allure of the East; by the time he finally reaches the doctor, and makes the necessary repairs, he is caught. Somehow, he can't seem to summon the will to start his journey back home. First he stays because all pianos need to “settle in” after tuning, and need a second going over after a couple of weeks. But the two weeks go by, and Drake still has no impetus to leave. Before he (or we) seem to realize it, three months have gone by, and he is still there.

Meanwhile, the British are beginning to have their doubts about the good doctor, and consequently about his piano tuner, too. Is the doctor really on their side? Or is he setting himself up as a power in his own right, not necessarily in line with the British goals and aspirations for the region?

While not directly forbidding Drake from traveling the last leg of his journey through the jungle to reach the doctor, it has become apparent that they intend to send him back to London, instead. The doctor sends one of his own native “messengers” to escort Drake to him, against the express wishes of the British. Attending them is Khin Myo, the woman assigned to him as his . . . servant? companion? from the time he arrived in Mandalay.

Naturally, he eventually falls in love with Khin Myo, but her role is never entirely clear, certainly not to him. Is she is the doctor's lover already? And yet he (Drake) has no intention of being unfaithful to his wife, to whom he writes occasional lengthy letters. He seems to have fallen unwittingly under the spell of the Orient itself, as expressed in the beauty (and squalor) of Mandalay, and the jungles beyond, a beauty of which Khin Myo is but a personification.

Eventually the British take action, suspecting the worst of the errant doctor AND his piano tuner. The story hurls itself headlong into its seemingly inevitable and yet unfathomable tragic ending.

The incongruous nature of the basic elements of the story—a piano tuner in the jungles of 19^th century Burma—makes for much of the ambiance, as do the thoughts and experiences of the piano tuner. We experience the narrative directly from his perspective, after all. We experience what he experiences. An unusual, but evocative tale. Definitely recommended.

The Pillars of the Earth and Stonehenge

2008-02-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell. New York: HarperTorch, 2000. ISBN (paperback): 0-06-109194-4. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. New York: Signet, 1989. No ISBN listed.

Here we have two great historical novels of England by two great historical novelists. Ken Follett, formerly famous for his spy novels, has turned his hand to medieval history, writing a fictional account of the building of a great English cathedral, during that long period when King Stephen and the Princess Maud fought over the throne. Of course, the story goes back further than that, and takes place over a period of two or more generations.

Follett is a master storyteller, par excellence, and the reader is captured, heart, mind and soul, from the very first page. Played out against the backdrop of civil war, the more immediate story involves a struggle between good and evil. First there is pious Prior Philip, against faithless power-hungry Bishop Waleran. Then the wicked and ruthless Hamleigh family, who dispossess the local earl and his family. Richard and Aliena, the earl's children, are left to make their own way in the world.

And there is also the builder, Tom, and his family. Eventually, it's his adopted son, Jack, who actually finishes the cathedral. Jack and Aliena eventually fall in love, have children, but can't get married, since Aliena was previously married to Tom's son by birth, Alfred, slow, sly and mean, and Waleran blocks any attempt at an annulment. Lots of good vs. evil conflicts happening, everywhere you look.

Follett has recently written a long-awaited sequel, World Without End. Since its release, both books are again very popular in the nation's public libraries, with multiple holds on both. I'll have to wait a good while to get my hands on World Without End, I'm afraid.

Stonehenge takes us back to a much earlier, prehistoric period in Britain's history, and chronicles the building of the greatest of all the circular stone circles found scattered across Britain. Bernard Cornwell is actually the more established author, in terms of writing historical fiction, with his series of novels retelling the Arthurian mythos, and his Saxon Stories, set in King Alfred's time, not to mention his over twenty Sharpe's novels. You can find reviews of the Arthurian books and some of the Saxon tales here on my blog. Check out the "other fiction" index.

But with Stonehenge, he has not even the luxury of any existing history or mythos on which to build. Other than archaeological evidence from the period, he has to make it all up. And while he does a darn good job of it, writing a story that is believable—this could indeed be how it might have, how it could have happened—with characters almost equally compelling to those of Follett, I wasn't quite as happy with this book.

Mainly because the primitive society he depicts is SO utterly savage and uncivilized. Although I'm sure it probably was, it is not as pleasant to read about. Not to say that the “civilized” evil in Follett's book is any more pleasant, really. But I find myself wanting to read and reread sections of Pillars, while I don't think I'll be tempted to reread Stonehenge any time soon. Not that I regret having read it, not at all. It's just not as enjoyable.

That said, both books are recommended. Follett is HIGHLY recommended, while Cornwell, in this instance, is more neutrally presented. Both are well worth reading, but Pillars is essential reading, in my view, while Stonehenge is optional.

The Gospel According to Judas by Jeffrey Archer

2008-01-27T22:08:00.000-08:00

The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot Recounted by Jeffrey Archer with the Assistance of Francis J. Maloney. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-312-37520-1

This book is deliberately presented in a way that seems intended to deceive. The author, Jeffrey Archer, even makes the claim that it's not a novel, but a gospel. Yeah, right, whatever. It is fiction, regardless of what he calls it, and not even very good fiction, at that.

What makes it so potentially confusing to the reader who casually picks it up, is the relatively recent rediscovery, translation from Coptic, and release of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas (in 1999) by the National Geographic Society. So naturally, if one picks up this book, one might think the two are in some way connected. But they're not. In fact, Archer (or Maloney, his pet expert) makes a point of repudiating that gospel by stating in one of the scholarly notes at the end of the book that “The Gospel According to Judas recorded here was not inspired by this text," referring to the Coptic, Gnostic Gospel of Judas.

Additionally confusing is the format and appearance of the story as printed, published and presented to the public. He (or his publisher) puts it in a fancy fakey binding replete with cream paper and a cloth ribbon. The text is divided into chapters and verses, just like the traditional Bible, even though this format has no real meaning in modern times, and makes the narrative more difficult to read.

So where DOES Archer get his alternative version of the story? He made it up out of whole cloth, apparently. In his version, Judas is tricked into betraying Jesus by one of the scribes. It was never his intention to do so. Further, he doesn't kill himself, as stipulated in the traditional gospels. Instead, he flees to join the Essenes in their desert stronghold, where his son finds him still living many years later. He is eventually crucified by the Romans during the Jewish uprising around AD 70.

All though the gospel story as supposedly told by Benjamin Iscariot, the son of Judas Iscariot, based on what his father told him, the real authors, Archer and Maloney, provide citations to the traditional Bible, the existing gospels, Old Testament scriptures, and even from the Apocryphal books Tobit and Judith. Much, if not most of the story is taken pretty much verbatim from the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But guess what: Where the author inserts his own version of the story, when Judas is assigned to roles or parts that never appeared in the original gospels, or where the story markedly diverges from the traditional version, no citations appear here! What gives Archer the right to pick and choose which parts of the traditional story he will accept, and which parts he will reject or change, is not clear at all.

It would be one thing if the book was presented as a novel, as fiction. But no, everything about it, including the author's own remarks about it, give the impression that it is the gospel truth. "It is a gospel, not a short story and not a novel. It is 22,000 words in length," Archer said, as cited in an ABC News story. And in a time where the very word “gospel” carries the additional meaning of something unquestionably true, this comes across as the height of arrogance.

What's worse, he doesn't even do a very good job of it at times. For example, when he retells the story of the paralytic who was lowered down through the roof, because there was no way to get him through the crowds of people surrounding Jesus, Archer puts this story in a synagogue, which hardly seems credible. The only gospel writer who sets a location for the story, Mark (Chapter 2), puts Jesus in a house (King James Version), or “at home” according to other translations. To imagine that folks would have torn up the roof of a synagogue to let the sick man down seems pretty far fetched and unlikely. And what purpose does this change from other versions of the story serve? None, really that I can see.

No, unless anything connected to the Bible is your thing, regardless of its credibility, I wouldn't bother with this novel masquerading as a gospel. Definitely not recommended.

The Gladiator by Harry Turtledove

2008-01-23T20:10:00.000-08:00

The Gladiator by Harry Turtledove. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1486-4

I'm confused. This book is, as it says on the cover, “A Novel of Crosstime Traffic,” but on the title page it says: “Crosstime Traffic—Book Four.” According to my entry on The Disunited States of America, IT was Book Four. And indeed, Disunited States IS the fourth title listed in the series on the Harry Turtledove website. So why The Gladiator claims to be only Book 4, when it appears to me that it is Book 5, is indeed, confusing.

Oh well, who cares which number it is in the series? It's well worth reading, regardless of where it comes in the sequence, and since all of these books stand equally well on their own, it doesn't matter which order you read them in, or even if you read them all, or not.

According to the Turtledove website (which is not maintained by Turtledove, himself, incidentally),

This series will cover the adventures of the employees of Crosstime Traffic, an organization which makes its money by sending traders to various timelines to take advantage of the differences between the timelines. Each work will be set in a different timeline and focus on different characters. The protagonists in each story will be teenagers who must come to terms with their new environments.

For a description of some of the timelines already visited, read my blog entry on The Disunited States. I have yet to read In High Places, presumably Book 3. This book, whether four or five, involves a timeline in which the Soviet Union won the Cold War, instead of the other way around. The book's action is set in The People's Republic of Italy, and all of Europe, and even the United States, are under the domination of the Soviets.

Interestingly, the series description I quoted above is already out of date, since in this volume, the primary characters are a couple of teenagers who are native to this alternate reality, rather than teens visiting from the home timeline, as in previous volumes. So these teens don't need to “come to terms with their new environments,” but instead, having found out out about the alternate reality, they have to learn to deal with that knowledge, and the knowledge that a better, albeit also imperfect, way of life exists elsewhere.

Once again, the story is well written, the characters engaging, and the result is well worth reading. Recommended for fans of the series, and especially recommended for teens, although most adults will probably enjoy it too.

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K. Dick

2008-01-20T22:26:00.000-08:00

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K. Dick. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1690-5

When I think of Philip K. Dick, I think of classic golden era science fiction novels like The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly. Certainly, I had no idea that Dick had also written several realistic novels, published posthumously, that aren't science fiction at all. This being one of them, and the first one I've read.

So, would I read another? Well, maybe, maybe not. Certainly I would never have read this book if anyone else's name had been on the cover. Not that it isn't well written, because it is. But it's not my kind of story, not really. It's got sort of a New Yorker kind of modern post-existentialist, almost surreal quality about it that doesn't really appeal to me. Although, like any well-crafted story, you soon identify with the characters, and want to know what's going to happen to them.

The two main characters both have a Willie Loman kind of quality to them. One is a successful but aging auto mechanic who has just sold his garage for a substantial sum, and is thinking about investing the money in one of those fancy new developments outside of town. Only he doesn't know that he's about to suffer a heart attack. It almost seems like a play on the New Testament parable with its punch line: “But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? (Luke 12:20).

The other character is the young fool, who operates a junky used car lot on the garage property, who is likely to be at loose ends, now that the garage has been sold, and he will probably have to move on, or find something else to do. His marriage is on the brink, he doesn't know what to do with his life, and now he gets caught up in a conspiracy theory kind of existence, thinking not only that the garage owner has betrayed him, but that he (the garage owner) is about to lose his money to some high finance swindlers.

All of this seems to be taking place in a forties or fifties-era America, when life was simpler, but the human condition no less tortured than today. The story certainly gets inside the characters' heads, but they aren't really the kind of people I want to know or care about. Marginally recommended primarily for those who just HAVE to read anything else that the great psychological master, Philip K. Dick, wrote.

Spindrift by Allen Steele

2008-01-13T21:49:00.000-08:00

Spindrift by Allen Steele. New York: Ace Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-441-01471-2

If you're a fan of genuine “hard” science fiction, then this is definitely a book for you. Allen Steele is one of those newer SciFi authors who has kind of slipped in under my radar, so to speak. He's won the Hugo award twice, and I've hardly even ever heard of him before. Shame on me!

This novel is set in his pre-existing “Coyote Trilogy” universe. It's a classic first alien contact novel, an old story, that's been told many times by many authors, but Steele gives it his own unique twist, with more than a few unexpected turns along the way.

Humanity has settled just one other system outside our own solar system, and has barely achieved “hyperspace” technology which allows for FTL (faster than light) travel, via wormholes. At least, I think that's how they do it.

By the end of the novel, they've made contact with that ever suspected, but ever elusive galactic civilization, after first almost accidentally discovering an alien artifact almost in humanity's back yard, so to speak, meaning, just a paltry few light years away.

Definitely recommended in the strongest possible terms for all hard science fiction fans. Now I need to go out and read the rest of his novels, starting with the Coyote Trilogy, but there are five books listed in his “Near-Space Series,” as well, and I imagine I'll want to read them all!

Musical Books Author Index

2008-01-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite genres to read is fiction with a musical theme, or with a musical aspect to the story in some form or other. In the very best examples, the musical element plays a pivotal or crucial role in the plot itself. In others, the music just provides part of the setting or background to the story.

Since I'm a musician myself, and an inveterate bookworm, the combination of these two parts of my life, music and reading, makes for an especially enjoyable exercise for me. Consequently, I am always on the lookout for such books, and read any that I come across. In this post, I've created an index to all of the books on the blog that have a musical aspect to them. They are mostly fiction, but there is some nonfiction included as well. Enjoy!

In addition to this index, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and suspense, "other" fiction and nonfiction indexes are also available.

Ackroyd, Peter: English Music

Askew, Rilla: Harpsong

Baantjer, A.C.: Dekok and Murder by Melody

Charbonnier, Rita: Mozart's Sister

Coleman, Rick: Blue Monday

Conroy, Frank: Body and Soul

Davies, Robertson: The Lyre of Orpheus

de Lint, Charles: The Harp of the Grey Rose

de Moor, Margriet: The Kreutzer Sonata

Drucker, Eugene: The Savior

Eidam, Klaus: The True Life of J.S. Bach

Goldstein, Yael: Overture

Mason, Daniel: The Piano Tuner

Modesitt, Jr., L.E.: The Soprano Sorceress

Rankin, Robert: The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code

Romano-Lax, Andromeda: The Spanish Bow

Tananarive, Due: Joplin's Ghost

Terkel, Studs: And They All Sang

Whitney, Craig: All the Stops

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber

2008-01-06T18:11:00.000-08:00

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber. New York: William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers), 2007. ISBN: 978-0-06-087446-9

Here's another great read for all you book lovers, who enjoy books about books, or books with literary themes, especially if they include a good mystery, and a little suspense thrown in for good measure. Here we have the ultimate literary prize at stake, a totally unknown play by William Shakespeare!

Our primary protagonist is a copyright lawyer, who seemingly ought to be a dull pedant of a fellow, who nonetheless gets caught up in a veritable conspiracy of mysteries. The other person we frequently follow through the story is Albert Crosetti, a would-be film maker working as a clerk in a rare books bookstore, primarily because of his computer abilities, which keep him busy running the online portion of the business, necessary in these contemporary times.

Crosetti is young, just out of college, and his hormones sometimes lead him astray, as when he gets tangled up with the upstairs clerk, an only slightly older, somewhat attractive woman who is involved in a scam, after a fire in the shop. He is helping her restore a rare six volume set of John Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732 edition), so that she can sell it to a third party on the sly, instead of breaking it up and selling off the maps and illustrations, as their boss has told her to do, after it was damaged in the fire.

Inside the end papers, they find an old manuscript, along with some other papers, that set the stage for everything that follows. For the papers are from a man who knew Shakespeare personally, and apparently (if the papers are for real, and not an elaborate hoax or forgery) commissioned him to write a play, which they then hid. An elaborate cypher is naturally involved, not to mention a bunch of Russian mafia types, who are determined to horn in on the action. The play, if it really exists, is undoubtedly worth literally hundreds of millions.

If this isn't enough to hook you on the story, just take my word for it. It's so well written that you'll be sucked in before you finish the first few pages. I haven't read anything else by this author, but I suppose I ought to, if this book is any indication of his usual style and abilities.

My only complaint is that the plot has just a few too many twists and turns, and some of them do strain and stretch my sense of disbelief. I mean, the whole thing just HAS to be a hoax, right? There is no new Shakespeare play to find, after all. Not in real life, anyhow. A month from now, I probably won't remember which plot twists were for real, and which were fake, but like I said at the get go, it was a great read, while it lasted. Definitely recommended.

Once Upon a Summer Day by Dennis L. McKiernan

2007-12-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

Once Upon a Summer Day by Dennis L. McKiernan. New York: Roc, 2005. ISBN: 0-451-46012-X

Here's the second in McKiernan's fantasy series based on the retelling of traditional fairy tales for adult readers. This time, the story is a version of Sleeping Beauty, although I never would have recognized it for such, since much of the interaction between the hero and the princess, take place in their magically shared dreams.

From the first volume, Once Upon a Winter's Night, you will recall that four of the many realms in Faery are linked to the four seasons, each eternally locked in winter, summer, fall or spring. The first story revolved around the lord of winter. Now we move on to his brother, the lord of the summer wood. He dreams of a maiden in distress, locked in a tower, surrounded by swords, hanging in midair.

And he has only until the next full moon to save her from some dire peril. After being cursed by one of his family enemies, a witch of considerable powers, he finds himself in a dungeon, about to be roasted and eaten by ogres and goblins. Escaping by the skin of his teeth, and accompanied by a only small sprite and its faithful companion, a bumblebee, he begins a lengthy quest, full of adventures, as he attempts to locate the sleeping maiden, as they continue to spend time together, gradually falling in love in their intertwined dreams.

I must confess that I was not quite as enthralled this time, as I was with the first volume in the series. I'm not entirely sure why: perhaps the novelty of the concept is wearing off just a bit. And now we've had the tales of the two brothers, and what remain are the sisters, the ladies of autumn and spring. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to reading their tales, and will certainly report on each in its turn, here on Tillabooks. Strongly recommended for all adult fantasy fans of faery tales.

Stork Naked by Piers Anthony

2007-12-23T15:02:00.000-08:00

Stork Naked by Piers Anthony. New York: Tor, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-765-30409-4

Every time I see a new Piers Anthony Xanth novel on the shelf at my local library, I have to suppress a groan. Why? Because this is the 29th Xanth novel, that's why! I don't know of any other successful fantasy series that has run this long.

And because the books are more than just a bit on the hokey side, that's why. Filled with bad puns sent in by faithful readers who crave that bit of recognition they get in the author's note at the rear of the book, where Anthony spends almost three solid pages just listing the puns and the names of the lucky sods who sent them in.

Nevertheless, every time, out of some sense of duty or misplaced loyalty, I bring the book home from the library anyhow. And after it sits around on a pile of other library books for a few weeks, I give in, and start reading it. And every time, I'm pleasantly surprised once again, at just how entertaining a story writer Piers is. Even plowing over this extremely over tilled ground, he still manages to craft a story that makes you want to find out what happens next, and creates a new batch of characters that engage your interest and sympathy.

Not to mention that by now, he's brought in just about every trick in the book to provide him with new grounds to till. He's created entire alternate worlds to visit (the planets that orbit around Princess Ida's head, or the dream world found inside any handy hypno-gourd, for instance), but now he resorts to another tired old trick, alternate realities. As if Xanth itself weren't enough of an alternate reality all on its own! But now we have the infinite alternate realities that theoretically are created every time there is the slightest possibility of any divergence of events.

Honestly, Piers, Xanth seems a sufficiently magical place all on its own that you didn't need to resort to split realities too! Oh well. So far, I've gone along for the ride on all 29 Xanth novels, and I imagine I'll go along on the next one, too. Half-heartedly recommended for the general fantasy reader, and semi-enthusiastically recommended for all Xanth fans.

Snake Oil Science by R. Barker Bausell

2007-12-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine by R. Barker Bausell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-19-531368-0

This is an incredibly illuminating book. An absolute must read for anyone involved in anything medical, whether mainline or alternative or complementary, or whatever. If you are an intellectually honest person involved in those fields, you really MUST read this book. If you don’t, then I question your intellectual honesty, flat out. If you are a person hunting for medical answers, if you have ever gone to any practitioner of any alternative medical treatments, again, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It is definitely an eye-opener.

My only complaint about the book is its title. I don’t know if the author himself suggested it, but I hope not. My guess would be that the title was imposed by some editor somewhere. It is really an unfortunate choice. If you’re a naturopath, or a chiropractor, or an acupuncturist, or anyone else involved in any of the areas typically defined as “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), how likely are you to read a book that by its very title, implies that you are a practitioner of snake oil medicine? The title is insulting, and I don’t think it’s fair to the author, or the book itself, which bends over backwards to be fair, objective, and quite the opposite of what the title implies.

So what does the book do? It lays out quite objectively, in relatively easy to read language, the bona fide, credible, scientific evidence related to complementary and alternative medicine. The author spends an entire chapter defining exactly what he means to cover under the label CAM, and eventually defines it as follows:

CAM therapies are physical, mental, chemical, or psychic interventions such as acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, chelation, folk medicine, herbs, megavitamin therapy, nutraceuticals, chiropractic manipulation, massage, biofeedback, hypnosis, yoga, tai chi, qi gong, and any sort of energetic, psychic, or spiritual healing used for the treatment of specific medical conditions or disease symptoms.

He probably could have stopped there, but he continues his definition thusly:

They are practiced in the absence of both scientific evidence proving their effectiveness and a plausible biological explanation for why they should be effective, and their practice continues unabated even after (1) there is scientific evidence that they are ineffective and (2) their biological basis is discredited.

The author describes himself as a research methodologist, or a biostatistician, a rather tedious occupation which mostly involves examining the methodologies of scientific research studies, and crunching numbers for statistical validity. According to the author, this book could not have been written even as recently as 1999, because the scientific evidence on which it is based did not yet exist. In the author’s words,

Now, however, enough evidence has accumulated to permit the first scientific evaluation of complementary and alternative medicine. And that is what this book is about.

The book attempts to answer the following question:

Is any complementary and alternative medical therapy more effective than a placebo?

To answer that question, the author proposes to examine and attempt to answer four related questions:

Is there such a thing as a placebo effect? In other words, can a completely bogus therapy work?
Is there something that has been demonstrated to take place within the body that could explain how a placebo effect occurs? In other words, if there is evidence that a placebo effect exists, are these results consistent with findings from other scientific disciplines?
Is there such a thing as a CAM effect over and above what can be attributed to the placebo effect?
Is there something that has been demonstrated to take place within the body that could explain how one or more of these CAM effects occurs? Again, this addresses the issue of whether or not the existing evidence is consistent with what we know about the biology of the human body.

Now, to me, these are completely fascinating questions, questions to which I really want to know the answers. Are there definitive answers available, based on sound scientific studies? Yes, according to our author, and this book takes us through the process of understanding what makes a scientific study scientific, what makes it reliable, and more importantly, what more often makes it unreliable, and how to interpret the results of such studies. He then examines the evidence that is actually available, focusing, naturally, on those that are the most reliable, for the reasons he clearly explicates, and tells us what those studies say about the answers to the questions posed above.

So what is the answer? Is there any evidence of any CAM effect over and above the placebo effect? I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to read the book. And believe me, it’s well worth reading. Highly recommended!

Invasive Procedures by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston

2007-12-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

Invasive Procedures by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. New York: Tor, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7653-1424-6

“This novel,” writes co-author Aaron Johnston in the “Acknowledgments” at the front of the book, “is based on my screenplay adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s short story ‘Malpractice,’ which was first published in Analog Science Fiction in 1977.” He then goes on to explain the process by which he and Card expanded the short story into a full-length screenplay, and then into this novel.

The book itself is a medical viral contagion thriller much in the vein of Michael Chrichton’s Andromeda Strain, brought up-to-date (and beyond) with current developments in DNA and genome science. The plot involves your typical megalomaniacal mad scientist type with a plot to make over the world’s DNA, and replicate himself genetically, memory and all, in the process, rendering himself effectively immortal.

The story is based in extrapolations from current genetic, DNA and viral research developments, taken presumably just a few years into the future, since the milieu in which the story takes place could easily be today, or anytime within the next decade or two. But the actual science involved seems quite a bit beyond current developments, and some of it, frankly, is not all that believable, especially the bits where a computer chip gets implanted in your brain, with the ability to download the mad doctor’s memories on top of yours.

So, while I had difficulty in suspending my sense of disbelief at times, the story is nevertheless very well written, quite suspenseful, full of good characterizations, people you can identify with, and a good, solidly entertaining read. I wouldn’t have expected less from anything associated with Orson Scott Card, who remains one of my all time favorite authors. Definitely recommended for anyone looking for a good medical oriented scifi thriller.

Iron John by Robert Bly

2007-12-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly. Reading, Massechusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990. ISBN: 0-201-21720-5

This is a book about male initiation. It is the author's contention that modern men are suffering from a lack of initiation rites, formal or informal; rites which were practiced in the past, and which are still practiced by less “civilized” societies. Due to this lack, many men do not know how to BE men.

The images of manhood that are promulgated by modern society are unsatisfactory. Even the many modern men that have attempted to discover their feminine sides, to become “sensitive” men, have, according to the author, found that this is not enough. It is not enough to reject the dark side of manhood, the macho, “domineering mode that has led to repression of women and their values for centuries.” No, something more is needed, and Robert Bly, the author, tries with this book to explain what that something more is. I'm not sure he altogether succeeds, at least for me, but it is most certainly a valiant effort.

He uses as his sustained metaphor throughout, the tale of Iron John, a “fairy tale” collected by the Grimm brothers early in the 19^th century. The different parts of this fairy tale are used to symbolize the different psychological or developmental stages in a man's life. Invariably, I can find parallels between my own personal life experience, and some of the life stages described by Bly, but often only partially, or imperfectly, and certainly not all of them.

An interesting book, but since, as the author himself acknowledges, it is never the case that "one size fits all," for me, at least, reading it was not a life-changing experience. I'm not sorry I read it, but I'll readily admit that my personality type is one that resists introspection, which probably makes my reaction typical for men such as myself. If you're male, and introspection IS your thing, this book would undoubtedly prove a useful and worthwhile tool.

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

2007-11-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay. New York: Roc, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-451-46129-2

Here we have a superior entry in that most difficult of genres to pull off, the modern life fantasy. I have to call it fantasy, because of the supernatural nature of the storyline. Ned, our primary protagonist, is the 15-year-old son of a famous American photographer, who is with his dad and several assistants in Provence, France, shooting pictures for a book.

While visiting the local cathedral, Ned meets a girl his own age, another American, from a student exchange program. And the two of them run into a very strange man, exhibiting some rather strange behavior, and right there in the cathedral, Ned has a kind of epiphany. Suddenly he seems to know things instinctively, things that don't make a lot of sense on the surface. Things that relate to the strange fellow they run into.

It seems that there are two men, thousands of years old, who have to keep coming back, kind of like the Wandering Jew of legend, over and over again, competing to win the affection of a woman. Only the woman returns by means of inhabiting the body of someone contemporary, whoever happens to be available in the right place at the right time. The time being Beltaine, the old Gaelic holiday celebrated around the beginning of May, and the place being Oppidum d'Entrement, an ancient ruin, a Celtic settlement from the pre-Roman era.

That's the story in a nutshell. Ned, the girl he meets, his father, their companions, and others, all get caught up in the ancient story, as it is relived one last time. Guy Gavriel Kay is obviously a master of his craft, and the story is completely engrossing, one of those page turners that grabs you from the beginning and won't let you go until you finish it. The age of the main characters, teenagers, and the coming of age aspects to the story, will likely make this book attractive to teens as well as adults.

My only quibble relates to the reason it's so hard to write fantasy in modern settings, like this. When Ned has to try and explain what's going on to his father and the rest of the group, they naturally don't believe it, not at first, anyway. Would you? I wouldn't. This is the part of the story that is the least successful. It's the kind of moment when (if it were a movie), you want to just shut your eyes until it's over. There's no way around it; this kind of supernatural stuff just doesn't mix with reality. We know it's not real, and to persuade the real people in the story (read, modern, contemporary people much like you or me) that it IS real, is just not going to be very believable, no matter how well it's written.

Still, put those two or three episodes aside, and the rest of the story makes for a real barn burner. Highly recommended.

Voodoo Science by Robert Park

2007-11-21T20:57:00.000-08:00

Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Robert Park. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-19-513515-6

This book is a real eye-opener when it comes to phony science, misguided science, or wishful thinking masquerading as science. The author, a bona fide scientist, a physicist, in fact, explains some of the ins and outs of how science works, how it doesn't work, and why so many of us get fooled so much of the time.

He also explains how the media and its obsession with headlines and telling sensational stories contributes to the gullibility of many. Some of the specific examples Park covers include cold fusion, homeopathy, NASA's obsession with putting people in space, and various claims to have invented perpetual motion or energy devices.

The book is written in simple language that anyone can understand, and provides an excellent overview of why so much phony science gets publicized and believed in by so many in our society today. A book that deserves to be widely read, and which should be read by anyone interested in separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to modern science. Definitely recommended.