Mad Times

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

Second book in Stross's Merchant Princes series. In this volume, Miriam begins exploring another alternate world and opening it to commerce while in the other two known alternate Earths various and sundry plots thicken. Miriam continues to be hyper-competent (and hyper-lucky) to a degree that strains credulity. I suspect these books might be enjoyed more by people who are more Economics-geeky than I am. Still, Stross can spin a yarn interestingly enough to keep the pages flipping by. This volume has some nice character building for some of the minor women characters from the first book including quite a few interesting revelations about Miriam's foster mother.

Dzur by Steven Brust

I can't think of another author who writes books that are as entertaining as Steven Brust's. Vlad Taltos, the protagonist of the series this is the tenth volume in, is a flawed, sarcastic, intelligent character who has had some significant growth over the course of the series while remaining fundamentally himself. This volume is lighter on plot than most of the books, but it makes up for it with a whole stack of in-jokes and a lovely framing device in the lush descriptions of a multi-course meal that start each of the seventeen (of course) chapters.

I should probably read it again cause I went pretty fast and by the end I completely couldn't understand why it was necessary for Vlad to enlist the assistance of Vera to get out of the fix he was in. Seemed like overkill.

But the book is fun and brings back some beloved characters and moves the story along. Definitely not the place to start, so catch up on the series before you hit this volume.

The Family Trade by Charles Stross

Miriam is a journalist reporting on corporate startups and venture capital. With the help of research assistant Paulette, she uncovers a massive money laundering operation. Rather than making her career, the discovery gets her fired and possibly stalked. If that weren't enough, her adoptive mother gives her a box of things relating to her birth mother. Among those things is a locket with a strange pattern inside. When Miriam examines it closely she finds herself abruptly transported from her cosy home in Boston to a cold dark wood.

In over her head in two worlds is about the size of it. But Stross's Miriam is a strong swimmer.

I was very distracted in the first few chapters when I wasn't sure whether the setting was England or New England. Mostly it seemed like the US, but there was just enough ambiguity ("Cambridge" doesn't narrow it down for example) and misplaced British terms to keep throwing me off. Also I think I was reading it too sporadically to get into the setting.

Miriam is one of those hyper-competent protagonists who are fun to read about but hard to believe. Fortunately Stross writes a tale with enough mysteries and a fast enough pace to distract you from the implausibility.

Frogs Into Princes by Richard Bandler and John Grinder

A friend of a friend suggested this as a good introduction to the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). The book is the transcript of a three-day seminar taught by the authors. The seminar was attended by mental health practitioners, so even apart from the content of the lectures, it's fascinating being a fly on the wall for such a gathering.

Bandler and Grinder call themselves modellers. They observe people who are successful in a domain and try to determine what it is that they're doing that makes them succeed. Once they figure that out they teach others how to use those methods. Seems like a good idea.

They're full of examples of ways in which the field of psychology/psychiatry fails badly in its supposed goal of making people happier and more effective members of society. As an alternative they lay out a system based on using the patient's sub-conscious mind to change their behavior. The methods are very close to hypnotism, but without most of the stereotypical baggage of that practice. There are no trances, they just talk to the patient, pay careful attention to the patient's conscious and unconscious reactions, and just tweak their psyche.

I haven't tried it, but I have friends who have had positive results from working with NLP practitioners. Seems pretty interesting. I might give it a try one of these days.

The book is out of print. I found a copy at the Seattle Public Library.

The Armies of Memory by John Barnes

Don't go anywhere near this book unless you're caught up on the series. (A Million Open Doors, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls) Earth Made of Glass especially has significant bearing on the events here.

The book starts off with spy/agitator/troubador Giraut Leones performing a concert in celebration of his 50th birthday, and nearly getting killed in the process. Many more assassination attempts follow. It seems like the plot moves along less in this volume than in the previous volumes. The dust jacket claims that this is the "Climactic Conclusion" of the series, but if so, it's a pretty unlikely conclusion if you ask me. But I never believe a word I read on a dust jacket anyway.

Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross

Dang, I'm letting these go too long. Finished this some time back in August. It's connected to Singularity Sky, but not a sequel really, just some common characters who you'll recognize if you've read the previous book.

The main character is Wednesday, a 16-year-old goth girl who lives on a space station. Wednesday has a friend named Herman she has never seen. Herman speaks to her sometimes (through a communications implant if I remember correctly), and has taught her all sorts of useful skills mostly related to sneaking around the station without getting caught. As the book opens, the station is in the final stages of evacuation prior to the arrival of the wave front of the violent and unexpected explosion of a nearby(-ish several light years away) star. Wednesday isn't on the escape ship, instead she's still on the station running away from a robotic police dog set on capturing her. Why's she still on the station? Only Herman knows.

I can't remember too many of the details of the plot, but even if I could, they'd be spoilers and I wouldn't tell you. Wednesday basically continues on the run for the full length of the 400+ page book. She picks up some more enemies set on her destruction as well as a few allies in addition to the mysterious Herman. Most of the motive for all this is related to the fact that the exploding star didn't explode by accident, someone set it off.

It's a fun little espionage thriller.

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

Another flashback review. I finished this back in early August and gave my copy away so I can't check back.

The book starts out from the point of view of a young singer, part of a travelling company which has been chosen to perform the funeral rites for a monarch. During a break in the performance he follows one of his fellow performers when she leaves the group and suspiciously creeps through obscure passages in the palace. In this way, the young man finds out that some of his cohorts have ulterior motives. He also finds out that they will go to rather extreme measures to distract anyone from finding out what those motives are.

Later that night, he follows his newfound knowledge into a situation that shows that the conspiracy he has glimpsed is more subtle, more widespread, and more powerful than he could have suspected.

The gist (and this is kind of spoilery even though these revelations come in the first couple chapters) is that there are two competing wizards who are locked in a fragile balance of power over control of the various principalities of the region. The son of one of the wizards was killed in a battle to conquer a country. In revenge, the wizard erases the name of that country. No one who was not born there can hear the name spoken, or remembers that it ever was. All physical artifacts of the country's culture are summarily destroyed. The country is renamed as if it were a sub-region of another country, long its enemy.

Of course, the country's name is Tigana. The conspiracy the young singer has discovered is made up of citizens of that country and their goal is to get their homeland back. The rest of the book (and there's a lot of "rest", it's a doorstop, even in paperback) shows the course of their attempt.

It's a significant achievement to write a book of this complexity about such an unlikely conspiracy and have each twist and turn of the plot feel relatively realistic. It would have been easy for the thing to feel like it had been engineered rather than being an account of actual events in the lives of real people. While some of the events are awfully unlikely, Kay manages to show the people who participate in and precipitate these events in a way that made me believe them capable of the feats they are depicted as having achieved.

Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

I've got a big backlog of reviews to write. It's been over a month since I finished this book, and my copy of it stayed in the Philippines, so I can't cheat and look up the names and such. That's my excuse for the vague.

Archaeologist dude with a past (heh. He had trouble on a dig where he found cool stuff and tried to keep it away from the indigenous folks whose land it was on) is led to a cave in the Alps where the thoroughly frozen and well-preserved bodies of a man, a woman, and a child lie. They appear to be a transitional stage between cro-magnon and homo-sap (or whatever the right terms are). The couple that led him there disturb the site and on the way down the mountain there's an accident throwing everything into uncertainty.

Elsewhere, a biotech firm is foundering, while the wife of the founder is attempting to rustle up customers for their gene therapy in the former Soviet Union, and incidentally running across 50-year-old mass graves that seem to have resulted from an attempt to stop a plague that had something to do with pregnancy (the bodies of the women are pregnant, mothers, fetuses, and fathers were all killed before being interred.)

We soon find out that there's a virus going around that causes miscarriages.

And the rest of the book has our characters stumbling around trying to find out what the heck is going on.

Bear is a fine writer so the resulting book is readable, but it feels like the final solution came first and he then tried to figure out ways to keep his characters from figuring it out too soon. The result just felt too engineered to be real for me. There's a sequel which might be the book he wanted to get to, so I'll probably give it a chance.

Singer by Jean Thesman

This was the last book I read for this year's Endeavour Award. I actually "read" a couple other books that didn't meet the criteria for writing them up here. I only post books that I read the whole book with no skimming. Some of the last few books (which shall remain nameless) were so clearly not contenders that I did some serious skimming so I could get on to the next one.

This book had its moments, but it came close to making me skim too. It's playing with a Welsh folk tale and there's a prologue that outlines the tale (in which a king's beautiful children are turned into swans by their evil step mother until another woman comes along to break the curse). The problem I had is that most of the events of the book tell the tale of the woman who broke the curse and while there are all kinds of portents and signs that presage the whole swan children episode, the story has nothing to do with the swan children until it's practically over. I think this could have worked, but the backstory Thesman puts together for her curse breaker just wasn't as engrossing as that brief summary of the fairy tale. And once the swan children do appear the telling of their tale really isn't much longer than the summary so there's no real payoff.

I guess I should have spoiler warnings on this stuff, but it just seemed like the book was self-spoiling, so I can't bring myself to care enough to bother.

The Gist Hunter & Other Stories by Matthew Hughes

Picked this up to read from the pool for the Endeavour Award.

The stories are in three sections. The first section focuses on a character with the unlikely name of Henghis Hapthorn. Hapthorn is a discriminator, which is basically a private investigator. He is the self-proclaimed (and apparently otherwise acclaimed) best discriminator there is. Not sure why he had to be the best for the stories to work. Maybe just to account for the character's planet-sized ego. Each story poses a puzzle which Hapthorn solves with the sometimes help of his homebuilt computer and his buddy the demon from another dimension.

The second section follows Guth Bandar. Bandar is an aspiring noönaut, a navigator of the cultural subconcious which exists as an array of interconnected alternate realities each representing a historical Event, an archetypical Situation, or a basic setting or Landscape. These stories show how Bandar gets into (and out of) various tricky situations (of both capitalizations) in his quest to master the noönaut's trade.

The final section consists of a near handful of stand alone stories.

Most of the stories in the book appeared previously in some form (all but one of the Hapthorn stories, for example, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). They all have a rather pleasing mix of fantasy and sf qualities (except the final story which is straight fiction and possibly my favorite of the bunch). Most of the stories were a bit over-written for my taste. A bit too much hooptedoodle, though it was executed well enough that it tended to fade into the background somewhat. Anyway, decent stories, but not really my thing.

Od Magic by Patricia A. McKillip

I think it was high school English class that instilled in me a skepticism about theme as an identifiable element of fiction. I was always of the opinion that it might be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex work, but felt that it was unlikely to be carefully engineered into any work I would want to read. This attitude makes me suspicious of any work where I feel like the there is an identifiable theme, moral, or lesson.

I say all that to explain my mixed feelings about Od Magic. The book is clearly about the costs of fear. How a population can be subdued by it, how it can incapacitate individuals, how it can corrupt those who wield it. It seems clear to me that this book was inspired by and serves as a commentary on the current US political environment. And the fact that I am in complete agreement with the points Ms. McKillip seems to be making with the book doesn't change the fact that I'm a little uncomfortable reading a novel that appears engineered to make those points.

And yet, despite the transparency of the motivation, McKillip, a master of her craft, has wrapped her message in a story that is actually interesting and peopled it with characters who are not cardboard cutouts. When I smacked my trepidation upside the head and locked it in the closet, I was left with a book that had me eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next. Don't get me wrong, it's not a unique story (man is confronted by mysterious stranger who sends him to the city to a school for magic. It's been done to death, even by McKillip), but it's presented with enough twists and charming details to make it feel both fresh and timeless.

So my prejudices aside, here is a pleasant book with some relevant social commentary. What was I complaining about?

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

Ms. Butler died in February of this year at the far-too-young age of 58. This was the last book she published. It's also the first book of hers that I've read.

This is one of those books that slowly reveals what's going on as the book progresses, so it's really hard to write a spoiler-free review.

It's told in first person narration by a young girl who awakens in a cave horribly wounded with no recollection of how she got there or who she is. Over the course of the first chapter she gets better (physically), and she gets better fast enough that you already are suspecting that there's something not quite human about her.

The events of the first two chapters are extremely shocking. The next few chapters reframe the shocking events to be less shocking. The shocking events are such that I expect to hear of attempts to ban this book by people who stopped reading at the shocking bits.

Ah hell, it doesn't spoil things too much to tell you that the narrator is a vampire. And that while that is shocking, it's not the most shocking thing in the first few chapters. And that Butler has tried to write a book with somewhat realistic vampires who could have inspired, but don't too closely match the common lore about vampires in our culture. Her vampires and their culture are fascinating and alluring.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book. The second half I enjoyed less, mostly because it strayed into the territory of courtroom drama which isn't my favorite. The ending made me sad, mostly because I'd grown to like these characters quite a lot and there won't be any more stories of them from Ms. Butler.

Runner by William C. Dietz

Runner is set in an almost post-technological far future. There was an interplanetary culture with frequent starship transit between planets. All that technology has been operating on automatic for a couple of centuries and it's starting to break down. The book follows Jak Rebo, a "runner" or courier. In the first chapter he is commissioned to deliver a young boy to a far-flung planet. The boy is thought to be the reincarnation of a religious leader. What complicates the task is that an opposing sect of the same religion has another boy that they think is the true reincarnation. Lanni Norr is a "sensitive", apparently a genetically modified human with psychic powers including the ability to communicate with the dead. She is in contact with a spirit who wants to bring back the technological era. She ends up joining Rebo and the boy.

The setting is really the most interesting part of this book. But not interesting enough to keep me from wanting to learn how to speed read so I could get through the thing in less time (I was reading it for the Endeavour Award screening process, otherwise I would have just stopped). The plotting feels very much like a role playing game campaign without much lattitude for player variations. Lots of plot coupons, lots of cardboard minor characters helping the main characters through their various trials. If it had been half as long it might have been tolerable, but at over 400 pages, it was just not enough story spread over too many pages. It's not really bad, I suspect there's an audience that will lap this up and beg for more (the end leaves plenty of room for sequels), but I'm not that audience.

Red Thunder by John Varley

I've been a Varley fan for a long time, but his novels have always been hit or miss for me. This one is a hit. In a near future, a couple of space crazy late teens go joy riding on the beach with their girlfriends after watching America's first manned mission to Mars lift off. They narrowly avoid squishing a very drunk ex-astronaut and start a friendship with him and his eccentric genius cousin. Through the magic of some sufficiently advanced technology, some nationalistic fervor (a Chinese Mars mission is going to beat the Americans there), and a suspicion that the American mission's new drive technology has the potential to fail catastrophically, this unlikely group determines to build a space ship and head to Mars themselves.

The "teenagers build a spaceship" thing has been done repeatedly in the history of SF, but in my opinion never with as much credibility and humor as Varley pours into this tale. The characters are somewhat charicatured, but they do have personalities that make them feel real despite the cliches. Plus, the fun of having a semi-plausible wish fulfillment fantasy like this story going on pretty much swamps any such minor concerns. And it looks like the fun will continue as Red Lightning is slated to come out in April.

Night Train to Rigel by Timothy Zahn

If I hadn't been reading this as a nominee for the Endeavour Award, I probably wouldn't have finished it. Frank Compton is the protagonist. He used to work for the UN, but he has a problem with politically ill-advised honesty and got fired. As the book opens he's being given a train ticket by a guy who's close to dead from some kind of sci-fi projectile weapon. Compton doesn't know anything about why the guy's there or why he's being given this ticket, so of course he goes and gets on the train. But it's not a choo choo, it's an FTL conveyance with a stop out by Saturn that ties the inhabited systems of the galaxy together. Once he gets out there he finds out it's the "spiders" who run the railway who've given him the ticket cause they have a job for him. They have had a prescient vision of a big war and want him to stop it before it starts.

I have a lot of gripes with the book, but they all boil down to the fact that the author's hand is far too evident for my taste. Compton gets shuffled around by different players in the story for reasons that while they aren't completely arbitrary are pretty close to "Zahn says so". The capabilities of technology are arbitrarily limited or expanded to move the plot along too. I could go on, but I'd rather just put this one behind me. Okay, one more: it's twice as long as it needs to be. Read something else.

Inside Job by Connie Willis

Short novella (90 pages) in a pricey hardcover package ($35)(hooray for the library!). Rob is a professional skeptic, debunking psychics and other charlatans who con the faithful out of their money. His partner in debunkery is Kildy, a beautiful movie starlet who quit the business to follow Rob's calling. Kildy wants Rob to investigate a channeler whose act has recently gotten intriguingly more authentic. When they go to the "seminar" they see the usual channeler mumbo jumbo until half-way through when the channeler abruptly changes personality and starts berating the audience as fools and rubes.

The story plays out with a lovely sense of cognitive dissonance as the debunkers try to determine where the truth lies with a channeler who seems to be trying to debunk herself. The confusion is echoed in Rob and Kildy's relationship where skepticism is standing in the way of truth. It's a fun little story.

End In Fire by Syne Mitchell

It's 2022. Claire Logan is an astronaut about to return home to her husband and their four-year-old son when China sets off a high-altitude nuclear blast in its war with India over one of Earth's last oil fields. That's just the first in a cascading series of Really Bad Things that happen to Earth and/or Claire in the course of the novel.

Mitchell does a really great job of balancing the need for lots of exposition and detail with that for a page-turning peril-filled plot. I'm not one of those SF readers who pulls out his slide rule and double-checks the orbital mechanics of a story, but short of that level of verisimiltude, I felt transported into the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit. I was impressed by how she even used the fundamental gravity contrast as a way to distinguish the planet-side scenes. It's cool how just having a character set down a cup of coffee can seem so alien when you just came out of a scene where great pains had to be taken to keep discarded items from wreaking havoc in microgravity. One of the short films from last week's film festival pointed out just how hard it is to get this kind of stuff right. It was called Microgravity and was set in a similar space station locale to this book. For a low-budget short film it did an amazing job, but there are too many details that remind you that it was filmed in a gravity well. Little things like a seat back flexing every time the actress settled back from reaching for a control just took me out of the movie. Granted, Mitchell is working in a different medium, but she got this stuff right.

I had a little bit of a problem with suspending my disbelief through the series of unfortunate events. I think there were just too many things that went just wrong enough to be scary and force the characters to move on to the next thing, but not wrong enough to be total disasters (for the main characters. Plenty of the events were total disasters for minor characters and for large swaths of mankind). So, yes, I'm simultaneously complaining that there were too many successive awful things, and that the awful things weren't awful enough.

Whining aside, I plowed through the book in short order and, despite the depressing subject matter, enjoyed it.

The Murdering of My Years by Mickey Z.

Subtitled "Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet", the author sent out questionnaires to 22 people whose life work is in activism or art, and asked them how they keep it together financially. The people range from 64 to 22 years old at time of publication and are all over the map in almost every other measurable demographic. The book is structured with a section of bios of the various respondents followed by sections for each question with attributed excerpts from responses to that question. The questions are about current financial situation, jobs held, work experiences, selling out, ideal work situation, impact of decision to be artist/activist on various aspects of life, inspirations, resources, and advice.

I don't think I'd say that I learned anything from the book, but it was interesting to read through all the answers. There aren't a lot of commonalities with this diverse crowd of people. I was struck by how mundane their work experiences are for the most part. Temps, McJobs, and other typical "unskilled" labor was the most common work background. The other things that seemed to be common were debt, parental support, and just plain getting by on not much money.

When they were talking about their chosen life goals, however, the tone was completely different. Passionate expressions of determination, excitement, and pleasure abounded.

I think I would have enjoyed reading the book a lot more if it hadn't been chopped up by question. I'd like to have been able to get more of a sense of the individuals, and it was almost impossible for me to do that when I was getting only a paragraph or two of any one person at a time.

I'd strongly recommend this book to anyone (especially anyone still in college) who's considering an idealistic life path. It probably won't dissuade you (not that it should), but it gives a starkly honest picture of what that choice can mean as it relates to work and money.

Almost forgot, the title is from Charles Bukowski who said, "I always resented all the years, the hours, the minutes I gave them as a working stiff. It actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me dizzy and a bit crazy. I couldn't understand the murdering of my years."

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I had a gajillion different people tell me that I had to read this book. And it's certainly got interesting bits. If you're one of the few people who hasn't read the book or heard the hype, Leavitt is a relatively young and brilliant economist whose most visible skill is in asking interesting questions and then using available data to find out the real answers. Questions highlighted in the book include "Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?" and "Where have all the criminals gone?"

I enjoyed the book, but there were parts of it that bugged me. The main annoyance was the way that they posed questions, gave the actual answers and then told the exciting story of finding the answers. I just would have found the story much more exciting if the answer hadn't been revealed beforehand. I suppose some of the answers were so non-intuitive that I was supposed to disbelieve them until they proved them to me, but I'm really good at suspension of disbelief and read pretty much every book as if it were gospel truth (at least in the context of the book.) My other gripe is that there's really very little of an arc to the book. To their credit they warned me right up front that there wasn't going to be one. But there was kind of a half-hearted arc in that there were principles highlighted at different points that kind of felt like they might fit together in an overall theme, but didn't. I think I would have preferred it if the book had been a series of completely standalone essays.

Okay, I'm kind of being grumpy here. The book really is very interesting and brings out a lot of cool counter-intuitive results through the application of the science of economics. If you don't understand the difference between correlation and causality before you start you should have a pretty good grasp by the time you're done. Plus you'll know what some school teachers have in common with some sumo wrestlers.

The Straight Girl's Guide to Sleeping With Chicks by Jen Sincero

I love living in a world where this book exists. I love living in a world where sex-positive stores like Blowfish can carry it. I love living in a world where I was able to check it out of my local public library so I could easily indulge my curiosity.

In that spirit of personal freedom, how about if I put the rest of this review behind a cut so anyone who might be offended can exercise their right to change the channel before I get to the (mildly) naughty bits.

The book is exactly what you'd expect from the title. Sincero starts off explaining why a straight woman might choose to have a sexual relationship with another woman:

1. the potential fluidity of role changes when both partners have the same equipment and sensibility
   
2. the ability to keep going (and going) past climax
   
3. the fun of simultaneously imagining what you're doing being done to you
   
4. girls are soft and feel good
   
5. getting to do something that makes you feel kinky
   

then spends the remainder of the book getting into the details, like practicing on yourself, strategies for hooking up, techniques, toys, safety, threesomes (girl/girl/boy), and emotional issues. As preparation for the book, Sincero conducted a survey and uses quotes from the responses throughout the book to illustrate various points along the way adding further corroboration to her advice.

I found myself laughing out loud several times at Sincero's irreverent wit. And at the pictures. The section on positions is illustrated with photos of a pair of tattooed Barbie-style dolls.

As a straight guy who regularly sleeps with a chick, and shares all but a couple pieces of equipment with the people this book is aimed at, I expect to be able to put at least some of what I read to good use.

Kris Longknife: Defiant by Mike Shepherd

I've been calling this a military science fiction weepie. Kris Longknife is the daughter of a wealthy political family. Rather than follow the wealth-building arm of the family or the political arm, she joined the Marines. Rather than being a good little soldier she specializes in solving problems by using her natural leadership skills (and some supernaturally competent sidekicks) to foil bad guys' plots through insubordination and out-of-the-box thinking. She's kind of like Miles Vorkosigan, only without the physical handicaps. The book sees her first on a brief diplomatic misson that turns into a hostage rescue. This part of the book didn't have any connection to the later plot that I can recall. It could be that it was wrapping up some issues from one of the previous books (this is the third book in a series, but the first I've read), but it felt like a stand-alone story. Then in the rest of the book she takes command of a meager planetary defense force in an effort to repel a well-armed fleet of invading starships. So there's the military and science fiction parts of the story. The weepie part comes in because in the course of the battle all sorts of people make all sorts of personal sacrifices in an almost certainly doomed attempt to defend their home from the bad guys.

The book is written and paced well enough that it's easy to keep turning the pages, but the plot and setting felt unduly contrived to me. People follow Kris, but it's not clear why. The majority of the book is the leadup and execution of a single intricate battle scene and it was clear almost from the beginning what the outcome would be, at least to this jaded reader. It is a series, after all. A series I probably won't read any more volumes from. (And I only read this one cause I'm scoring books for the Endeavour Award again this year.)

jeffy's 2005 in books

Perhaps a better preposition would be "out of". By my count I finished a whopping 36 books in 2005. I believe this is the fewest books finished by quite a lot since I started keeping track in 1992. I suspect it's the fewest books finished in any year since I got my first library card.

I can't decide which was the worse culprit in this pathetic showing: time spent reading blogs and other stuff on the internet, or time spent watching tv shows on DVD. I'm not prepared to give up either of these activities altogether, but clearly a better balance must be found.

Might have to trim the blogroll a bit. I currently have 190 feeds. This week I kept track, and 110 of those feeds updated for a total of about 1200 entries. That's just one week! Normally I try to read everything dry each day so I don't notice the sheer volume of material I've been going through.

Probably should cut back a smidge on the TV show DVDs too. We've been watching Buffy and Angel regularly and in 2005 watched full seasons of Firefly and West Wing and Joan of Arcadia and Battlestar Galactica and Sex and the City (done with SatC finally). We've got seasons of Seinfeld sitting around and Northern Exposure will come from the library soon.

I'm less begrudging of the time spent watching movies. I'll summarize our year in film in another post.

Shaman's Crossing by Robin Hobb

With this volume, Robin Hobb has graduated to that exalted sphere of authors whose names appear on the dust jackets of their books in larger type than the title (at least on my collection of US hard covers... Can't speak for when or whether this happened for other editions of her books.) This makes me happy because at least for now it means that her books are selling and so there are likely to be more of them. It also gives me hope that we may see the books written under her previous nom de plume, Megan Lindholm, reissued, which would be a very fine thing.

Shaman's Crossing is the first book in a new trilogy. It doesn't appear to be set in the same world as Hobb's previous books, but I wouldn't discard the possibility that they might be somehow linked. The setting finds an early industrial society which has almost completely subjugated a nomadic horse-riding, plains-dwelling, earth-worshipping people, and is starting to encroach on a forest-dwelling people of similar culture. The parallels to the North American conflicts between the First Nations peoples and the white man are blatant, but not precise.

The story is told in first person from the point of view of Nevare Burvelle, the son of a Gernian soldier recently promoted into landed nobility by the king following the long, bloody war with the plains people which, in turn followed a longer, bloodier war with the country of Varnia which lost Gernia their entire coastal holdings. Not a happy political climate. The culture dictates that birth order of the sons of the family strictly dictates the life pursuits of each son. The first-born is the heir, second, a soldier, third into the priesthood, fourth, the arts, etc. Nevare is a second son and so trains from his youth to be a soldier.

The first half of the book follows Nevare's early training, first with his father and a series of hired tutors, then, less conventionally, with a plainsman enemy of his father's who subjects Nevare to trials his father didn't bargain on.

The second half of the book follows Nevare to the Cavalla (read Cavalry) academy.

For much of the book I felt like I had a pretty good idea of the shape the story was going to take. This being the first book, it's not clear that I was completely wrong, but I was definitely surprised by the way this volume played out. I can't be more specific without major spoilers. I was a little disappointed by the second half of the book in that large swaths of it are fairly generic boarding school drama, but Nevare's unique personal challenges, the secondary characters, and the details of the world made it just novel enough to keep me going through all the boilerplate. Next volume should be interesting.

Raven's Strike by Patricia Briggs

I read this book's predecessor, Raven's Shadow when I was scoring books for the 2005 Endeavour Award. It was one of my favorites of those books so when this second volume showed up on the "Choice Reads" shelf at the library, I checked it out.

Again in this volume I really enjoyed the central characters, all members of one family. The fantasy setting is the other major attraction, with a well-realized system of magic where different people are born into certain fairly tightly defined magic ability flavors, each symbolized by a bird. Meadowlark for Healer, Cormorant: weather witch, Owl: bard, Eagle: guardian, Falcon: hunter, and Raven: mage. The family conveniently has members of all the orders but the healer Lark. It's also something of a mystery since not everyone is born into an order and a single family with such a concentration of order-bearers is virtually unprecedented.

The plot of Raven's Strike reveals big chunks of the world's backstory in the bounds of a fairly generic stop-the-big-bad storyline. What makes it fun are the characters, the nature of the world, and Briggs's page-turner pacing.

This volume is also distinctive for having cover art with one of the most annoyingly wrong depictions of a character from its book. The model for the woman on the cover appears to be about sixteen years old and is wearing some sort of ridiculous faux-medieval livery with flowing sleeves, a short skirt, and some kind of cape. The character who actually participated in the scene depicted is a mature, practical mother of three who wouldn't be caught dead in such an absurd costume.

The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod

See if we can finish up the reviews for 2005 here. This story is told in two timelines. The first is far in the future following a major global disaster where Clovis, a history graduate student, meets a woman, Merrial, while he's working a summer job building the first spaceship to be launched following the disaster. Merrial is a "tinker," a member of the small subculture that still mucks about with computer technology and software. The second timeline is before the disaster and follows Myra Godwin-Davidova, the People's Commissar for Social Policy, Prime Minister Pro-Tem, and acting President of the International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic, an entity existing somewhere in the vicinity of Kazakhstan.

The two threads are connected, of course, but how exactly is not revealed until mid-way through the book. I really liked the Clovis and Merrial thread from the beginning, but had a hard time getting traction with the Myra thread until the connection became clear (the connection wasn't really a surprise, but there was enough ambiguity about it that I didn't want to make any assumptions). MacLeod does a wonderful job of writing characters with realistic grey areas. It's not always clear who's acting in good faith. The characters themselves have to muddle through with best guesses about each other's motives. Reading a book where this is true points out how rarely books are written this way. It seems a much more interesting and honest way to tell stories about humans to me.

This book is the fourth in MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. I didn't read them in order, and it doesn't seem to be necessary to do so. I can see that rereading them in different orders is likely to throw different characters and parts of the narrative history into the spotlight. And they're worth rereading both for the characters and the fascinating future history MacLeod put together.

Between the Strokes of Night by Charles Sheffield

Nancy Kress wrote a trilogy (Beggars in Spain (1991), Beggars and Choosers (1994), Beggars Ride (1996)) about what happened when the need to sleep was genetically engineered out of the human genome. In her books, one of the side effects of sleeplessness was drastically extended lifespan.

Sheffield's book, published in 1985, has sleep researchers discover a mode of human physiological function in which need for sleep is drastically reduced while lifespan is even more drastically increased.

It's so cool how effectively these SF tropes can be reused and reformed. Sheffield's book and Kress's trilogy really have very little in common except for the vague details outlined above.

First and foremost, Sheffield's mechanism is much less plausible. They find that by chilling the human body to near freezing (accompanied by some hand waving techie tech additional assistance), they reach a new slowed-down mode where they can operate in a way that seems normal to them but is slowed down 2000 times from "normal" function. I can think of a dozen reasons why this isn't very likely, but who cares.

What Sheffield does with the idea is to tell a story where interstellar travel with sub-lightspeed ships is plausible. You've got to choose your implausibility, you know?

He carves out an entertaining story exploring the implications of this change.

It's interesting that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a story in her Changing Planes about a world where engineering away the need for sleep transformed the changed people into simple beasts with no trace of humanity. Was this a curmudgeonly commentary on the wishful thinking of Sheffield's and Kress's techno-utopian imagining?

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Both Becky and Rachel raved about this so it was a pretty good bet that it'd be good. Of course Robin McKinley wrote it so the odds are even better.

There are some books where half-way through the first chapter you know everything you need to know about the characters and the setting, and then there are the books that slowly unfold, revealing details as they become important to the story so that the world and characters come into progressively sharper focus as the book goes on. Sunshine is a book of the latter sort. And as such, it's very diifficult to write a spoiler-free review because almost anything I could tell you about it is a mystery as the book begins. I'm probably not spoiling too much by saying that it takes place in a world where vampires and werewolves and other demons and monsters are an accepted true part of life.

In such a setting there's a lot of information that has to be communicated to the reader so they know, for example, what sorts of demons there are. McKinley uses a clever device to make these info-dumps palatable: she puts them in the narrator's voice where the narrator, the Sunshine of the title, is a bit of an Other nerd, spending her spare time reading all about the Others. Her voice as someone who knows a little bit too much about her preferred subject is completely convincing and charming enough, in that way that true-geeks always are, that the info-dumps are virtually transparent within the larger narrative.

I don't want to say anything more about it because you should just go and read it for yourself. Go.

Serenity: the Official Visual Companion by Joss Whedon

Okay, so I'm a shameless fanboy. This book consists of the shooting script for the movie Serenity packaged with an extended interview with Joss Whedon and some pre-production documents also written by Whedon. Oh and a whole bunch of pictures from the movie and the production process. It's probably exactly the same stuff that's going to show up as extras on the DVD when that comes out in a few weeks. But when I saw it in the book store my brain went "Shiny!" and handed over the bucks.

On first watching we were pretty disappointed in the movie. We were in the process of watching the series DVDs for the third or fourth time and so we were completely steeped in the characters and the worlds as they were in the show. They changed for the movie in subtle but important ways and to us it was just wrong. After we saw the movie a couple more times the new slant became more tolerable and we could accept the movie on its own terms.

Reading the script makes it clear that the changes were definitely engineered in by Whedon and weren't a strange byproduct of the production process. There is stuff in the script that was cut from the theatrical release too so we're hoping there will be some deleted scenes on the DVD. Inara in particular got cut pretty heavily.

The pre-production memos from Whedon trying to give the production crew a sense of the Firefly universe are fun to read for Joss's self-deprecating yet goofily pompous tone.

It's a nicely put together little book of fan goodies.

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

The conceit of this book is that the period of loose-endedness one has while waiting in an airport for one's connecting flight, far from being boring wasted time, puts one in a position to (literally) visit other planes of existence. The book is made up of 16 short pieces describing different planes visited by the narrator through the auspices of the Interplanary Agency which mediates and facilitates travel between the various planes. Each entry is part travelogue and part fable, using the strange ways of living on these other worlds to examine the variety of ways in which thinking beings can relate to their environments and each other.

I could reduce many of the planes to a brief description (the plane where no one speaks aloud, the warrior plane, the plane where never sleeping was a very bad idea), but condensing Le Guin is not a satisfying activity. She is an author who has more original thoughts before breakfast than I have in a week, and a facility with prose that is unmatched. I have a hard time being reasonable about Le Guin. She is a true master.

That said, I had a hard time getting through the book. I think I've had it out from the library for three months. This almost surely has more to do with my state of mind than any failings of the book. I did plow through the last third in a few hours on vacation last week. I was just flipping through the first couple of chapters before writing this entry, and I can't see what could have been holding me up, so probably just mood. If you're the sort of person who likes Le Guin, then this is the sort of thing you will like.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Fat Charlie Nancy discovers at his father's funeral that said father was Anansi, the trickster god in spider form. Fat Charlie also learns at the funeral that he has a brother, Spider, he has never known. Fat Charlie invites his brother for a visit and his life is never the same.

Fat Charlie is a pretty typical Gaiman protagonist, an everyman who's not prepared to find the supernatural becoming a part of his everyday life. So when Spider comes along and starts passing for Fat Charlie (first with his boss, and then with his fiance), Fat Charlie goes to some unthinkable lengths to get his life back.

The book is very light in tone. While some fairly awful things happen to some of the characters, they're not the sorts of things liable to give you nightmares. Fat Charlie and Spider are both likable in their own ways and concern for each of them keeps some level of suspense rolling even in the face of a story that seems assured of a happy ending from the beginning. Fun quick read.

Creating 3-D Animation by Peter Lord and Brian Sibley

I was looking at the photography section in the library and the subtitle of this bright yellow book caught my eye: "The Aardman Book of Filmmaking". I pulled it down and sure enough, Wallace and Gromit grace the cover in all their toothy plasticine glory. It's a neat book. It starts off with an extensive illustrated history of stop-action animation from the early days of Edward Muybridge's motion studies up through George Pal and Ray Harryhausen and all the rest. There are lots of names covered from all around the world showing that animation isn't just Disney. And if the various denizens of the Aardman studios get a bit more coverage than anyone else, well, they did write the book, after all.

The rest of the book has purely practical chapters about basic equipment, simple technique, modelmaking, set design, animation and performance, and finally putting it all together to make a film. Each chapter is generously illustrated with examples from Aardman films and these illustrations make the book worthwhile reading even if you have no intention of doing your own animation. It's a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of their wonderful films, mostly the Wallace and Gromit shows, but also the earlier stuff and a couple of peeks at Chicken Run which was in production as the book was being written. But even if you have no intention of doing your own animation going in, you'll surely be tempted by the time you finish.

The emphasis is, predictably, on film and model stop-action work. Even so, there's enough stuff in here about animation in general that any aspiring animator is sure to pick up a few useful tips.

Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons

I thought I kept a pretty close watch on Dan Simmons's production, but this book slipped right by me until a friendly librarian recommended it last week. I might have missed it because Simmons is genre shifting again. This book is a straight crime drama thriller, not horror, not science fiction.

Protagonist Darwin Minor is an independent accident reconstruction expert. His job is to figure out what chain of events resulted in the aftermath that's usually all anyone sees of a fatal accident. Early on in the book, someone tries to kill him for reasons he can't fathom. It quickly becomes clear that the murder attempt is connected to an ongoing investigation of a suspicious series of botched insurance fraud attempts. And the rest is the mystery so I'll just shut up.

The book is written in a really interesting voice. It's third person, not first, but the things being told are all the things that Minor would notice.

The book is very tightly plotted and I'd be astonished if the film rights aren't a hot property. It's got car chase gun fights, explosions, snipers, elaborate car crashes, snappy dialogue, a little gratuitous sex, a sweet love story, and a glider vs. helicopter dog fight. What's not to love? I'd pay 8 bucks to see it in the theatre. Great fun.

The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (2005) ed. by Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden

If you step back and think about it, fiction is an amazing thing in and of itself. It's a little boggling that abstract symbols can be processed through your eyes to assemble a virtual reality in your brain that can seem nearly as real as anything in the outside world. I find that short fiction accentuates this effect much as the first bite of a sinful dessert is often the most intense and satisfying part of the experience.

Nielsen Hayden and Yolen have assembled a whole trolley full of intense experiences in this new (first annual) collection of speculative fiction short stories with maximum teen-appeal.

The first story is "The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link which tells about a young woman's relationship with her grandmother and the grandmother's curious relationship with her possibly enchanted handbag.

"Blood Wolf" by S. M. Stirling is set in the world of some of Stirling's novels, an alternate history Earth where Nantucket island is sent back in time to the Bronze Age. The title character is a young, we might say "savage", viking man coming to seek his fortune in the new world.

Lynette Aspey's "Sleeping Dragons" is set in Australia and told from the point of view of a young girl whose human-seeming brother hatched from an egg.

"Endings" by Garth Nix is an ambiguous short-short about joy and sorrow.

David Gerrold wrote "Dancer in the Dark", one of the longer entries. In it, something bad has happened to the world and a refugee boy is transported to a small farming community in the American midwest to work for his keep in the strangely dark world of its denizens. As much as I agreed with the message of this story I found its metaphor a bit too transparent (no pun intended) for it to work well as a story.

"A Piece of Flesh" is by Adam Stemple who I know as the excellent guitarist of Boiled in Lead (he's also the son of Jane Yolen who disclaims having been the one to choose his story for this collection). The story is of a young girl who is the only one who notices that her little brother has been kidnapped and replaced with a changeling.

Delia Sherman contributes "Catnyp", a fun little urban fantasy set in the New York Public Library. Sort of.

The collection starts a tradition of including one story from the early days of the genre, and in this volume that story is "They" by Rudyard Kipling (published in 1904), a sort of ghost story that is as mysterious today for its unaccustomed style and setting as for its subject matter.

"The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" by Theodora Goss is set in North Carolina after the Civil War when a violin-playing German appears in town and captures the imagination of a rebellious young woman.

"Displaced Persons" by Leah Bobet tells what happened to the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys after she died. From the monkeys' point of view.

Finally, Bradley Denton's "Sergeant Chip" is told from the point of view of an intelligence-enhanced army dog explaining how and why he came to kill eighteen soldiers in defense of the people in his care.

It's a very good collection of stories, just as you'd expect from editorial superstars like Yolen and Nielsen Hayden. They accentuate each story with brief sensitive introductions along with suggestions for other books with similar subject and tone to each story. I look forward to next year's edition.

Digital Photography Hacks by Derrick Story

I bought my first O'Reilly & Associates book in 1986 at the bookstore on the Cal State Stanislaus campus where I was a Math/CS undergrad. It was a book about Usenet and I still have it, though I haven't used a news reader in close to a decade (unless you count the web interface at http://groups.google.com/, which I suppose you should now that I think about it). O'Reilly titles were always written for geeks by geeks, and this current volume is proof that they still are.

This is not a reference manual, and it's not a "how to take pictures" tutorial. It is just what the subtitle declares: "100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools". They're a wild variety of tips. How to take pictures of a white board. How to take soft focus portraits with a panty hose filter. How to take pictures of fireworks or little kids or the moon. Useful things to do with a camera phone. Common photoshop touch up operations. And lots of other stuff. You can look at the Table of Contents for yourself. I won't use every single one of these hacks, but a majority of them sound like fun to try and a bunch more are things it's good to know exist in case I'm ever in a situation to need them (like the existence of a camera mount that clamps to a partially rolled-down car window, or how to take my own passport pictures) so I will be buying a copy of this to add to my multitude of O'Reilly titles.

Something From the Nightside by Simon R. Green

The setting of this book is so nearly identical to that of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (published in 1998 after the Gaiman-scripted BBC miniseries from 1996. Green's book is copyright 2003.) that I had a hard time not trying to fit Neverwhere into this book as backstory. It doesn't really work, though since the flavors of the two works are so different. Gaiman's is creepy in that humorous, insidious, fey way he does so well. Green's is more mean and malevolently dangerous.

For those who have read neither book and don't know what I'm on about, Nightside is about a private investigator, John Taylor, who gets a job that takes him back to the "Nightside", a place he has left behind and is reluctant to revisit. The nightside is a sort of parallel version of London existing alongside and within the one we know. Taylor is complete cliche wisecracking private detective and the style is verging on parody of the hard boiled noir trope. Green does okay making the style and voice of the book work on those terms, but the story feels rushed and arbitrary. The book's very clearly a setup for a series, but I didn't find the characters engaging enough to make me want to read farther. They got into sticky situations and then got out again through their special powers. They had relationships, but they didn't have any chemistry. In a similar way, the plot didn't feel like a story that was happening to people, it felt like a clumsily devised role playing game. Not my cup of tea.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling

Read this the weekend after it came out (I was second in line to read Rachel's copy). The good news is that this is a far better book than the previous volume, almost completely lacking Order of the Phoenix's extreme case of logorrhea. Not to say it's not a weighty tome, but it doesn't go on and on and on to no purpose like the last book.

As the penultimate book in the series, it has a major case of middle-book syndrome, though. You can see Rowling moving everything into place to set up for the formidable task of wrapping up the story that's become a cultural phenomenon for a generation of kids. Unfortunately, it sure looks as if volume seven is going to be a "collect the plot coupons" story. Maybe she'll surprise me.

The best thing about the books has been the core characters of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Rowling has done a great job of growing them up. I especially enjoyed this book's treatment of their sexual awakenings. I really liked the way she portrayed Harry's inner hormonal turmoil.

I won't share any speculations about the implications of the book's ending. I've got some theories, but I'm perfectly happy to wait for the last book to see what happens.

Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer

This is a tiny little book (110 small pages) subtitled "listening for the voice of vocation". It was being used for a study in a mid-life spirituality group a few of our friends are in. We joined in. I don't do well with reading books a chapter at a time for a meeting. I tend to put it off until the last minute and then read the chapter even more quickly than usual and then go to the study, and then put the book down until it's time to cram for the next one. But while my appreciation of the book was hindered by this format, I did like what I read and will probably read it again some time.

The book is a collection of essays on various topics orbiting around the idea of vocation where "vocation" is close to Frederick Buechner's wonderful definition: the work that you most need to do that the world most needs to have done. The book concentrates mostly on the first half of that equation. Palmer tells about his own personal journey toward his vocation and in the process helps illuminate a common path that can lead us to our own most appropriate destination. Palmer is a Quaker, so the book is written with a religious bent, but it's a quiet and thoughtful religiosity that I think few could find offensive.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is Palmer's description of the process he used to make a difficult vocational decision. It's a Quaker practice called a "clearness committee" where Palmer assembled half a dozen of his most trusted friends for a three hour meeting. Rather than giving him advice, their job was to ask him honest, open questions aimed at helping him discover his own inner truth. The process was simultaneously excruciating and liberating as his friends helped him to cut through the bullshit stories he had been telling himself and get to the truth that was a little too scary to face on his own.

It's this sense of thoughtful honesty that makes the book so engaging. Plus you've got to like someone who can write these sentences: "Years ago, someone told me that humility is central to the spiritual life. That made sense to me: I was proud to think of myself as humble!"

Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D.

My boss's boss made him read this book. Then my boss offered his team the opportunity to have their very own copy. Predictably, when offered a free book I said, "sure, why not."

The basic premise of the book is that all the usual self improvement focus on repairing one's weaknesses is wrongheaded. The authors contend that your weaknesses are part of your nature and while they can be mitigated, they're not going away. Instead, they posit that one is better served by identifying one's strengths and honing them to a razor edge and applying them as appropriately as one can to life's challenges.

This all begs the question of what your strengths might be. The Gallup organization who are behind this book have analyzed the data from studies of over two million people and distilled them down to a set of 34 strengths. Not only that, they've devised a questionairre which will tell them what your top five strengths are. You'd think that when you (or your boss) pay $30 for a cheesy management book, the questionairre would be included in the purchase price and you'd be right. Sort of. Printed on the inside of the dust jacket of the book is a code number you can use to take the test exactly once at the gallup web site. Whatever. It's not my money. So I took the test and, lo, my five biggest strengths are apparently:

input, intellection, ideation, adaptability, and relator

Of course to find out what those really mean you have to read the sections expanding on their meaning in the book. There are some vague sketch explanations on the web page, but they're only marginally better than the words alone.

None of their findings comes as a particular shock to me, but they are interesting. I was disappointed to learn that the book doesn't focus much on the honing part of the equation, but more on a management view. It talks about how you should relate to and deploy an employee who posesses a particular strength. I guess this would be useful if I were or wanted to be a manager, but since I'm not and don't, not so much.

It's a quick read, but I wouldn't recommend you spring for the book/test unless your boss will pay for it.

The Phoenix Guards by Steven Brust (repeat)

After reading all those books that were slightly outside of my comfort zone, I wanted to read something that was pure fun. Brust's first Dumas pastiche fit the bill perfectly. The exaggeratedly florid style of this book and the ones that follow after just make me giggle with glee. And the book bears rereading very well. With all the twists and turns of allegiance and fortune, it's virtually impossible to remember the whole book with enough clarity to ruin all of the surprises. Great fun.

Raven's Shadow by Patricia Briggs

The last Endeavour Award candidate I read for this year's award. And happily it was my favorite of the bunch. There ought to be a name for the flavor of fantasy this is. It's not epic exactly, there are no great quests or overwhelming evils or superhuman heroes or mystical beasts. The characters are all recognizably human with plausible talents and failings. The magic is subtle and inherent, not overly ritualized or attached to ancient artifacts.

The first chapter introduces Tier, who's returning home from a campaign as a soldier in the army. Along the way, he rescues Seraph (though there's some ambiguity about that. Her attackers may have thanked him had they known more about her). The remainder of the book takes up close to twenty years later, Tier and Seraph have been married nearly as long and have three teen-aged children. You could pitch the flavor of the story from here as The Incredibles in a medieval setting, but that's only a hint. In short, Tier disappears and the rest of the family sets out to rescue him. The details make it a gripping tale. Briggs introduces characters with abandon and each is complex and nuanced and interesting. In the end there's plenty of room for sequels, and I for one would be happy to read another book in this setting with these characters.

Dreams of the Desert Wind by Kurt R. A. Giambastiani

Another candidate for the Endeavour Award, and the only one I really had to struggle to get through. I wanted to like it. The subtitle is "A modern fantasy of the Middle East" and that sounds like a great concept. But the book is too rough to deliver on the promise. The plot is driven by coincidence. The characters are cardboard cliche cutouts, the American student, the Israeli girlfriend, the shifty Arabic guide, the wise Bedouin patriarch.

And yet I can't condemn it completely, the prose was readable if a touch precious, and the pacing was good. I think with a firm editorial hand and a rewrite or two this could have been a good book, but it just isn't there yet.

Very Bad Deaths by Spider Robinson

Another Endeavour contestant, though I'd already bought a copy so I would have read this one anyway.

Spider Robinson has been stuck in sort of a rut for 20 years, but it's a rut that I like. Almost all of his books depict lovable misfits who save the world through luck (often bad), hard work, inspiration, and getting psychic. The threat changes, but the pattern of figuring out the solution doesn't vary in flavor all that much. In Very Bad Deaths, the threat is from the king of all psychopaths who's got a nasty plan that must be foiled. The foilers are an aging suicidal newspaper columnist, his college friend nicknamed "Smelly" who has discovered the plot (through means which are a spoiler despite the fact that the jacket copy describes them in detail. Don't read the jacket copy! Of any book. At least until you're done with the book.), and a woman they enlist who's a cop.

What makes Spider's books fun, though, is the outrageous details he weaves into these tall tales, and the way he makes it seem reasonable that real-seeming people make intuitive leaps that belong in a Heinlein novel. If you like Spider's stuff you'll like this book. If you haven't read him before you might like this book if a humorous SF thriller sounds like fun. If you're one of the many people who got tired of Spider's schtick a long time ago, it's not safe to come back yet. As I'm in the first group, I had a ball reading this book.

The Secrets of Jin-Shei by Alma Alexander

Third book I read for the Endeavour Award. This one was refreshing for being a stand-alone novel. It's set in a fictional land modelled on Imperial China. The story revolves around a number of women whose connection is the "jin-shei" of the title, a sort of formalized friendship bond.

I really enjoyed the book. The characters, while not all likable, were all interesting and had plausible and sympathetic arcs. The book covers nearly the entire lives of the different women with their various interlocking relationships. The magic in the book wasn't typical fantasy magic and was used consistently and responsibly (no "good thing I know the spell to save the day!" deus ex magica cop outs). My only quibble is that it could have been 100 pages shorter without sustaining too much harm. The overall effect is sort of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood in Imperial China. Worth reading if that sounds at all appealing to you.

Dragon and Soldier by Timothy Zahn

This is the second book I read for the Endeavour Award. It's the second book of an open-ended series about young Jack Morgan who in the first book (Dragon and Thief which I have not read) seems to have teamed up with a K'da named Draycos. The K'da are aliens with two modes of operation. They look like what we'd call a dragon when operating autonomously, but have to spend some portion of their time attached to a host in which mode they appear two-dimensional, almost like a tattoo on the host's body. Jack is an extremely independent though somewhat amoral (in the sense that he's been operating as a con man with his (now deceased, though still around as an AI) uncle for most of his life) fourteen-year-old while Draycos is an adult "Warrior Poet" who follows a strict moral code.

I enjoyed the premise that I've just laid out, and the characters were well enough drawn that it was fun getting to know them better through the course of the book. The plotting left something to be desired, though, with the whole rationale of the events in the book feeling contrived. Maybe I was just missing something from not having read the first book.

Consequences by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Back in early May I heard that the Endeavour Award was looking for readers. The Endeavour is an award given for a work of speculative fiction published by a writer from the Pacific Northwest. The process for the award requires that each eligible nominated book be read by five or seven preliminary readers who each rate the book in a number of different categories. These ratings get distilled down to a numerical score which is used to trim the field down to a half-dozen finalist books which are then judged by a panel of three professional writers. I signed up to be a preliminary reader, so this and the next several book reviews are of books I might not necessarily have chosen on my own, but were read closely for a good cause.

Consequences is part of Rusch's "Retrieval Artist" series. It appears to be the third volume in the series, but I was able to keep up pretty well despite not having read the prior volumes. The book is a hard-boiled detective story set in a city on our moon. Miles Flint is an ex-cop turned retrieval artist, which is an occupation that takes some explaining. The setting is a future where we've made contact with multiple alien species. In such a diverse cultural mix, humans can run afoul of obscure alien laws. If humans think the law is unjust or the penalty too severe or something, the offender can go into a kind of witness relocation program where they're disappeared off to some obscure corner of the galaxy to hide and wait hoping to outlive the statute of limitations or the race they've offended. Retrieval artists are sort of reverse bounty hunters who track down a disappeared person when it's safe for them to come back to their old lives.

Flint's case in this book gets mixed up with a murder for which he feels some degree of responsibility, so he tries to solve the case bringing him into conflict with his old partner, Noelle DeRicci. To complicate matters, the investigation happens in parallel with a summit meeting between some warring races. As the story unfolds, we find out that this confluence of events is not exactly a coincidence.

All the interlocking events in the book have a nice feeling of realistic complexity, and not everything ties together cleanly. There are some reasonable coincidences and some reasonable random events that make the overall plot feel more like real life than a styilized story. And if some of the plot uncomfortably brings to mind some of our real world current events, I can forgive Ms. Rusch since she went to reasonable pains to keep things from being too parallel.

Debt-Proof Living by Mary Hunt

Someone on the 43 Folders mailing list mentioned this book with an executive summary that turned out to be the main thing that stuck with me from reading the book.

Here it is: First, kill off all your unsecured debt. Done? Good. Now out of every paycheck, put 10% off the top in savings, give away another 10%, and then live on the remaining 80%. By way of managing that 80%, set up a "contingency fund" to bail you out in the event of a major catastrophe (lose your job, that kind of thing), and then through monthly contributions, build a "freedom account' which buffers all your recurring, but non-monthly expenses so that the money's there when you need it (for insurance premiums, tax bills, christmas presents, whatever).

None of this is rocket science, but it is spelled out here in one place where you can see it long enough to get it into your brain (if your brain, like mine, isn't very good at holding on to such concepts). There's a bunch more stuff delving in to more of the nitty gritty details of living a debt-proof life. The book is no Your Money or Your Life (Dominguez & Robin's deservedly classic financial management book), but it was a good refresher for me.

Dark As Day by Charles Sheffield

The cover declares this as "a sequel to Cold As Ice". I suppose this is true in the loose sense of historical continuity (plus one common character), but there's hardly any plot continuity between the two books. Not that there's a problem with that, just me getting annoyed with misleading cover copy. Usually I avoid reading any of the words on the jackets, but that bit keeps getting its barbs into my brain.

Dark as Day follows the pattern of the other two books in this setting having bunches of seemingly unconnected characters slowly converging towards an exciting conclusion. This one includes threads about historically predictive computer models, reception of alien transmissions, a plot to destroy all life in the solar system, and other fun stuff like that. The characters and their individual sub-plots are more distinctive and engaging than in Cold as Ice making this book fun. I lost my suspension of disbelief late in the book when a lot of the action depended on some extremely smart people behaving in an uncharacteristically dense way, but it wasn't enough to ruin the book, just enough to pull me out of it for a moment. Overall, an enjoyable future solar system book.

What You Can Change and What You Can't by Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D.

Someone on the 43Folders list mentioned this book so I got it from the library. Seligman is a professor of psychology. In this book he synthesizes the extant research on various common psychological issues and presents the results in lay language.

What I found refreshing about the book was Seligman's candor about his own qualifications and biases. He is meticulous about tagging statements which are his own opinion or theory vs. what the studies have shown. He also is very careful to qualify the results of the studies with his opinion of how well the experiment was designed. It's a very science-based approach.

The issues he considers in depth are things like anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessions, depression, anger, post-traumatic stress, sex issues (from transsexuality to homosexuality to more mundane sexual issues), dieting, alcohol and other substance abuses. In each case he considers what is known or theorized about the causes of the issue. From there he moves on to the various treatment options and what is known about their success rate both in the short term and long term.

The results, as the title implies, range from maladies like panic where the causes and solutions are well understood to things like weight loss where there does not appear to be any such certainty. If you suffer from any of the issues in the last paragraph, I would urge you to take a look at this book to help you decide how (and whether) to pursue treatment.

All that positive stuff said, Seligman falls into the usual trap of medical research. If 75% of the participants in a study of a treatment are not helped then that treatment is judged a failure. And yet 25% of the people were helped. To me, this is the more interesting part of the result. What was it about the interaction of that 25% with the treatment in question that made it work for them and not for the others? We are all different in uncountable ways, and it seems to me that progress in medicine isn't going to make any giant leaps until they accept that fact and start tailoring treatment to the individual patient.

Back off my soapbox, the book is a fascinating read and my copy is bristling with flags on interesting passages. A few examples...

About anxiety, he writes.

Everyday anxiety level is not a category to which psychologists have devoted a great deal of attention. The vast bulk of work on emotion is about "disorders"--helping "abnormal" people to lead "normal" emotional lives. In my view, not nearly enough serious science has been done to improve the emotional life of normal people--to help them lead better emotional lives. This task has been left by default to preachers, profiteers, advice columnists, and charismatic hucksters on talk shows. This is a gross mistake, and I believe that one of the obligations of qualified psychologists is to help members of the general public try to make rational decisions about improving their emotional lives.

About nature vs. nurture (genetic vs. environmental influences being dominant in psychological matters)

And make no mistake about the political side. It is no coincidence that Locke fathered both the idea that all knowledge is associations and the idea that all men are created equal. The behaviorists, scientific Lockeans all, dominated academic psychology from the end of World War I to the Vietnam era. John Watson began the behaviorist movement in the era of the melting pot. His popularity was in part the result of his covert message: The new immigrants were not inferior to the people already in America; they could be molded into the same high-quality stuff that the WASPs already were. The defeat of Hitler added fuel to American environmentalism: The genocide of the concentration camps filled my generation with determination never again to countenance genetic explanations of human psychology.

and

Some of what is difficult to change ties us to the life-and-death struggles of our ancestors. And it is not only our fears that are prepared. The sexual objects that we spend our lives pursuing, the aggression and competition we have such difficulty suppressing, our prejudice against people who look different from us, our masculinity or femininity, and those recurring obsessions we can't get out of our minds are all examples of psychological links to our biological past.

The last forty pages of the book are foot notes, and they're worth reading as well, not only because of the links to the studies Seligman cites, but also because some of the funniest parts of the book are in the notes.

What is needed now is an updated edition to include any new findings since this book's publication way back in 1993.

Cold As Ice by Charles Sheffield

This is one of the books that I discovered was connected to The Ganymede Club after I finished that book. Fortunately, it turns out the connection is pretty loose. Cold As Ice was published before Ganymede but takes place after. They have one character in common, but there's no dependency of understanding between the two books. Not to say the books aren't similar. They are. Very. And not. This one starts off with a ship at the end of the Great War (the interplanetary one, not our puny WWI) trying (in vain) to evade a smart weapon set on destroying them. The ship manages to send the children in their crew away in escape pods with little hope that they will be recovered in time to survive. The rest of the book takes place many years later and introduces a bunch of different characters who seem to be completely unconnected until they all start to collide and interact in interesting ways that all converge on Jupiter's moon, Europa. There's lots of fun sci fi stuff along the way (a very very very large array telescope (elements accross the entire inner solar system), submarine exploration of the oceans of Europa (and Earth), human genetic engineering) and the characters are engaging enough to make you want to find out what happens to them. It's a fun read and I'll keep working through Sheffield's stuff.

Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer

Third book in Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series. True to form, Sawyer crams enough ideas into this one book for a whole career for any other author. Topics investigated include the potential of genetic engineering, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and the origins of religion in the so-called "god organ," the effects of testosterone, the effect of pervasive surveillance on crime, the origin of consciousness, rapid repolarization of the Earth's magnetic field. Add to all that cool science-based skiffy stuff some interesting characters and a nifty trans-dimensional (and credulity straining) setting and Sawyer's workmanlike prose and you have a fun series of books to read. In this one Sawyer pokes a few more holes in the Neanderthal society making it seem a little less utopian. I felt like he took some liberties with the actions of his main characters causing them to do things they wouldn't have done except under authorial fiat. Still, the book is entertaining and there is almost certainly another one coming down the line in this series judging from the open loops at the end of this one.

New Magics ed. by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Shortly after reading Patrick Nielsen Hayden's excellent New Skies I found out somehow that he had edited a similar volume of young adult stories leaning more toward the fantasy end of the sf spectrum. It's been a while now since I read it, but I like having more time between read and review for short story anthologies.

Neil Gaiman leads off the collection with "Chivalry" which has a fabulous first sentence: "Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat." Gaiman delivers nicely on that setup.

I'd already read Ellen Kushner's "Charis" in one of Terri Windling's Borderland books. It's a great distillation of the coming of age story uniquely suited to the Borderland setting where Faerie intrudes into modern midwest North America.

"Jo's Hair" by Susan Palwick, as the title implies follows Jo March's hair from the point where she cut it all off in Little Women through the life of adventure and non-conformism that Jo herself could have lived had she not chosen the path she did.

In "Not All Wolves," Harry Turtledove examines human bigotry through the eyes of a young werewolf in 12th century Cologne.

Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald contribute "Stealing God," a hard boiled mystery with a Knight Templar protagonist.

"Mama Gone" is Jane Yolen's story of a young girl who has to cope with the fact that her recently deceased mother is a vampire. And she manages to write it without ever once bringing to mind Buffy. Well, maybe once.

Charles de Lint's "The Bone Woman" is another I'd read before. It's set in his fictional city of Newford, and is about the people on the fringes of life in any big city.

"Liza and the Crazy Water Man" by Andy Duncan appeared previously in Nielsen Hayden's Starlight 1. It was nice to read it again here, especially with the resurgence in interest in old time music following the Coen Brothers' Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. The fantasy element of the story is pretty subtle in this one.

Sherwood Smith looks at stories like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Pamela Dean's Secret Country books from the point of view of the parents of the children who find their way into another world in "Mom and Dad at the Home Front".

Emma Bull writes "A Bird That Whistles" which I could have sworn was in Ellen Kushner's Horns of Elfland, but isn't, so it must have been Double Feature where I read it first. A winsome story of the collision between magic, music, and growing up.

"The Bones of the Earth" is one of Ursula K. le Guin's recent stories returning to the world and characters of The Wizard of Earthsea. I can't write about le Guin without gushing.

The book ends with Orson Scott Card's "Hatrack River" which tells the story of the birth of Alvin Maker. I have been annoyed by some of Card's stories, but there is no arguing that he is a brilliant craftsman of characters and prose. This story had tears running down my face from sadness and joy. How does he do that?

As usual, Patrick Nielsen Hayden delivers the good stuff.

Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott

I checked this out of the library after reading a brief interview with the author in the Powell's bookstore newsletter. The book seems to be semi autobiographical, telling a series of stories from the point of view of a man named Theo who grew up in foster care in Chicago. The stories are in very nearly reverse chronological order, showing Theo as an adult and then moving farther back into his past as the book goes on.

The thing that caught my eye in the Powells interview was the author saying that it was a book about S&M, and then going on to talk mostly about the book's style of writing. I've enjoyed some other books that could be discussed in similar terms. It's not my kink, but there's something about pain play and humiliation play that speaks eloquently of the human condition.

And Elliott speaks eloquently indeed. There's not much flash in the writing in this book, but he manages to perform that magic that puts you behind the eyes of a character despite having characters with whom I have almost no experience in common. I often say this about books that I enjoy, but in this case it's especially true: the characters and situations seemed real to me. With this kind of material it would be easy to slip into caricature and to stylize the events into being more palatable to a general audience. Instead, Elliott keeps things raw, seeming to tell the stories the way they happened or at least the way the characters saw them.

All that said, the book's probably not for everyone. Some of the sex and violence content is consensual, but some is decidedly not. Caveat lector.

The Ganymede Club by Charles Sheffield

I'd never read Sheffield before, but I found myself in the Twice Sold Tales on University with half an hour to kill before my bus home, and a hankering for some good sci fi. This one looked like it would fit the bill, and did, keeping me entertained for my bus ride home and for a couple of evenings later.

The book opens in 2032 aboard a ship exploring the Saturn system. The crew finds something unexpected. And the book jumps ahead 31 years to introduce another character, this time on Mars. The next chapters jump a few more years to 2066. (I had to sit back and marvel over that far distant year for a minute. It's the year I'll turn 100. :-) More characters are introduced and then one more 6-year jump and the rest of the book proceeds in something like real time in 2072.

That last jump spans The Great War, one which makes the one we call that now look like a minor skirmish.

The characters who play out the main story are Lola Belman, her kid brother Spook, Spook's friend Bat, and a mathematician named Bryce Sonnenberg. Lola is a Haldane, a psychiatrist with better drugs and equipment than have been invented yet. Her brother and his friend are Masters in the Puzzle Network, a kind of intramural logic competition. Bryce is Lola's patient: he's experiencing memories that seem to be of someone else's life.

These four come up against the inheritors of the Saturn explorers from chapter 1 and things get complicated.

There are mysteries galore, and most of them get wrapped up satisfactorily in the end. The one thing that bugged me is that there's no explanation of the unexpected discovery from chapter 1. Well, the "what" is explained, but the "why" and "how" are left quite unexplained. It seems an awfully big coincidence. There is room for a sequel I suppose. Ah. A little web searching reveals that this is the middle book of a sort of trilogy. Sigh. First book is Cold As Ice, third is Dark As Day. Obviously, since I didn't notice this until now, the book works fine as a standalone. Very nice hard sf potboiler. Guess I'll have to track down the others and see what references sailed over my head.

The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

This is the third novel I've read by Wilson. I didn't like the first two very well, but a friend insisted that this one was really good. It was the same friend who said that about Blind Lake, but he put it in my hands so I gave it a whirl. It's pretty good.

Scott is an American living in Thailand with his wife and daughter when, one night, an enormous towering obelisk appears in the jungle. Inscribed in this edifice is a statement commemorating a battle 20 years in the future.

The book plays out in an exploration of the meaning of coincidence, prophecy, and destiny set in the turmoil that accrues from the appearance of the series of inexplicable monuments.

I think what made the book more satisfying to me than the others of Wilson's that I've read was the way that the plot and the character relationships echoed the time loops implied by the obelisks. The other books were similarly driven by a single advanced technological intervention in the fabric of normal reality, but those didn't feel as well integrated in the fabric of the book. It's a fine line. I could easily see that integration making it all seem too contrived, but in The Chronoliths, Wilson makes it work.

Through a Brazen Mirror by Delia Sherman

That isn't the cover of the copy I read. I'd picked up a copy of the original Ace Fantasy Special after reading some of Ms. Sherman's short fiction in one of the Bordertown collections, and in Ellen Kushner's wonderful The Horns of Elfland. The cover pictured here is from the relatively new Circlet Press Ultra Violet Library edition. This edition is marketed towards the lesbian/gay/bi/trans market which seemed odd to me until I started trying to look at the book through that lens.

I tend to read books very much on their own terms, accepting the worlds depicted as they are without considering the individual elements that make them up too closely. Brazen Mirror is set in the Middle Ages. Its protagonist (though she is never the point of view) is a woman (Elinor) who, following a personal tragedy, dresses as a man to find a place in a castle's kitchen staff. She makes a meteoric rise through the castle staff until she is working directly with the king himself. We learn that the king's great love (though unconsumated) has been one of his male friends who is now dead. The king (and some women) fall in love with Elinor believing she is a man.

These are radical simplifications of the plot and characters of the book in order to separate out the gender issues from the larger story. The main plot element of the book is the conflict between Elinor and Margaret, her birth mother whom she has never met. Margaret is a sorceress who believes that her daughter will be her undoing and so is single-mindedly working to destroy Elinor's life without taking the karmically deadly step of harming her directly.

The book is complexly structured with past and present timelines interleaving and recurring in successive sections. I'm no historical scholar, but it seems that the language and conditions of Middle Ages life are rendered accurately. At a few points it seemed as if the book was a result of way too much time in graduate history classes in college, but those were only fleeting moments. As a whole the book has the feel of true events within a true world.

Like many Ace titles, the original didn't sell initially and basically disappeared. Perhaps it will find its audience in its new packaging.

Gaudeamus by John Barnes

I don't think I've ever read a novel that was written in first person from the author's point of view. Most of the action consists of events as told to Mr. Barnes by Travis Bismarck, a private investigator working on what at first appears to be a simple case of industrial espionage. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that there is much more going on including breakthroughs in neuropharmacology, transportation, and power generation, plus alien first contact.

That doesn't give away much more than the cover art does. Barnes is great when he's writing adventure stories with intrigue like this. Well, I think he's always great, but this book lacks the darker element that I've seen frequently derided in his other books, particularly Mother of Storms and Kaleidoscope Century. If I weren't paying attention I might have thought this was a Spider Robinson book since it shares some of the weaknesses of Spider's work, in particular a need to devise incredibly outlandish scenarios in order to write an optimistic near-future story. That whole "getting psychic to save the world" thing. Barnes does truly entertaining things in this book and, as usual, writes about them with panache. It's a fun, silly little book.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

I read some Steinbeck in high school as assigned reading and he was okay. As an adult I happened to read his Sweet Thursday and acquired a new appreciation of his writing. The Pearl is one of the books I had to read as a kid and I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot more reading it for pleasure.

Kino is a pearl diver. He lives in a hut with his woman Juana and their infant son Coyotito. The baby is stung by a scorpion. They have no money to pay the doctor. Kino prays that he should find a pearl sufficient to save his son's life. His prayer is answered too well when he finds the pearl of pearls. It is a pearl to inspire dreams in its owner and avarice in all others. It brings Kino and his family no good.

Steinbeck is a writer who can somehow give the effect of minimalism while using heaps of artful ornament. He writes with layer upon layer of meaning and ends up with a page turner. It's great stuff.

I'm not going to try to analyze the book. I think I already did that when I read it in high school. I will say that it seems like the early part of the book over-romanticizes the poverty that Kino and his fellow divers live under. The other thing that struck me as I read it was the similarities between this story of the corruption of men's souls wrought by a talisman of great power and that other story that can be described thus: The Lord of the Rings. Steinbeck's treatment of the ma