Mad Times

This long-out-of-print novel has been re-released by Firebird Books in a handsomely produced trade paperback. I’ve still got my old mass-market paperback around here somewhere, but it’s nice to have a good reading copy of this book.

Originally published as an entry in Tor’s fairy tale series, it is a retelling of an old fairy story. In this case the ballad of Tam Lin. This is not at all vital information to the enjoyment of the book, however. Dean’s books are always focussed mainly on their characters, and the plot, while not an afterthought, seems inevitable and somewhat mundane, sort of like real life. The book’s main character is Janet Carter, a newly matriculated college student at a midwest liberal arts college (modeled on the one where Dean was an undergrad). The other characters are Janet’s dorm room mates, her family, her teachers, and other students. The fantasy elements and the links to the ballad are subtle and, to Janet, somewhat bewildering.

Janet is an English major, but she falls in with a crowd who are mostly classics majors, so there are many many references to English and classical literature thrown about as if everyone had read Homer in the original Greek or had memorized Shakespeare’s plays as a child. In less capable hands this sort of lofty material could be off-putting, but instead, at least for me, the result is rather charming and makes me wish I’d spent my youth reading plays instead of whatever it was I did do.

This pattern of things which should be annoying failing to illicit that response recurs in several areas of the book so I would be leery of recommending it to others in fear that I am somehow among the small perfect audience for the book. However Tam Lin has many fans (besides me if I haven’t made that clear) so perhaps it is merely a property of the book itself. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

This book comes before Widdershins in the continuity of de Lint’s Newford stories. That doesn’t matter too much as you’re reading either story, but there are some relationships that begin in this book that make Widdershins make a little more sense.

Rather than just having faerie permeate the modern world as he usual does with his urban fantasy novels, this book has faerie saturating cyberspace as well. The plot is pretty much boilerplate de Lint (see my Widdershins review for a description). But as usual, the attraction of the book is less in the plot and more in the characters and how they manage when suddenly confronted with the presence of magic in a world they thought was governed by knowable scientific principles.

Christy Riddell’s girlfriend Saskia who if you’ve been reading the books for a while you’ll know was somehow born out of the Wordwood web site disappears when a virus attack takes down the site. But she’s not the only one, lots of other people went poof at the same time. Christy and his friend Holly who helped create the site work to organize a rescue mission into the faerie otherworld where the Wordwood manifests as a real place.

It sounds pretty cheesy, but as long as you’re willing to engage your disbelief suspension equipment, the adventure is exciting and reveals cool stuff about some of the characters.

In writing this review I remembered to go google the Wordwood and discovered that some fans have set up a wiki at http://thewordwood.info/ to simultaneously document de Lint’s work and emulate the Wordwood site in the books.

As with many of Sawyer’s science fiction novels, this one starts off with a purely human problem. Heather Davis and Kyle Graves have been separated for nearly a year when their daughter Becky brings them together to make an announcement that threatens to sunder the family completely. This family drama is accompanied by a parallel drama in Heather’s work where she is part of a global effort to decode an alien transmission received from Alpha Centauri A. Heather has a breakthrough and determines that the message is instructions for building a machine. When she constructs it she discovers that the machine will affect not only human society, but also her own family in far-reaching ways.

While there are a dozen different ideas being explored here, one of the biggest ones is how pervasive transparency in human relationships would affect society and individuals. It’s a theme Sawyer has explored in other books, in particular his series that started with Hominids. This book takes the concept further, but shares that one’s optimism positing that if only we could review what really happened to people in a situation, the result would be a kind of utopia. While the situations that Sawyer puts together do seem to collapse into a solution when easy review becomes available, I’m not convinced that this is a universal cure for what ails humanity. I’m hoping that this doesn’t become to Sawyer what telepathy became to Spider Robinson, the one-cure-fits-all-ills that made many of Robinson’s books so predictable.

Murder mystery set in an English country house. Alternates chapters with the points of view of a Scotland Yard inspector and the newlywed wife of a prime suspect. What sets it apart from other “cosy” mysteries is that it takes place in an England that chose to sign a treaty with Hitler. Matters are complicated by the fact that the victim negotiated the treaty and the manner of his death throws suspicion on the only Jew who happens to be around.

My clumsy summary does not do justice to Walton’s delicate and nuanced narrative. This is a carefully written and deeply thought book that reads like a potboiler. And while it’s easy to dismiss any comparison of current events with those of WWII as hyperbolic, it’s difficult to deny that there is some resonance. Enough that even though I read the book very quickly the characters and situations have stayed knocking around my head even here over a month after I finished it.

Her second book in this setting just came out (Ha’penny) and there will be one more forthcoming.

Largely a sequel to The Onion Girl, but this one doesn’t start with Jilly Coppercorn. Instead, the entry to the story is when fiddler Lizzie Mahone, her car broken down at a lonely crossroads, disrupts a bit of rogue unseelie business making friends and enemies in the process. When the second fiddle player in Lizzie’s band is injured, the band calls Geordie Riddell to fill in and Jilly comes along for the ride. Mayhem ensues when Jilly and Lizzie both disappear in the night and the folks left behind have to try to find them and bring them back.

Widdershins is shaped very much like other de Lint books with a quick jump into a mystically complicated plot followed by a layered array of different groups working their way out of the mess from different directions. It’s an effective pattern allowing lots of character development and suspense as the groups all have to work with the information and personalities they have and as you read you can see where they’re headed for potential disaster or can wonder how the heck they’re going to connect in the end.

The book is a little bit more of a soap opera plot than usual with the eternally evaded romantic tension between Jilly and Geordie seeming like maybe it will finally be resolved, but it’s not at all clear in the course of the book which way it might go.

In 2002, Mitch Kapor founded a new company to build a personal information management software product called Chandler. Rosenberg’s book uses Kapor’s company as an entryway into the big questions about software: why does it take so long? why is it so hard to make it good?

The book is one part history of software engineering and one part case study with a sprinkling of speculation about what the future holds. The case study turns out to be an excellent example because Chandler’s genesis falls somewhere on the less-auspicious end of typical. By the end of the book (published in 2007), Kapor’s team still hadn’t shipped a usable product, but they were still plugging away. At the beginning of October, a month after I finished reading the book, the team announced a “Preview” release that still isn’t a 1.0.

Rosenberg does a nice job on the history, talking about all aspects of development from architecture to UI design to people management. What comes out is that the advancements in the software art just don’t progress at the rate we might wish. While improvements in computer hardware design have allowed finished software to run ever more quickly, the creation of the software itself is still a laborious manual process. And there’s nothing on the horizon that looks likely to change that fact.

Attack of the Bacon Robots and Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings are the subtitles of these first two collections of the uber gaming geek web comic Penny Arcade. Each comic is accompanied by a bit of explanatory text to help make sense of the inspiration for that strip. This is an extremely useful feature! I frequently can’t make head or tails of the strips when they first appear. I’m not sufficiently steeped in gaming culture to get their references. Sometimes I’ll catch up with the references a day or a week later and the light will go on “oh, so that’s what that was all about.” I keep reading them because when I can make sense of the joke it’s usually very funny indeed.

Picked this up for a reread after seeing the recent film version. This is one of Gaiman’s stream of consciousness books. It reads like he started in to writing one day with a vague idea of where the story would end up and inserted amusing or surprising events until the book was thick enough. Of course Gaiman is a good enough wordsmith to make the resulting book pleasant to read in spite of the potential for calamity in such an approach. Not a masterpiece, but an amusing diversion.

Let’s get this out of the way. The book is written in the second person. Yes, the book is all about you. (The second paragraph starts “You’re pedaling home.” Yes, like that). Some people object to this. It didn’t really bother me.

The book is nominally a sequel to his novel Dogland. I say “nominally” because while the fantasy in that book is so subtle you could easily miss it, this book takes a left turn into deep fantasy territory pretty early on. I think it’s better to think of them as completely separate books. I’m a little worried about rereading Dogland after reading Gospel. It’s definitely going to color it a little (pun totally not intended).

But let’s talk about this book. Christopher Nix is a rebellious teenager in 1969. He’s a hippie wannabe. He has run-ins with rednecks. He meets a girl. He has a strangely distant relationship with his family. One day he finds out that a benefactor will pay for him to go to an exclusive prep school and he decides to go. That decision makes a mind-boggling change in Chris’s life and turns the book into something completely different. Later on some other weird stuff happens that leads to a story within the story and it is this section that gives the book its title.

All very vague, but enough that I can talk about the book without spoiling it too much, I think. The book is about class. As in “class struggle” or “class war”. This subject matter will come as no shock to anyone familiar with Shetterly’s non-fiction writing. Shetterly thinks it’s an important subject and should be talked about more. I don’t disagree, but that motivation is too visible in this book. It feels preachy. No surprise for a book with “Gospel” in the title, I suppose. That gospel section of the book is a fictional lost gospel story with another take on the whole New Testament story. Preachy.

I can almost forgive the preachiness since he’s attempting some interesting narrative tricks to get his message across (beyond just the second person thing). The book is repeatedly surprising in the way that it steers away from cliched solutions to problems (never mind that it has to get into cliched situations to be able to get out of them in novel ways). I wish I could read the book with a younger mind. I think I would have liked it better if I’d read it when I was less of a curmudgeon.

Note that if you decide to read it you might want to know that Shetterly has already revised it, adding a new last line.

I was a little skeptical when I heard that Emma Bull’s new book was a western. Not only a western, but a historical western set in Tombstone, Arizona at the time of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But while skeptical, I couldn’t really help assuming that she would win me over, and in that I was right.

The book centers on two fictional characters who are peripheral to the feud between the Earps and the MacLaurys and Clantons. One is Mildred Benjamin, a widow working as a typesetter in one of the town papers. The other is Jesse Fox, a stranger who comes to town in the first chapter. But while the events are seen through the lens of these two’s perceptions, the main players in the historical drama are featured players as well, especially the enigmatic Doc Holliday.

This is a fantasy novel, though, and that aspect comes in as a kind of secret history where magic is at work in Tombstone, adding another layer to the things that happen there.

I don’t want to say too much about the book, but I will tell you one thing that I was glad to have known before I read it. There’s a second part to this story. The book isn’t a cliffhanger exactly, but it does leave a great number of things unexplained. In my view, this is cause for celebration, not lamentation. I have been heard to proclaim a few times since finishing this book, “I want to read the second half of Territory!” I’m really looking forward to finding out what happens to these characters in the concluding volume.