Mad Times

I don’t really have much to say about this book. I didn’t envy Rowling trying to bring this series to a conclusion that would be satisfying to her legions of fans. I think she did a remarkably good job. Now I don’t envy the filmmakers who will have to turn this book into a satisfying movie. A pretty large portion of the book consists of Harry and various supporters setting up and breaking down camp in various unpleasant corners of England. Not exactly dramatic gold, but I’m sure they’ll manage.

I got this from the library because I read the Livejournal of one of the authors (Ryk E. Spoor, otherwise known as “seawasp”). I read his journal because I used to enjoy his posts on rec.arts.sf.written back before Usenet became more noise than signal. I’d never read any of his fiction and one day decided that was dumb and put a hold on this, the only book of his in my library. I would never have picked the book up based on the cover. I don’t know if you can tell from that little thumbnail, but it depicts a pack of dinosaurs tearing into a crashed spaceship. Dinosaurs and spaceships together don’t really push my buttons. Plus I’d never read Eric Flint and had some vague association that he wrote military SF, another sub-genre that doesn’t turn my crank.

The book starts off on a paleontology dig in our near future where a totally new fossilized animal is found alongside some better-known dinosaurs. Adding to the interest is that it’s found right on the K-T boundary (the stratum between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods. Right on the line where mammals started taking over from the reptiles.

The rest of the book concentrates on two different efforts to make a manned flight to Mars, one by NASA, another by a private company. At first glance these two story lines don’t seem to have anything to do with each other, but Flint and Spoor do a fine job of slowly revealing the connection.

The disparate disciplines also provide a nice array of characters. There are paleontologists and engineers and astronauts (and paleontologist engineer astronauts!), all believably smart and quirky and human. And there are the politics of all of those disciplines to mix things up.

So if you see the book, ignore the cover and know that inside is a hard SF book that takes an interesting poke at some of the big unknown questions in several disciplines. Very fun!

First of Evanovich’s books about the unlikely bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. Becky had been talking these up for a while and a friend from work with very different tastes from Becky also liked them. Even my mom read a few. So I tossed this in my bag when I had a long bus ride one day. I was able to read over half of the book on my way to lunch and back (which says more about how hard it was to get to lunch on Metro than it does about the book, I know).

Stephanie Plum is at the end of her financial rope when her mother sends her to talk to a loose relation who is a bail bondsman. She goes in looking for a clerical job and instead picks up a bounty hunting contract. She probably wouldn’t have gone after a cop accused of murder who skipped out on his bail, but Stephanie was wronged by the cop in question in a romantic relationship in high school and she kind of holds a grudge.

The writing is snappy and the plot moves right along. Stephanie is an amusing basket of quirks and tics. And there are some pleasingly complex romantic entanglements. Light entertainment.

I got this from the library after reading about it in the Writer’s Almanac on Seth’s birthday (June 20th). Their mention of the book said “It tells the story of the computer engineers working in Silicon Valley, developing the early version of the personal computer.” which sounded pretty cool, especially since it also mentions that the book is in the form of an epic poem. Well, the book is indeed in verse, but it has nothing to do with computer engineering. Fortunately by the time I got the book from the library I’d forgotten exactly why I’d been interested, so I wasn’t disappointed by the mistake until just now when I looked up the reference to write this review!

The book is set in the bay area starting around 1980 (published in 1986) and tells the story of an interconnected collection of friends as they stumble through various rather mundane adventures. Honestly, the story resembles nothing more than Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. What sets the book apart is the verse. The book is composed entirely of sonnets. The dedication is a sonnet. The acknowledgement section is a sonnet. The about the author blurb is a sonnet. Even the table of contents is a sonnet. And of course the main text is a series of sonnets. On the order of 600 of them (about 300 pages, two per page).

It sounds tiresome, but it’s actually rather delightful. Seth doesn’t take himself too seriously. Most of the rhyming is conventional, but every once in a while he throws in a rhyme that only works if you use very creative pronunciation. As I recall, this is a time-honored tradition. (I had a professor in junior college who insisted that the poem “Don Juan” be pronounced “Don Joo-un” because at one point Byron rhymes it with “new one”) The characters (a lawyer, a project manager, a divinity student, an artist, an activist) relate in all sorts of ways. There are children and lovers (of a couple different gender combinations, this is San Francisco after all) and parents and friends. There are house cats and even a pet iguana. If the plot is mostly soap opera and skids to a rather abrupt conclusion, I found it easy to forgive such minor failings in return for the fun I had reading the book.

I’d thought I might write this review in sonnet form, but I’m six books behind already, so no.

The story of Fawn and Dag, begun in The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, picks up right where it left off. Which makes it hard to write a spoiler-free review with much of any content to it.

But the plot isn’t really all that important. This book, like its predecessor, is all about character and setting. Sure, there is a plot, and it moves along nicely enough to keep the pages flipping by, but it’s not full of twists and turns, at least not ones that are very surprising. The fun of the book is seeing Fawn and Dag dealing with the complexities of Dag’s family and his duties as a Lakewalker.

I didn’t like this one as well as the first book. There isn’t that much new information about the world or about what the main characters are capable of. The ending sets up some interesting possibilities, though, so I’ll wait and see what the next book brings.

Boing Boing pointed to a collection of links to author’s web pages a while back which led me to John Barnes’s blog which is primarily concerned with his efforts to sell the research materials and drafts of his past works to people who will keep them together and make them available for future research. In amongst the posts on this odd activity I discovered that he had self-published an unsellable novel as an e-book.

Barnes is on my buy-on-sight list, so no sooner had I seen that a book existed than I paid the four bucks to download a PDF (ack!) of this novel. (We’ll leave out the bit about the too much time I spent converting the PDF into something I could reasonably read on my Palm.)

Barnes includes front matter exploring how the book aged and why it was unpublishable. The short version of that tale is that it was written about a terrorist attack on an American city carried out by Muslims. And it was written in 1997. For various typical publishing reasons it didn’t get printed before Fall of 2001, and after that it was decidedly out of date.

The book is set in Detroit, Michigan. It follows three characters. First is Kit Miles, an arson investigator attempting to track down a new incendiary device used to set several especially nasty fires. Second is Adhem, one of the terrorists who is trying to find the same devices, only he knows just what they are because they were stolen from him. Finally, there’s Kit’s sister LaTonya who’s an FBI agent working undercover for a possibly corrupt congressman.

The characters are well drawn and the prose is largely up to Barnes’s usual page-turner quality. That said, you probably shouldn’t bother reading this unless you’re a die-hard Barnes fan.

The book clearly needed another rewrite even before true events made its fiction seem less strange. It’s heavily front-loaded with exposition and what turns out to be a subplot with many characters and events that don’t end up having more than a passing relevance to the main thrust of the book which plays out largely in the last few chapters.

Still, I read the whole thing. It was an interesting peek into how even a fairly experienced and talented writer like Barnes benefits from the editorial process.

Should read “by Spider Robinson from an outline (or most of one) by Robert A Heinlein.” Yes, Heinlein has been dead for a while. What happened was that his literary executor found an outline and some notes for a novel he never got around to writing. Spider was a pretty logical choice to write it, being one of the biggest Heinlein fanboys around and having been frequently compared to the master.

The reason I suggest putting Spider’s name first is that this is very much a Spider Robinson book. No one would mistake it for a lost Heinlein novel. But that’s not to say that Heinlein’s hand isn’t visible. The shape of the plot is more Heinlein than Robinson. In particular, nobody saves the world by getting psychic in this book, so that’s good. The main character mostly feels like one of the characters from Heinlein’s completed juveniles despite the fact that he talks like a Robinson character.

I’m pretty close to the ideal audience for this book. I love Spider like an eccentric uncle, warts and all. I dig, but don’t deify Heinlein. I really like sf with interstellar rocket ships with really big crews (and I’m willing to suspend a whole lot of disbelief to get them, even enough to swallow a ship driven by raw brainpower.) If you don’t like Spider you should probably skip this one even if you adore Heinlein.

I can’t really talk about the plot in a spoiler-free way because there’s a twist in the first chapter. (It’s not a spoiler to say that. The second sentence of the book makes it clear there’s going to be a twist, you just don’t know what it’s going to be.) I can say that the book quickly moves into the story of a young man who chooses to ship out on a near-light-speed journey to colonize a planet in another star system. The trip will take 20 years ship time and the rest of the book takes place on the ship.

I liked it. Some of the Spiderisms are laid on a little thick (Zen, transcendence through music, telepathy (didn’t say there wasn’t any, just said it didn’t save the world), interpersonal relations), but they’re nicely leavened with Heinlein’s emphasis on personal integrity and growth. And to Spider’s credit, I think he did a great job filling in the missing end of the outline (yes, Heinlein’s planned ending was lost).

I couldn’t find the cover of the old paperback version I read on the internets so no picture. I saw this book referred to in some blog in the last few weeks so when I was looking for something to take on a recent trip to Portland I grabbed it for a reread. Fun with cloning and brain backups. I lost count of how many different versions of the main character there are by the end of the book. Less than six I think. Some of them die (quite a few, now that I think about it). In the universe of this book we can grow a clone of your body up to the equivalent of 18 years in a week or two. Add to that the ability to do backup and restore of the state of your brain (all your memories and personality), and people have become essentially immortal. But that’s all just background. Multiple concurrent copies of a person are illegal, but not impossible. The book concerns itself with the ways in which the criminal element games the system.

The title refers to a message stream from deep space that contains info about how to do all sorts of useful things (like make quick clones and brain backups). It’s not clear until pretty late in the book why that should be its title.

I love reading Varley for the way he plays with these kinds of cool sfnal ideas by plunking smart capable Heinleinesque characters into impossible situations and letting them try to find ways out of them with the tools at hand.

Subtitled “or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. The “Diamond Age” part of the title refers to an era ushered in by the perfection of nanotechnology and the ability to build diamonds (or nearly anything else) from raw elements and the parallel ability to use that tech to make stuff (like windows) out of diamond. The book has two primary narrative tracks. The first centers on John Percival Hackworth, a master programmer of nano computers. He is commissioned to build a computer in the form of a book which is optimized to interact with young girls and give them the kinds of experiences that will make them independent and capable women. The commissioned object is for the granddaughter of his wealthy patron, but another copy finds its way into the hands of Nell, a little girl with a drug addicted mother, an absent father, and a seemingly less-than-bright future. And Nell is, of course, the other primary character.

The technology in the book is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. It’s really cool, but it’s hard to see how it would work.

Last time I read it my suspension of disbelief was strained by the idea of Victorian social mores coming back in a high-tech society, but for some reason I found that part easier to take this time. Not sure if that’s because the world has changed to make the idea more plausible or if I just got that particular skepticism out of my system.

This is my favorite Stephenson novel for its combination of tight plotting, revolutionary philosophy, fully drawn characters, and cool stuff.

You can’t swing a wooden stake in the fiction section these days without impaling a vampires-in-the-modern-world book. This one is distinguished by the fact that its vampire protagonist was turned while following his duties as a soldier in Iraq. Then he came back home and became (what else?) a private investigator. Goth meet noir. And if those aren’t enough genres for you, it’s also going for humor and sex in addition to the military, supernatural, and PI flavors. The result is a melange as unpalatable to me as the blood-based meals the protagonist subsists on.