Mad Times

In 2006 I read only 31 books (a couple of reviews aren’t up yet). This is even worse than the 36 I thought was so scandalously low last year. All the same reasons apply.

We did do some pretty cool things this year that might have eaten some of my reading time.

• Went to the first annual Science fiction short film festival
• Had a big party to celebrate our 40th birthdays
• Had an art and craft sale at our house
• Learned how to do chain mail. And did
• Went to the Philippines
• Switched blog platforms to WordPress
• Got back into hand drumming, this time dragging Becky along
• Photographed lost gloves #69-111 (42)

We also watched a bunch of movies, so like I posted last year, here’s what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater. Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc.

That’s 75 movies (only 10 in the theater) and doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before. We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll blather on.

There’s been a recent surge in interest in this book, but I want to make sure I get all possible cred for being in the know by pointing out that I got it out of the library after reading about it in James Nicoll’s blog back in early November. The surge of buzz is due to the fact that Watts has posted the whole book under a Creative Commons license on his website (he did this because the book has been released into a kind of perfect storm of lousy sales which you can read about (at length) on his blog). And in the interest of full disclosure I have to come clean that even though I got it out of the library, I never got around to reading that copy, just kept it for a month and turned it in late without ever having cracked the cover. Instead, I downloaded the novel after he posted it and read it on my Palm.

I really liked the book. It’s refreshing to read such an idea-based hard science fiction novel after the recent rash of disappointing Endeavour hopefuls (Blindsight isn’t eligible since Watts lives outside the Pacific Northwest). In particular, Blindsight builds up to one rather disturbing big idea, but if I told you that (like many other reviewers apparently do), I’d be subverting the whole reason for this book’s existence and you don’t want that, do you?

Fortunately there are a bunch of other fascinating smaller ideas in the rest of the book that I can reveal without particularly spoiling anything. Blindsight is what Alien might look like if it had been written by Oliver Sacks. There are neurological fringe cases all over the book. The point of view character had a radical hemispherectomy as a child to address a seizure disorder. One of the characters has an intentionally induced multiple personality (to better use her brain’s capacity), another has had his brain rewired to extend his sensory range and ability to use telepresence equipment. Another principal character is a vampire.

I hesitate to even mention the vampire connection since it’s mostly a peripheral issue. This isn’t a vampire book in any traditional sense. Watts seems to have included them more as a lark, but he does some very interesting stuff to make his vampires somewhat plausible within the existing vampire mythos as well as showing how their existence might be useful to the rest of us.

So what the book is about is an alien first contact. And it’s a nice scary creepy what-the-heck-are-they-and-what-do-they-want kind of first contact novel rather than the tiresome humanoid-meets-humanoid kind.

So if a claustrophobic, talky, space-based, first contact novel with neurologically marginal but interesting and realistic characters sounds like fun to you, go buy Watts’s book. Or if you’re a cheap bastard like me, get it from the library or download a copy. And when you’ve read it, send me an email and let’s talk about that big scary idea.

Another one I read for the Endeavour Award. I came awfully close to flinging this one against the wall, but it’s a library book so I didn’t.

It doesn’t help that I came to this saga with the second book, but I don’t think much of anything would have helped me like this book. Cardboard characters, cardboard setting, cardboard plot. Over-zealous use of the thesaurus coupled with way too many made-up words.

I came to think of the book as an attempt to write a woman character in a setting like the Conan the Barbarian books, but that makes it sound interesting. The protagonist is a woman in a male-dominated society who’s become addicted to dragon venom which when ingested is a stimulant and hallucinogen. She’s also being nagged by the ghost of her mother who appears to her in the form of various flying creatures when she is in mortal danger and tries to get her to go searching for her long lost sister. She has talked a dragon master into taking her on as an apprentice despite the fact that women don’t do that (something about a prophetic scroll here. sigh.)

She faces all kinds of humiliations. When complaining about the book to Becky and Rachel I called it “dragon porn”. This is another description that makes the book sound interesting in a way that it’s not. The book opens with the protagonist being flogged. And not nice cuddly consensual sexy flogging, but the nasty version inflicted by someone who’s hurting her just cause he feels like it. That’s just the beginning of the series of degrading and life-threatening treatments she undergoes. I’m sure there are people who’d enjoy the fantasy of this sort of treatment, but they’ll have to overlook all the cardboard to get their kicks. I can’t imagine that it would be worth it.

I’d picked this up at the library before I found out I’d be reading it for the Endeavour Award. I picked it up because I’d read Mitchell’s End In Fire for last year’s award and enjoyed her evocative depiction of micro-gravity environments in an interesting plot.

Unfortunately, this book doesn’t share the setting or the accomplishment of End In Fire. Last Mortal Man is set in a world where nanotechnology has been successfully applied to the aging problem (among other things). The technology is controlled by one man, Lucius Sterling, who is essentially the business manager for the ivory tower type who made the actual breakthrough. The book opens with an attempt to assassinate Sterling told from the point of view of one of the assassins. She gets cold feet at the last moment and manages to save his life. In exchange he whisks her away from the crime scene and puts her back together (the weapon was a disassembler). During her convalescence she manages to talk him into hiring her as his personal body guard and giving her the expensive full-body makeover that makes her effectively immortal. In exchange she becomes his indentured servant for quite a long time (250 years? can’t remember).

With those preliminaries out of the way, the book hares off into ever more improbable territory. My gripe with the book is that the rules of the nanotech make no sense. First the stuff is ubiquitous, then there are ways to avoid it. The title character is deathly allergic to the stuff so he has to wear an isolation suit which is somehow self-cleaning without having any technology included. In general, the plot moves in just the way that it seems Mitchell wants it to with increasingly little regard for logic or consequences. I could overlook a lot of this, but when it’s coupled with cardboard characters I just give up. Be afraid, because this is marked “Book One of the Deathless”.

It’s really amazing how many good books have been written using the Arthurian legends as their base material. And here’s another one. This one keeps things fresh by mixing the Arthur stuff up with Faerie and the eternal Seelie vs. Unseelie court intrigue. Along with that leavening, Bear’s book also brings the story to the current day and puts part of it on the streets of New York City.

It took me a few pages to get used to Bear’s slightly heightened style. She uses lots of adjectives (usually color-related) and novel similes that made sentences stick and require rereading until I got used to the style and was able to trust that she really did write the surprising sentence I thought I read. This makes it sound as if the book is full of awkward sentences, but they read so smoothly (once you stop trying to second guess them) that they belie their complex vocabulary. I read a few passages aloud to B and was surprised each time at how smooth and rhythmical they were when spoken. Lovely.

I really liked how all the characters felt like they were in over their heads, but went ahead and did the best they could under the circumstances. It would be easy in a story like this for events to seem arbitrary, but Bear managed to make everything that happens clearly result from a decision that some character plausibly thought was a sensible course of action.

I only wish we’d gotten to see a lot more of her Merlin.

Sequel to Red Thunder, but set 20 years later. The kids from the first book are the parents of the kids in this book. And the kids in this book spend a lot more time as baggage than their parents did in the earlier adventures.

This book also lacks the single story arc of Thunder. The first half of the book shows the family heading to Earth (from Mars, natch) to attempt a rescue of grandma from her Florida hotel in the wake (heh) of a major Atlantic ocean tsunami. The afterword of the book reveals that this part of the book was written before the 2004 tsunami and long before the Katrina fiasco. In light of that, the book is astoundingly prophetic both about the scale of damage from such an event and the utter lack of preparation for dealing with the aftermath.

The second half of the book is about a corporate and governmental man hunt in the wake of the disappearance of the quirky genius Jubal from the first book and the impact of another of his physics-redefining inventions.

The book is fun reading, but the resolutions of both halves of the story left me rolling my eyes at implausibilities.

Sequel to Darwin’s Radio. I was disappointed in the first book, but based on Bear’s record of usually writing stuff I enjoy, I gave this one a chance. Oh well.

The primary plot mover is that the US has reacted with fear to the new species that seems to be trying to emerge. The fear is somewhat justified in that there’s a literal viral element to the conception of these new children, but with a couple of notable exceptions (in millions of cases), the new children don’t seem to pose a medical threat. The story revolves around the measures various factions take to sequester the new children and the actions other factions take to resist.

The problem I have with the book is that while there’s some degree of plausibility to the quarantine approach, it’s no fun to read about. What I was hoping to get was more about the implications of the changes Bear made in the genome. Instead it’s just another exploration of man’s inhumanity to man.

I first read Mitchell when one of her books (End In Fire) came up on the list for this year’s Endeavour Award. I liked that one enough to pick this one up when it showed up on the shelf at the library.

The setting is a far distant future where faster-than-light travel has scattered humans throughout the galaxy. Unfortunately they haven’t been able to leave capitalism behind on the home world, so things are run by a cabal of powerful corporations and the class divide is alive and well, just morphed by space travel from the simple haves and have-nots to those who live in gravity and the “floaters,” those who have worked long enough in zero-gee that they can’t function effectively in significant gravity. The floaters are primarily working class.

The Murphy of the title is a young floater woman who has made it into the galactic police academy and excelled as a pilot. As the book opens, she competes with another student in a test with a new space ship design. She wins, but her chance to capitalize on her success is cut short when she is framed in a crime by a fellow student. And thus begins a series of plot devices that slam our heroine from event to event through the course of the book.

The plot is arbitrary and cliche, but Mitchell speeds through it with such bravado that I didn’t have time to get too annoyed with it while reading the book. There’s nothing subtle about this book, but sometimes it’s fun to read a simple adventure that doesn’t ask too much of your higher reason.

This is the post I was trying to put up when the old blog croaked.

I got this from the library after Jane Espenson was raving about it on her blog. So when a conspicuous character in the book was named Jane I was a little suspicious, and when it turned out that it was that Jane, it made the book that much more fun. (For those who don’t recognize her name, Jane Espenson is a TV writer who’s done major work on little shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and Gilmore Girls and even has an upcoming episode of Battlestar Galactica to her credit.)

Bob Harris was a contestant on the tv game show, Jeopardy. The book is a memoir of his experience with the show and the impact the show had on his life. You’d think this would be the kind of boring story about some egghead who bones up on trivia for fun and profit, but you haven’t met Bob Harris.

Harris is a funny guy. And from his story it seems he’s not really the proverbial egghead either. Actually, to hear him tell it, the primary reason for his success is his ability to press his thumb on the signal button (or “Jeopardy Weapon”) at just the right time. That and the ability to cram reams of trivia into his head and retrieve it as needed.

The book has tips and tricks on remembering stuff, surprisingly suspenseful accounts of the Jeopardy games Harris played, and even more surprisingly, truly touching accounts of how playing this game changed Harris’s life.

It’s an immensely entertaining book about how his quest to win the game led to a genuine love of knowledge and even to love of another kind. And did I mention the funny?

This is the second incarnation of Mad Times. To see posts from the earlier incarnation, follow the links below.

Category archives:

Administrivia
Bloggage
Book Reviews
Cat Blogging
Lost Gloves
Movie Reviews
Personal Interest

Photo Log
Soapbox
Transportation
Travelogue

Date-based archives:

October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006

February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005

May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004

August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003

November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003