Mad Times

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.

I know this looks like it was taken moments after the last cat picture I posted a couple of weeks ago, but you’ll have to trust me that they were taken almost two weeks apart. Sorry about posting so many sleeping pictures. I need to get the camera out on one of the rare occasions when they’re conscious.

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 For various typical publishing reasons it didn’t get printed before Fall of 2001, and after that it was decidedly out of date.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.

If you see this post then you’re seeing our shiny new server. I need to replace all the recently uploaded images (I have them, just haven’t returned them to their rightful places). Otherwise things look pretty normal.

Email to tomecat addresses may be delayed for as much as a day due to systems caching the old address. If you feel you’re not getting through, try me at my gmail address jeff.youngstrom@gmail.com.

Now to figure out what to do with all this space.

Merlin over at 43folders pointed to John Udell’s venerable but still spiffy library lookup bookmarklet generator. I couldn’t figure out what values to use to make it work with the King County Library System catalog, but I was able to hack the code to make it work. Since most of my friends who use the library probably aren’t going to do that themselves, I’m sticking it here for them to grab.

What this does is if you’re looking at a book on Amazon or any other page that displays the book’s ISBN in a recognizable way, you click on the link I’m about to share and it will open a new window showing the search results for that ISBN in the KCLS catalog.

Drag this link: KCLS-it to the link bar in your browser. Then go look something up at Powell’s and once you’ve got the book you want showing, click the link in your link bar. It should open a new window (or tab) showing that book in the catalog. If the book isn’t in the system it will show you a list of items around that ISBN that are in the catalog.

Yell if you have problems and I’ll try to help you out.

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.