Obsolete Your Idols

Hey, guess what I did in 2006. I read a novel. Then I did it again forty-nine more times. Not the same novel, obviously, as one of my self-set constraints was that they must be novels I hadn't previously read.

I just read the fiftieth and it was Drama City. This was out of my usual reading genres, a modern crime drama. Usually reading sf with the occasional fantasy, this book was a shift in reading styles. The first half of the novel was just character building and gradually warming heat under the stewplot.

Then somebody dies.

Until I hit that midway point, this book wasn't really grabbing me. We spend a lot of time understanding the central characters and their histories and it felt to me like it wasn't going anywhere until it abruptly dropped the story into gear and took off at a flash. The latter half benefits from the structure of the first half but I could have used a faster acceleration in the beginning.

So it's set in [as I guess I'm supposed to guess from the name] the District of Columbia and it's got ex-cons and criminals and some people on the other side of the law enforcement line but not very many. It ended satisfyingly and became a much more interesting book to me at just about the midpoint.

What I liked about this book

• once things started to unravel, it takes off like a rocket in brisk pacing
• the characters felt real, partly because of the use of repetition to establish the patterns and cycles of their lives
• the dialog sounded natural to my reading ear
• it's got a brief but torrid sex scene

What I didn't like about it

• slow slow start; I prefer stories which start when something changes in the lives of the central characters
• there's some minor graphic violence
• in the first three pages, it already seemed the author was talking down to reader, through unsubtle repetition

Who might like this book

• people running gritty modern role-playing games [Dark Champions, Unknown Armies, Esoterrorists, Delta Green]
• people who already read crime fiction and like it
• people who don't read crime fiction and want to read something solid and conclusive

Thanks for reading, it's been fun to have a reason to blab at you through 2006.

Forty-ninth novel of the year I hadn't previously read, Silver on the Tree, is now read.

This book is the payoff for all which came before it. It is a culmination of the story, the climax of the fight between the Dark and the Light, and has a rather nice epilogue. It's once again set mostly in Wales, roughly current and substantially earlier.

It has many references to mythology, familiar and otherwise, which drove me to search engines to get a grip on some of the subtext and context not made manifestly clear through this story but only hinted at.

What I liked

• great smash-up climactic ending
• some nice bits with Jane actually getting a personality
• lots of echoes of earlier mythic ages
• King Arthur
• the sad king / maker

What I didn't

• the whole Also the White Rider bit, which seemed a bit unanticipated
• the traditional issue I have with stories of destiny and prophecy, which is, how can they fail?
• substantially longer than many of the previous books in this sequence which made them seem a bit thin in retrospect

Who will like this book [and by implication, the whole sequence]

• fans of the King Arthur stories
• fans of Wales
• writers of slash fiction looking for a space less trampled than His Publishedness
• kids who feel different and want to feel special and magical
• people who want to get back a sense of the wonder of Yule, like it was before Shopping Christ peed all over it

OK, almost to the finishing line. Can't talk. Reading.

Fourth of the Dark is Rising sequence, The Grey King, is all about Will, the youngest of the Old, again.

He goes off to Wales to convalesce, meets a freaky albino boy with a freaky albino dog and has some freaky albino adventure.

Also, there's a harp, an evil fog bank, and some uppity foxes. Also some food which sounds interesting and I'd have liked an appendix of recipes. Oh, and some lessons in Welsh pronunciation, which might come in handy for someone working on the Linux kernel in the footsteps of a famous developer.

It's good. It's not too short. It has more pieces of Welsh myths than I recognize and some Arthurian stuff which I do.

The end is nigh!

It's coming.

ObOb: Hosting for this site is provided by a member of Beatnik Turtle.

Hey, I read Greenwitch by Susan Cooper and it was short short SHORT.

It brings the various heroes from books one and two in this sequence together and tells an incredibly brief story of yet another fight against an agent of the Dark.

There's a nice court scene and it's really short. Did I mention it's short? So I read it in three BART rides.

Predictably, I read the second book in the sequence, The Dark is Rising and it was pretty good. I can see where it would appeal particularly to people with a childlike sense of wonder about Christmas, and those who have December birthdays.

It reminded me quite a bit of the Christmas Revels which Vy and I attended in 2005 and which Vy tells me borrow quite heavily from this book or perhaps some common source material. You may recall I didn't really care for the revels because, well, I am a no-fun grinch.

Also, I don't like audience participation type stuff.

But this book, it's all right. There's unexplained magic and deep symbolic portent and a character from the first book plays an even more major part here than in the first book in the sequence.

So if you like the idea of Britain being a magical land guarded by beings of Light and fighting off an onslaught by the Dark then, yeah, you'll dig this book, too, because More of the Same. Some nice characterization of one of the villains this time out.

Welcome to the Catching Shannon Up Show wherein I read a young adult series ... excuse me, sequence, which all the rest of you read twenty or thirty years ago.

It's Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, and it starts with Over Sea, Under Stone. Now go ahead and open that link in another tab. Look at the cover. See that dude? He is very, very bad. Also, he has a hypnotic voice.

He's awesome. But he doesn't get much screen time. This book is about three delightful, wonderful, rambunctious, cheerful, brave and beautiful children finding adventure under the protection of a powerful family friend. Man, that must be nice. Don't get me wrong. This is a fun book. It's cheery and fresh and precious. But it didn't really hit on any of my spaceships.

What I liked:

• Arthurian bits
• there was an evil girl and in the movie in my mind, she's played by Jennifer Blaire
• a riddle which can be answered hundreds of years later, reminding me of these guys

What I didn't:

• the menace was never very menacing
• the kids sometimes behaved in a way which maybe kids behaved in the 1970s but, now? no way
• no retribution!

If you mysteriously haven't yet read this sequence which everyone has read and you think you might like to read some young adult fantasy which is neither patronizing nor boring, this is a pretty good read. It moves briskly, which always helps.

Third novel in the Faded Sun trilogy by C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kutath, already? That's awesome!

This was the best of the trilogy. It was the thematic and action climax of the story arc and it even had a nice denouement.

That's really all there is to say about this. If you buy this book, skip the first two hundred pages, and read the rest of it, you'll probably dig it, if you're anything like me. It's a character story, it's got some good intrigue and politics, it has several bloody catastrophes. Good stuff.

We've moved to a new location and if you didn't get the updated address and should have, email me.

If you mailed me and it came back with permanent failure, well, try again. I screwed up the DNS in two different ways and both should now be fixed. Likewise, and more importantly, if you sent email to Vy, and she didn't respond, send again.

If you need an unsolicited recommendation for a moving company in the San Francisco Bay Area, the people at Shamrock Moving & Storage did great by us and we're quite happy with their timeliness, accuracy, courtesy, skills, and adaptability.

Second novel in the Faded Sun trilogy by C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Shon'jir, I liked much more than the first novel in this trilogy. This is a close study of a handful of characters set at the endpoint of an epic length time-line.

Well worth having read the first book to get to this, it's about some of the characters who survived the first novel and what happens to them in the wake of the peace between the humans and the aliens which kicked off the series. It seems to me to bear a lot of similarity to Lawrence of Arabia but some of that is surely the desert setting which [again!] dominates the narrative, even when the characters are on a ship in space.

This one has actual story events, hints at big doings, and has character development arcs which engaged me. Also, there's an action scene! With real conflict! And shooting! Sort of. Near the end. If you read closely.

This is another sf novel aimed squarely at people not me but I enjoyed it more than the first.

You know what book I really didn't like?

Deathwatch.

Good thing that isn't the book I just read.

Instead, I read Faded Sun: Kesrith. It's better than Deathwatch was but reminded me a lot of it. Also, a lot of the journey to Mordor parts of that other book by that one guy. The one with all the slash fanfic fans. Which I also didn't like either of the times I read it.

But this book, about Kesrith, is allegedly a standalone story. I guess it is. The problem I had with it is that that story is all in the last fifty pages. So what happens in the first 205 pages? Well, there's a whiny alien kid forced to live with old people who oppress him and there's a desert. A big honking huge desert planet with weird weather and some kind of bearish totem animals. Oh, and there's another alien species living on the planet with them and somewhere off in space there are humans who are dirty and don't understand honor.

It's all exposition for the actual events. Not to spoil this for anyone but, really, the first 200 pages or so of this book could have read "Niun lived for an almost unbearably long time with elders of his kind who were actually preparing him for his destiny. Then the first humans landed on their home-world."

But. This book is the first in a trilogy. If I hadn't known that, I wouldn't have finished it. But I did know that so I did finish it.

What I liked about this book

• the two alien cultures both seemed genuinely alien
• there was some good politicking and partial information negotiations
• I liked the human governor's assistant

What I didn't like about this book

• long, unbroken streaks of nothing happening
• incessant whining from one of the point of view characters
• an entire culture choosing death before compromise
• not finding out, as a reader, what the big secret of the novel-ending quest is
• the feeling that if this book had been forced to stand alone, I couldn't have gotten to the interesting parts

Who might like this book

• aliens who miss their home-world
• fans of CJ Cherryh who want to read one of her favorite of her own books
• humans wanting to think about alien mindsets
• people expecting to have to survive in an alien desert
• fans of samurai mindsets

I finished reading the Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction. The last novella is a Nancy Kress called And Wild for to Hold and it's about Anne Boleyn, wife of King Henry the Eighth. You'll have heard of him and probably her, as well.

This is a good story for someone not me. The protagonist is more passive and more of a spectator than I enjoy. The trope is the clever figure of power which asserts control regardless of circumstance and there's some stuff about how rejection works as an aphrodisiac.

Didn't really care for it, but I wouldn't tell other people not to read it. So there we go, a book of novellas finished and nine more novels to read before year's end. Striking distance.

I read a James Patrick Kelly story. It was called Mr. Boy. I think this is the first JPK story I've read but it certainly won't be the last. Man! This story was awesome.

It's got extreme body modification, dire caste and class divisions, and language and culture and fashion forecasting in a delightful "if this goes on" vein. It is, I think, a story fundamentally about Peter Pan growing up, twisted.

It's in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, of course.

One more novella left in this book! ONWARD

I read a Robert Silverberg story, Sailing to Byzantium.

But wait! I hear those of you who've had their paws on a copy of Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction cry. What happened in between the Russ and the Silverberg?

Oh, all right. I skipped a novella. Because I'd already read it and recognized it two pages in. So you don't get to know my thoughts about Lucius Shepard's novella because I'm only reading new novels in 2006 and this one I read in late 2005.

Then I read the Silverberg. I've read a bunch of his longer stuff previously and while it's been enjoyable it hasn't been memorable for me. There was the one about the guy who's a juggler. And. Um. A Gypsy king? Something like that, anyway. Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with his writing. I have a hypothesis that some writing hits me right in my retention lobes, that of Roger Zelazny, for example, while other writing misses the part of my brain which makes new memories.

Robert Silverberg's writing takes the form of perfectly fine sentences which pass in my eyes and fall out of the back of my head.

So did I like this story? Yes.

What is this story about? I didn't remember until I referred back to it for this write up.

It's in the future and it has a group of lovely brown physically similar people and a vast horde of temporary humanoids and a protagonist who is neither. It's got some ruminations on what makes a person real, a bit like PKD stories and it's got some epic contemplations of sentiment, a bit like Zelazny, but overall is a whole lot of Silverberg and will remind you of other Silverberg you have read, assuming you are not me and can remember it. At least I think so. It might be nothing like any other Silverberg story other than its ability to evade my memory, in which case, I apologize in advance for potentially misleading you.

So is this meandering a response in kind to this story, a critique which takes on some of the characteristics of the story to convey impressionistic-ally the effect of the story?

Don't ask me, man. I'm just a visitor to this story.

I dreamed that the atheists, the progressives, the secular humanists, the socialists, the environmentalists, the anarchists disappeared from the Earth during the night. All of the people accused of being in a vast conspiracy to disrupt business and spoil politics and corrupt morals. The only people left on Earth were the people who identify as persons of faith, who worry most that someone else somewhere is having fun, that value money above all things, that howl for violent revenge upon anyone who disagrees with them.

Some countries were more changed than others. America was virtually unchanged in the visible places. The news still appeared as normal and the same editorials were still written blaming failures upon those vanished millions, disowning all responsibility. The corporations still issued press releases and managers still met. Many of them had fewer employees, though few of the managers noticed other than to bring in consultants to sit in the now empty cubes. Few of the temporary agencies were able to dispatch any employees, as many of them were gone. The Federal and State governments were at full strength and still tended to the important business of letting lobbyists buy them lunch.

The Midwest was emptier, but no one noticed. The coastal cities were emptied, but no one cared.

Then the President declared himself President Elect for Life. The congress passed law after law, making every action a crime but providing exemptions for those above certain income levels or those entities recognized by the courts as corporations. The air became brown, the oceans became red, the earth glowed by night, as pollution was unregulated. People with less power were preyed upon by those with more and it was legally sanctioned. Newspapers and television reported that the rapes and murders were the work of the God-less Left, who had never left but were in hiding, lurking behind every corner, lying in wait. They kept the uninformed in a state of panic and rage. The ones in power lived like decadent emperors until someone with more power came and took it away from them.

Soon there was widespread bloodshed as heavily armed militias shot it out with one another, squabbling over sordid deals gone awry. The warfare escalated all over the world. Then nuclear weapons were deployed, tactically. Not between nations, for many of them had already fractured into fiefdoms, but between faiths. In the US, the Mormons and the Dominionists and the Catholics had a three way nuclear exchange. Other countries had more complicated fights and feuds and there were many more attempts to use nuclear weapons than there were successes, as some were second hand, sold from ancient American stockpiles by the corporations which controlled the American lands.

Eventually, it was quiet, as the few survivors developed terminal illnesses from the pollutants in the wrecked environment. Almost every animal had been wiped out, through hunting or clumsiness. Almost every human had died from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or being too greedy, or by believing in a lie. Not one of them went to Heaven or anything like it. They just lay where they were and their heart stopped and their brain stopped.

Then those who had disappeared were brought back. They had seen it all happen. They saw the wreck and ruin of life on Earth as it stood. They all cried out, "Let us fix it! Let us help! Let us undo the damage!" Because it's what they'd always feared. It's what they had tried to fight when they were on Earth. It was their worst nightmare.

So they were put back on Earth, at the same place and time they had been taken away. They knew all that would happen if they let things develop without them. They remembered how it would all end in death and desolation. They knew that would spend lifetimes and be rewarded with the contempt and disdain of the selfish, the foolish, the evil and the merely banal. But they remembered how much more awful the alternative was.

What a freaking nightmare.

I read the Joanna Russ story, Souls.

It's completely awesome, despite the unreliable narrator.

It's an historical science fiction story with an unrevealed force and some sharp characterization and insightful treatments of human relationships. So it's not the kind of story I normally don't like; yet, I like this one a lot.

It's from Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction.
Of course. It's short and it involves a German monastery and some vikings. And maybe some space elves with no hair. I think.

In the interest of trimming my spending, I dropped my pull list at the local comic shop. Here's what the last visit held:

• Shadowpact #6. It's okay. Start of a new story arc. It's got a flipper baby telekinetic. That's fine.
• CheckMate #7. Awesome. Death! Plotting! More plotting! Definitely one I'll pick up in trade paper down the road.
• Desolation Jones #7. Great story. Art hurts my eyes.
• WildCats #1. Grant. Fucking. Morrison. This issue is nearly enough to get me to run back to the comic shop and uncancel my pull list. Nearly.
• 52 #23 & #24. Yeah. I've been reading 52. It's a mixed bag, as with any multiple creator work. Each them had a scene which had me chortling out loud [23, Osiris gets imbued with power; 24, the citizens of Metropolis yelling out their hero names]
• Martian Manhunter #3 with a cover featuring the same rictus as 52 #23. Some nice tragedy if you like that kind of thing and plans are put in motion to make J'onn's life even more worser than it already is, HOORAY.
• Hellblazer #225. Pretty to look at. Still not really understanding the whole animosity / empathy thing but I guess now I'll get to wait until it's trade-bound to figure it all out.
• Creeper #3. I like it and I don't have to justify that to anybody.
• Deadman #3. Um. I don't get it. I mean, I really don't get it. I understand the theoretical physics they claim to be drawing on here and I still don't get it. This book should be the comic version of an instrumental. Just use liquid paper on all the word balloons so they stop distracting you and enjoy the boobies.
• Ramayan 3392AD #2. If blood does not bother you, this would be a good comic book to look at while high. The art is dream like. The story is ... there. It's okay.
• Devi #4. Another beautiful book with transparent characterization and a story wavering between clever and stupid.
• John Woo's 7 Brothers #1. This is the best damned book in the pile. Thirty seconds ago, you started reading it. Remember?

OK, that's it on comics for a while.

Who doesn't like Frankenstein stories? This one also has incest but not the kind you might expect and a dystopian societal collapse background. Good stuff! It's a real downer kind of story with one door closing as another more weird door opens.

It's called Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and it's by Kate Wilhelm who I had the joy of hearing speak at Wiscon 30 but whose writing I had not previously read. It's out of that book, you know, the one I'm reading to catch up on the fifty novel project.

Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction. This book, I should belatedly mention, is one Vy recommended to me and this story is one of her favorites from this book, which is more evidence that we like different kinds of sf, since I enjoyed it but less so than some others so far in this collection.

My friend Cat sold the only piece I've had the pleasure to hear her read. It's an awesome piece which perhaps only a person who MUDs could have written. Look for it when it hits the stands.

I read The Death of Doctor Island by Gene Wolfe. It's got some haunting imagery and a pair of clever perspective pivots, most notably where the character who we've been following turns out to be just a walk-on in somebody else's story. Also, there are monkeys.

It's another tale from Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, short and punchy, simultaneously brisk in pacing and lyrical in prose. I guess someone made a movie of it, which would probably be worth watching. Reading Gene Wolfe is a guilty pleasure somewhat close to that of reading Robert Heinlein for me; despite the sometimes jarring intrusions of disagreeable ethos, it's often a pretty fun read.

No links to other stuff by or about Wolfe; any search engine you choose to use will have much, much more about him. He's prolific.

I read Merchants of Venus which is not exactly Merchants of Venus nor Merchants of Venus nor Merchant of Venice and so on. There are a lot of things of similar name which is not, all of them inspired at a minimum and in some cases directly translated from this Merchant of Venice.

The one I just read is another novella in Modern Classic Short Novels of SF and it's a satisfyingly complete story with nicely woven exposition and context. Not of the here's an extraordinarily long and inappropriate brain-dump style of world-background but more naturally unfolding in a way which doesn't feel forced or artificial to me as a reader.

So that part I really liked. The lack of ultimate explanation for what's afoot with the Heechee and their tunnels, that's great, too. I even liked the protagonist's mild sexism given how his expectation is refuted by the narrative. This story is a gem that shines on its own.

Brian Aldiss wrote a bunch of stuff, not very much of which I can remember having read. But I read Total Environment in the Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction and it was pretty okay. It's a micro-story of a micro-environment of a micro-cosmic importance.

It touches on some themes of suffering and humanity and inhumanity and the greater good and perspective. So it's some capital letter themes writ small. There's a lot of good material here for someone who wanted to run a story in a modernistic setting, twenty minutes into the future.

There were some slightly wince-worthy race and culture biases but they contributed to the claustrophobic narrative and probably enhanced the experience of reading this story.

Now I read The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany from Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction and it was the meatiest of the stories so far, by far. It gave me the strongest sensations that there was a plausible world looming ahead of us in the future with real people, real aspirations, real failures, real wins and real tragedies. It follows a narrator who starts by telling us a story within his story and then follows him through a short story arc with tightly-woven strands of exposition which support and propel the narrative.

It's some astounding craftsmanship from one of the deservedly renowned writers of our time.

After you read it, you may want to immediately re-read it to see it develop from the first words to the last, one more time. Unless, that is, you still have 17 more novels to read before year end.

I realize that the kinds of entities which accept donations of money are caught in a cycle where the humans who decide things there believe that they must send out frequent ever-more-strident solicitations for money. But I think they're wrong. I'm sick of feeling like a chump because I was once moved to donate money and continue to pay for it in pounds of junk mail requests for even more money.

Organizations Which Continue to Hassle Me and Thus Get No More Money

• ACLU
• Amnesty International
• the Democratic National Committee
• Habitat for Humanity
• National Public Radio
• the Sierra Club

Organizations Which Rarely or Never Hassle Me and Thus Could Get More Money

• EFF
• EPIC
• Friends for Jim McDermott
• OpenBSD
• SPI
• STAND!

I guess I'm not sorry about any of the donations I've made but I do regret that every single communication from some of the entities is another solicitation for yet more money and that I hear from them so frequently. My ideal experience would be to receive maybe twenty or so communications from an entity I've donated money to in a year's time and have one of them ask me for more money with nineteen being about what they did with the money people gave them.

If they've got nothing to say to me other than "Spare Change? Spare Change?" I'd prefer they not show up every week.

My friend Tim has a brief confession about his new-found fondness for Google. I'm probably reading too much into it by noticing that his blog is hosted at Blogger, aren't I? That's how they get to you! I say we take off and nuke the whole codepus from orbit.

So in the interest of full-disclosure, nutrients I receive regularly from the Google teats, other than the obvious searches:

• Gmail account used for
  • Google news alerts
  • Google group membership
  • a dusty old Orkut account
• Maps, which reminds me to mention my home town. Evidently there is a misspelled name on that map. Twice.
• sometimes I eat nan which Evan leaves at the Lair after gaming. He probably buys it with money paid to him by Google.

I tend to look briefly at each new Google beta or lab service as it gets buzz around it and then not use it very much, not go back to give it a second trial. It's a big web. I have a lot more links I need to be clicking on. I can't wait around for a second chance.

But I'm not ready to jump on the Google-is-secretly-evil bandwagon. I think I'm just glad to see someone else excited about something I have been excited about before.

I like Cordwainer Smith stories, in the abstract.

They're the kind of richly detailed setting I should like.

They're the intricate contextual unfolding of characterization and story which I rave about.

And yet.

I read On the Storm Planet from the Modern Classic Short Novels book I'm using to catch up on my novel reading goal. It should have been my cup of tea.

It's allegedly a revenge story. Sort of. It involves enigmatic characters, re-contextualized religion and myth, space opera. All those things I dig on. The planet it's mostly set on, Henriada, has attractively extreme weather and seems to have references to Alabama.

And yet.

This is a fine story for people who like Cordwainer Smith. For people like me who keep wanting to like Cordwainer Smith, it probably won't shift you into the fan column.

I buy comic books.

Sometimes I buy a few. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes I read them. Sometimes I don't. I'm probably part of what's wrong with the comic book industry today; I am inconsistent in my habits, fickle in my devotion and create a weak secondary market by giving comic books away to people who might otherwise buy books.

But today I want to mention three comic books which are ongoing titles. They're probably also announced in trade-bound editions but since I picked these up as part of my current trend of having a stack to read through in order of anticipated enjoyment fortnightly, that's not how I read them.

The first one is a title I've stopped reading. It's the Blue Beetle. I have fond memories of a character of that name dating back to the early seventies, thanks to The Electric Company.

I'd read some comic books with appearances by a character of that name over the years and probably the most satisfying was a character of a very different name, Nite Owl 2. But, still, fundamentally the things I liked about the character were present. Similar to Batman but less deranged.

So I picked up the new Blue Beetle title and read it. For four issues. I'm not sure if it's the feeling that ethnicity is simultaneously ubiquitous and irrelevant or that the cultural mores seem questionable or if I'm hitting an overdose of magic-based characters but it's just boring me.

So that's one I'm not reading anymore.

Another one is Elephantmen. It's a title from Image Comics which, yes, I know better. I learned years ago [roughly, at the company creation] to not expect plausible artwork, interesting characters or plausible story from them. But this time I let the clerk at the counter convince me to give it a try.

I made it to issue #2, which has text entirely constructed of quotes from the Bible super-imposed over a fight as clearly presented as if it had been directed by Michael Bay. The other serial narrative in the book is a parody of Howard Stern. Only, with less class.

But I said I'd talk about three titles. The third one is going to seem odd. It's a title from Marvel. It's yet another retread of a character from thirty years ago. It's Moon Knight. And it's awesome.

Here's why

• it is a revenge story
• it preserves the entire fucked up canonical Moon Knight back-story
• including the parts which were already self-contradictory
• did I mention it's a revenge story?
• revealing new depth and complexity to canonical characters
• fabulous [new?] villain, The Profiler
• it's totally a revenge story

Moon Knight, along with Baron Winter, Ghost Rider and Iron Fist are my guilty childhood comic book pleasures. So I was nervous about how this new series would hold up to my memories. I even made it worse for myself by picking up the Essential Moon Knight phone-book and reading through it.

This new incarnation of Moon Knight not only does my memories justice, it enhances the whole experience in retrospect and makes me eager for more.

Second modern classic short novel down. This one is from Poul Anderson, 1960. It's the moving story of a fallen colony of Earth-spawned civilization and the pride of one ship's captain. Contrasted with the lack of pride by the de facto captain of another ship.

It's got a more interesting narrative voice than the Vance story I read before if, arguably. But the story itself didn't move me as much.

Well worth the honor bestowed it by Dozois's selection of it here, though a story which I perceive as being most enjoyable to me because I'm a guy and it's a story about guys doing stuff and making tough guy decisions and tougher guy sacrifices. Life sucks when you're in charge.

Oh, it's called The Longest Voyage. But you probably already knew that.

Time to make up for lost time in the pursuit of reading fifty novels. I'm tackling Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction and I'm counting each novella as a novel. This will more than offset my counting the five Demon Princes novels as two books.

First up: The Miracle Workers.

It's a Jack Vance story. That's all I have to say about it.

Well, no. It's a great Jack Vance story. In fact, it's a great Jack Vance story about the common acceptance of scientific wonders and the adulation piled upon antiquated traditions. Maybe that's what it's about. That's what I took away from it, anyway.

It's a future other world story where humans contend with the aboriginal inhabitants and are disdainful of such superstitions as the scientific method.

There'll be a dozen more like these. Stay tuned.

Do you know who Greg Egan is? You should.

He wrote the book I just read, Quarantine.

I read it when I did because a coworker loaned it to me. I would have read it anyway, in time, because I had already read the book Distress which he also wrote, loaned to me by a friend. But wow.

Wow.

WOW.

Quarantine takes a perspective I would have previously guessed impossible to carry off and manages it with eloquence and resonance. Not to be coy. It's the measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics as a point of view.

It's a tiny bit like the story from Star Diaries where Tichy bunches up his causal stream. It's a lot like the narrativist styled rpgs I've been playing around with lately. It's good. It's really good. Also, short.

What I liked about it

• the story hooked me four pages in
• the protagonist is so likable despite his radical personality change midway through
• it's got credible, plausible, marvelous technology
• it's got a nicely woven story arc

What I didn't

• there is nothing to not like about this story

Who may like this book

• you
• all of you
• the uncollapsed waveform of all potential you
• technoptimists who believe that all humanity needs is more sufficiently advanced technology

My friend Randy gets quoted in an article about the Indie Band Survival Guide he had a hand in writing.

If you are capable of reading these words, you should probably go read the guide or at least visit the Beatnik Turtle site.

Do it! Do it now!

A co-worker loaned me Lamb and since it'd already been recommended to me by a friend, I read it. You've probably already heard about this book. Maybe you read it, already.

It's good.

It's probably the second best book about Jesus I've read, after Ken's Guide to the Bible. So what is it? It's a novel from the point of view of Jesus's childhood pal, Levi called Biff. A new spin on a story which has been covered a number of times which happens to be laugh-out-loud funny in parts and snuffly sad in others.

What I liked

• it's a genuinely warm and funny look at Jesus
• it's got kung-fu
• it's got sex and quite a lot of it

What I didn't

• Nothing, other than the clenching my wallet did when it realized I must now buy all of the books Christopher Moore has written

Who might like this book

• Jews
• Gentiles
• people not possessed by demons
• pigs not possessed by demons
• dogs not otherwise distracted by a flank steak

I went to Linuxworld. Or, at least the Exhibit Hall, which is as much of it as one can see without paying money for the privilege. I saw a lot of vendors, some of them in suits. I saw a lot of companies I recognized the products of and one which I had thought had died.

Ingres. That's right. They're around again. Or still. Depending upon how you measure you it. Once upon a time I was an Ingres DBA. The last time I saw it, CA had rushed out some half-assed almost-worked-on-Linux version of the Ingres database engine but I wasn't able to make a case for using it to my boss of the time when Oracle had a less broken engine available to run on Linux.

I also saw a bit of holy war humor. Unfortunately the resolution on my camera-phone wasn't high enough for anyone to read the signs on the booths so you'll just to take my word for who was there.

I came away from the show with some weak schwag [mostly stickers] and only one disturbing moment. I chanced to be near the Debian booth when some visitor asked what the relationship is between Debian and Ubuntu.

The representative of Debian said that the chief differences are

• Ubuntu focuses more on the desktop presentation
• Ubuntu configures different default options for the user
• ... which restricts users unnecessarily
• Ubuntu doesn't do as much to insure security of the software

I've been a Debian system administrator, personally and professionally, for years. I've been an Ubuntu system administrator for a year, in parallel. I haven't given up my Debian systems. But I don't put Debian on any new systems I install.

Because while the first point might be true, it's done using the task system for bundling packages, inherited from Debian. While the second point is true, it certainly doesn't lead to the third point. The options are still there, still configurable. If a person uses Ubuntu and doesn't like the options they started with, there are a number of sources of information they can use to find out how to change their system.

As for the fourth stated difference, I just don't see how that can be true. The apt repositories of security updates is virtually identical to the system Debian has in place. The source code for changes is all available so it's not as if the Ubuntu developers have to guess what changes were made to a Debian package to secure it. It's not as if there isn't some overlap in the development communities and tools and mailing lists and concerns between the two projects.

So how are they different? Here's what I see as the differences

• Ubuntu releases every six months
• Ubuntu airs less of their dirty laundry in public
• ... but that may be entirely subjective as I used to subscribe to a lot of Debian mailing lists and I only subscribe to Ubuntu announcements and security announcements, currently
• Ubuntu is more active about supporting commercial applications for end-users

That's it. I can do anything with Debian I can with Ubuntu with almost equal ease. I don't feel notably less secure with either distribution. I could perhaps make a case if I were a more buzzword compliant developer that having new libraries and tools available every six months was somehow better than the less regularly scheduled Debian updates but with my system administrator decoder ring on, I could go either way on it. The things I like in Debian, I like in Ubuntu.

The things I didn't like in Debian have less to do with the software and more with the ceaseless flame-wars. I'm as much a moralist as anyone, probably more. But I still got tuckered out just trying to read past them to the actual technical informations.

I read Matt Ruff's first book, huzzah. He had this published when he was 21 and it's called Fool on the Hill.

So what's it like? It's a first novel. It has a slight case of the kitchen sink. There are a lot of threads, a lot of short passages and chapters, a lot of self-awareness on the part of the characters and the deployment of tropes. Which certainly isn't bad but is something to be aware of when you read it.

This book is a good case of a clever, cute, funny book which is intended for someone not me. Unlike his Public Works Trilogy, which was a clever, cute, funny and conspiracy-laden book, which was intended for me or someone very like me.

Fool on the Hill has:

• at least one Greek god
• several other supernatural entities
• dogs which are telepathic with cats and each other
• cats which are telepathic with dogs and each other and which can understand spoken and written human languages
• sprites who can not ordinarily be seen by humans and so live among them
• Bohemians, which in this usage I translate as Chaos Lords
• magic spear, no magic helmet in sight
• several love stories, romance stories and friendship stories
• a Dragon
• a college town

It's thick, it's ambitious, and parts of it were genuinely fun to read for me.

What I liked about this book

• it's a thoroughly upbeat book
• there's some very clever language
• it reminded me of my time in a college town

What I didn't

• it's kind of a scrambled mess of a story with a lot of pieces going into the omelet
• it has my least favorite tale ending form ever and it even foreshadows it happening through a character who is a plausible author avatar
• it breaks the fourth wall more than I can enjoy
• many of the characters don't seem to have much there, there

Who might like this book

• fans of fantasy in modern settings
• fans of talking animals
• readers who enjoy first novels
• people who lived in the House of Chaos or, really, any larger than life party house
• people who fly kites

Some time in 2005 I read a novel called Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. I read it because a friend recommended it and because it was set in a future Oakland, California. I was extremely glad I'd read it, because the story was fairly fucking awesome. I searched around for other books by the same writer, wish-listed a couple of them, and forgot all about it.

Then a book store I was at spontaneously went out of business while I was there so I got some good deals on books I'd been eying, including As She Climbed Across the Table, another Jonathan Lethem novel. So that's the book I just read.

As She Climbed Across the Table is not a lot like Gun, With Occasional Music.

They're both in the near-time future, sure. They both focus on a male protagonist, more or less. But this book reminded me much less of the first Lethem I read and much more of David Foster Wallace. Only, without the footnotes or the digressions.

But it has the same sense of academic introspection. It's the story of frustrated lovers responding to a technological innovation more than it's the story of that innovation. A fine and valid story and a very quick read for me.

This book is about a man in love with a woman in love with a void. Cue the J. Geils references. It's got some resonance for people who've drank deeply of deconstruction-ism or at least post-modernism. It's got quirky charming characters. It has a surprisingly resolving conclusion.

What I Liked

• witty prose
• clear and strong characterizations of the major players
• fast pacing
• Garth and Evan, who seem to have arrived in this novel from a David Lynch film
• a nice almost-sex on drugs scene

What I Didn't

• the center of this novel is a big nothing; I don't like it in Witch Hunt, and I don't care for it here

I would normally make some jokes here about who should read this book but I really don't know. This book is okay. It's better than many I've read. If you're the kind of person who would like this book, you've probably already read it. It's somewhere in the territory charted by Dr. Excitement's Elixir of Longevity but not as far out as, say, Infinite Jest.

Vy and I had a picnic in mid-July. Randy was kind enough to take some pictures. I did a rough cull and put the ones I felt were most interesting here.

I read Macrolife and it was sassy.

Here's a book originally published in 1979 with a mildly optimistic view of humanity's ability to transcend tragedy and seek the stars. Republished in 2006, the view is perhaps even more optimistic.

It is, however, a work which challenged me to think new thoughts so it achieved that stated goal. It's a plausibly realistic projection of what the future might hold for a humanity which survives an Earth-devastating disaster.

What I liked

• technology-driven sf
• sweeping epic future narrative
• it's got a little sex and a little slaughter in its tale
• it's got a sassy introductory essay in this edition by Ian Watson

What I didn't like

• it's a long book; really, it's a novel, a novella, and a short story

That was all that I really can complain about. It took me longer than a week to get through. That's a lot of time to invest into a Utopian tale of the high-tech future.

Who might like this book

• fans of so-called hard sf
• fans of utopia stories
• people who have survived the death of at least one universe

I read Carmen Dog and it took me longer than I was expecting it to take. It's a short book. It's a book about women and animals and opera. It reminds me of the writing of Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez. Which I don't really care for.

Really, it's not the writing. It's me. Because when I read about something not merely improbable but outright impossible, I say to myself "Aha, this is an allegory for something!" and then I try to puzzle out what it might be representing. This tends to ruin a lot of the enjoyment I might otherwise derive from the story.

But don't let that discourage you from reading this book. This book is arguably an important book and certainly a clever book and absolutely a short book.

What I liked about this book

• it's got a likable protagonist
• it's got a lot of biting
• it's very different from most books I read

What I didn't

• it's got a lot of opera references and lyrics; I didn't get most of them
• I felt compelled to try to decode metaphors
• I couldn't get a clear picture in my head of the characters because of the language used to describe them

Who might like this book

• people who think that women are every bit as human as men are [ you know, feminists ]
• animals who can read or have it read to them, including people animals
• Greek sorceresses
• servants of ship-wrecked magicians named Prospero
• your mom
• no, seriously; your mom
• fans of opera

Still off tempo from my trip to Wiscon, but another novel knocked out. Another Varley, Red Thunder.

In a word, it's awesome.

Here are some more words. The comparison you might have seen to Heinlein's young adult sf, like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is apt in that this story manages to make an audacious scheme seem plausible, reinforces the belief that there is a combination of youthful bravado and naivety which makes it possible to set impossible goals and reach them, and got me again excited about the possibility of space travel.

As with some of my favorite science fiction, there are instances of improbable technology and here it really works to free the story to be a high adventure in the local solar system. Good characterizations and I loved having a Cuban American protagonist. Brisk pacing, moving and meaningful climax and a satisfying denouement, pointing at the inevitable sequel.

There is no reason not to like this book unless you dislike reading an author who is described as lower-case libertarian in the Heinlein flavor.

Almost a month later, I finished reading the next book. I'd never heard of it before, but it was published in 1980, the paperback printing here was 1989 and it won a Hugo. It's called The Snow Queen. It's a massively dense book, rich with culture and ideas and conflicted romances. It's got some overtones of polyamory or at least love geometrical solids. It's mostly set on a backwater planet in a post-galactic-empire confederacy of worlds. It's got drugs and sex and murder and gee-whiz science. It's got paganism and masks and suicide attempts.

It's a pretty good read; the tipping point for me on this was about 157 pages in, roughly a third of the way. Someone who identifies more with the protagonist, Moon Dawntreader Summer, would probably have gotten hooked by the story earlier.

What I liked

• plausible story throughout once you accept the technology behind it
• some really good knife twists in the obstacles put in front of the characters
• the Big Secret Behind It All
• characters accepting responsibility for their own actions

What I didn't

• we spend an awful lot of time on the emotional inner life of characters who don't communicate with each other
• we spend an awful lot of time following characters who are only minor players in the story

Who might like this book

• fans of Dune
• fans of The Culture
• fans of A Song of Fire and Ice
• fans of Glory Season
• people who are the clones of semi-immortal queens
• people who think that winter lasts for over a hundred years

In retrospect, I can reconstruct why it took me so long to read the book The Golden Globe by John Varley. It comes down to a simple, dumb thing. On the cover, there is a positive blurb about the author. A positive blurb from the pen of Tom Clancy. Despite having enormously enjoyed the half a dozen Varley books I'd previously read, that one quote stuck in my craw and so I didn't read The Golden Globe, the first book by him I saw with the blurb, for years.

Recently, I got past the quote.

This book is a picaresque tale and for those who aren't fans of The Decembrists or, perhaps, like me, were unaware they've used that word as an album title, it means that the protagonist is a rogue whose story arc involves the flight from pursuit halted only by the concoction of yet another scheme which will lead to future pursuit. It works smashingly well to tell the story of Kenneth Valentine.

There are links between this story and some of his other works but they're not links of dependency. You can read this standalone and be just fine with it. It's also got riffs on Shakespeare so fans of the Bard will be on firm ground here, at least for a time.

What I liked

• the protagonist and his little dog, too
• the universe and the way Varley peels back a layer at a time of it
• the villain of the present day
• the revenge subplots

What I didn't

• the unreliable narrator

So one minor recurring peeve of mine in a pile of good stuff. Briskly paced story, evocations of my time spent among the people of theater, and some gee-whiz space science. Very enjoyable read and positively a good place to start reading John Varley.

Hey, it's a book about my new favorite city, San Francisco. It's called The City, Not Long After and it's by Pat Murphy who also wrote The Falling Woman. I enjoyed this one more.

It's a tiny bit like Dhalgren but only when distilled down to a too brief summary. It's a future America where an international plague has winnowed the population tremendously. I can't be sure but I think it's a book about a woman's quest to create an identity for herself or possibly it's about a city forcing an identity on a woman. So it's got touches of Danny the Street insofar as the City, itself, is a character with motives and a story arc. It's also a meditation on the purposes of art and the resolution of the conflict of conflict.

What I Liked

• the weirdness
• rich characterizations
• extremely likable protagonists
• the art installation descriptions
• San Francisco geography; I knew some of the places she wrote about

What I Didn't Like

• the epilogue; I didn't need it, it felt like a The Moral of the Story Is

Who May Like This Story

• dystopianists
• people who wanted to read Dhalgren but were unable to arrange a multi-state Greyhound trip which would force them to actually finish it
• people who don't read the epilogue
• people who thought The Parable of the Sower was kind of a downer
• people who want to read about a living city

So, the third of three, Prophet completes the story arc of the central characters.

This is the strongest of the three. The wicked end badly, the good end unhappily. You'll probably only find this interesting if you read the first two or at least the second one. It hits a couple flat notes but finishes strong so points for that.

What I liked

• Carlos Mendoza, again
• Gravedancer
• the Prophet's Plan

What I didn't

• The Anointed One
• The Silicon Kid
• the infallibility of cranky old men

Essentially, there was a set of throwaway characters and a perfectly good opportunity to add some chaos into the mix which wasn't used, here. So not a great trilogy in retrospect but better than many stories and definitely tackling an interesting problem.

Who might like this book

• players of any varient of Traveller
• people who read any of the Santiago stories or earlier books in this series
• GMs with precogs in their campaigns looking for some effective ways to foil them

Coming soon, a great game for people who can maintain the concentration to play a computer game while on drugs, SpongeBob Diner Dash.

Book two of the trilogy, Oracle is the sequel to Soothsayer, prequel to Prophet. This is the part where some trilogies fall apart, after a strong opening. If you paid attention to my last review, I didn't think it was a very exciting opening.

The good news is, this book is much stronger. You could read this without reading the one before it, and not miss much. In fact, I'd recommend reading this one and then going back to read the first one.

What I liked

• Carlos Mendoza is more interesting this time out
• The Whistler's characterization and story arc
• the Lorhn
• tells a stand-alone story but which threads into the precursor
• the ending

What I didn't

• The Injun, who was a collection of stereotypes, most offensive
• 32
• the ending

Yeah, I list "the ending" under both. I have mixed reactions to it. It doesn't resolve anything, which bothers me, but it does twist nicely from where I feared it was going. So on to the third volume.

Who might like this book

• people who spend a lot of time thinking about free will
• people who spend a lot of time thinking about predestination
• people who like the joke: "Of course women are smarter than men. A man on a date with a woman will wonder all evening if they're going to have sex; the woman already knows."

Hey, Mike Resnick writes books. I read one a long time ago called Santiago and it was awesome. So when I told my friend Drew that, he gave me a bunch of other Resnick books, including the one I just read, Soothsayer. It's the first book of a trilogy, which is good to know, because it ends without a great deal of resolution for the titular character. It's a western of the future, with gunfights and bounty hunters and trading towns and nicknames. It's got the deft touch for dialog that I remember from Santiago and visits a troubling [if improbable] question. It's about a little girl who can see into the future and the lives that are changed and ended by her passage through their lives.

What I liked

• characters, from nicknames to dialog to motivation; the character back-stories slip in under cover of night
• the setting; I like Resnick's vision of the future, probably because I'm an American who was raised on westerns
• fast flowing story
• dilemma; this is an interesting problem from an authorial point of view, which I sometimes experience as a game-master of role-playing games
• Carlos Mendoza

What I didn't

• there's not a lot of meat to this book and it seems to have been written to set up books in this arc; I hope it pays off
• many of the characters aren't much more than a nickname, which is fine for a fast moving book but I had more questions raised than answered
• I prefer my trilogies to have each volume more self-contained and free-standing; just personal preference, if you're planning to read the whole trilogy, this won't be a buzz-kill

Who should read this

• Deadlands players, possibly
• people who liked The Demon Princes
• people who liked the start of Dune but thought it got "a little heavy/tedious/dry" in the middle

As a side-effect of walking along under BART tracks reading Soothsayer, I received unsolicited but welcome book recommendations for Welcome Chaos as well as the work of Chester Himes, who I have seen listed as an inspiration for various writers I've enjoyed but not actually read anything by, knowingly. So watch for those down the line. Next book up will be the sequel to Soothsayer, Oracle.

This review probable won't be useful, because it's for a book which is out of print and has been for a while. But one never knows, maybe there will be a revival or it'll be bundled into an omnibus edition. It's called Ability Quotient by Mack Reynolds. You might remember him from a previous review I did. He's an author China Mieville recommends to writers interested in Socialist themes.

The book itself is not a foreign idea. A protagonist is provided means to enhance his intelligence. It's been done many times since this book and several times before. What's different here is that it's starkly sketched in terms of whether the enhancements will be the dominion of a self-defined elite or whether it will be distributed to all. It's a short book, clocking in at 160 pages. I read it in less than twenty-four hours.

What I liked

• forward momentum the story had; it never dragged or really even paused
• the protagonist was likable and had more depth revealed over time
• the core conflict, which presages the current fuss over the Singularity

What I didn't

• the characters never really rise above being puppets in the shape of socks hastily pulled over animating ideas, with quirky buttons sewed on for personality
• kind of a rushed ending which makes me think this book either needed to be a short story or a longer book to give the idea time to develop
• the generic betrayal
• the generic love-story
• the generic settings

So, well worth the dollar I paid for it. Probably not anything anyone else would want to read unless they were trying to do a comprehensive study of attitudes toward the idea of humanity creating the next generation of humanity, for better or worse, in fiction.

This book took me almost two weeks to read. It's The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre. I've met her, briefly, at a party for Clarion West students. Vy really liked it and recommended it to me.

I didn't really get into it until page 330 of 458. It won a bunch of awards and I still nearly didn't finish it. It's about an alternate history where sea dwelling humanoids interact with [primarily] French nobility. It's the story of a woman at court and her interactions with the rich, powerful, and bitchy.

What I liked about it

• it did a really good job of capturing the arrogance of the extremely powerful
• I liked the bits with the portrait of the king

What I didn't like about it

• there's a lot of blood in this book; other people who've read the book who I say this to are surprised that

  • I think that

    • menstruation anxiety chapter
    • ghastly blood-letting scene
    • farcical hunt of stampeding animals into batteries of gunfire

  • I was bothered by that

  • I'm not bothered by bloody movies
• is there anybody in this book who isn't secretly the bastard offspring of someone important?
• a protagonist who spends most of the story powerless and suffering is not my trip
• too long by half; I'd have cut the subplot with Haleed, if I had edited it

It's not a bad book. It's just not a book for me. People who might enjoy it include

• women, as all the ones I know who've read it loved it
• 7th Sea players of Montaigne characters
• fans of lushly described settings
• creatures of the sea who are wondering why no one thinks they are real

I read Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and it was of the same type of story as many PKD novels I've read.

A protagonist suffers from persecution by hostile forces which may include the universe, itself.

So if you like PKD, you'll like this book. If you don't, it won't change your mind about his stuff. If you've never read any PKD, this is a fine first choice.

What I liked

• persuasive inner monologue by narrator character
• mysterious actions have causes which are revealed in the fullness of time
• the Whatever Happened To denouement
• the mighty brought low
• Felix Buckman's bluff
• Alys Buckman

What I didn't

• some parts of the story weren't as accessible to me as I might have liked because I didn't recognize most of the quotes
• I wanted to know more of the history and setting of this world, though I could extrapolate a lot of it, knowing when it had been written
• totally didn't get the scene at the gas station; it was like a music video for Radiohead or some-such

I just converted my workhorse system, which was my desktop machine in 1999 and has had a few minor upgrades since then and now is the core of my home network, from using a mix of reiserfs and ext3 file systems to having only ext3 file systems, managed by LVM. I'm documenting the process because I'm about to do it again to another machine and this probably won't be the last time I do it, either.

Why?

• wanted dynamic control and resizing of file systems
• had three physical devices
• wanted to use only file systems with dump/restore capability
• wanted to be able to take clean, quiescent file system dumps

How?

• identify a partition to start with

  • not in active use by the running OS
  • as big as another partition
  • small enough used that it can be copied off to another file system

• copy the data off of the target partition's file system

• unmount the target partition
• pvcreate on the target partition
• vgcreate using the target partition
• START OF LOOP: lvcreate using all available PE in the volume group; if you know the next partition you'll be working with, name the logical volume appropriately
• mkfs -t ext3 on the logical volume
• mount the new file system in a temporary location

• identify a partition to pivot

  • used space in the file system on the partition must be less than available in new file system
  • smoother if nearly quiescent, so if it's /var or similar, stop as many daemons as you can
  • best choices will be large, mostly unused file systems early on

• cp -a or rsync from the target partition's file system to the temporary mounted file system of the logical volume

• diff or re-rsync to verify currency; log files may well have updated during the replication
• unmount the logical volume from the temporary location
• edit /etc/fstab to reference the logical volume at its future permanent mount point
• if it's a file system in use, reboot; otherwise, unmount the target partition, mount the logical volume in its place
• pvcreate on the target partition
• vgextend using the target partition
• return to START OF LOOP until you've converted everything

I left the swap partitions alone as I already had equal priority swap partitions on each of several drives and it's easy enough to change their size without needing to reboot if the system is lightly loaded. So now I'll be using the lvm snapshot capability to take backups of the point in time state of my file systems. I can also respond to changing system needs in terms of space and file system architecture.

Hey, I read another book. It was called The Falling Woman. It was written by Pat Murphy, a writer I have never met. But perhaps I will at WisCon because it seems that I heard that she might be there. She taught Clarion West the year my wife attended. Wow, that's a lot of linkage.

Anyway. The book, it's probably science fantasy. There are inexplicable events ... but then again the narrators might be crazy. Or maybe it's Clarke's Law at work. Or maybe it's genuinely supernatural. Or maybe it's a relationship story about a woman and her daughter.

What I liked about this book

• it's not the kind of thing I usually read; I like to diversify
• it's got good, plausible dialog
• the Mayan culture and history bits
• revolving perspectives to give the story more breadth

What I didn't like about this book

• the core story is a mother-daughter relationship; couldn't really relate
• potentially unreliable narrators

So, overall, pretty decent and probably even more enjoyable for female readers who have mothers who are crazy and distant than it was for me.

Everything I know about T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land I've learned from someone else's reference or homage to it. Which brings me to my most recently read novel, Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks. Reusing the same line from which he took the title of another novel in the same setting provides a potentially deeper context from which to consider this story, if you've read it. While I have read it, it had been so long since doing so that I only remembered enough to feel some vague sense of connection. Perhaps a re-read once I've gotten through the fifty new of 2006 will elucidate.

So for people who know nothing about this author or this setting, it's a post-scarcity galaxy-spanning set of civilizations ruminating upon regret, revenge, ethics and art. With an adequate amount of action. As promised by the back cover blurbs, this was an ideal novel for someone to jump onto the Culture setting, as proved by my almost total lack of memory of the previous two novels I'd read from this setting. This story was still engaging, intriguing, moving and satisfying.

It's about members of societies, and those societies as a whole, feeling regret for their actions, or lack of actions, and the things they do or abstain from doing in response to those feelings. Where the consequences are things like mass murder. So it's epic, and it's thought provoking and it's a bunch of other superlatives but I don't think there's much point to my using more. If you know who this author is and what this setting is like, you'll be glad to know that this book is as strong any other I've read and more accessible than some. If you don't know who this author is or you only know him from his thinly disguised pseudonym, then I can recommend this particular book as a solid introduction to his SF writing and his setting called The Culture.

What I Didn't Like

• The Epilogue. It illuminates shadowy motives but recasts the entire story. I thought it was quite satisfying without this.
• The skipping about through time as part of the exposition.
• The futility attached to the story arc of the perfectly likable scholar.
• The drone E. H. Tersano. The one character who didn't seem as well developed or needed as all the others.

What I Did

• The setting. I like the travails of post-Scarcity societies, with the notable exception of Star Trek: the Next Generation which should be a post-Scarcity society and yet people still scrabble for resources. WHY? But here it rings true.
• The characters. From the sulky bon vivant Cr. Mahrai Ziller to the tormented Masaq' Hub, to the dutiful Praf 974, they seemed to be sitting right across from me in the flash while I read this.
• The names of ships. It's a small thing, and it's played as a joke in many ways, but I think it well captures the moods of the Minds which are housed in them.
• The story. I was blown away when the purportedly divine revelation which sets the central story of this novel into motion is revealed. Because suddenly religious fanaticism made sense to me.

If you like science fiction, you will probably like something about this book. It's almost 500 pages in the printing I have and I tore through it in four days. It's fast-paced, engaging and had a momentum which dragged me in its wake. If you're still not convinced you should read it, I've probably got another book in the setting further down in my queue, so look for that.

All right! Big finish to the Demon Princes stories with volume two, wrapping up the story with Kirth Gersen's pursuit of the two remaining villains responsible for the murder and enslavement of his family, friends and neighbors. A splendid ending and well worth reading.

What I liked

• still with the revenge, still cool
• better characterizations
• great darkly humorous bits
• the irony of a villain being out for revenge, himself

What I didn't like

• Again, nothing! Superior writing, great empathy for the protagonist.

It finishes out the story arc quite nicely and was a satisfying conclusion for me.

So, a spaceship for me is revenge. Stories like Jack of Shadows or Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less really work for me far more in excess of how well written they might be or whatever else the story contains. So long as someone is out for vengeance, sign me up.

Another thing I really rather like is Jack Vance. I'd actually read some of his Dying Earth stories before I ever saw the eerily familiar Advanced Dungeons and Dragons magic system. I had been hypnotized by his passion for language and image, drawn in by his clever characters who fought and struggled, armed with blade, poison, spell and bon motte. Good dashing adventure stuff told in lyrical prose.

So you can imagine with what glee I sat down to read The Demon Princes vol 1, a Jack Vance tale about revenge, an omnibus edition collecting tales originally published as three novels.

Let me assuage any trepidation you may feel given this build up. It is a wonderful book. Kirth Gersen is an engaging protagonist, the villains are suitably malicious and cunning, the plots are quick and rich, and the revenge is sweet. It's space opera, meaning that the technology is largely backdrop conveniences to enable aspects of the story and not plausible or unduly impacting the characters. They don't wrestle with the implications of the abilities of their faster than light spaceships, they just use them to shorten the time frame they're cooped up together between star systems.

What I Liked:

• Revenge! It's awesome. Everyone should have some.
• Language; it's clear to me that, like Gene Wolfe and China Mieville, Jack Vance loved words and his prose reads like a scholarly paean to the words, themselves.
• Characters. Well developed or at least glibly captured. Alternately charming and terrifying villains.
• Knowing that there's more of this story to read, still. There's Volume Two, which collects The Face and The Book of Dreams.

What I Didn't Like:

• Nothing! This book was a superb recommendation [Thanks, Drew!] and gift [Thanks, dad-in-law!].

If you like English, revenge, space opera or reviling books I enjoy, you'll want to read this one!

1. I picked up this word second hand from the [Clarion West] [cw] class of 2004. One of the critiques, as it was told to me, was biased in the positive direction because an important element of the story was that it was set on a spaceship. In the way that words take on implications through sociological forces, the word spaceship came to symbolize an element of a story which would hold a reader in thrall, regardless of how good the story, itself, was.

Right on track, another novel. Lagrange Five is another late-1970s sf novel, covering the brave new world of an Earth in decay, an ascendant cadre of elite space-seeking explorers, with criminal and energy cartel villains, and colonists in near Earth space.

It is, more or less, a detective story with a veneer of social commentary and an optimistic view of how things should have progressed by this point. Which is sort of depressing, to contemplate from this point in time how far we've fallen short of these ideals.

What I liked about this novel

• space idealism
• lovable loser detective protagonist
• plausible rebuttal of a lurking suspicion that this setting was meant to be a utopia

What I didn't like about this novel

• villains were first and second order stereotypes
• elitism derived from standardized tests was portrayed as virtuous

This novel is probably only of interest to die-hard space colonization optimists and idealists who can suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy a fluffy future of humans in space. It will probably grate on modern sensibilities and not appeal outside of the people already on board with the goal of living in space. But a fast read, so if you're needing something to fill in a gap, like a short plane flight, this would do it.

Continuing the very little momentum we've gained, here's a tiny bit of tag fodder for this blog to see if the pinging plugin does the trick.

I like cats, aliens, and coffee. Let's see if any of that registers or if it's too little signal and too much noise.

Additionally, I may have solved something which annoyed since I moved to this server as a host for my blog.

That being the Mystery of the Nonfunctional Blosxom Plugins. Which came down to Habitual Solution #2, permissions.

It's been a while since I tried out a new plugin for Blosxom but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about them and reading about them. So today's trial is the markdown utility, deployed as a plugin.

Can I Learn a New Syntax?

To tell the truth, I'm not sure, myself.

Yes, I Can!

At least, I hope so.

If only criminals are concerned for their privacy then sign me up for some criminal behavior. I can think of lots of things I do which aren't crimes but which I wouldn't want captured on camera; administrating Windows, for starters. This on top of the already ongoing and illegal spying that's been happening on Americans.

So, feeling antagonized, I responded in typical fashion. I gave money to

• the ACLU
• the EFF
• the EPIC

And then just to cover all my bases of flight from the panoptic scan, I also gave some money to

• Amnesty International USA
• the Sierra Club

The Speed of Dark is a straightforward story told through the filter of an autistic point of view. The story isn't overly complicated, the world is largely congruent to America of today, but the perspective makes all of the difference. The edition I read has a short interview with the writer and a set of questions so a discussion group or teacher could use this as a springboard to discussion.

This book is not like most of the books I prefer to read but I'm glad I read it for the way it showed me familiar circumstances through new eyes.

What I liked:

• I gather that this use of perspective to focus a story is called Voice; it's effective here.
• It had several of my spaceships in cameo roles
  1. Space travel
  2. Pattern recognition
  3. Computer professionals
  4. Fencing
• Plausible characters, setting and situation.

What I didn't:

• There's not a lot of meat to this story, it wasn't a lot of new material for thought for me.
• I wanted more detail; the perspective was more of an awareness filter than a delving into details of observation.
• Some of the characters seemed no more than names.

Probably a good read for people who consider themselves to be not science fiction readers but are interested in a literary take on the mindset of an autistic man. Less interesting for people outside of that criteria.

"The Revolution will be Downloaded" [URL may expire shortly] a panel of IGDA with some live blogging by me. Or not.

Kenny Dinkin is the moderator, hooray. Downloadable games are awesome. They will save the industry from

• sequel-itis
• random licenses
• something else; I forget what, but it was bad

Or not.

Casual games have something like 95% growth rate per year [for the last few minutes that casual games have existed, anyway]. Mostly people 35+ years old [cool, I'm not old enough!], mostly women. So that's good. Different market, different challenge