Obsolete Your Idols

The book I just read turned out to be a couple of firsts for me

• first Ken MacLeod book I've read
• first post-Singularity book I've read (possibly)*
• first book I've read this year which I'm ready to pronounce my favorite of the year

This book follows one old and dedicated woman in her quest to resolve a deep and abiding threat. We get flashbacks of her youth, we get political and philosophical arguments, we get ironic social commentary, we get sf alien tech.

The book is called The Cassini Division and when I first saw it on a friend's shelf I was compelled to pick it up and look at the back cover and flyleaf text. Once I'd read that much of it, I was driven to borrow it and bump it to the top of my reading queue. If anything, it was even better than I was hoping.

So what's it about? This book is about anticipating what life after the Singularity might be like if only people selfish enough to sacrifice everything to attain it pass through that event. It's full of references to other sf, most overtly in the chapter titles. It's a nice character study and often the dialog had me chuckling aloud.

I like it. I think it's the best book I read this year.

Who else might like it

• people who think about the Singularity
• people who like Heinlein's narratives but not his politics

I would like especially to thank Brad who, on every occasion I have spoken to him for the past year said nothing but "KenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeod" and Brent, who loaned me his copy to read.

*Depending upon whether you consider Wil McCarthy's post-Scarcity analogous to post-Singularity

UPDATE 2007/12/30: No it's not new
I may have given the impression simply by being so late to the party on this book that it's a new book. It's not, it's been out for years, but I am a slow reader and have a long to-read queue which prevents me noticing many good books. This book does meet my new reading criteria: it's good enough that if I had died without reading it, I would have been sad about that (in theory, in an alternate reality where sentiment persisted beyond incarnation or where one could know of things beyond one's exposure).

Imagine someone sapped you, popped open your skull like a Pez dispenser and shoved a radio into your head which enabled someone to transmit instructions into your head with the same plausibility as your own thoughts. If that sounds familiar, you've read some of the same books I have.

So I read another book on the same theme and it was The Squares of the City. It's from 1965 and it's One of the Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of the Year. I know that because the publisher helpfully printed that on the cover. What is this book?

It's a novelization of a chess game. Specifically, this chess game. In this aspect, it's a little like The Man in the High Castle, where the narrative is shaped by an external pattern. Chess is less random than the I Ching, or so I seem to believe.

That's not a spoiler, about the chess game. I say this because

• the back cover tells you this
• the foreword tells you this
• the introduction tells you this
• the afterword tells you this

You're supposed to read this story, knowing that it is an anthropomorphic rendition of the chess game. Name characters are pieces and they move, interact, threaten and capture, according to the schedule set by the chess games.

Does it work? Yes and no. It's easy, reading the story, to forget the structure imposed upon it by the chess game. The story is reasonably interesting as a man vs. society struggle. But in the end, it felt overly constrained by that framework. Sometimes the protagonist seems struck inert and unmotivated by the dictates of the game.

Things I liked about it

• prescient awareness of the threat that subliminal messaging presents
• prescient warning that someday the government would manage populace using gimmicks dreamed up by advertisers
• Maria Posador, a strong female character
• romanticizing civil engineering
• an experimental framework which added a layer to understanding the work
• an exploration of prejudice

Things I didn't

• the presentation of the story which laid out over and over the chess game underlying
• the endgame compromise where Brunner abandons the game as played

Who might like this story

• chess fans
• fans of John Brunner, the godfather of cyberpunk
• fans of experimental fiction

So a friend of mine is making her way through Snow Crash. Plowing, as she cleverly puts it. Reading her midpoint assessment of it reminded me of the first time I read it. How the opening passage, with The Deliverator, grabbed my attention, how everything seemed comic book slick and sf movie out-there.

It was like an especially good novelization of a wicked cool dream some nerdy guy might have. Which is why it held such appeal for me then and still does. But after a couple times through it, and having learned more about how stories get crafted, it's no longer a book I'd rave about to someone.

In fact, as much as I really deeply enjoy Stephenson books, it's not even the first Stephenson book I'd suggest someone new to him read. For sheer accessibility, I'd recommend Interface and even then I'm not convinced I'd recommend Stephenson to most people. Honestly, the kind of fetishization of information and language and long perspective view needed to really suck the marrow out of the bones of his novels is not very common.

That is, it's a niche of an already niche market. A subselection, as it were. I don't exactly construe it as a guy vs. gal thing but I think there are probably social forces which make it more likely that there is a higher percent of gears which will mesh in a guy's head when reading Stephenson than will click with a gal reader.

I know. Exceptions. If you're reading this, you're quite possibly in the self-selecting narrow range of people who read about the kinds of books I read and write about, even if you don't read those books, yourself.

So I think it's a fair assessment to believe that Snow Crash is a book which will predominantly appeal to guys, in particular a subset of guys who are computer savvy, language obsessed and who, yes, fetishize girls on skateboards. I suppose by now the market must be relatively flooded by derivative and imitative works which refer or have the underlying assumption of familiarity with Snow Crash but I haven't sought them out because, after Snow Crash hit all those buttons for me, I was satisfied.

But that implies to me that there is, somewhere subsequently, a novel which is enough like Snow Crash that the bit-head guys would dig on it but which has broadened out enough in appeal that people outside of that demographic, even just a little bit [bit-head gals, non-bit-head guys] or way, way out [non-bit-head gals] would enjoy but if that is true, even if I were to become aware of the book, would I even recognize the similarity? Would I be able to read it?

I know I couldn't read many of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy books, and when I could I would be unsatisfied at how incoherent, contradictory or blandly derived they were.

So if Alli Dalisay had asked me for a book recommendation sort of in the cyberpunk modern style, I wouldn't have said Snow Crash. I'd have said When Gravity Fails or if she wanted Stephenson in particular, Cryptonomicon -- hey, it even has scenes in the Philippines.

It's possible to draw a line, dividing the comic book works of Warren Ellis I enjoy from those which I don't. It severs the cape and sf work (which I can't get enough of) from the horror and prehistory stuff (which, while viscerally affecting, I do not consider enjoyable).

Some of his work is closer to the line, on one side or another. Global Frequency is just barely on the like side, for example. I can't read that as a book, I have to read each chapter/issue and let it simmer between readings. Nextwave is just barely on the dislike side, mostly because I'm not a fan of the Marvel setting which he's riffing on, there.

I like his way of seeing the world enough that I even bought his Available Light book. Read it, and enjoyed it for more than novelty's sake. Some very striking images and suitable prose.

So now he's written a novel. This novel.

It's called Crooked Little Vein and in a word it is awesome.

It's an American road trip viewed through the lens of the internet.

It's a natural outgrowth of some of the text fragments I've seen him posting before on his various websites, news stories he's flagged as research materials, rolled up into a nice sharp bolus of insight. It's a perspective on America from the other side of an ocean. It's funny and gross and suspenseful and wry.

It's in a similar vein to the last book I read and a pair of my all-time favorite books but updated to a more modern set of patterns of perception.

Who might like this book

• paranoids, practical and practicing
• fans of Warren Ellis's dialog and characters
• fans of secret history
• fans of noir stories

Who might not like this book

• people who are frightened of the internet
• people who are so over the internet, already

Tangentially, there's a more informed and less glib review of CLV over at fearzone written by Nick Mamatas.

Remember when I read Catch-22 and I said I should have read it years ago? That wasn't strictly true in that at a younger age I probably wouldn't have appreciated it as much as I did reading it now. That I had to age into the point where that cynicism glitters.

I just read The Crying of Lot 49 and I may have the opposite situation, where I'm past the prime of my enjoyment of the book.

I did enjoy it, but I probably would have enjoyed it more at the point where I still thought powerful ideas were enough to change the world. That the sharpest knife is actually perspective and that it can be used to carve away all the parts which don't fit in the perfect world. That's the kind of book this was for me, an exploration of a perspective where paranoia is contagious and the extrusion of other worlds into one's own are wondrous and revelatory as well as disturbing and sickening.

Is that an operational definition of the consensus reality of the real world? Maybe. I'm less sure than I once was.

This story did seem to capture something core about the California experience, the droning background impression of living here, where everyone seems to be the star of their own dramatic tale and all other humans are merely bit players. In the same way that Oedipa Maas entertains the notion that the entire sequence of events she's experiencing are perhaps an elaborate prank or a targeted threat, many of the people I see every day similarly behave as if everything is staged for their benefit. It's an odd realization to notice that you're the least important person in California, if you were to judge by the reactions of others.

The book is the story of a woman brushing up against and becoming ensnared with either madness, a prank, a conspiracy or something which borrows from all three. It's structured very pleasantly and the protagonist is likable and not at all unreliable. The other characters are deftly conveyed but not very convolute. That's the surface.

I suspect there's a lot to decode here, going deeper and analyzing and unraveling the symbols but I'm a shallow reader so you'll need to talk to a graduate student about all of that.

What I liked about the book

• reliable narrator, hooray, even when she's possibly hallucinating
• conspiracy stories, love 'em, especially with secret history overtones
• short and fast read
• meta-fiction, with the play within the book narrative

What I didn't

• nothing

Who might like this book

• young aspiring anarchists, artists, rebels, malcontents, riffraff, hop-heads, surrealists and Republicans
• people who think they should like Pynchon but find his other works too long or too slow
• stamp collectors who've been looking for a racy book to prove to other people that philatelists can intersect with fornication

The book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is not science-fiction but it is fiction. I'd previously read The Speed of Dark and I can't help but compare the two (compare, not contrast).

Both have autistic narrators as protagonists. Both feature simple narratives and focus on the kinds of situations which one assumes to be simple for non-autistic people to navigate but which are shown to be challenging for the functional autistic people in our societies.

So what did The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time bring which was usefully new? Some ruminations on how absolutely brutally difficult it is to assimilate betrayal into one's mindset if one has little to no emotional empathy. The implication here being that with a sense of why someone might do or say to express complex emotional states, it becomes possible to perceive a gradation of excusable behavior.

So in that reading, this book is not really about an autistic sense of the world, it's more a narrative about how people are constantly committing betrayals of one another, great and small, for the most justifiable of reasons and they are able to do this because of a deep sense of emotional empathy. Because I suspect some fact may harm another, I choose not to reveal it or perhaps I reveal it partially or perhaps I even obfuscate that fact to hide it from the person who I suspect it may harm.

But the world is a multi-vector space.

Even if I never reveal the fact, the potentially harmed person may learn it in some other way. The impact may be heightened if they can learn or deduce that I kept the information from them.

That's the message I took away from this book and that's much deeper than the textual narrative. I don't know that that's something the author put into it on purpose but it's something I feel free to take from it as a late modernist period reader (tangentially, we are not yet post-modern because I haven't seen anyone actually being over modernism; we're junkies in denial, not remission) and that explanatory framing of this story made it an enjoyable read for me, after the fact. During the reading, the story was interesting but had no real accelerant quality to motivate me to read it faster and faster.

Interestingly, this is a book which a record number of co-workers had already read (TWO of them) before I did and both of them loved it and raved about it. They're not especially genre readers so this book is probably pretty accessible to people who hate the other books I write about having read.

(I also read Secrets and Lies in the interim but nobody cares about my take on that as it is the anticipated response.)

Who might like this book

• genre-haters who like books with a little different spin
• people who like to read about children and broken homes
• people who like bite-sized math facts

Who might not

• dog-lovers with sensitive constitutions

Overall, a not very challenging, easy read of a book. It even has pictures and some fun math bits.

If I knew a strange story of something which happened to me but rather than tell you that story I told you a story about telling you the story of the strange events which transpired, it would be a form of story not entirely unlike Kelly Link telling you stories as she does in stranger things happen which I just read. This is not an explanation of her stories, this is not even an explanation of my experience of her stories but it does seem to indicate an almost irrepressible urge to take on some of the practices of her writing in shallow form when writing about her writing.

It's all very meta-, you see.

There's a blurb on the cover and it's by Jonathan Lethem and it seems to me to be Jonathan Lethem writing about Kelly Link as if he were Kelly Link writing about someone else (who has the same name as Kelly Link) but is not the Kelly Link about whom Kelly Link (in her guise as Jonathan Lethem) is writing. It says

Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.

When I read that blurb, before reading the stories in the book, I thought What a curious way to say that and it didn't sound very much like the Jonathan Lethem books I've read but now that I've read this collection of stories, I think it's very much like something Kelly Link might say about her writing if she were someone else.

This collection has eleven stories. Here are some brief notes about them.

• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. When this story was over, I wanted to watch The World According to Garp. It seems representative of Kelly Link stories to me, in that it has a protagonist who is unclear on their origin, motives, and environment.
• Water Off a Black Dog's Back. This is a moral tale about not fucking people you meet in libraries. Or a cautionary tale about being sure to lose things you care about before it's too late. I'm not entirely sure.
• The Specialist's Hat. I can give this story no higher praise than to say: this story could have been written by Vy.
• Flying Lessons. This is a good story for people who want to run certain kinds of Unknown Armies games or for people who like a kind of glib knowing modernization of Greek myths.
• Travels with the Snow Queen. I guess it's a fairy anti-fairy tale but I didn't really care for it very much.
• Vanishing Act. I have no response to this story. I think that I don't get it.
• Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party. I have been waiting all my life for someone to write a story based on this joke premise. It's everything I dreamed it would be, almost. Needed more rough sex.
• Shoe and Marriage. This story seems like a writing experiment. The last part was the best part. The Miss Kansas bit was also pretty good.
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water. I think this is my favorite story in this collection. Sadly, nothing happens, so I can't tell you what happens in it. There are some phone conversations and some emotions, mostly sadness and lust and love. You should read this story sometime with whiskey and if you think it's you I'm talking to, yes, you're right.
• Louise's Ghost. Another story which makes me think it's the result of Kelly writing a writing experiment along the lines of "how can I have a story with two characters of the same name?" Given how reasonable an explanation that seems to me, I'm pretty sure that's not what she did here. But it's got some fetishization of cellists so, hooray for that.
• The Girl Detective. I guess this is the story everybody loves. Shortest response: I'm not everybody.

So this collection is totally readable and not at all hostile. It is friendly but doesn't know what to say to you, quite, when it sees you in the hallway of conventions. Do I read too much in to it? Very well, I read too much in to it.

I liked this collection but I am looking forward to having my own thought patterns reassert themselves.

People who might especially like these stories.

• writers who are serious about their craft
• writers who are frivolous about their craft
• people who are or suspect they may be dead

So now I have read something by Kelly Link, only three months after I could have talked to her about it; there is always next year, but I still don't think I know anything to say she won't already have heard. Many of the things I enjoy in her writing are things I enjoy in Vy's writing. The few things I don't enjoy I attribute to my not getting some underlying mechanism of narrative.

Kelly Link: she is thinking harder about her stories than you are.

Because Vy is awesome, she buys me books.

Most recently she bought me Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas and I just finished reading it.

First, some digressions.

I know Nick. Have known him years, first as a quirky and amusing set of pixels forming acerbic text and later as a more tangible manifestation of cynicism.

I've read all three of his novels, now, shortly after they've been printed.

I remember when I read Northern Gothic I was puzzled by something and so I connected to the online place where I knew he hung about. I said, "Hey, NK, I just read your book and I have a question." He said, "NO, I'm not gay!"

So I never asked him my question, which was, "But why is the ghost haunting the dildo?"

Which is to say, I think I have trouble making these simple and fundamental connections which infuse his stories.

His second novel, Move Under Ground didn't confuse me so much but that's because I don't expect the Beatnik novels to have any kind of closure or to ever really be about anything I can make sense of and the Lovecraftian fusion in it, well, that was just gravy and pandering to the audience of People Like Me. All, uh, 12 of us on the planet or whatever.

Now I've read Under My Roof and I've got one question which has confounded me (aside from what seems to be some fairly bad copy editing) and that is: How does Geri drive away in the car which Daniel just pages earlier sold and had Herbert help him pretend was a car jacking?

But that's enough digressions about my confusion so now I'll talk about the book itself.

It's short.

It's really short. Like, 150 pages short. Is this Young Adult fiction? Probably, hence the lack of length. It moves at a good clip and uses some good devices to keep the story engaging and skip over the boring parts.

It's a coming of age story for all ages. Various characters grow up, grow down, or grow in circles. There's some clever science-y bits and some strong female characters and suitably wry grown-ups-don't-get-kids observations from the young point of view character, who is arguably the protagonist though his struggles are few and far between and he mostly observes distantly the meaty bits of the narrative.

Who might like this book

• kids who are misunderstood by adults
• adults who are misunderstood by adults
• kids who are telepathic or want to be
• satirists, cynics, anarchists, iconoclasts, malcontents and commuters

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which exist

• satmaps.com

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which do not exist

• treatyonline.org
• mysonherbiethelovebug.org
• topplethegnome.com

So if you're looking for some domains to squat for when this novel becomes a movie, now's the time!

Once upon a time I worked for a manager with an overtly unusual sense of humor.

An example would be an occasion on which he set up an automatic response in his email client to respond to anything he received from his boss with "That's an excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion." I guess that went on for a couple weeks before his boss caught on that it was scripted.

Similarly, at one point he loaned me a book which he said he thought reflected my attitude toward my job and my co-workers. He loaned me A Confederacy of Dunces.

Right.

I didn't see a whole lot of myself in that book but I wasn't offended. I was amused. Now that I've read a different book, I know what book he should have loaned me, the one which captured my sense of my career field.

Catch-22.

Everyone around me is insane. Many of them are trying to kill me. Some of them are trying to literally kill me, some are merely trying to expose me to fatally dangerous conditions.

Is it too late to become Milo Minderbinder, I wonder?

I won't try to actually review this book because you've either read it by now or nothing I can say will convince you to do what a stack of critics, pundits and probable friends have told you. I didn't get around to reading it until now because I am slow to appreciate classics. In a sense I'm very glad I didn't read it until now because it seems quite probable to me that at some earlier point in my life I could not have appreciated this novel, certainly not to the degree that I now savored the bureaucratic constriction.

So insofar as reviews of books often say more about the reviewer than the book, the important thing to know is this: if you work with me, I'm on to you!

I read a list of books which all the cool kids already know about in New York Magazine and I had already read one of them and have another of them kicking around in my queue of books to read. When I showed the list to my co-workers, my boss loaned me a book by an author who was on that list.

It's called Paradise and it's by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It's about a boy who is given into the care of a merchant. He learns that he's now a slave and his entire life is turned upside down. It's a sad book with some moments of hilarity and others of brutality.

What I liked about it

• good pacing with a distinct narrative voice
• protagonist who is both sympathetic and invested
• really different from most of the books I read

What I didn't like about it

• protagonist isn't very active for most of the story
• it's a sad book about slavery and deprivation

This is probably a good book for people who like sad stories. Like, say, Beloved or Farewell My Concubine.

I'm a bad person. I went to WisCon 31 this year without having ever knowingly read anything by either Guest of Honor. I'd met Kelly Link before and I was vaguely aware of the kinds of writing she does, but it was all second hand. I don't think I'd even heard of Laurie Marks before this WisCon.

I decided to atone for this in the wake of the convention. No, not by actually reading any of their writing; at least, not yet. Instead I'm reading works by the Guests of Honor for next year. Specifically, I read China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh over the last week. (Before that I was reading a collection of Philip K. Dick short work from the 50s.)

I can see why this novel was nominated for awards (the Hugo and Nebula) and nominated for and won awards (Locus Best First Novel, James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award) and I can see why people gush about it. I see all that. What I don't see is why it ends where it does and that is probably because it felt incomplete rather than ambiguous to me in the same way that I find Catcher in the Rye to be an incomplete story.

That's not bad, mind you. Other people will probably feel that enough is resolved for them to have a warm fuzzy feeling about the characters in the story. For me, I want a sequel or an epilogue or something. Because I can't imagine what happens next in their lives. Maybe this represents an insufficient understanding on my part of their nature, their motives, their universe. It felt like too few pages; when I reached the last one, I turned back to make sure I hadn't missed something, that some pages weren't missing from my copy.

It's a fascinating world viewed through genuinely sympathetic and sharply expressed characters. It's a complex interweaving of desires balanced against fears. It's a book which makes me crave a sequel in the same universe.

Aside from the disquieting sense of incompletion, which I admit may be a deliberate part of the presentation of the story, it's a book I'd recommend to just about anyone. It's got socialists and gamblers and prostitutes and Martian colonists and a protagonist who is pushed by his situation into fulfilling a greater portion of his potential than he might otherwise have done so I read it as a maturation story and a stirring from inertia story.

I'll be trying to get my hands on something by the other Guest of Honor, L. Timmel Duchamp, soon, and catching up on the Kelly Link we have in the house (because I keep buying it for Vy) and finding some Laurie Marks but first, first, I need to glut myself on my (not so secret) crush on the worlds Ed Greenwood made, The Forgotten Realms. I have a backlog of current and out of print D&D books about it to read, as well as a slew of downloaded gratis PDFs provided by the otherwise thoroughly detestable Hasbro through their Wizards of the Coast orifice. No link love for them. You know where to find them.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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