A couple of months back I reported here that award-winning author Catherine Asaro, pained at my dissing her works on my website, had sent me three of her novels to try and make me change my mind; and that indeed I very much enjoyed her first, Primary Inversion. It was therefore with a certain amount of eager anticipation that I turned to The Radiant Seas which picks up the story from where we left it at the end of the first book.
Oh dear. A real disappointment. Lots of infodumping, tedious handwaving technicalese - the nadir, close to the end, is this sentence:
With a rest mass of 1.9 eV and a charge of 5.95x10-25 C, abitons only needed an accelerator with a 50 cm radius and 0.0001 Telsa [sic] magnet.Which I wouldn't mind if it actually helped the book make sense; but it doesn't. Anyway thanks to the helpfully provided diagram I spent much time wondering how you could possibly keep anything, let alone tons of antimatter, in a Klein bottle (whose inside is the same as its outside).
I was quite unable to suspend my disbelief to take seriously the family and interplanetary politics as I could for the first book. The good guys always escape certain doom in the nick of time, unlike the bad guys. And worst of all, my particular bête noire, there is a chatty artificial intelligence which tries to get its owner to call it by a proper name. Aargh.
Out of a (possibly misplaced) sense of honour, I will read the third book she sent me, but I don't feel any sense of urgency about it.
This is another from the Time list of 25 must-read graphic novels. Once again, fantastic. Very much in the Will Eisner tradition, following a set of characters through a richly imagined historical background; for instance the Potsdamerplatz, in the early episodes, seems to almost have a life of its own. But unlike Will Eisner, we know that there is a historical catastrophe coming; each episode takes place in one of the months from September 1928 to May Day 1929, with different characters experiencing different aspects of the gathering storm. Berlin has always fascinated me, and this book has further whetted my appetite. The most disappointing thing about it is that it's only the first part of a trilogy and the next two bits aren't out yet.
Due to its weight, I found it physically difficult to pick this book up. Due to its plot, I found it very difficult to put down. Here we have bits of Neal Stephenson's Baroque trilogy, except with all the improving stuff about economics and mathematics replaced by magic. (No doubt the fact that I say that indicates my embarrassing ignorance of Jane Austen.) Here we have friendship, rivalry and reconciliation against the background of the Napoleonic wars as they never happened. And the alternate military history reminds me a bit of Mary Gentle's Ash, though that book challenges the received version by introducing women rather than wizards.
Coincidences are weird things. Susanna Clarke's name is a lengthened version of my ex-girlfriend's (they are different people though as far as I can tell). The novel features a Captain Whyte in the Peninsular War, a conflict in which my great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Whyte, lost two of his brothers. (Fascinating interview with her here; also interviews with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell themselves.) All very strange, yet compelling.
This is one of the long books I've been struggling through over the last few weeks. Funny to come back to it, twenty years after I first read it, now that The Lord of the Rings has had a longer time to settle into my subconscious.
This second edition comes with an unexpected bonus - a lengthy (19-page) letter from Tolkien to his publisher, written in 1951 (ie as the text of The Lord of the Rings was being finalised and twenty-five years before The Silmarillion was eventually published) in which he explains his purpose in writing the stories of Middle Earth. The key passage is this:
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of fairy-story the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor from the vast backcloths which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our "air" (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe; not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be "high", purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.And as Tom Shippey points out, in his books and in the mini-documentary on the Peter Jackson DVD's, he pretty much succeeded in this aim.
Nobody will ever start reading Tolkien with The Silmarillion - anyone who reads it will have already read The Lord of the Rings and will hope for background here. It's nice to get some of the non-fictional hinterland as well as 350 pages of narrative; especially since the brutal truth is that the narrative isn't especially good. I remember spending many hours poring over Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle Earth partly to work out what had actually happened in The Silmarillion. There's lots of mythic portent, but also a strangely distanced feel about the action - for instance, an early event which we are repeatedly told is deeply traumatic, the Kin-Slaying at Alqualondë, is covered in less than a page.
There are only one and a half good stories in the entire book (the one being the story of Húrin's children, the half being Beren and Lúthien). Particularly disappointing is Eärendil, who we've been hearing about ever since Bilbo's poem about him in Rivendell half-way through the Fellowship of the Ring, and who indeed gets plenty of foreshadowing in the middle chapters of The Silmarillion; but it seems oddly flat when we finally get there.
That's not quite fair; the Númenor story is pretty dramatic, with the hubris of Ar-Pharazôn, but at the same time has an odd internal structure, and the resonances of Avallónë/Avalon and Atalantë/Atlantis are simply distracting. And it seems quite unnecessary to have another 25 pages at the end recapitulating the plot of The Lord of the Rings in mythic voice.
I suspect that as time goes on I will gradually acquire all the various History of Middle Earth volumes, which may well clarify the extent to which these flaws were already present in the material or were introduced by either Christopher Tolkien or Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped him edit it. Of course Kay himself has turned out to be a superb novelist in his own right (judging from The Lions of Al-Rassan and Tigana; I can't really blame Christopher Tolkien either for thinking that he had to make a judicious choice of which of his father's manuscripts would be worth publishing, little realising that it would turn out to be worth publishing them all.
Still, I'm glad I've re-read it. Right, time to get kids in bed and watch my new Lord of the Rings DVDs!
A perfectly chosen Christmas gift from my sister; lots of trivia that nobody ever wanted to know, including such joys as a complete list of US Vice-Presidents, eight fictional movie moguls featured in the works of PG Wodehouse, twelve catch-phrases from the Goon Show, and a list of the real names of various saints (including Simon Templar and Yves Saint-Laurent which is stretching it a bit). I picked up only one total error - comets go around the sun, not the earth - and a few stretched categories (Hereward the Wake wasn't royal, and Ceauşescu [properly Ceaușescu] was not really assassinated).
Given my fascination with book lists, I was amused to see that the 1999 Modern Library readers' poll of the top ten books of the twentieth century included three titles by L Ron Hubbard and four by Ayn Rand! We can take it that the other three (in order, The Lord of the Rings, To Kill A Mockingbird, and 1984) did not have organised backers...
And it's not just lists. The short entries on parrhesia, the reptiles of Antarctica and the Giant Rat of Sumatra are all very pleasing; though I doubt if I will have occasion to use the phrases suggested for flirting in Turkish or dumping someone in Japanese. Recommended.
PS looking around the web for other reviews of this I find one stating that it is the perfect gift for "the big brother who thinks he knows everything". Hmmmmmmmmmm.
Gosh, just occasionally I find a novel that really chimes with the romantic in me and this is it for the time being (I think that the last love story I read and really enjoyed was Ali and Nino, the great novel of Azerbaijan). I mean, looking through the books I've read and enjoyed recently, there were indeed a few where there are strong romantic elements - Primary Inversion, Rebecca, Kushiel's Avatar, Paladin of Souls - but none that were really romances in the way this is (apart from the awful collection Irresistible Forces).
The time-travel bits are almost as important as the romance, but not quite. I very much enjoyed Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, and most of all F.M. Busby's story "If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy", which all have similar themes, though it must be twenty years since I read them. Interesting that all three of those stories are by men, and all three focus on the effect the time travel has on relationships. (Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5, of course, is in the same mould but concentrates much less on the personal life side of things.) The Time Traveler's Wife almost reads like a woman writer's riposte to Anderson, Busby and Gerrold, except that I doubt if Niffenegger has read any of them.
For Niffenegger the time-travel seems to be a metaphor for the things we know and don't know and can't know about the people that we love. Of course I'm curious about what my wife was like as a child, or even before I knew her well; and of course I'd love to know now what our children will grow up to be like. Yet although Henry and Clare in the novel have some access to each other's pasts and futures in that way, the mystery remains.
I couldn't put this down, and I'm really surprised that it has made so little impression in sf circles.
I read this at the weekend and have been wondering whether to include it on my list of books read. Seeing as it's over 100 pages long, I think I will. Also my boss had (possibly quite a substantial) part in writing it.
I found it more interesting than I had expected, especially the first bit, reflecting at some length on both a) what states' mutual and internal obligations now are in the 21st century, and the way in which we have moved on from the Westphalian (or Montevideo) conventions. Also the reflections on what the new security threats actually are, and what can in fact be done about them, made the whole mess feel rather less like the ineluctable foreces of nature that it sometimes does feel like, and more like something that one can actually do things about.
The core of the report is of course the specific set of proposals for UN reform, and as someone who's not close enough to that policy nexus I can't really judge how utopian or likely the proposals are; they all seem to make sense anyway.
More comics education. This is very good. The title story in particular (I have actually been to the synagogue in Tbilisi/Tiflis, where the main character starts his life), and the last story, "Cookalein" which juggles about a dozen characters and storylines and stays on top of them all in only 50-odd pages are very memorable; I was a bit less satisfied with the middle two, which both feature nasty male characters who exploit those around them and then get their come-uppance. Will copntinue working my way through that list, it's got me two good reads out of two so far.
Jeepers, it's incredible that this won the Hugo award in 1989. The competition was not so impressive, of course: Red Prophet, by Orson Scott Card, has its merits but isn't science fiction; Falling Free is not Lois McMaster Bujold's best (though oddly enough it did win the Nebula that year; I haven't read Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling, and while I have read the other nominee, Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson, I can't remember a single thing about the plot, which indeed is my complaint about most William Gibson novels starting with Neuromancer (I've read that book at least five times and still have no idea what happens).
Anyway, after cudgelling myself through the first 250 pages, it actually started to pick up, taken as a Bildungsroman of young Ari Emory, clone and heir of a fiendish political manipulator. This carried my interest quite well for another 400 pages and then at the end it all fell apart again; I have no idea what happened at the climax. Cherryh's style is very dense; she doesn't believe in telling you much about the background or setting. I have one more book of hers on the "to read" shelf but I think it may linger there for a while.
The one interesting thing I picked up is that Lois McMaster Bujold's take on the social norms regarding clones and genetically engineered people seems to be at least in part a reaction to Cherryh's much more brutal (and I think unrealistic) take on this issue. Some of Bujold's best stuff is written directly around the question - think Mirror Dance and Brothers in Arms, obviously, but also the Taura stories, Falling Free and Ethan of Athos - and much of the rest of her work has it in the background. I find myself much more satisfied with Bujold's treatment of it than Cherryh's.
More light reading for me, sequel to The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Actually this is very light reading. The actual mystery is not very mysterious, and is resolved by our heroine by feminine intuition - ( minor spoiler ) I'll try one more of these but unless something actually happens I'll leave it there.
A really charming book, and I hope that the real Botswana is as friendly and laid-back as the Botswana portrayed here (I know that George Monbiot has harsher things to say about the place). This isn't really a novel, more a loosely linked series of cheerful vignettes, as if the author was doing a series of trial pieces to try out his writing skills. But all very nice, with on the whole happy endings to each of them.
Much the most interesting of the 2003 SF anthologies. The Dozois one remains definitive, and best value for money, and the Haber/Strahan one I found a bit disappointing. But this has a couple of my favourite stories from the Dozois again (none in common with Haber/Strahan, interestingly) and a number of gems. This includes two stories translated from Spanish, one of which I'm afraid I just couldn't get into, but the other one a fascinating riff on altering history (in this case, enduring that the post-Franco transition to democracy is not prevented). Lots of good stuff here which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to read. Recommended.
Set of short stories by this Protestant writer from rural County Cork, mainly depressing tales about Protestants in rural County Cork (you should write about what you know, as Anne always says). Reminded me how glad I am to have moved away from Belfast. But easy reading.
I have been a fan of Tove Jansson's Moomin books for as long as I can remember being able to read, an enthusiasm which once contributed to a minor diplomatic embarrassment. This, however, is one of her novels for adults. Though to say it's a novel is perhaps stretching it a bit; it's more a series of vignettes about the relationship between Sophia, whose age is never made clear but is I guess between seven and eleven, and her grandmother, living on one of the islands in the Gulf of Finland with Sophia's father (her mother is dead). The island and its neighbourhood are described with fascinating accuracy; so too are Sophia and her grandmother - no romanticised, misty-eyed view here of either childhood or old age. A beautiful book.
What about Martin Tupper now?Difficult to be really sure about this one. The plot is relatively straightforward; Gabriel Syme, poet and detective, infiltrates the Central Committee of Anarchists under the pseudonym of "Thursday".
No one would regret anything in the nature of an interference by the Archdeacon more than I. I trust it will not come to that. But, for the last time, where are your goloshes? The thing is too bad, especially after what uncle said.But all is not as it seems on the Central Committee and a series of chase scenes, through the streets of London and rural France, ensue, accompnied by dramatic unmaskings.
Fly at once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known. -- A FRIEND.Towards the end the chase continues by elephant and by balloon. (Incidentally the latter is liberated from Earl's Court which apparently in 1907 boasted a ferris wheel along the lines of the London Eye.)
The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'.But the plot is interspersed with odd reflections on wealth, power, religion, politics, human characters, and so on; of course it's not much good as a text on anarchism, any more than Jules Verne or Arthur Conan Doyle is on Mormonism.
When the herring runs a mile,/ Let the Secretary smile;/ When the herring tries to fly,/ Let the Secretary die./ Rustic Proverb.And the ending just gets truly bizarre. While we know right from the start who Thursday is, the central mystery of the book is the man who was Sunday; and while the author hints at the answer, we are really left to make our own interpretation.
Your beauty has not left me indifferent. -- From LITTLE SNOWDROP.Incidentally I think the "Martin Tupper" referred to must be the obscure nineteenth-century poet rather than the central character of that wacky sit-com "Dream On" - which surely got a little inspiration from this book.
This book, published in 1975, is a fix-up of three stories published in Analog between 1968 and 1971 featuring psychic detective George Sandford, the last of which won a Nebula. The setting is remarkable - New York in a world recovering from environmental catastrophe, where there is much greenery and derelict buildings (and vulnerable underwater suburbs), and significant social control in return for quality of life. Sandford's somewhat seedy character and his feelings of blurred identity when he tries to read the minds of criminals (or their victims) are quite vivid. It is reminiscent of Alfred Bester, Philip K Dick and John Brunner. MacLean was obviously a pretty talented author who simply didn't produce as much as the other three; the only other story by her I remember reading is "The Snowball Effect", about the small town sewing circle that takes over the world.
Of the three annual sf anthologies published last year and the year before, the other two being edited by David Hartwell and Gardner Dozois, I found the one compiled by husband-and-wife team Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber the weakest. Now Silverberg has given up his editorial slot to Jonathan Strahan, but the format remains the same. It's still not impressive (though I haven't yet read this year's Hartwell collection - see here for review of the Dozois); most of the stories I had read before as they were Hugo or Nebula finalists, or collected somewhere else, and the remaining ones were generally not up to much. (Honourable mentions though to "Flowers for Alice" by Cory Doctorow and
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autopope, and especially to "Only Partly Here", by Lucius Shepard, the first successful genre story I've read about 9/11 - must look out for that collection of his that coalescent has been raving about). There is also a surprisingly unprofessional level of misprints, a problem shared by the Silverberg/Haber volumes in this series. I don't think I'll bother with next year's unless I hear that things have improved.
I've been feeling a bit off-colour all day (and it's a public holiday too) so had time to read this while writing article for
sneerpout and looking after Bridget as rest of family went to the zoo. It's a short book, written very lightly and so I finished it in a couple of hours. A firm of lorry-drivers whose only task is basically to service their own lorries as part of a nationwide scheme for full employment is hit by industrial action. It's supposed to be funny but to be honest I didn't really get it; who exactly is being satirised? Academics? The NHS? The pre-Thatcher nationalised industries? The last of these seems the most likely but hey man, that was over two decades ago. Or was it really the Soviet Union? For that matter, does Moby-Dick represent the Republic of Ireland? (I did once read an academic article arguing precisely that.) All a bit pointless really.
A very good book, this, which had been sitting on my "to-read" pile for far too long. Thirteen-year-old Briony tells a lie with huge consequences for her family. As one review put it, there are three stories here - a love story, a war story, and a story about a story. The first two of these were gripping and page-turning; it was with difficulty that I put the book down last night after finishing the first part (my mathematical mind pleased by the fact that it came at page 175 of a 350-page book). I was a bit less convinced by the very last section, which left me wondering to an extent what I had been getting worked up about. Still, much recommended.
Travelogue through Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan, in the company of archaeologist Avner Goren who gets most of the best lines. It's a very interesting exploration of the intersection between geography, history, archaeology and personal belief. Could perhaps have been a bit shorter; and I'd have got more from it if I were more familiar with the minutiae of the Pentateuch.
Enjoyable space opera romp. Reminded me a bit of the setting of Wil McCarthy's The Collapsium but I thought this was better. Took a few chapters to get into and understand what was going on, and I was worried at first that I was going to repeat my C.J. Cherryh experience, but in fact by the end all had become clear despite the superhuman transcendent intelligences who play a major part in the action and it seems well set up for the next volume - also on my "to read" pile but some way down.
shsilver and Martin H GreenbergNice idea, getting the first published story of numerous well-known sf authors - to be specific, Murray Leinster, L Sprague de Camp, Anne McCaffrey, Hal Clement, Arthur C Clarke and so on, and publishing it in an anthology together with an introduction by the author in question (or in one case from his daughter). The stories are a bit variable in quality, but less than one might have thought, and the autobiographical material from each author more than makes up for it, especially for those who have since died (de Camp and Clement).
I did wonder what the rationale for choosing particular authors was. Why Clarke, but not Asimov or Heinlein? Why include authors as recent as Catherine Asaro (first story published 1993), Michael Burstein (1995), Julie Czerneda (1997)? And there's a definite leaning towards the hard end of the sf spectrum. None of these are necessarily bad things but it would have enlightened me if the editors had explained them. As it is the choice looks a little strange - and why is the Ann McCaffrey story apparently out of the order-of-initial-publication sequence that seems to link the rest?
My "to-read" pile is so huge that I'm not allowed to buy any more books until Christmas. That is, books for me; buying for other family members is OK. Anyway, I found this in the pile left over from my summer purchases and got through it reasonably quickly. It's the story of mathematician Andrew Wiles and his predecessors in the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem, the proposition that
a^n + b^n = c^nhas no solution for n>2 and a,b,c > 0. To be honest I was a little disappointed in this best-seller. Having a doctorate in HPS I expect a little more social grit with my history of mathematical Great Men (and, surprisingly, a couple of women in this case). As a former Cambridge astrophysics student I like a little more maths with my accounts of what they did - contrast here the Sarah Flannery In Code book. And as a Clare graduate myself, I was frankly mystified that the college where Wiles actually did his doctorate and where his father was Dean is not even named - the only college that is actually name-checked is Emmanuel, where his supervisor was a Fellow. So I'm glad I bought it second hand, rather than new, and it didn't really enlighten me much more about any of my own occasional speculations into number theory.
I guess it's pretty certain that Fermat was wrong. His "wonderful proof" which was too small to fit in the margin cannot possibly have included the work of any of the dozens of later mathematicians drawn on by Wiles to compile his eventual paper of more than 100 pages. So presumably he had found what he thought was a proof, but because he never shared it with anyone in his lifetime, he never discovered that it was unsound.
After watching the dismal Steve Coogan/Jackie Chan film on the plane a couple of weeks ago, I realised I had the novel on my PDA and decided to re-read it. And, well, it's good. There's a little bit of the nerdishness recently satirised here, in that every means of transport is described in total detail. There are one and a half total implausibilities in the plot. But basically, this is a story of its time, full of the new wonders available in 1872 - the Suez Canal had been open for only three years, so had the rail link across the United States,and of course the whole point of the book is that the railway across India opened only that year. And this is an India only fifteen years on from the 1857 Mutiny - as far as we are from the fall of Communism; a Japan that has just experienced the Meiji restoration; a United States recovering from the Civil War, and doing its best to deal with the Mormons. And of course this is written by an author whose own native France has been devastated by a catastrophic military defeat the previous year, and is a determined attempt to look outwards and forwards.
( spoilers )
And how come all the bells in London strike at ten to nine anyway? Philip José Farmer had an explanation of this in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, an otherwise completely forgettable effort. Apart from the points noted above, this is really fun and everyone should read it.
Huckleberry Finn says of this book that "The statements was interesting, but tough", which I think is fair. Several things struck me - the unattractiveness of the main character, Christian, who wilfully abandons his family, and having lost his first travelling companion Faithful by gruesome means then becomes a know-all to his new friend Hopeful; the fact that the metaphors and allegory are about as subtle as a brick (actually, a brick is more subtle - perhaps "as subtle as a Vogon Constructor Fleet" is the simile I am looking for); the fact that when you think you're finished the book it then turns out that his wife Christiana and four sons are going to do the same journey; the repeated use of prisons (as Anne said, write about what you know) and capital punishment; and the fact that the main characters are happy to drink wine without threat of eternal damnation, something that many of the book's greatest fans today would probably disagree with.
I don't think many people actually do finish the book. Perhaps its most best known image is the Slough of Despond, which is actually described in less than a page in its first appearance (page 31 in my edition). Vanity Fair, while a great name for a town, seems to change out of all recognition between Christian's visit and Christiana's. And their children get married off with rather indecent haste.
Two final thoughts. First, the opening poem says some interesting and almost charming things about writing (as well as of course reflecting the writer's views on other matters); I think it's rather nice.
When at the first I took my pen in handAnd my second, much naughtier final thought is this: I kept on reading the dialogues between Christian and Hopeful/Faithful, and wondering what a skilled fic-writer like
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.
[...]
Well, so I did; but yet I did not think
To shew to all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify.
daegaer or cygny or aramuin could make of that relationship. Ladies, if any of you chooses to try this one, I look forward to finding out...
This is the second book about 9-11 that I've read in a month, the first being the famous Commission Report. The two are ever so slightly different. The Commission Report is hundreds of pages of dense research, whereas this is ten huge pages of graphics explaining the reaction of one resident of Lower Manhattan.
Spiegelman and his wife rushed to their daughter's school beside the World Trade Center as soon as they realised what was happening; while they were inside looking for her the first tower collapsed; on their way out, the second tower fell too.
We turn to see the bones of the tower glow and shimmy in the sky. Ever-so-slowly it cascades into itself.The image of the glowing tower, about to fall, illuminates the entire work. But he also expresses a deep hostility to the entire American political system, President Bush in particular, for (as he sees it) using the excuse of the attacks to pursue business as usual.
Our hero is trapped reliving the traumas of Sept 11, 2001...Yet at the same time he maintains a certain ability to question his own reactions (which will be familiar to anyone else who's read his Maus) and even pokes fun at his own propensity to read up on conspiracy theories. He doesn't come to a firm conclusion, but that goes for most of us.
Unbeknownst to him, brigands suffering from war fever have since hijacked those tragic events...
The 9-11 material is followed by an interesting if not especially related brief history of comics in New York, with a few classic scenes from the likes of Little Nemo In Slumberland which Spiegelman links into the overall theme. The inside front and back cover carry the September 11 1901 headlines from the New York World, also a time of (generally forgotten) national trauma, as President William McKinley, shot a few days before in upstate New York, was gradually deteriorating to his death on September 14. But almost the best bit is Spiegelman's two-page introduction to the book as a whole, which says much more than I can here about why he did it, and why he did it the way he did.
I spotted this in a Harvard bookshop and, as it's notoriously supposed to be the worst ever winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel (under the original title "They'd Rather Be Right") I couldn't resist it, for only $3.
Well. It's not a great book, but it's not utterly terrible either; more sort of forgettable. Machine is invented that takes humanity to the Next Step of evolution. The misunderstood genius hero triumphs against the stupid mundanes. That's about it. Another tick in the box for me; if I can bring myself to finish Cyteen I'll only have three left.
Picked this up, as one does, in the Dulles Airport terminal branch of Borders. Lots of fun gossip and trivia, with a cut-off date of 1980, and a slightly contrived reaching back to cover the Salem Witch trials. But generally entertaining. The shortest chapter, "A Short, Ugly Story", reads, in full:
In 1875 James Stephen Hogg, the first native-born Texan to become the state's governor, names his daughter Ima.She actually appears to have been quite famous.
Enough said.
This is a totally superb collection. OK, $15.95 for 500 pages paperback may seem a bit pricy, but the quality of the stories really justifies it. Of the 18 stories, I had read eight previously - the six that have won both Hugo and Nebula (as well as the Locus Award, a precondition for inclusion), and also Sterling's "Maneki Neko" and Le Guin's "The Day Before The Revolution". The other ten are all classics which I should have read years ago and somehow hadn't:
"The Death of Doctor Island" by Gene Wolfe
"The Way of Cross and Dragon", by George R.R. Martin
"Souls" by Joanna Russ
"The Only Neat Thing to Do", by James Tiptree Jr - possibly the weakest story in the collection, I thought, but still very good
"Rachel In Love", by Pat Murphy
"The Scale-Hunter's Beautiful Daughter", by Lucius Shepard
"Buffalo", by John Kessel
"Gone", by John Crowley
"Border Guards", by Greg Egan
"October in the Chair", by Neil Gaiman
Go out and buy it.
An impulse purchase in Boston, this comic about love and sinister goings-on seems rather good - reminiscent a bit of "Love and Rockets" but much less confusing. I shall buy more of it.
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