HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: NOISE, by Darin Bradley

Without realizing it, Hiram and Levi had been in training for the Collapse most of their lives. They learned lessons in shop class, Boy Scouts, Renaissance Fairs, and all night sessions of Dungeons and Dragons. The began to receive instruction and train in earnest after television went all digital. On the unmonitored analog channels, 'Casters began sending out coded messages buried in the static, saying what to expect and how to prepare. Other messages were hidden in the wild style graffiti covering the walls of their college town somewhere in North Texas. When the Collapse occurred, Hiram and Levi would be among the prepared. The 'Casts had helped them assemble The Book, a sort of army training manuel for the survival of your Group. Following instructions Hiram and Levi already have established their Place in the country and stocked it with Salvage, i.e. stolen stuff. They have planned an escape route.

I was reading Noise on Black Friday. I took a break after about fifty pages, turned on the computer to check email, and saw first thing the videos of ambulances driving the fallen away from Best Buys in Colorado. Then I read the story of the woman at the California Wall Mart who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers to protect her xbox console. And all morning I had thought I was reading a novel.

What Hiram and Levi have been learning, what they have assembled in The Book, are lessons in ruthlessness. They will not be victims. They will take advantage of chaos. They will regard all those outside their Group as enemies, and they will neutralize them when necessary. They neutralize some unsuspecting National Guardsmen who have been called in to discourage the turmoil breaking out in malls and on the campus. They steal the NG's Humvee with its 50 caliber machine gun. It comes in handy when dealing with disgruntled suburban males who don't like the look of what's going on. Hiram and Levi pick up some followers before their escape from the city, but this crowd, only partially trained in the disciplines of the 'Casts, prove to be a mixed blessing. When one thirteen year old is caught trying to escape -- he wants to go home to his parents across town -- he is tied to a porch railing, judged, and neutralized. The Group has done the right thing. The kid knew too much.

Noise is an unsettling read. It follows its relentless logic for just 200 pages and gets the survivors of Hiram and Levi's group to their Place of safety. I am one of those movie watchers who always wonder why characters hit guards and bad guys over the head instead of killing, I mean, neutralizing them, but I also know there is always payback time. Much of what is in The Book makes an awful sort of sense, given the situation. But nobody's long-term prospects look good.

Get the message?

BOOK REIVEW:SINEATER by Elizabeth Massie

I picked this up because it was on the Horror Writers' Association list of horror must-reads. I have always been a pro-horror film voice, but was never attracted to reading horror novels. Movies are over in 90 minutes. Novels takes hours and hours. And I also had the not-uncommon prejudice against the genre, or at least against anything written much later than the turn of the 20th century.

But I liked Sineater. I guess it's a horror novel, although I wondered if Massie's publisher didn't promote it as a genre book so it would not get lost in mid-list literary fiction. It's really a pretty good coming-of-age story set in a grotesque situation. If there is such a thing as the Hillbilly Anti-Defamation League, I am sure this book is on its radar. One lesson I took away from it was to fill up the car with gas before driving through Virginia and don't make any stops. These people are crazy.

Sineaters, a tradition that made it to the states from Scotland and Wales, are outsiders, shunned by the community but necessary to its functioning. They appear at wakes and eat a light meal prepared for them by the grieving family and placed on the corpse of the recently deceased loved one. The meal is the sins of the one who has passed on, and by consuming it the sineater assures their soul will go to heaven. No one must ever look on his face.

Avery Barker is an unusual sineater. He is married to the woman he loved before he took up his profession, and although even she must never look on his face, that have managed to have three children. Joel Avery, the youngest son, is the central character, the first Avery allowed to attend school. His only friend was the son of the liberal Methodist minister who has recently moved his family to a parish outside Washington, D.C. Joel's potential new friend is a very different sort of person. Burke Campbell is a skinny, angry redhead sent to live with his religious nut aunt after her daughter has gone missing. Burke's friendly overtures to Joel involve shooting him the finger every time he sees him in the halls at school.

Sineeater is not the gorefest I assumed contemporary horror novels to be. The story is long and leisurely Southern Gothic with lots of character development and one moment so repulsive that I made that pledge about never getting out the car in Virginia.


(Below is a sineater currently plying his/her(?) trade in the Baltic states.)

BOOK REVIEW: COMEBACK, by Richard Stark

This was my first Parker novel and I am a convert. Never a fan of police procedurals, I was seduced in the first pages by this "crime procedural."

Parker is a good criminal -- in this instance a thief. I am not sure what additional talents he may exhibit in other novels. He is not an anti-hero along the lines of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley or TV's Dexter. I did not watch Parker with the mix of disbelief, horror, and pleasure I do those other characters. Parker is simply a criminal who gets away with things because he is smarter and when necessary more brutal than those around him. Those around him are often sleazy, but that doesn't mean "they have it coming to them." Some are pathetically naive, and some a downright stupid. Parker is intelligent and anything but naive. Sleazy? Is there not something inherently sleazy about stealing $400,000 from a traveling evangelist, knowing all along that your inside man on the job will be killed or at the very least never see his share of the money?

If Parker took a bullet and died in one of these stories, I suppose the world would be an infinitesimally better place. But we, the citizens, would be denied the pleasure of watching Richard Stark, one of the late Donald Westlake's several pseudonyms, practice his impeccable craft.


As Billy Preston would say


I got a story ain't got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once and awhile

BOOK REVIEW: SANDMAN SLIM by Richard Kadrey

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

How could I not read this book? William Gibson called it a "...deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece." The bits I read promised a hard-boiled, noirish novel about a living human who escapes from Hell and returns to Los Angeles to kill the men who not only sent him there but murdered his girlfriend. The bastards. Jack Stark, the narrator, is a magician, as are all those he is sworn to kill. There are also angels, alchemists, a vampire-like creature who's trying to reform, men from the Department of Homeland Security, and some particularly unpleasant demons called Kissi.

I really loved this book for the first fifty pages or so, then I thought, "So what?" If everything is supernatural, nothing really matters. The pleasure in noir fiction and film lies in experiencing the lives of desperate people, on both sides of the law, trapped by the systems that will crush them. In Sandman Slim the fate of the world hangs in the balance, but big deal. The novel is a very clever, carnival spook house. But maybe that's what Gibson meant when he called is a "..deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece."

Kadrey is very funny and he keeps the pace swift. Catching all his pop culture references will make you feel in with the in crowd. I was batting a hundred until I was wrong about Lawrence Tierney. Kadrey does fall prey in the extended denouement to the common fault of superhero movies -- he spends twenty pages setting up the basis for a franchise. The second book is already available.


View all my reviews

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE by Muriel Spark

Dougal Douglas, or Douglas Dougal depending upon when and on what side of town you meet him, is a Scottish devil. He offers to let most anyone feel the nubs of his horns buried in his curly red hair. The good working-class citizens of Peckham Rye, a South London suburb where people speak with distaste of any need to "cross the river," don't know quite what to make of Dougal or his nubby horns. If he is not a devil he is certainly a rascal, a young man who cons his way into local industry as an "arts man," a position recommended by progressive minded politicians who think if only workers could expand their minds they might also be less inclined to absenteeism. Dougal takes this position at two competing firms, hence the name change, and sets about his "human research" that assures he seldom darkens either of his offices. Instead he makes friends all over Peckham, which means, in effect, he sets about ruining several peoples' lives.

When Spark published her novel in 1960, Peckham Rye was a shining example of British pettiness and tedium. During the next decades it would become one of the highest crime districts in London, and hints of violence among discontented youth run throughout the novel. For her characters the sophisticated city across the river was equally a lure and a object of distrust. They like their quiet life in Peckham Rye, which retains some of its pre-suburban village character. They are sitting ducks for Dougal's freewheeling, mayhem-inducing charades. By the time the Scotsman feels its time to leave, he has left broken hearts, cancelled weddings, and crimes of passion in his wake.

Spark tells her story in an economical 140 pages.

I like to think that in the picture below she is writing the scene that involves murder by corkscrew.

BOOK REVIEW: THE MOVING TARGET, by Ross MacDonald

This was my first Lew Archer book, as it was its author's. MacDonald is considered the heir of hard-boiled detective novels after Hammet and Chandler. Perhaps because this one was written in 1949, it seems especially close to its predecessors. Southern California. Wealthy people. Creepy people. Beautiful people. Corruptible people. Losers from the word go. They are all here and they all play their roles.

MacDonald is credited with bringing more psychological depth to the genre. I didn't see a lot of that here but it is his first novel. I admit an innate prejudice against detective fiction. I like crime novels -- Patricia Highsmith, Georges Simenon, James Ellroy, recently Richard Stark. Crime novels can take you in unexpected directions and leave you slack-jawed when they are over. Detectives, whether they are Miss Marple, Richard Marlowe, or Lew Archer, will take some serious beatings but figure things out in the end. (Actually I doubt Miss Marple every took any serious beatings.)

Detectives suffer betrayals, but it's all part of the job. They go home to more cigarettes and rye. (I should have left Miss Marple out of this.)

In a good crime novel, the world shifts under your feet and settles into a place you feared it belonged the whole time.

Paul Newman played Lew Archer, renamed Harper, in the 1966 film version.

BOOK REVIEW: THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE by John Varley

Try not to take this personally.

In the year 2050, invaders from another galaxy enter our solar system and take over Jupiter and Earth. They have come to make contact with intelligent species like themselves, which unfortunately does not include the human race. On earth they are interested in only whales and dolphins. Human beings they put in the same category as beavers and muskrats. By plowing under the surface of the planet, they cause most earth life to starve. I suppose the invaders are meanwhile in the oceans partying down with whales and dolphins. Humans that have already begun populating the moon and the eight other planets the invaders leave to their own resources. We are like squirrels: just part of the landscape unless we become a nuisance and require an exterminator.

Progress on the eight worlds has been speeded along by transmissions that appear to come from Ophiuchi, a star seventeen light years away. Even though most of the information is unintelligible, mankind now has sophisticated technologies such as cloning, advanced space travel, and these really nifty suits that fit you like a skintight mirror and allow you to exist for thirty hours in a vacuum.

Lilo is a geneticist condemned to death for unlicensed experimentation. She is freed by Boss Tweed, ex-president and now among the wealthiest men in the universe. (Why the historical reference here I never understood.) Tweed finances the Free Earth movement, a fool's errand that hopes to expel the Invaders. Lilo is smart and spunky. She has been killed three times trying to escape and is now living as her third or fourth clone. She finally goes off on Tweed's sponsored expedition to Poseidon, Jupiter's crummiest moon. From here on out there are so many plots and so many agendas that the book turns into the wild adventure that has earned it classic status. The characters are smart and capable of facing each challenge thrown their way. Varley's settings, whether they are the manmade caverns on Poseidon or Tweed's absurd Disney-like environments, stay true to their own logic and give each episode its own feel.

There has also been a disturbing new transmission from Ophuichi. It is garbled like all the rest, but it is unmistakably a bill, and there are some serious late charges.

flag

Here is an actual photograph of Ophiuchi. It's one of those brighter dots.

BOOK REVIEW: SON OF MAN by Robert Silverberg

A few pages into this book, I groaned. I picked it up because I was reading Robert Silverberg books. I barely glanced at the cover to get a sense of what it was going to be about. On the first page, Clay, a man of our time, which in the case of the book would be around 1970, finds himself caught in a time flux and deposited in some future world, a verdant paradise possibly a million years in the future. Soon he meets Hanmer, one of the current human specimens, a soft spoken, somewhat androgynous young man with green skin and red eyes. Hanmer will be Clay's guide.

That's when I groaned. I seldom like books that involve a stranger trotted around a wondrous new world and shown wonders. Dante set a high literary standard for this format around the beginning of the 14th century. Utopian novels employ this method, and they are a drag. In science fiction from about the same tame as Silverberg's novel there is Theodore Sturgeon'sVenus Plus X, a silly and tedious book. Nothing much can happen in these stories, if they are stories. They read like account of visits to futuristic theme parks that prompt from their authors inflated language suited to the wonders on view. Silverberg is an author who can describe some pretty outlandish worlds and make them totally believable. For Son of Man he slips into highfalutin language that he imagines does justice to the mystic and ecstatic rituals Clay experiences. It doesn't. It just sounds strained.

Few books I have ever read spend such time on the state of their protagonist's genitals. Everyone is naked in this world. Hanmer and his five friends, known as Skimmers, not only look androgynous but change gender at will. Clay's frequent erections, whether prompted by sexual arousal by a Skimmer in his/her female mode or at times simply by something in the air, are mighty things. Except for one gender-bending encounter that must have much more titillating and shocking in 1971 that it is today, Clay finds himself mounting not only the Skimmers but in some cases the primordial ooze he drags himself through and even wet sand on a beach. (Think about the last one.) There is much engulfing and thrusting described, although at times Clay ejaculates more spontaneously. We also learn how the varying atmospheric conditions affect his penis and testicles. Silverberg was a hardworking, full-time writer who in addition to SF wrote dirty books for long forgotten paperback publishers like Nightstand Editions. That industry was done in by home video and the internet, but if you were around in the seventies you probably encountered these kinds of publications and you will recognize their language in Son of Man. Where else would you come across the word "encunted"? (It doesn't make it through spell check but it is in Wiktionary.)

But I digress. No, I take that back. Clay's erections are a central feature of the book. His other experiences involve body-dissolving trips to the edge of the universe, time spent as a giant carrot, and struggles alone through the "Unpleasant Zones," areas with names like Heavy, Slow, Dark, Cold, Empty. The Skimmers, who are not unlike H.G. Wells' Eloi minus the inconvenience of the Morlocks, live a carefree existence, their only duty being certain rituals that keep the world humming along. Sound boring? It is. But to Silverberg's credit, and his love of monstrosities, Clay meets along his journey some pretty interesting throwbacks to earlier human forms that range from spheres who live in mobile cages, to pimply, stinky goat men, to ravenous dinosaurs -- each of them some evolutionary adaptation to an era of earth's history.

The conclusion is a cosmic experience, at the Well of First Things. (Endemic to this kind of book is an absolute lack of humor, and yet much in Son of Man could be transferred to a Douglas Adams book with little rewriting.) In addition to a prolonged ejaculation this climactic eperience involves an immersion in the full panoply of humanity and a quasi-religious experience in which Clay takes on all the sorrows, fears, and boredom of everything from his Skimmer friends to Neanderthals and the spheroid thing in the cage, Why he feels compelled or even has the right to do this is not clear, except that he is Clay, he is one special dude.

BOOK REVIEW: THORNS by Robert Silverberg

Duncan Chalk begins every working day climbing the iron rungs that form a switchback trail to his desk perched forty feet above the floor. Duncan Chalk weighs over 600 pounds. "Pain," he explains to his minions, "is instructive."

Chalk should add that it is also profitable. He runs a media empire that ranges from carnival attractions to the most exclusive resorts in the solar system. His broadcast speciality is programming that allows the audience to watch other people go through hard times, or simply to suffer in general. Actually, none of this is made particularly clear by Silverberg, but given that the novel dates from 1967, he rates "fortune teller" status for his prescient view of what the future viewing public will want to watch. 

Chalk, through a process that is also not made clear, feeds off the misery he markets. And he needs a new attraction. Fortunately for him. an astronaut named Burris has recently returned from a disastrous encounter with the inhabitants of the planet Manjipoor. (Yes, it sounds like an Indian restaurant.) The Manjipoorians, for what seems to be no better reason than idle curiosity, performed operations on Burris that killed two of his shipmates and left him a grotesque deformity. Then there is Lona, a young woman who is mother to 100 children. She donated eggs for what turned out to be fantastically successful experiment. He anonymous participation was blown by the press, and she became more famous than our own, beloved Octomom. Months later, her unwanted celebrity a thing of the past, he lives in seclusion with severe post-partum depression. 

Chalk decides these two should get together, have a very public romance, followed by an inevitable public breakup, a scenario that will delight both him and his millions of consumers. I know none of this makes any sense, but Silverberg pulls it off. Every character, from Burris and Lona to Chalk's lowliest minions are well-developed individuals. The settings, that range from shopping malls for the vulgar masses to resorts that only the most fabulously wealthy humans can afford, are more believable today than they would have been to Silverberg's readers forty years ago. The resorts are like Steven Wynn wet dreams.

Thorns is consistently entertaining but I am not sure that it has a point. Our absurdly mismatched lovebirds learn some hard lessons, Chalk receives a spectacular comeuppance, and I suppose the ending in more or less positive. It's a great ride with just a bit of a letdown at the end.

BOOK REVIEW: THE END OF ETERNITY by Isaac Asimov

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Granted it's a classic, but also, let's face it, it's a drag. This is the only Asimov novel I have read, and it doesn't make me want to dive right in to the Foundation books or anything else. The ideas are intriguing, the writing is pedestrian, the characters are a bore.


View all my reviews

BOOK REVIEW: SHOW UP, LOOK GOOD,, by Mark Wisniewski

Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This may be the book that gets me into and out of the Rumpus Book Club in a single month. For the Rumpus club, you pay good money for an advance copy of the book of their choice, and then have the chance to discuss it on forums and eventually have a live web chat with the author,

I was left so cold by Show Up, Look Good that I am not inclined to participate in either of those activities. The advance copy come slathered with praise from notable readers who possibly read a different book than I did. I did not find it the "laugh-out-loud romp" described by Ben Fountain. Wisniewski's was not Jonathan Lethem's "riotously original voice." T. R. Hummer is right that the book is "part Carson McCullers, part Truman Capote, and part Elmore Leonard," but those parts never come together in a dynamic way.

The opening paragraph promises all the readerly pleasures Wisniewski's book delivers at best half-heartedly.

I know of  a secret murder, and  I have loved a speechless man, and sometimes I'd like to tell someone about how death and love have changed my life, but any of three thoughts give me pause. For one, if I talk about the murder, I myself could be killed. I can't know how true this is, but the speechless man said it was, and even though he disappointed me, I trusted him. Two, if someone's murdered, she's murdered, and talking about her will never change that. Then there's the reality that very few people care to face: unless you have majestic beauty and power, your secrets rarely matter to anyone but yourself.

That's the best part of the book.

Michelle is a thirty-something who breaks up with her boyfriend of eleven years when she catches him masturbating with a plastic vagina. She leaves Kankakee, Illinois for New York City, and promptly begins to live the life and have the kinds of -- somehow adventures doesn't seem the right word -- that Midwestern transplants should have in their twenty's. There's the offbeat, bizarre yet friendly living arrangement that must be traded in for an apartment shared with posers possessing their "MFA's from NYU." She nonchalantly earns money by scalping tickets to David Lettermen. She moves in with a an older married couple in Astoria who have so much love in their marriage that need to share it with others. (She really should have seen that one coming.) She works for a horrible boss in a Queen's supermarket. Back in Manhattan she moves into a tiny apartment where her only job is to free it up for lunchtime and afterwork assignations between businessmen and their pick-ups. And there is that murder.

When towards then end of the book, Michelle proves be an unreliable narrator, the revelation does not cast the preceding events in a more interesting light, they simply make her more irritating,



View all my reviews

BOOK REVIEW: RED LIGHTS by Georges Simenon

Red Lights by Georges Simenon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third of Simenon's roman durs that I have read, and even though it is my least favorite so far I admire the lean prose and psychological complexity. But at times the story read like an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Steve and Nancy Hogan, Long Islanders who work in Manhattan, head out on Labor Day Weekend to pick up their kids at Camp Walla Walla in Maine. Even by the lax standards of the 1950's, when the novel takes place, Steve has a "drinking problem."  He sneaks extra drinks when his wife isn't looking, though she is hardly unaware of his habits, and once on the road he stops for quick shots at roadhouses along the way. He insists he drives better when he has had a few. At his first stop, he finds that Nancy has not waited for him in the car. She has left behind a note that she is taking the bus the rest of the way. Steve's drunkeness sidetracks his attempt to catch up with the bus. He stops at another bar to further "clear his head." He is drunkenly voluble with a silent man seated next to him at the bar. Although it stretches credulity is comes as no surprise that this man, whom Steve finds waiting in his car, is the armed-and-dangerous escapee from Sing Sing discussed on the televisions in the bar. Steve gives him a ride, blathering all the time about true manhood and the qualities he imagines he shares with the criminal.

The novel has attitudes towards alcoholism and sexual assault that will not sit well with contemporary readers, which is perhaps why the ambiguities at the end of the novel seem more unsatisfying that intriguing. But Simenon's style remains impeccable, and Steve's delusional drunken consciousness is presented in excruciating detail.


View all my reviews

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS by Muriel Spark

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Muriel Spark novel I have read, and I have always had the notion that she was an author one read entirely, not just a random novel here and there. But The Girls of Slender Means is a completely satisfying three hours' read. Spark had me from the first paragraph, and when the novel was over, the incidents of death, murder, and insanity seemed all of a piece with the sort of girls' boarding house comedy I associate with something along the lines of Stage Door.

The setting is London, 1945, after the war in Europe but with VJ day still in the future. Ration cards for everything from powdered milk to clothing are tradable commodities, and bombed-out ruins litter the urban landscape. It was a time, Spark says, when "all the nice people of England were poor, allowing for exceptions." The May of Teck Club stands opposite Kensington Gardens and provides a home for the daughter of country clerics and other respectable middle-class families who must find work after the war. Exactly what many of the young women do remains vague, but they date a great deal, the youngest settling for RAF pilots and the more mature girls setting their eyes on American officers.

Spark's voice provides insights and asides that are remorseless rather than cruel. The action, such as it is, builds towards the kind of flamboyant set piece Alfred Hitchcock favored in his films of the 1940's. The denouement, which Spark intersperses throughout the book starting on about page three, takes the reader out of the closed-in world of the May of Teck Club and into the 1960's.


View all my reviews    

BOOK REVIEW: NEEDLE by Hal Clement

Needle by Hal Clement


Hal Clement had a fifty year career in sf and was made a Science Fiction Writer of America Grand Master in 1999.


Needle (1950) was his first published novel and it suffers the dubious fate of containing so many new sf elements that they have become standards of the medium over time. Two aliens, one good, one bad, crash onto Earth, The good alien, Hunter, is after the criminal alien and yes this is roughly the plot of Critters along with many lesser sf movies and books. Just the other night I decided not to watch something called Alien Hunter which I suspect had a similar plot.


These aliens are gelatinous beings that must find a host organism for survival. They exist cooperatively with their host, doing generally good things for its immune system and such, although they are also capable of killing it in a variety of ways. The good alien, Hunter, enters the body of a fifteen-year-old boy and is ready to track down his prey, but finds himself transported from the research island in the South Pacific where he landed to a boys boarding school in Massachusetts. Bob, the alien's host, gets on well with his new bodily resident and manages to leave school and return to the South Pacific so the hunt can proceed.


If published today, Needle would be YA fiction. It's dated. The world of Booth Tarkington is in its past, but the spirit of the Hardy Boys makes itself felt. Everyone rides bicycles, wears swimming outfits, and they organize their days around returning home in time for dinner. Various of Bob's friends are suspects, and clearing them of potential possession drags on for the middle third of the book. This gets a little boring. Also, I am not particularly good at this sort of thing, but I guessed where the bad alien was hiding out just by deciding which character would offer the biggest payoff for a finale.


Clement's strengths, as in Mission of Gravity, his only other novel I have read, is working with alien psychology, alien/human interaction, and those scenes where the alien acts like an alien. Clement returned to these characters almost thirty years later, and even as unengaging as I found much of this novel, I am curious to see what he does with them a second time around.


View all my reviews 

BOOK REVIEW: MISSION OF GRAVITY by Ha Clement

Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The science in "hard science fiction" doesn't have to be all that hard to go over my head. If publishers and critical readers say an author has done his homework and knows what he's talking about, I find myself taking a lot of things on faith. On the other hand, I am just as happy reading Philip K. Dick who ignores the niceties of scientific plausibility and has a fully recovered earth with citizens zipping around in flying cars and planning to colonize the galaxy just a few years after an atomic war.

During a 50 year publishing career, Hal Clement established himself as a master of hard sf. He held degrees in astronomy and chemistry, was a WWII pilot, and taught science at Milton Academy. Mission of Gravity(1954) is generally considered to be Clement's best novel. It appears in the Jim Pringle list of 100 best Science Fiction novels, but the description there goes beyond damning with faint praise. Pringle writes, "Of course the psychology is minimal, the characters wooden, and the prose flat." I finally picked it up with low expectations. I was wrong.

The setting is the planet Mesklin, a dense, discus shaped planet that rotates so rapidly so close to its sun that its gravity ranges from about twice that of earth's when near the equatorial rim to 700 times earth's near the poles. Clement later rethought this, and reduced the maximum gravity to 250 times that of earth, but you get the idea. Mesklin is largely inaccessible to earthling space explorers, and  you would think to any form of life whatsoever. But earth has sent a probe to Mesklin which is stranded at the south pole. A research station orbits the planet, and our boots on the ground is a single astronaut names Charles Strickland. His craft must stay near the rim, but there he has found the planets intelligent life form. The Mesklinites are tough-shelled caterpillar like creatures, about fifteen inches long, built low to the ground, and highly intelligent. Barlennan, our Mesklinite hero, leads a group of ocean traders. He has befriended Strickland, who must spend most of his time in his surface craft, learned English, and agreed to undertake the dangerous trip to the pole to retrieve the recording devices off the space probe.

I don't know why Jim Pringle held so low an opinion of the psychology and characterizations of this book. Barlennan and his crew are true adveturers, clever problem solvers, and determined when trading to get the better end of the deal. Strickland and his scientist co-workers orbiting the planet come off as enthusiastic, brainy grad students. A nice period touch is their rush to their slide rules when they need to work out complicated mathematical formulas. (Do they even make slide rules anymore?)

The adventure on the ground involves storms, unfriendly natives, some peculiar beasts in the mid-gravity zones, and the Mesklinites determination to overcome their justifiable fear of heights in a world where a fall of less than a foot would be fatal, The mixture of science and adventure here is closer to the spirit of Jules Verne than any sf novel I have read. Twenty years later, Clement returned to the Mesklinites, transporting them a giant rock in the sky, again inaccessible to earthmen, in a novel called Starlight.


View all my reviews    

BOOK REVIEW: BLACKOUT by Connie Willis

Blackout by Connie Willis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't like cliffhangers. I knew this was a continuous story with All Clear, but I am not inclined to jump into another 500 page novel with these same, quite frankly, not very interesting characters and their predicament as time travelers stuck in London during The Blitz.

The opening scenes in Oxford have a madcap energy that got me all excited about what might come next. In 2060, historians have become time travelers, going back in time for firsthand information on everything from the Crusades to World War II. In Oxford, the historians are the cool kids on campus, rushing from wardrobe, to props, to research, crossing paths with coworkers and competing for slots in a crowded schedule of drops and pick-ups. There are hints, however, that something is going wrong, some glitch in the system that is causing increasingly frequent slippages in time and place. Historians find themselves arriving days earlier or later than they intended, and sometimes miles from where they expected to be.

Willis follows three main characters and a couple of minor ones, and everything would seem to be in place for a thrilling read -- Dunkirk, the Blitz, life among child evacuees. But although the situations are realistic, nothing very interesting is happening to anybody. Things are going wrong, there are injuries and confusion, and each character's drop point, which is also their retrieval point, has ceased to operate. All this mounts up to the kinds of crises you would expect to see in a British TV series available on DVD here in the states. And just like I might find myself renting the second series just to see what finally happens, I can imagine myself picking up All Clear with a combination of irritation and curiosity.

Unless All Clear turns out to be a knockout, Willis should have gotten this over in one book.


View all my reviews   

BOOK REVIEW: PAYING FOR IT by Chester Brown

Paying for It by Chester Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chester Brown's autobiographical graphic novel starts with his break up from long-term girlfriend Sook Yin Lee. They live in her apartment, and he agrees to move into the guest room so her new boyfriend can stay over and eventually move in with her. So from the start, Brown sets himself up as a sad sack, disappointed in romantic love and incapable of establishing his 30'ish-year-old self in the world.

He decides to act on his interest in buying sex, and Paying for It records the next several years of his life among call girls and escorts. HIs initial insecurity gives way to a practicality about what he wants and from whom. He learns to read the review websites that cover local prostitutes. He has his favorites, and takes in stride the indignities that go with paid sex: He calls up a favorite and learns that the phone has been disconnected. When he goes to meet a woman for the second time, a different woman, claiming the same name, answers the door. But no problem -- the woman he wants is watching soap operas in the room next door and is available. He finds the women consistently beautiful but worries sometimes about their true ages. For the first few months tipping poses a problem.

Don't think for a moment that this book is funny or sexy. Brown puts eight panels of the digest-sized pages of his book. The setting is Toronto, and the main characters walk generic streets and end up in anonymous bedrooms. The sex scenes for the most part could depict copulating noodles. Brown never shows the women's faces, but I doubt that I would even recognize him if I saw him on the street. (Actually that's not true, there is photo of him in the back of the book.)

Brown is in frequent conversation and debate with two friends, one of whom asks him the priceless question, "When you were a child did you think you would grow up to be whoremonger?" At times Brown seems willfully disingenuous.  He feels confident that none of the women he frequents have been trafficked. He accepts their stories that they are independent entrepreneurs, not being run by organized crime or pimps. He also draws no direct line between the world of the relatively high-priced call  girls he visits and prostitutes turning tricks on the street and the drugs, crime, and violence that goes with that trade, His answer for everything, explained in copious appendixes, is to legalize prostitution.

This book is not likely to change anyone's opinion on prostitution, but it is a fascinating, first-hand case study.


View all my reviews     

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL 5 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 5 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Is it a known tendency among Japanese pre-adolescents to opt for blood sacrifice whenever they are faced with a really serious threat? As the tiny but deadly bugs that have hatched from the eggs of the big deadly bug attack them, one group decides it is all one little boy's fault and he must die. Our hero  Sho itervenes, but the intended victim bashes his owns brains out. The bugs disappear, so maybe he was to blame after all.

Next on the agenda is bubonic plague, and the controversy rages as to whom is infected and what to do with them -- chase them away, stab them with spears, or burn them with gasoline.

This tragedy is not bringing out anyone's best qualities. I thought volume 5 dragged a bit, but there were lots of great drawings of one or more child screaming "PLAGUE!"


View all my reviews 

BOOK REVIEW: THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEEL JACK by Mark Hodder

Hodder needed a different, meaner editor for his first novel. Anywhere from 20% - 25% could go. Every incident goes on a little too long. The second half of every compound sentence could be dropped. Conversations are over before Hodder cuts them off. He never got the memo on adverbs.

This is the steampunk novel I have read, and I am not the best audience. I don't care about the gadgetry, and the gadgetry seems to be much of the attraction here. On the other hand, I am a sucker for time travel stories. That's what attracted me to Spring Heeled Jack, and Hodder does a good job with the complications caused by going back in time, although it is not hard to guess that his time traveller will end up causing all the things he attempts to prevent.

The historical characters that fill the story range from the well known -- Captain Sir Richard Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde -- to more obscure players such as the founder of the Libertine Club, Richard Monckton Milnes, or Laurence Oliphant, a minor political figure and minor novelist more or less lost to history. The early chapters have to bring the readers up to date on who everyone is, and they read like a script from the History Channel, or The Alternate History Channel. Things don't really pick up until the appearance of Spring Heel Jack himself, a figures in a close fitting white suit, a black helmet surrounded by blue flames, and boots with a spring mechanism that allows to him to leap over buildings and disappear into the sky.

There are also werewolves who abduct chimney sweeps, mesmerists, and machines that were once human. All of this makes for an over-crowded but consistent plot, it just needs to get on with it and get it over with about a hundred pages before Hodder is able to wrap the whole thing up. 

 

flag

BOOK REVIEW: THE TIGER'S WIFE by Tea Obreht

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just as there are some movies whose main purpose seems to be garnering Academy Award nominations if not the awards themselves -- The King's English is a good example of the genre -- there are some novels that must have as part of their marketing strategy their suitability for your more literate reading groups, those that are not going to be reading The Help but are unlikely to plan an intensive investigation of The Magic Mountain.


Enter Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife. Great backstory --  first novel by author under 30, born in Belgrade but U.S. resident since age of 12. Elegant prose style. A plot chockablock with talking points -- Balkan history, folk beliefs, magic realism, the present infused with the past. As I was reading it I received in the mail an announcement of the Spring lunch time discussion group at the Dallas Institute for the Humanities. The Tiger's Wife was first on the list.




View all my reviews