Red & Blue Planet Changes
Blue Planet Gets Red Hot
As expected, given the lateness of winter, we skipped spring and went right into summer. The temperatures literally went from 28F one Sunday to 28C by the next one. Snow didn't just melt - it all vanished. Like ninjas into the night.
Now the good times can start rolling with daylight sticking around past 09:30 pm already and humidity-free.
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Red Planet Blues
Incorporating the first 10 chapters of Robert Sawyer's Identity Theft into this book, the story continues in this book answering all the dangling threads.
This is a fun SF/mystery/noire mash up that pays hommage to stories like The Maltese Falcon. The ability to transfer bodies to artificially constructed bodies keeps you guessing until the end who is whom. And who will live or die.
This is a change of pace from Sawyer's previous novels as it does not contain any big idea concepts and is focused mainly on human motivations. It sounds like Rob's next book returns to the big idea concept and a very fascinating one at that. I eagerly anticipate that one but until then this is an excellent change of pace.
Will we ever get to see Alex Lomax again? I wonder as his story does not seem finished...
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NBCs Hannibal continues to impress. The show has avoided being a serial killer of the week show and is deeply exploring the psyches of not just Will Graham but Jack Crawford too. The exploration of Lecter is at a much slower and more subtle pace. The glimpses into his mind are only seen through whatever killings that take place in an episode.
This week's installment entitled 'Entrée' - each episode is named after some item of French cuisine - made many callbacks to The Silence of The Lambs and served up a Clarice Starling-like FBI trainee - Miriam Lass played by Anna Chlumsky - that Crawford employs to help in the search the Chesapeake Ripper. There is an inmate at the Baltimore State Hospital ensconced in a cell down a hall very much like the one from SOTL. The Ripper has been silent for two years and Lass has been missing that long. The inmate is another doctor - Dr. Abel Gideon played by Eddie Izzard - who has just killed a nurse in the same ritual as the Ripper.
Graham and Crawford are not convinced that Gideon is the Ripper and we learn through flashbacks that Lass inadvertently discovered who the Ripper was when she visited the recently retired surgeon - Hannibal Lecter. Her discovery of a drawing that matches a recent Ripper victim in Lecter's off and the sight of a sock footed Lecter - he had just removed his shoes to sneak up behind her - happens with shocky swiftness. Well done.
And the scenes with Hannibal serving guests meals - has yet to get old.