Why I love my car - and reviews
O my Honda Civic Hybrid -- I love you because when I took misterrivkat to the airport for his trip to Iceland, we left DC at 4:15 and I spent until around 6:30 navigating the usual, moderately awful DC-area rush hour in DC, Maryland, DC again and then Virginia.
And I got over 45 miles per gallon.
Admittedly, this is a notable result, and I probably won't get that for the whole tank. But it still makes me unreasonably happy.
Harlan Coben, The Final Detail: This thriller is about a sports agent who comes back from a tropical vacation to find his partner in jail for the murder of one of his clients, an aging, addicted baseball player who just might have been ready for a comeback. The story moved briskly, with plenty of twists and turns, but failed to grab me. It seemed as if the main character had probably starred in an earlier Coben book, given why he was on that tropical vacation - Coben was very good at providing just enough information to let me know who this guy was without revisiting past plots. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood for elaborate schemes and stunning reveals, despite their competent crafting.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Traitors: I think this fantasy-ish sf was the most disappointing Rusch I’ve read to date, if only because I’ve read her more recent, politically complex sf and it was so much more successful. Set on a world colonized a few hundred years before the start of the story, and now apparently isolated from other humans, the story concerns Emilio Diate, a Dancer and son of a rebel against the Kingdom, the government that regulates all Talents, including Magic Talents, for the greater glory of the state. After Diate’s family is slaughtered, he flees to Golgoth, a differently repressive state from which the Kingdom seceded many decades back, and becomes a favorite of the ruler there. The story lurches forward in big jumps - fifteen years, then one year at a time - and the political configurations seemed unlikely. It’s true that people will accept a lot of oppression, but I didn’t understand why the other nations would allow the Kingdom’s denizens to travel freely among them when it was state policy to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. Likewise, Diate’s characterization seemed to fluctuate - at one time, he was very self-aware and pages later, blind; he was loyal to the Kingdom and then pages later Rusch says he’d never felt fully comfortable there. Those could have been reconciled, but they weren’t; he seemed to change based on what would produce the most dramatic tension. All in all, I’d recommend a Retrieval Artist novel instead.
Kim Stanley Robinson, A Short Sharp Shock: A theme for the review - this was the least satisfying KSR I’ve read to date. It is a short mood piece, a series of related dreams perhaps about a man lost on a planet that is all water except for a rock spine girdling the planet, on which various strange groups of villagers live and hunt and kill. The man and a woman, “the swimmer,” have fantastic experiences, often grim; they may be stranded space travelers who’ve lost their memories. I would have preferred storytelling to style, but there is style aplenty: “Inside him the flesh metronome went tick, tick. Life slipped away hadron by hadron, limning every joy with a rime of grief, and he walked backward into the future, waving and crying out “Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!” I did like that the swimmer and the man apparently spoke languages overlapping almost completely, except that what meant “loyalty” to the man meant “stubborness” to the woman, “arbitrary” was “beautiful,” “actually” was “currently,” and “I love you” was “I will leave you.”
Jonathan Kellerman, The Conspiracy Club: My father was right about the problem with this book: nothing much happens. There’s a psychologist - not the usual one, another one, who lost the woman he loved to a horrific crime and is slowly coming out of his horrified shell - he’s different from Kellerman’s usual protagonist because he’s an orphan, he lacks a dog, and he lives in what appears to be Chicago, though I’m not 100% sure about that last. An older doctor at his hospital draws him into a small group of people who seem to have a fascination with violent crime and evil. What are they trying to do to him? Are they helping him find the monster who’s killing lots of women? The low peril-to-investigation ratio is clearly more realistic than the standard thriller, but it’s less fun, and the writing is so uninspired that I can’t recommend the book even for those of us who routinely read Kellerman.
Patricia Briggs, When Demons Walk: I bought this and another early Briggs as an Adobe download from Amazon for $4.99 each. While it was entertaining, I probably wouldn't have kept it if it hadn't been tied to my computer with digital rights management, so there's a lesson learned. The book itself is the story of a thief/mage who has grown up under the rule of foreign conquerors who don't believe in magic, which helps her thievery considerably. But a demon is killing conqueror and native alike in her small city, and she joins with the city's ruler - who is slowly dying as the result of a crippling disease - to fight it. Of course, he doesn't believe in magic either. Knives, sorcery and romance feature in what follows. The overall arc was fairly typical fantasy, but Sham, the heroine, did seem to be having more fun than most oppressed fantasy heroines, and I even enjoyed reading about how she scandalized the court nobles with her outrageous dresses when she was pretending to be the ruler's mistress.
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky: In the mid-twenty-first century, Earth underwent a Singularity: a creature from the deep future - at least, one who said so, and who said it was the descendant of Earth's AIs - showed up and moved ninety percent of the population to other worlds. The story in this book starts much later; Earth is a libertarian anarchist's paradise, run by contractual arrangements and using the UN as an entity for confused planets trying to find an Earth government with which to negotiate. Something called the Festival, which brings opportunity and danger, arrives at a planet that's a colony of a repressive monarchist regime and starts to shake things up. When the ruling regime finds out about the Festival, it thinks it's being invaded and sends a big fleet to the colony - but its plans may endanger more than just the one regime, if it provokes reaction from the Singularity by using banned weapons. Two people from Earth are caught up in the excitement; one's a diplomat/spy and the other's (mostly) an engineer. There's a lot of exotic technology, from cornucopia machines that make anything to FTL travel that moves in closed timelike curves. The main characters seemed like actual human people, if phenomenally competent. My biggest peeve was that, during battle scenes, Stross tended to narrate exact commands - including the thirty, twenty, ten second countdowns - in such complete jargon that I had to read merely to get the sense that story-time was passing rather than to understand what was going on, because the latter was impossible. It was the kind of thing that would work to create tension in a movie, but didn't really succeed in the book. The rest of the exposition was more tolerable, though I'm not sure I liked the politics inherent in the setup or the way that the numerous deaths caused by the Festival were barely acknowledged -- but perhaps I'm blaming Stross for his POV characters' attitudes, which were consistent with the rest of their characterization.
Ken MacLeod, Cosmonaut Keep: Recognizably human characters with snappy dialogue - where has this Ken MacLeod been hiding? I haven't liked MacLeod's other books, and now I think maybe it was because he had pushed society so far out into the future, with his wacked-out version of state socialism (looking a lot like state capitalism, I might add, if resources were unlimited), that I couldn't understand the characters, much less like them. This book jumps back and forth - part is set a little bit into the future, after a revitalized Russia has conquered Europe and there's a cool war on between the virulently capitalist US and the comfortably socialist and info-controlled Europeans. The other part is set in the far future, though some of the people from the first part are still alive due to (a) age-retarding telomere enhancements and (b) relativistic effects from near-light-speed interstellar travel. The folks in the future are, for political reasons, trying to figure out how one ship managed to get out to the stars from Earth without help from aliens, when everybody else had to come via alien express. But that's not really the point - it's a story about discovering the past in order to find the future, and about how both are always messier than you'd like.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower: So it turns out I'm finally old enough to enjoy Butler; I tried her many years ago and didn't get her. Now, her stories of protagonists who aren't ordinary sf heroes seem much more intriguing. I think this is the first book in the Earthseed timeline, because it's about the founder of the Earthseed religion escaping from the collapsing urban society of her birth, though my impression is that it wasn't the first Earthseed book Butler wrote. It's a short book, and many unpleasant things happen to the protagonist, but she deals with them without flinching - with ruthless compassion, as Sinead O'Connor might say. That kind of narrative voice is nice - it could easily tip over into preachy and holier-than-thou, especially since it's about the founder of a new religion, but the narrator's self-awareness of how bizarre she sounds, a kid talking about hope and the power to change in the middle of a world that isn't falling apart but exploding apart, helps minimize the preachiness.
And I got over 45 miles per gallon.
Admittedly, this is a notable result, and I probably won't get that for the whole tank. But it still makes me unreasonably happy.
Harlan Coben, The Final Detail: This thriller is about a sports agent who comes back from a tropical vacation to find his partner in jail for the murder of one of his clients, an aging, addicted baseball player who just might have been ready for a comeback. The story moved briskly, with plenty of twists and turns, but failed to grab me. It seemed as if the main character had probably starred in an earlier Coben book, given why he was on that tropical vacation - Coben was very good at providing just enough information to let me know who this guy was without revisiting past plots. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood for elaborate schemes and stunning reveals, despite their competent crafting.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Traitors: I think this fantasy-ish sf was the most disappointing Rusch I’ve read to date, if only because I’ve read her more recent, politically complex sf and it was so much more successful. Set on a world colonized a few hundred years before the start of the story, and now apparently isolated from other humans, the story concerns Emilio Diate, a Dancer and son of a rebel against the Kingdom, the government that regulates all Talents, including Magic Talents, for the greater glory of the state. After Diate’s family is slaughtered, he flees to Golgoth, a differently repressive state from which the Kingdom seceded many decades back, and becomes a favorite of the ruler there. The story lurches forward in big jumps - fifteen years, then one year at a time - and the political configurations seemed unlikely. It’s true that people will accept a lot of oppression, but I didn’t understand why the other nations would allow the Kingdom’s denizens to travel freely among them when it was state policy to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. Likewise, Diate’s characterization seemed to fluctuate - at one time, he was very self-aware and pages later, blind; he was loyal to the Kingdom and then pages later Rusch says he’d never felt fully comfortable there. Those could have been reconciled, but they weren’t; he seemed to change based on what would produce the most dramatic tension. All in all, I’d recommend a Retrieval Artist novel instead.
Kim Stanley Robinson, A Short Sharp Shock: A theme for the review - this was the least satisfying KSR I’ve read to date. It is a short mood piece, a series of related dreams perhaps about a man lost on a planet that is all water except for a rock spine girdling the planet, on which various strange groups of villagers live and hunt and kill. The man and a woman, “the swimmer,” have fantastic experiences, often grim; they may be stranded space travelers who’ve lost their memories. I would have preferred storytelling to style, but there is style aplenty: “Inside him the flesh metronome went tick, tick. Life slipped away hadron by hadron, limning every joy with a rime of grief, and he walked backward into the future, waving and crying out “Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!” I did like that the swimmer and the man apparently spoke languages overlapping almost completely, except that what meant “loyalty” to the man meant “stubborness” to the woman, “arbitrary” was “beautiful,” “actually” was “currently,” and “I love you” was “I will leave you.”
Jonathan Kellerman, The Conspiracy Club: My father was right about the problem with this book: nothing much happens. There’s a psychologist - not the usual one, another one, who lost the woman he loved to a horrific crime and is slowly coming out of his horrified shell - he’s different from Kellerman’s usual protagonist because he’s an orphan, he lacks a dog, and he lives in what appears to be Chicago, though I’m not 100% sure about that last. An older doctor at his hospital draws him into a small group of people who seem to have a fascination with violent crime and evil. What are they trying to do to him? Are they helping him find the monster who’s killing lots of women? The low peril-to-investigation ratio is clearly more realistic than the standard thriller, but it’s less fun, and the writing is so uninspired that I can’t recommend the book even for those of us who routinely read Kellerman.
Patricia Briggs, When Demons Walk: I bought this and another early Briggs as an Adobe download from Amazon for $4.99 each. While it was entertaining, I probably wouldn't have kept it if it hadn't been tied to my computer with digital rights management, so there's a lesson learned. The book itself is the story of a thief/mage who has grown up under the rule of foreign conquerors who don't believe in magic, which helps her thievery considerably. But a demon is killing conqueror and native alike in her small city, and she joins with the city's ruler - who is slowly dying as the result of a crippling disease - to fight it. Of course, he doesn't believe in magic either. Knives, sorcery and romance feature in what follows. The overall arc was fairly typical fantasy, but Sham, the heroine, did seem to be having more fun than most oppressed fantasy heroines, and I even enjoyed reading about how she scandalized the court nobles with her outrageous dresses when she was pretending to be the ruler's mistress.
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky: In the mid-twenty-first century, Earth underwent a Singularity: a creature from the deep future - at least, one who said so, and who said it was the descendant of Earth's AIs - showed up and moved ninety percent of the population to other worlds. The story in this book starts much later; Earth is a libertarian anarchist's paradise, run by contractual arrangements and using the UN as an entity for confused planets trying to find an Earth government with which to negotiate. Something called the Festival, which brings opportunity and danger, arrives at a planet that's a colony of a repressive monarchist regime and starts to shake things up. When the ruling regime finds out about the Festival, it thinks it's being invaded and sends a big fleet to the colony - but its plans may endanger more than just the one regime, if it provokes reaction from the Singularity by using banned weapons. Two people from Earth are caught up in the excitement; one's a diplomat/spy and the other's (mostly) an engineer. There's a lot of exotic technology, from cornucopia machines that make anything to FTL travel that moves in closed timelike curves. The main characters seemed like actual human people, if phenomenally competent. My biggest peeve was that, during battle scenes, Stross tended to narrate exact commands - including the thirty, twenty, ten second countdowns - in such complete jargon that I had to read merely to get the sense that story-time was passing rather than to understand what was going on, because the latter was impossible. It was the kind of thing that would work to create tension in a movie, but didn't really succeed in the book. The rest of the exposition was more tolerable, though I'm not sure I liked the politics inherent in the setup or the way that the numerous deaths caused by the Festival were barely acknowledged -- but perhaps I'm blaming Stross for his POV characters' attitudes, which were consistent with the rest of their characterization.
Ken MacLeod, Cosmonaut Keep: Recognizably human characters with snappy dialogue - where has this Ken MacLeod been hiding? I haven't liked MacLeod's other books, and now I think maybe it was because he had pushed society so far out into the future, with his wacked-out version of state socialism (looking a lot like state capitalism, I might add, if resources were unlimited), that I couldn't understand the characters, much less like them. This book jumps back and forth - part is set a little bit into the future, after a revitalized Russia has conquered Europe and there's a cool war on between the virulently capitalist US and the comfortably socialist and info-controlled Europeans. The other part is set in the far future, though some of the people from the first part are still alive due to (a) age-retarding telomere enhancements and (b) relativistic effects from near-light-speed interstellar travel. The folks in the future are, for political reasons, trying to figure out how one ship managed to get out to the stars from Earth without help from aliens, when everybody else had to come via alien express. But that's not really the point - it's a story about discovering the past in order to find the future, and about how both are always messier than you'd like.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower: So it turns out I'm finally old enough to enjoy Butler; I tried her many years ago and didn't get her. Now, her stories of protagonists who aren't ordinary sf heroes seem much more intriguing. I think this is the first book in the Earthseed timeline, because it's about the founder of the Earthseed religion escaping from the collapsing urban society of her birth, though my impression is that it wasn't the first Earthseed book Butler wrote. It's a short book, and many unpleasant things happen to the protagonist, but she deals with them without flinching - with ruthless compassion, as Sinead O'Connor might say. That kind of narrative voice is nice - it could easily tip over into preachy and holier-than-thou, especially since it's about the founder of a new religion, but the narrator's self-awareness of how bizarre she sounds, a kid talking about hope and the power to change in the middle of a world that isn't falling apart but exploding apart, helps minimize the preachiness.