2004-05-03: Book review ponderings
Over the past couple of days, I've been looking at a wide variety of book
reviews around the Internet, in part for recommendations and in part to
think some more about how I'm currently handling reviews and if there are
better ways of doing it.
The main things that I'm missing compared to most other review sites (other
than quantity, which will come with time) is more metadata; right now, my
reviews have basically no metadata other than author and title, and at
least an ISBN code would probably be useful (although is its own headache
in other ways).
Some of this (like ISBN) would be pretty straightforward to include,
although in some cases a bit hard to add retroactively. Page count would
probably also be useful; I'm not sure if there's any other metadata that's
particularly interesting to people, with the exception of cover scans.
One thing that I discovered in looking at other collections of reviews is
that I really do love having the cover scans included. They don't
necessarily add anything in particular to the review, but they give it a
certain character and often I'll recognize the book more readily (and
sometimes will not recognize the book when I should, which is also
interesting).
However, I have no idea what the legal issues are surrounding cover scans.
It looks like I can reuse Amazon's images obtainable via their web services
interface, which is rather neat, except that their list of terms and
conditions is incredibly long and intimidating. It also would appear to
require that I link to Amazon for purchases, and I'd actually rather
recommend Powell's or some other independent bookseller. Hm.
I'm wondering if there is some other source of small cover art pictures (I
don't want full-sized scans even if I could get them) usable explicitly for
book reviews out there that I'm not seeing. I know that I can get this
sort of information from places like Muze, but then of course I'd have to
pay for it; their target market is on-line booksellers.
If anyone out there knows anything more about this, what other people do,
or where to look, I'd be very interested.
2004-05-03: Few more new books
It looks like I forgot a few books on my list of ones I just picked up,
borrowed, received as a gift (thank you!), or otherwise was adding to my
to-read list. So here are the additions:
Bill Bryson -- The Mother Tongue (nf)
Lynn Flewelling -- The Bone Doll's Twin (sff)
Lynn Flewelling -- Hidden Warrior (sff)
Jo Walton -- The King's Peace (sff)
Jo Walton -- The King's Name (sff)
Now, to take time to read all of these....
2004-05-11: Hominids
Review: Hominids, by Robert J. Sawyer
Pages: 444
ISBN: 0-765-34500-5
Publisher: Tor
This is the Hugo award winner for 2003. I have absolutely no idea why.
With the possible exception of Kiln People, which I've not yet read,
it's far and away the worst book on the short list. I'm getting very close
to the point of just ignoring the Hugos completely.
The basic story is that the Neanderthals prospered in a parallel world
while Homo sapiens becomes extinct. One of the Neanderthals is
accidentally shunted into our world as a side effect of a scientific
experiment. A clash of culture ensues.
Well, sort of. What actually ensues is a pile of self-righteous, cliched,
preachy tripe. The Neanderthals have perfect population control, have bred
violence largely out of their society (without losing anything important,
no less), have a perfect judicial system without real privacy concerns, are
generally happy, well-adjusted, near-perfect people. And so on and so on,
until the reader is utterly sick of it. The unrelenting, simplistic slam
on Homo sapiens culture is at least woven into the story rather
than concentrated in chunks of preaching, so there's some reason to keep
reading, but it never reaches the point of credibility.
Some sections are just spectacularly bad. At the point that the only
justification for religion that one of the human characters could muster
was Pascal's Wager (!) and the Neanderthal concludes that the reason why
human society is so messed up is because the belief in a God means no one
cares about the current life nearly had me throwing the book across the
room. I don't even like religion, but come on.
I like books that challenge assumptions and that tackle hard questions
about human identity, but they have to actually say something interesting.
I don't even mind books that get preachy if they offer some compelling
story, but this one doesn't, and the preaching says nothing interesting.
It just handwaves through all of the reasons why human culture is the way
that it is and seems to have as its goal making the reader feel guilty
about how screwed up Homo sapiens is. The random rape of one of
the main human characters at the beginning of the book, just so that it can
be used as an illustration of how our society is full of evil male
violence, is typical of this whole book.
The book is competently plotted and the writing isn't horrible, although
the characters occasionally come across as ham-handed cliches. The book is
not, however, competently thought through. Avoid.
Rating: 4 out of 10
2004-05-13: Stirge's Reviews
My friend Eric Sturgeon has started writing
video game reviews. They are
perhaps not the best at being reviews, in that they don't always say
a lot of specifics about the game, but they're some of the most
entertaining reviews I've ever read. Rather more so than mine, in fact.
You should go read them. And then tell him that you like them so that
he'll keep writing more.
(I'm the one who
owns the
couch. Although there are unfortunately now geographic obstacles to him
sitting on it.)
2004-05-24: Someplace to be Flying
Review: Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint
Pages: 544
ISBN: 0-812-55158-3
Publisher: Tor
Most science fiction and fantasy books are about big things, about large,
ambitious plots that define the book, that serve as catch phrases to
memory. "Remember the book about...." It makes them easier to get a
handle on; you touch on the overall plot, give the person you're talking to
an idea of what archtypes of story are blended together, and from that they
can get a pretty good idea of whether the ideas are ones they want to spend
a few days exploring.
Someplace to be Flying isn't like that. It's not that there isn't a
plot... there are two, really, one about Raven's pot, and one about
sisters. It's more that the plots, while important, just aren't what the
book is about. It's about the characters, about Jack and his stories,
about the crow girls, about screwing things up because you're too afraid of
screwing them up, about what it feels like to start discovering a whole
different way of thinking about the world and then the odd sadness when you
realize that some people will just never follow you there, but it's okay,
they're still good people. And it's more than that, too... lots of books
have excellent characters, but these just live their lives out on the pages
in front of you, open and honest and suspicious and defensive, quirky and
sad and scarred and earnest.
de Lint talks a little bit on his web pages about how he's had a hard time finding a good term for what
he writes, and that he's arrived on "mythic fiction" as a reasonable
term. It's urban fantasy, to be sure, but the setting is even more
current-day than that might imply; in some ways, it verges on magic
realism, but there's more peering under the hood and more actual
artifacts, magic, and detail than I'd associate with magic realism. But
whatever you want to call it, it's amazing and engrossing.
I loved this book. I loved meeting the whole menagerie of characters,
every one of which is significant, interesting, and memorable in some way.
There's philosophy in here that really touched me, a certain acceptance of
who one is and what one cares about, some real thought about the basis of
loyalty and why people help each other and what the costs are. There are
also Maida and Zia, the crow girls, two of the most memorable and likable
supporting characters that I've ever read about. It's a book that I feel
different, calmer, more thoughtful for having read.
It's hard to really describe this one, and unfortunately it's also hard to
come by. Charles de Lint's books don't appear to be kept in print very
well, and this one seems to be on near-permanent back-order. But if you
happen across it in a used bookstore, pick it up and give it a shot. Try
the first chapter, because I bet you'll keep reading.
Rating: 10 out of 10
2004-05-24: Book haul
Yes, of course, I couldn't stay away from ordering from Powell's for too
long. (I'd gotten The Confusion in hardcover, see, so of course I
had to get Quicksilver in the same format, and while I was placing
an order anyway....)
Anyway, here's the latest bunch:
James Gleick -- Faster (nf)
Madeleine L'Engle -- A Wind in the Door (sff)
Terry Pratchett -- Guards! Guards! (sff)
Terry Pratchett -- Reaper Man (sff)
Alastair Reynolds -- Revelation Space (sff)
James H. Schmitz -- Telzey Amberdon (sff)
Karl Schroeder -- Ventus (sff)
Neal Stephenson -- Quicksilver (sff)
Joss Whedon, et al. -- Fray (graphic novel)
Roger Zelazny -- Lord of Light (sff)
2004-05-24: spin 1.46
A small upgrade that adds support for a -e command line option, specifying
regexes of files to ignore. Useful if there are stray files around in your
thread source tree that you don't want to copy into your destination web
site.
You can get the current version from the
spin web site.
2004-05-24: remctl 1.6
This release fixes a format string vulnerability in the remctld server, so
everyone using remctl should upgrade (bleh). Sorry about that. There are
no other user-visible changes.
This will likely be the final release of remctl before a substantial
rewrite that uses a much richer and more robust configuration file syntax.
You can get the current version from the
remctl web site.
2004-05-29: Initial Baycon haul
The dealer room at Baycon this year has been good to me. I would have
liked to be able to find some more fantasy and some more recent stuff,
since the new book selection and the used selection that isn't classic SF
is a bit limited, but I've still been able to find quite a lot.
There will be more; there are some things that I'm going to pick up
tomorrow that I haven't yet for a variety of reasons. But here's what I've
gotten so far:
Peter S. Beagle -- The Last Unicorn (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- Brothers of Earth (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- The Faded Sun: Kutath (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- The Faded Sun: Shon'jir (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- Hunter of Worlds (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- Serpent's Reach (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- Visible Light (sff)
Samuel R. Delany -- The Einstein Intersection (sff)
Lord Dunsany -- The King of Elfland's Daughter (sff)
Mary Gentle -- A Hawk in Silver (sff)
Harry Harrison -- The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat
(sff)
David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (ed.) -- Year's Best SF
9 (sff)
Robert A. Heinlein -- Citizen of the Galaxy (sff)
Robert A. Heinlein -- Double Star (sff)
Robert A. Heinlein -- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (sff)
Frank Herbert -- Whipping Star (sff)
Katherine Kurtz -- Deryni Rising (sff)
Mercedes Lackey -- Sacred Ground (sff)
Fritz Leiber -- The Wanderer (sff)
Vonda N. McIntyre -- Starfarers (sff)
Vonda N. McIntyre -- Superluminal (sff)
Ken Macleod -- The Cassini Division (sff)
Elizabeth Moon -- The Speed of Dark (sff)
Larry Niven -- Limits (sff)
Larry Niven -- A World Out of Time (sff)
Larry Niven & Steven Barnes -- The Barsoom Project
(sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle -- Oath of Fealty (sff)
George Orwell -- Animal Farm (f)
Robert Silverberg -- A Time of Changes (sff)
Dan Simmons -- Hard Freeze (f)
Sean Stewart -- Passion Play (sff)
James White -- Mind Changer (sff)
Most of what's likely still coming is Zelazny.
2004-05-30: Lord of Light
Review: Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
Pages: 279
ISBN: 0-380-01403-3
Publisher: EOS
I've been planning on reading Zelazny for years, as many of my friends love
his work, but for some reason I'd focused only on Amber and it hadn't
occurred to me that he probably had unrelated novels. So he'd been waiting
and waiting until I felt in the mood to start a long series and had
acquired more of them.
Lord of Light is entirely unrelated to Amber, so if you'd been
caught up in the same erroneous belief that I have, this is a decent place
to start with his writing. And the premise is an excellent one: on a
world other than Earth, far into the future, the founders of a colony live
as Hindu gods, constantly reincarnating through advanced technology, secure
in their power and their well-defended city, maintaining a hold over a
planet of people kept in medieval technology (not to mention the captive
native inhabitants of the world). Most of them do, that is; others ply
their trade as normal humans, again and again, and then there is the one
people call Buddha, who never claimed to be a god, but who never claimed
not to be a god either.
I don't know nearly enough about Hinduism and Buddhism to catch all of the
parallels and play in this story, and I think my enjoyment of it suffered
some because of it, but it even with what I know, the way that Zelazny
plays with the ideas and flow of religion is fascinating. This is a book
that for much of the story works well on two levels at once, both as a
story of men and gods and a story of technological lords, set in their
ways, trying to cope with or head off change.
Almost everything has two ways of looking at it. For example, there are
mythical demons trapped in the bowels of the earth, with which brave men
can bargain, but should still fear for their lives; and there is a native
population of pure energy beings, trapped, immortal, and angry, who may
make deals but who still have a slightly alien way of looking at the world.
There are living Hindu gods in their sacred city, and there are men who
still command advanced technology and use it to secure their paradise while
taking on roles to keep their hold over the population secure. The story
can be read both ways, and many times the characters themselves struggle to
decide which defines them, or stride confidently with one foot in both
histories.
I can highly recommend this book for the concept. The story is somewhat
more pedestrian, following the adventures of Mahasamatman (who prefers
Sam), the Buddha, who doesn't believe in religion, let alone in himself,
and yet manages to be a credible religious figure at the same time. The
plot elements are mostly excuses for Sam to be either cunning or oddly
honorable at right angles to the world, which definitely enhances the
religious parallel.
I had a rough time with the language of the book at the beginning, but
after a while the mix between slightly archaic, formal speech patterns and
descriptions and the oddly blunt, modern-sounding, sarcastic wordplay in an
occasional description or comment started mostly working. It was still
occasionally jarring, however, and not everywhere do the two levels of the
story blend smoothly. The other primary flaw in the book was that I found
the cast endlessly confusing; someone better versed in Hindu mythology
would likely remember the names better, but I kept getting lost between
Kali, Kubera, and Krishna, among others, and it definitely did not help
that multiple characters use the same name at various points in the story.
The setting is, outside of the brilliant basic idea, unfortunately
forgettable, or, more accurately, purely a backdrop. The places in the
world feel like the hints of a stage setting, rolled out behind the curtain
during intermission, sufficient only to set a certain mood and remind the
audience of a context. The world never came alive, never became a
character in its own right, and I missed that (although again this does fit
the paradigm of a series of stories about the Buddha).
Overall, there is no mistaking that this is a great book. I found it to be
a great book with distracting flaws, and how deep one finds the flaws will
likely vary greatly from person to person, but I doubt anyone would not
agree that under them is brilliance.
Incidentally, something that may save you some confusion: The first
chapter of this book takes place much later than the second and subsequent
chapters, at least until the end of the book. There is some signal of this
in the book itself, but I missed it completely, and then spent half the
book very confused about the order of events. Maybe this will help someone
else avoid the same fate.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2004-05-30: Nobody's Son
Review: Nobody's Son, by Sean Stewart
Pages: 273
ISBN: 0-441-00128-9
Publisher: Ace
This book suffers from a horrible synopsis in Powell's. I'm not sure if
it's the publisher's fault, theirs, or someone else's, but the sum total of
information available in the Powell's listing is:
The magical tale of the unhappy things that happen to a hero after "happily
ever after" -- a Canadian Library Association Best Young Adult Novel.
This is horrible, and I delayed reading the book in part because of some
very erroneous impressions I got from it. Here is an excerpt from the book
that speaks much better:
He saw Gail give her friend a quick, sharp glance. Well, maybe Lissa had
meant to insult him. And yet, he didn't think the cut in the comment was
really meant for him. Rather, it was as if he were hearing an echo of an
old conversation between the two women. Must be a lot of water has
flowed between these two. Deep water. Strong currents.
Reading the comment in Powell's, I had expected some sort of satire on the
concept of "happily ever after," a nice enough idea, but something to read
when in the mood for something poking fun at fantasy tropes. Whatever
there is of that, it's faint and fleeting, and this book is not even
remotely a satire.
There is a lot of deep water and strong currents here, and many echos of
old conversations. This is not a parody of fantasy; it's an embracing of
it at a deeper level than the mere affairs of magic and power. It's about
how fantasy touches a person, about a hero coming of age who truly does
need to grow up despite his good heart, and about how saving the world
comes more truly in understanding how to cut past what's expected than any
great deeds, since what's expected is exactly what's failing when the world
needs saving. It starts with disgust about the expectations for happily
ever after and ends with a happily ever after that one can believe in.
I truly liked the hero here, a rough and uneducated person who does not
magically become more educated or much less rough over the course of the
story, who is not suddenly trained to read, and who was never simple and
hence never needed to become more complicated, only wiser.
Advance warning: The first chapter requires some plodding, in part because
you have to get used to the language of the characters, which is written in
dialect, and in part because the first chapter just isn't much like the
rest of the book. It's there as background and to lay the groundwork for
important events later, but this book really begins in the second chapter.
At that point, you meet the remaining cast of the story and start to get a
feel for what the book is really like, and when it finally returns to the
setting of the first chapter, the eeriness will fit better into the story.
A lot of water flows beneath these characters, in ways that left me
thinking and happy to have listened to the rushing of it. Recommended.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2004-05-30: Second Baycon Haul
This will probably be it for me this year, particularly since the de Lint
books are all hardcover (okay, I splurged). Used hardcover (except
Forests of the Heart), but still. (Although I need to buy his books
new to help encourage his publisher to print more of them....)
Isaac Asimov -- Foundation
Isaac Asimov -- Foundation and Empire
Isaac Asimov -- Second Foundation
Stephen Baxter -- Vacuum Diagrams
Charles de Lint -- Forests of the Heart
Charles de Lint -- The Little Country
Charles de Lint -- Moonlight and Vines
Charles de Lint -- Tapping the Dream Tree
Sean Stewart -- Resurrection Man
Roger Zelazny -- Doorways in the Sand
Roger Zelazny -- Isle of the Dead
Roger Zelazny -- This Immortal
The Foundation series I've already read, but had never owned, so
that's just filling in a gap in my personal library.
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