2004-11-03: Vacation haul
I'm back from an excellent two week vacation at the Oregon coast, and am
slowly digging my way out from under everything that happened while I was
gone. I expect I'll be rather behind for a while.
I spent a fair bit of my vacation used book shopping, particular at the
excellent Robert's Books in Lincoln City. One box of purchases has arrived
so far, and I'm expecting the second next week sometime, but I took note of
what I picked up as I got it. Here's the complete list of new
acquisitions:
Brian W. Aldiss -- Supertoys Last All Summer Long (sff)
Poul Anderson -- Genesis (sff)
Poul Anderson -- Operation Luna (sff)
James Blish -- A Case of Conscience (sff)
John Brunner -- The Jagged Orbit (sff)
Orson Scott Card -- Alvin Journeyman (sff)
Orson Scott Card -- Heartfire (sff)
Suzy McKee Charnas -- Motherlines (sff)
Suzy McKee Charnas -- Walk to the End of the World (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- Forty Thousand in Gehenna (sff)
C.J. Cherryh -- Rimrunners (sff)
Charles de Lint -- Memory and Dream (sff)
Charles de Lint -- Yarrow (sff)
Bradley Denton -- Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (sff)
Sara Douglass -- The Wayfarer Redemption (sff)
Dorothy Dunnett -- The Game of Kings (historical)
Umberto Eco -- The Name of the Rose (sff)
Philip José Farmer -- To Your Scattered Bodies Go (sff)
Patricia Geary -- Strange Toys (sff)
Nicola Griffith -- Ammonite (sff)
Ken Grimwood -- Replay (sff)
M. John Harrison -- The Pastel City (sff)
M. John Harrison -- A Storm of Wings (sff)
Nina Kiriki Hoffman -- A Fistfull of Sky (sff)
William Kotzwinkle -- Doctor Rat (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin -- The Lathe of Heaven (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin -- The Other Wind (sff)
Fritz Leiber -- Conjure Wife (sff)
Fritz Leiber -- Our Lady of Darkness (sff)
Anne McCaffrey & Mercedes Lackey -- The Ship Who Searched (sff)
Ian McDonald -- King of Morning, Queen of Day (sff)
Maureen F. McHugh -- China Mountain Zhang (sff)
Ken MacLeod -- Dark Light (sff)
Julian May -- The Many-Colored Land (sff)
Michael Moorcock -- The Swords Trilogy (sff)
Rebecca Ore -- Becoming Alien (sff)
Kenneth Oppel -- Airborn (sff)
Mervyn Peake -- Titus Groan (sff)
Frederik Pohl -- Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (sff)
Frederik Pohl -- The Years of the City (sff)
Tim Powers -- Dinner at Deviant's Palace (sff)
Kim Stanley Robinson -- Red Mars (sff)
Mary Doria Russell -- Children of God (sff)
Richard Paul Russo -- Subterranean Gallery (sff)
Fred Saberhagen -- Thorn (sff)
Bob Shaw -- Orbitsville (sff)
Bob Shaw -- The Ragged Astronauts (sff)
Michael Shea -- The Incompleat Nifft (sff)
Charles Sheffield -- Brother to Dragons (sff)
Charles Sheffield -- Tomorrow and Tomorrow (sff)
Clifford D. Simak -- Way Station (sff)
Joan Slonczewski -- A Door Into Ocean (sff)
Sean Stewart -- Clouds End (sff)
Tricia Sullivan -- Dreaming in Smoke (sff)
Sheri S. Tepper -- Beauty (sff)
Ian Watson -- The Jonah Kit (sff)
James White -- Double Contact (sff)
Liz Williams -- Empire of Bones (sff)
Connie Willis & Cynthia Felice -- Light Raid (sff)
Gene Wolfe -- Soldier of the Mist (sff)
Roger Zelazny -- The Last Defender of Camelot (sff)
I also read ten books on vacation and therefore have reviews waiting to be
posted. Those I'll probably space out over a few days.
2004-11-04: filter-syslog 1.18
Turns out that include directives didn't work correctly after the last
change. Any lines in the original including file after the include
directive would be ignored, since the recursive call to the configuration
parser was stomping on open file handles. This has now been fixed.
You can get the latest version from the
filter-syslog
distribution page.
2004-11-05: Flowers for Algernon
Review: Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: March 1966
ISBN: 0-553-27450-3
Pages: 216
This is the novel expansion of Flowers for Algernon, which won the
Nebula Award in 1966. I'd read the original short story by the same name,
some time ago. I actually like the expansion better, I think; it feels
like there's more room to explore the characters, although it's been a long
time since I've read the original.
This is one of the classics of science fiction, and has even sparked a fair
amount of mainstream attention, so many people are already familiar with
the basic plot. A mentally retarded man is the subject of a scientific
experiment to increase his mental capacity and becomes a genius.
Flowers for Algernon is written as his personal journal entries,
starting before the experiment and leading the reader through it and what
happens afterwards.
The journal technique is quite effective in bringing the reader into the
story and conveying Charlie's intelligence level, using spelling and
grammar as superficial clues and the sophistication of Charlie's
observations as a deeper clue to his current intelligence level. Over the
course of the book, the writing slowly becomes more sophisticated, in tune
with the underlying thoughts. I liked the balance between first-person
immediacy and thoughtful retrospective that the format of a journal entry
at the end of each day or two provides.
While this is clearly speculative fiction, the point of Flowers for
Algernon isn't the technology that lets Charlie become more intelligent
but rather how people react to him, both before and afterwards, as his
perceptions of the world change. This is, in part, a sharp rebuke of the
way that the mentally retarded are treated, but there are also interesting
explorations of identity, friendship, and the results of revisiting one's
past. There are several wonderfully memorable characters, particularly the
free-living artist living next door.
Parts of this book are a bit painful to read, particularly Charlie's
attempts to come to terms with his sex life, and the pacing does suffer
from the expansion from a short story in a few places. The story also
isn't easy; human cruelty and failings are sharply portrayed. But this is
a classic of science fiction for well-deserved reasons, even though there
isn't much here in the way of science. The reader's growing ability to
understand Charlie and Charlie's attempts to understand himself touch on
the exploration of alienness and human reactions to it that underpin so
many great science fiction stories. Highly recommended.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2004-11-10: The Sorcerer's Stone
Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine
Copyright: October 1998
ISBN: 0-590-35340-3
Pages: 309
I should warn up front that when Harry Potter first became popular, I was
deluged with so much talk about the books that I got thoroughly sick of the
very mention of them. I might, therefore, have a bit of a negative bias,
although one of the reasons for waiting this long to read them was to let
that die down.
That being said, no matter what sort of expectations I went into this book
with, I don't think anything would have prepared me for the sheer
hideousness of the beginning.
Let me set the context for you, with information that's all covered in the
first few chapters of the book. Harry Potter is the only son of a famous
wizard family who survives the attack of an evil wizard who kills his
parents when he's only a baby. Initially in the custody of some of the
staff of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he is sent to live
with his aunt, uncle, and cousin, who hate him and abuse him.
Let's make no bones about this. Harry Potter is an abused child. His
guardians routinely lock him in a closet. They punish him if he ever asks
questions. They treat him as a domestic slave. He has no friends because
his cousin makes sure no one is ever seen with him. He is routinely
physically abused by his cousin, and at least verbally abused by his aunt
and uncle. All of this is described quite clearly in the book, and yet not
only does Harry show no signs whatsoever of the sort of psychological
damage that this sort of abuse causes, but this is treated as an annoyance
to Harry, something to be born and not really all that bad once he has some
friends.
There are some themes that if raised, must be dealt with in an honest
fashion. Child abuse is one of them. I have no problems with having an
abused kid as the hero, but you simply cannot then treat abuse as something
that doesn't really matter. I don't care what age you're targetting a book
at -- this sort of fatuous, slapdash treatment is simply wrong. I cannot
express how deeply offensive I found the setup of this book. What's the
message for children who are starved, imprisoned, and physically abused
here? Just bear through it with a smile since it won't actually hurt you
and eventually you'll be rescued by magic wizards?
The wizards, as far as I'm concerned, should be locked up with Harry's aunt
and uncle as accessories to child abuse. I suppose they're a great analogy
for the horror stories about child protective services; despite professing
concern for his well-being, they never even bother to check on how he's
doing. And when they finally do come to get him, on his birthday, to
deliver his invitation to attend Hogwarts, do they see this abuse and do
anything about it? Express at least some degree of remorse? No, not at
all; the only thing they're upset about is that Harry wasn't taught about
magic. And then leave him, in the abusive family, for a month afterwards.
And then send him back there after the term in school!
This is beyond disgusting. This is absolutely vile.
But this is how things work in Rowlingverse -- actions do not have
consequences. This goes far deeper than just the horrific beginning, which
the author doesn't seem to even understand is horrific. Ideas, plot
elements, and settings exist only to drive Rowling's superficial rescue
fantasy plot, and need make no sense whatsoever outside of that role. The
world of wizards is a hodge-podge of cute ideas that have nothing to do
with each other and have no unifying theme. Common-sense implications are
ignored or shoved under the rug unless Rowling finds them interesting.
There is no unifying set of natural laws here, no concept of cause and
effect beyond the superficial, and no underlying honesty to the world. In
short, there is no world-building here at all, just self-indulgent spewing
of pet images. This is children's fiction for people who believe in
neither science nor the logic underlying science.
Children's literature doesn't have to be this way. Children can grasp
subtleties of right and wrong without having all the characters neatly
labelled as good guys and bad guys like they are here. Children can
understand underlying basic principles, and can use them to figure out the
world and make guesses about what's going on. C.S. Lewis's
Chronicles of Narnia presented serious moral questions to readers
the same age as the age target for this book. The children's novels of
Diane Duane or Diana Wynn Jones have coherent world-building to put Rowling
to shame. Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series has far more
complete and believable characters. If you're looking for random
silliness, I highly recommend Helen Cresswell's wonderful Bagthorpe series,
which manages the same without insulting the intelligence of its readers.
There are hundreds of other children's books, fantasy, science fiction, and
mainstream, that are far, far better.
I can see the appeal of this book to people who don't care about world
building, universe consistency, or the ethics of thumbing one's nose at the
issue of child abuse. Rowling clearly does have talent at the mechanics of
writing. The story moves right along, the prose is clear, expressive, and
gets out of the way of the story, there's a plot twist at the end, and the
book never drags. I was never bored reading it -- angry, disgusted,
revolted, and contemptuous, but never bored. I think she does have the
capability to write a better book, judging from her grasp of the skill of
storytelling. I hope she writes it in one of the later books of this
series, since I'm wading through the first four to get to the one that won
a Hugo.
This book, though, is simply crap.
Rating: 3 out of 10
2004-11-12: No more Potter
That's it for the Harry Potter reviews, so those of you who are tired of me
ranting about the series can rest easy. I'll be back to posting reviews of
other things tomorrow.
That's also the last of the books that I read while on vacation, so I'm
almost up to my current reading again with reviews. I have one more that
I've already read and have not posted yet, which I'll be posting tomorrow,
and one more book that I've finished and not yet written a review of. So
by the end of the weekend, I should be completely caught up in posting
reviews of my current reading.
I've been pretty busy with a lot of things lately, particularly NNTP
standardization and work, but will hopefully have more time this weekend to
do some reading and maybe fiddle around with some web page projects.
2004-11-14: SFF awards reorganized
I've reorganized the presentation of the lists of SFF award winning books
in my review pages, and in the process have put together some statistics on
the average rating I gave books winning various awards. This is all to be
taken with a grain of salt, of course, particularly for those awards where
I've only read a handful of winning books. It's also somewhat skewed by
the fact that there are a bunch of books I rated from memory and those
ratings may revise when I get a chance to read them again.
That being said, the Nebula has a clear advantage in average rating (7.61)
over the Hugo (7.10) for me, and even the Locus poll (7.45) has a noticable
edge on the Hugo even though one of the Harry Potter books won a Locus
fantasy award (a better book than the one that won a Hugo, though).
The best award currently, as a predictor of books that I would like, is the
Arthur C. Clarke award, with an average rating of 8.5, but that's based on
only two books (Perdido Street Station and The Sparrow) and
I'm sure will will drop down as I read more Clarke winners.
Anyway, for what it's worth, here's
the new award index
page.
2004-11-16: lbcd 3.2.2
I finally got around to putting the daemon that we use to drive software
load balancing up on a web page somewhere, since some folks at other
institutions were asking after it. An older version had been available
from Rob Riepel's web pages, but I've since fixed a few things and cleaned
it up a bit.
This is a little daemon that answers UDP requests with system uptime, load
averages, number of logged-in users, whether there's a user on console, and
percentage free in /tmp (and /var/tmp), and we use it to drive a simple
DNS-based load balancing system.
You can get it from the
lbcd distribution page.
2004-11-16: newsyslog 1.6
I finally got around to adding the correct Autoconf code for checking for
large files and building with large file support. I also rolled the cron
job that we've been using locally to run newsyslog fragments into the main
Debian package so that I don't have to keep installing it with each
individual service template.
You can get the new version from the
newsyslog
distribution page.
2004-11-18: NNTP status
Just a quick note about this, for those who are curious. We are still
working on the next draft of the NNTP standard. We almost were ready to
publish, including a specification for STARTTLS and SASL, but some good
issues came up at the last minute, and we're currently working on revising
how the new extension mechanism will work to deal with those issues. But
most of the text is done, and the remaining changes should be minimal.
I hate to predict any timeframe given what's happened so far, but I have
hope that a few more months will do it. (Of course, that means I have to
find time to read and comment on all of the messages and direct traffic on
the mailing list....)
2004-11-22: spin 1.55
A couple of bug fixes in this release. First, spin now detects the case of
a thread file having DOS line endings on a Unix system (although it still
doesn't work correctly with such files, since DOS line endings break Perl's
ability to process things in paragraph mode). Second, I fixed a bug if one
put block elements inside a list marked packed; this is an invalid
construct that will result in HTML that doesn't validate regardless, but at
least now it won't break quite as bad as it was.
While I was in there making changes, I fixed something I should have fixed
a long time ago. There is now a separate \strong command that does
<strong> and \bold actually does <b> like it should have in the
first place.
You can get the latest version from my
web tools distribution
page.
2004-11-24: Revised Potter
After a lot of discussions and some excellent comments from a large number
of people, I've gone back and significantly revised my Harry Potter reviews
to make it clearer where I'm coming from in reviewing them and to tone down
some of the vitriol while providing more actual information.
This is one of the nice things about maintaining reviews as web pages; if I
happen to read one and see something that bothers me, I can fix it, and I
can also improve reviews with insights that I get from discussion following
their original posting. Normally, the changes are pretty minor and I won't
bother to note them here, but in this case I did some significant
rewriting, particularly of the first review.
If you're interested, you can read the new versions in their regular
location (the review section of my home page), starting with
The
Sorcerer's Stone.
2004-11-25: The King's Name
Review: The King's Name, by Jo Walton
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: December 2001
ISBN: 0-765-34340-1
Pages: 320
This is the third part of a three-part story, the first two parts of which
are combined in
The
King's Peace. While there is a summary of the previous book in the
introduction, cunningly well-handled by mixing it into a summary of how the
first-person narrative of the book is viewed in the future of this
alternate world, I wouldn't recommend reading it without reading the prior
book first.
It may be that I just missed the degree to which
The
King's Peace was an Arthurian by just not knowing the details well
enough, since The King's Name quite clearly followed the Arthurian
story. Even the annoying love triangle turns up here to a degree, although
thankfully in a modified form that strikes me as both more realistic and
involving far less stupidity on the part of those involved. It is far from
a straight retelling, though, and The King's Name goes on to an
ending with a much different tone.
This story is about preserving central government in the face of treachery
and squabbling self-interest, but it is also about religion, and here is
where I think it shines. Sulien's attempts to understand both the nature
of the magic and gods of her own belief and the religious future of the
land under the White God reach a satisfying conclusion, without falling
into the trap of writing an ending to a question about belief. It's clear
that one is meant to sympathize with Sulien's view and prefer the native
gods, but it's still both clear and reasonable why so many follow the White
God and the story avoids the trap of vilifying either. And the portrayal
of the gods themselves, with a sense of awe and a feeling of powers beyond
human scope, compares well with such accomplished fantasy authors as Guy
Gavriel Kay.
While there is still a feel of a medieval war novel here, including some
strategy and several detailed battles, I found The King's Name much
better paced and less liable to bog down than
The
King's Peace. It focuses on politics and religion more than on the
details of the combat, and is a better book for the change. The trouble,
of course, is that this is a story of civil war and tragedy, and so I spent
about half the book extremely angry and frustrated (and Walton writes a
truly nasty villain), but even with tragedy I came away with a feeling of
closure.
I also liked how the great events of war and treachery are brought firmly
down to earth, with bickering and negotiation over peace treaties, personal
rivalries, incompetent kings, complicated meshes of relations and races,
worries of who to put on the thrones of various regions, and a refreshing
lack of idolization of the Arthur equivalent. The edges haven't been all
rounded off to focus on the drama; there's still gritty dirt in the cracks
to give the reader a glimpse of what living through the wars might be like.
This story never blew me away, but it's a solid, competent, well-researched
pair of novels, featuring strong characters with believable reactions and a
nicely thought-out fantasy twist. Magic and the gods remain a constant
part of the plot without ever taking it over and claiming center stage,
which is an impressive balancing act. I wish the first book had been as
engaging as the second, since as-is you have to do some wading to get
through the story, but I think it's worth the trouble.
Oh, and compliments to Julie Bell, the cover artist, for two covers that
fit events in the books and feature a female character who, like the hero,
is tall, wears armor that might actually protect something, and is no great
beauty. I wish all cover art were this faithful to the books it
illustrates.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2004-11-25: Latest haul
The main point of this Powells order was to get as many of the remaining
Bagthorpes books as I could, but of course I had to pick up a few other
things while I was placing an order. A couple of books here from Emerald
City recommendations.
Storm Constantine -- Sea Dragon Heir (sff)
Helen Cresswell -- Ordinary Jack (children)
Helen Cresswell -- Absolute Zero (children)
Helen Cresswell -- Bagthorpes Unlimited (children)
Helen Cresswell -- Bagthorpes Haunted (children)
Laurie J. Marks -- Fire Logic (sff)
Fred Saberhagen -- The Face of Apollo (sff)
Neal Stephenson -- The System of the World (sff)
David Wingrove -- The Middle Kingdom (sff)
Huh, I didn't realize that Wingrove had co-written the Myst novels.
2004-11-26: Emerald City
I've mentioned here a few times (and much more prominantly on my review web
pages) a particular fanzine named Emerald
City. For those who don't know, a fanzine is writing about either SF or
the SF fandom community, distributed for free or in exchange for another
fanzine or letters or contributions. A lot of fanzines are focused on the
fanzine community itself and on letter columns, but Emerald City, which
just won a Hugo for the best fanzine, is primarily focused on book reviews.
It's really good stuff, and has been a source of a lot of really good book
recommendations for me. I've not read a lot of what I've bought based on
those recommendations yet, but I have quite a lot queued up.
Anyway, I just finished reading the entire set of them, back to #1, over
the course of the last few months. As each one is pretty substantial,
that's quite a lot of reading. Cheryl Morgan has become a much better
writer over time, and I like the current issues much better than the
earlier ones, but the book reviews are good throughout, as are the con
reports.
If you like science fiction and like being kept abreast of what's
happening, highly recommended. The issues are also very skimmable if
you're only interested in the book reviews, or only in particular types of
books, and Cheryl has been adding more regular features as time goes on
(right now, she's doing interviews with different small press publishers
every issue, which has often been fascinating).
(Now I'll have to find some other time-wasting activity to do between
chatserver lines.)
2004-11-29: A Wizard of Earthsea
Review: A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: November 1968
ISBN: 0-553-26250-5
Pages: 183
I had previously read the first three Earthsea books, but that was about
ten years ago and I didn't remember them well enough to jump into the
fourth book. There is also a miniseries upcoming on the Sci-Fi Channel in
the US and the books are nice and short, so this seemed like a good time to
re-read them.
The memory that stuck in my mind of A Wizard of Earthsea was one of
boredom. I was expecting to be pleasantly surprised, given that I've since
developed more of a taste for Le Guin's slow but sophisticated writing
style. As it turns out, though, memory was pretty much spot on.
I'm not quite sure why I find this book so dull. Certainly, quite a bit
happens in it. The plot moves right along, visiting quite a variety of
locations in a mere 180 pages and painting each one with enough description
that I at least get a basic feel for the area. The main character is
interesting enough, the handling of magic is quite good for creating a
mythic feel, the world is different and intriguing, and the ending is
satisfying (if a little bit predictable). All in all, you'd think that one
had the makings of a decent young adult novel, and it's not that it's a bad
book, but....
I think most of the problem I had was the narrative tone. Le Guin wanders
a bit too far to the side of description for me at the best of times, but
A Wizard of Earthsea can be downright dry. The story is told with a
very remote, detached voice, giving the impression of someone relating a
legend of events long ago, a legend that they've heard so many times that
it's lost emotional impact. Ged certainly goes through strong emotions in
the course of the story, but they don't seem to ever really touch the
narrator, and because of that I never felt emotionally involved in the
story. There is also rather a lot of telling rather than showing,
particularly with regard to how Ged is feeling, and while the telling is at
times quietly lyrical, I still could have used more help with seeing Ged as
a living and dynamic character.
To be fair, it's possible that this book has simply lost emotional impact
for me personally, since this was my second reading and I found I
remembered most of the highlights even after ten years (something of a
recommendation itself). Not all books survive re-reading well.
One thing I do love about this book is that the characters are never
stupid. Ged is impulsive, arrogant, and makes some bad choices when young,
but I never felt like he's just being dim. The experienced senior wizards
act their age and conduct themselves as appropriate to their expertise,
characters know what I expect them to know, people don't show off their
power blatantly when there's no need to do so, and the problems that the
characters have trouble with actually feel difficult. This can be sadly
rare in fantasy, particularly sustained through a whole book, and Le Guin
deserves a lot of credit for it.
Overall, though, I don't particularly recommend this one unless you really
love Le Guin's descriptions. It's worth reading just as a springboard into
the later books (which, if I recall correctly, significantly improve), but
I wouldn't read it again on its own right.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2004-11-30: Added Aurora awards
I've added the Prix Aurora Award for best long form in English to my
SFF awards pages on
my review site. This brings
the total number of awards that I'm tracking to 12, and seems to pretty
much exhaust the awards that I might personally be interested in except
maybe the Australian awards.
The Prix Aurora is for the best work of the year written by a Canadian
author and published in Canada. Since several of my favorite SFF authors
are Canadian (particularly Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint), this turns
out to be pretty good for finding good books. I'd already read four and
reviewed two of the winners, which is quite a bit better than the World
Fantasy or Mythopoetic awards.
Unlike the other awards except the British Fantasy award (which had rather
too much Stephen King), I'm not planning on adding all the Aurora winners
to my want list and tracking them all down. Among other reasons, I just
don't like Robert Sawyer that much, based on what I've read of him so far.
But I do already own three of the other winners, including Blind
Lake which won this year, and will probably end up acquiring the Gibson
books and the one Charles de Lint.
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