Friday, March 19, 2010

There is no end

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
Grouch Marx

I did less reading on my vacation than I expected.

Let me rephrase that: I read fewer books on my vacation than I expected. Partially it's that I was often busy with other things. The only time I read in a book when I was at the beach on Sanibel island, because as far as I'm concerned, the only two things to do at a beach are swim in the ocean and read. When I was a child, those two activities took up 95 percent of my time on the sand. Build sandcastles? Why? Play volleyball? Maybe in 30 pages. That was, and still is, my attitude to the coastline.

The other thing which cut into my book reading was the Internet. If any of you have Google Reader, check out their "Recommended Items" feature. You'll start, and three hours later you'll wonder where the time went. It's chock full of random cool things. The current link at the top of my feed is filled with pictures and descriptions of the Six Flags park in New Orleans, which has been abandoned since Katrina. I didn't even know that there had been a park, or it never reopened, but you can easily see how someone could spend 10 or 15 minutes looking at a site with pictures of rotting roller coasters and moldy cafeterias that haven't been used for half a decade. 

Anyway, I only got through two and a half books while I was traveling. (Technically, I got through one whole book, and three half-books). I didn't bring any great literature with me; these were books I checked out of the honor system section of the library. Those tend to be mass market paperbacks, not classics that will endure forever.Since then, I've finished three and a half books -- three sci-fi and a mystery -- and will give my impression.

Helix, By Eric Brown
Helix is a good vacation book. It's Ringworld, but without the intellectual stuff. Ringworld, by Larry Niven, is a Hugo and Nebula winning science fiction novel (that's the equivalent of the Oscar and Golden Globes from scifi fans) about some people who mean to explore a strange, enormous construct, but wind up stuck on it. 

Niven, a hard science fiction author, put a lot of puzzles and science in his book. His giant construct is a ring around the sun, about the same distance as earth is. To give you an idea how large that is, to walk around the earth at the equator would require going 25,000 miles. To walk around the Ringworld would require going 615,000,000 -- that's like going around the world more than  24,000 times. And Niven was really concerned with what this meant for the inhabitants -- how did you get gravity? How did they make day and night? How did they prevent disasters?

Brown's construct is a giant helix. Think of a spiral staircase 8,000 steps high, where every step is actually a planet. He kind of answers some of the big questions, but I get the impression he just threw in the answers to let things happen in the story. 

About the plot: Helix starts about 100 years in the future, on a dying Earth. Pollution, wars, and fanatic cultists have destroyed most of civilization. (Always a promising beginning for me.) The protagonist, Joe Hendry, is living alone in Australia, stoically accepting things will end for the human race. Then he hears from his daughter, who tells him she's going to be a colonist on a starship. She'll be frozen, and thawed out when they arrive at their planet 1,000 years n the future to start a new world.

A few days later, after she's been frozen, Joe gets an invitation to join the ship. Fanatics killed members of the crew, and he's one of the last qualified people on Earth who can manage the ship's computer system when it enters the new system. Thinking how nice it will be to see his daughter, he accepts.

Of course, things go wrong. The ship crashes into the Helix, and Joe and a few other members of the skeleton crew must travel from bead to bead on the Helix, trying to find a place to revive the colonists. 

This is complicated by the fact each bead is inhabited. Most of the action takes place in a world which is perpetually gray and snowy (because of where it is in relation to the Helix's sun). Small monkey-like creatures live there, ruled over by a cruel church. And they fly around in zeppelins. Because I think the author said "snowstorms, monkeys, blimps and the Inquisition would be a nice combination."

If you read Helix as a page turner, it's quite enjoyable. I wouldn't say the characters are fascinating, or the story makes a lot of sense, or that the ending is particularly profound. But it's a good ride along the way.

Watchers of Time, by Charles Todd
I don't follow mystery series too often, so I don't know how many Inspector Rutlledge books are out there. The inside cover says that Todd has six other books, but I don't know if they're in the same series, and don't feel like taking the six seconds it would require to open a new tab, go to Amazon, and look them up. I didn't think this book was terrible, but I only finished it because I felt I had time invested in it. 

Which is a pity, because on paper it sounds fascinating. The story is set in England, shortly after World War I, Inspector Ian Rutledge, a brilliant Scotland Yard detective, has come back from fighting on the front, badly injured both physically and mentally. He's almost recovered from his physical wounds, but not the psychological trauma. He still hears the voice of Hamish, a Scotsman who fought beside him, and whose corpse protected  the detective from getting killed after an explosion buried them. (It's even more complicated, but the point is that throughout the book he has silent conversations with an imaginary friend with a Scottish accent.)

The book starts in the small town of Osterly, when Harvey Baker, a dying man, asks to see Father James, a Catholic priest. This wouldn't be too unusual, by the Bakers are Anglican. Still, it's not too unusual, and the local vicar encourages it.

Not too long after that, the priest is killed, his head bashed in by an unknown assailant hiding and waiting for him.

Rutledge is asked to go to Osterly. Although the local police seem to have things in hand, the murder of a clergyman is considered heinous enough the bishop asks for the big guys to take a look. And his boss figures that it should be an easy assignment for a man on the mend: say a few comforting words to the priest's replacement, congratulate the local cops, and come back to London. But the priest is worried, the police sergeant would like an extra set of eyes, and things aren't what they seem.

The blurb on the back of the book suggested that the sinking of the Titanic would play a great part in the mystery. That's a bit deceptive, as far as I can tell. The ship isn't mentioned until halfway through the novel, and isn't as pivotal as the summary made it sound. Imagine you went to see a movie because it starred a particular actor, and they were in it for about 20 minutes. That's how I felt.
As I said, the book is finishable. But I think it could have been so much more. I wish I had seen a bigger glimpse into the world of 1919 England. There were pieces -- soldiers scarred by the war, cars that needed to be cranked to start, and people are still interested in buying Lordships and becoming nobility. But all these could have been more immersive.

Use of Weapons, by Iain Banks
If you live in Great Britain, Banks is a big, big author. He's known for both his science fiction and mainstream thrillers. When I was there in 2007, I saw bookstores with shelves of his work. In America, he's less well known. Most of what gets printed are his science fiction novels, like Use of Weapons.

Use of Weapons is part of Banks' Culture series, a really tough world to write in. The main problem is that the Culture is a super-advanced utopia. People can, pretty literally, do whatever they want. Feel like owning your own planet? They can find our build you one. Feel like being a duck? You can tell your DNA to change. It's probably no even that unusual. People who grow up in the Culture only know about unhappiness and misery from classes. In two memorable examples in the book, a crew of a Culture ship decide to give themselves colds because it sounds interesting. In another case, some members of Special Circumstances, the culture's special ops division, ask someone they've hired who doesn't belong to them , why he's asking for 10 percent more, he replies "inflation." "What's that?" they ask, unused to money.

The way Banks handles this in the books is by not focusing on the Culture, but looking at the other societies that inhabit the galaxy. Use of Weapons' main character is Cheradaline Zakalwe, a warrior hired by the Culture for certain operations due to his understanding of military tactics. The book jumps around in time, telling of the many battles Zakalwe's fought for the culture and before he was contacted by them. He's a man tortured by his past, especially an encounter with a mysterious "chairmaker." The main story consists of his attempts to complete a mission, for which the Culture has promised to take him to meeta woman from his past.

This was an okay book, but not my favorite by him. Banks always has some disturbing imagery in his books, but it's often leavened by more humor than he displays here. And while avoiding the Culture for lower tech civilizations (capable of only reaching a few dozen planets) avoids the problem of coming up with conflicts for nigh-omnipotent people who are perfectly content, it also means that you're not looking at the universe's reason for being. Imagine if Arthur Conan Doyle had written a book about how Sherlock Holmes walked around London for a day, doing nothing. It might be enjoyable, but don't you want to see him solve mysteries?

My other observation: the protagonist's last name kept grabbing my attention, because it sounds so similar to the Sept. 11 mastermind.  But since this was written in 1990, it's not

The Other End of Time, by Frederik Pohl
This is the half-book, which I haven't finished, because it's a tease. I got 63 pages into, according to the slip of stationery from the Days Inn I used as a bookmark. Here's how it opens: "When the first message arrived on Earth, five people who were on their way to the eschaton were busy at their own affairs."

It's not a bad introduction  What is the eschaton? (It's a rather obscure term.) Why are these five people important? What do their affairs mean?

I don't know. But every five or ten pages, there's a sentence like "so and so didn't know it, but bad things were going to happen." Then get to the bad things, Mr. Pohl! It's not that what was going on is boring, just that you're promising explosions and giving me sparklers. 

Hm. The more I write in this entry, the more I find myself using metaphor and analogies. Perhaps, much the way the crowing of the rooster indicates that it's time for the vampire to flee back to its castle, I should stop working on this.

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