A good vampire novel

I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the lollipop that sticks in your hair. I am Darkwing Duck.

Darkwing Duck

I always bring several books with me when I travel. This trip, the one that I've been reading is The Vampire Genevieve by Jack Yeovil. It is set in the Warhammer universe, which means I would normally never read it, because while I love roleplaying games, I've found 99 percent of the fictional tie-ins to be complete and utter crap. But I decided to give these a chance for one reason: I discovered that Jack Yeovil is a pseudonym for Kim Newman.

Sometime in the 1990s I read a great trilogy called Anno Dracula, by Newman. If you enjoyed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you'd love this. The first book is set in a Victorian England, where Van Helsing has failed to kill Dracula, and the Count turns Queen Victoria into his bride and takes over the British empire. In addition to Dracula, it's got Fu Manchu, Moriarty, Jack the Ripper, Dr. Jeckyl, Gilbert and Sullivan, and many other real and unreal characters. And one of the main characters is a vampire named Genevieve.

A couple of months ago, I learned that Newman had first written about her for Warhammer, and liked the character so much he used her in a non-Warhammer book.

The Vampire Genevieve collects Newman's novels written in the Warhammer universe. For those who don't know, it's not quite a standard D&D-esque fantasy world. It's got a heavier influence from Michael Moorcock and H.P. Lovecraft. It's sometimes described with the phrase "grimdark." It's very clearly set in Europe with the serial numbers filed off. For example, Genevieve was turned into a vampire 600 years ago, when she was a teenager in the land of Bretonia, which is very obviously Brittany.

The prologue of the book opens with Genevieve and a group of heroes on a quest to slay the evil archfiend. This immortal wizard had killed her father when she was still a mortal, and the prince who recruited her thought she would go along on their quest for vengeance. However, that didn't interest her; she knew he'd have been dead six centuries even if the big bad hadn't gotten him. Then the prince appeals to her need for something interesting and a change of pace, and she finds that a reasonable excuse to go adventuring.

Against great odds, they defeat the wizard. The main action in this story takes place 25 years later, and involves writing a play. I was rather happy to see that. In a world where the dark gods of chaos and destruction threaten humanity daily, it's nice to see a story about actors. Of course, the play is about the events of a quarter century before, and horrible deaths start happening during the rehearsals...

The second story also involves plays. That play is clearly Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, though the names are given a Slavic twist. It also involves a phantom of the opera, who is much more disturbing that just a guy in a mask.

Another involves what I can only describe as a soap opera performed by a twisted version of the Adams Family. Yet another involves unicorn hunters, blackmail, and assassination attempts.

What I respect about the heroine is that she does not sparkle. She isn't quite the classic vampire that turns to ash in the sunlight, but she doesn't angst about how horrible it is to have the strength of 20 men, or never grow old. She can be a crazed, unpleasant killer, but she isn't always the nastiest thing in the room. Some men do fall wildly in love with her, but others are indifferent, and her relationships tend to be complex.

So this book is definitely a good vacation read. It's got lots of action and excitement, but it's also got nods to classics and cultural references.

The Art Detective

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Michelangelo

The Art Detective is one of the most compelling collection of mysteries I have read in the last few years. Its tales are thrilling despite the lack of murder, violence, or even theft (with one possible, indirect, exception). And the fact that unlike most detective stories, these are non-fiction.

Philip Mould's website, if you're interested in acquiring British portraits

The Art Detective: Fakes, Frauds and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures, by Philip Mould is exactly what the name says, stories of how people in the art world examine paintings and decide whether it's a genuine article or a cheap imitation. Since these works can sell for millions of dollars, this is a serious market.

The Art Detective tells stories of how Mould and others make special finds, and demonstrate their authenticity. 

This is surprisingly gripping, and more than money might be at stake. The proper authentication can lead history books to be rewritten, literally. Historian David Starkey revealed that a painting everyone assumed had been of Lady Jane Grey (sometimes called the "Nine Day Queen," a claimant to the throne after the death of Edward VI) was actually one of Henry VIII's wives, because of the jewelry she was wearing. That picture had been a standard in English text books.

As Mould tells it, finding the authenticity of a picture is a combination of intuition and research. There's a difference between the work of a master and an imitator that anyone versed in the work can feel. In one chapter, "The Norman Rockwell Hoax," he tells of a Rockwell painting that everyone knew had to be authentic. Rockwell had sold it to a friend, whose children had given it to a museum to put on display. But many of the people who saw it were bothered for some reason. They chalked this up to the possibility the canvas had been damaged when it was shipped to an international exhibit, damaging the vibrancy of the work. As the title suggests, there was a much better reason it didn't feel like it was painted by the master of Americana. But intuition isn't enough. Modern science lets art experts determine the age of a pigment and frame, details of what had been painted over, and other things essential to proving a piece is genuine.

Once an artist is finished with a painting, that doesn't mean the picture will stay in the same condition forever. In the late 19th and early 20th century, when there was a vogue in America for classic paintings, many tried to to touch up the details that had faded due to smoke and dust accumulating on the varnish. Then, to hide their touch-ups, they had to paint over parts of the picture where something looked incongruous. The subtle details a master might place on the folds of clothing or clumps of trees became streaks of black or green. Sometimes it was even the artists themselves who "ruined" a work. Rembrandt, who made his living as an art dealer as well as a painter, often had his apprentices repaint his works that weren't selling, turning artistic self portraits into something that might move faster. (Rembrandt, by the way, painted wonderful self portraits. I remember seeing one in the Frick Gallery in New York City a few years ago. He looked both prosperous and extremely sad.)

Also, as Mould notes at some points in the book, a lot of information needed to determine a painting's history isn't available on Google. Trying to track the authenticity of different works took him from library archives where one of a few known copiers of a work existed to small towns in Vermont to Nassau in the Bahamas. Other researchers had to parse everything from bizarre 18th century banking records and speeches Queen Elizabeth I delivered to the House of Lords.

Each story is mesmerizing. Perhaps that's to be expected. In The Art Detective, you travel around the world, deal with works worth millions of dollars, and get a taste of both the big picture of history and intimate family moments.

While this book is factual, I feel like I'd be giving away too much to go into details of his finds. But here are a few teasers:

• How the author wound up in the middle of Vermont in a snowstorm, and how he found a collection worth millions by a man who hated to spend money on anything.
• How the author discovered a work he thought could be an early Gainsborough even though it was attributed to a different artist; and how it helped reinterpret that landscape painter's early life. Also, this story had a moment which made me feel so sorry for Mould and his hard work in making this discovery.
• Why generations refused to believe that a picture was by Rembrandt when it turned out the be the genuine article.
• How paintings can suggest details of the love life of royalty. 
• A classic Antiques Roadshow story where a find made while on a fishing trip turns out to be worth a fortune.

Storyteller: thumbs up

"I knew that from then on," Wilder says, "the audience wouldn't know if I was lying or telling the truth." Or whether Wonka was good or evil, sane or crazy, a question that isn't resolved until the last few minutes of the film. 

"Gene Wilder: It Hurts To Laugh," by David Segal, The Washington Post, March 28, 2005

Did you know that in the first draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket was Black? Roald Dahl's inspiration for the character was drawn on a servant he had while living in Dar Es Salaam, Mdisho. (It was horribly colonial: he was employed by Shell Oil company, and they provided each of their employees at Shell House in Africa with their own personal "boy.") Though Mdisho was only 3 years younger than Dahl, the future children's author was charmed by the 19 year old. "Mdisho's lack of guile and his simple, honest view of the world resonated with Dahl," writes Donald Sturrock on Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl.

Given the first draft of Charlie, it's surprising that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory got Dahl in trouble with the NAACP, who objected to the portrayal of Oompa-Loompas as African Pygmies. If you think of the Oompa-Loompas as orange with green hair, like in the movies, you're right. Dahl changed the detail for later editions, shocked that people had seen it as offensive, but infuriated with the NAACP for what he thought was misreading his work. Interestingly, Charlie had been out several years before anyone started objecting to possible racist overtones.

Roald Dahl is, to my mind, not just one of the best children's authors of the 20th century, but one of the best authors, period. For example, I cannot think of any book nearly as disturbing as The Witches. I can still remember how the Big Friendly Giant (who wasn't so big for a giant) said "belly choppers" instead of "helicopters." When I went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox in the theaters, I remembered only one detail from the book -- about his tail -- but that vivid image stuck with me for two decades. Lemony Snicket, author of the wonderful Series Of Unfortunate Events, says that when he was first asked to write a children's book, he used Dahl as an inspiration.

But amazingly he was much more than just an author. He made two major contributions to the field of medicine, both to help ailing members of his family -- including helping his first wife, Oscar winning actress Patricia Neale, recover from a major brain injury, changing how stroke victims are given therapy. He wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice, which was fitting, because he'd worked with Bond creator Ian Fleming on espionage matters duirng World War II. (He actually didn't like the original novel, but neither did the director.) It would be easy to make a movie out of his life.

He was an unpredictable man, perhaps the only person in all of England to say Salman Rushdie had made a mistake by publishing the Satanic Verses when he knew it would prove so offensive. (Though he was very kind to the owner publishing house who printed the book and got in trouble.) Editors were afraid to work with him, because you never knew what he considered helpful criticism and what he considered attempts to destroy his vision. Once, when he found a woman needed to raise money to by expensive electric wheelchairs for her children, and was looking for some autographed books to auction in a fundraiser, he not only signed a complete collection of his works, but also gave her $10,000 to buy a chair. He convinced his American publishers to pay him through a dummy corporation based in Switzerland to avoid paying enormous British taxes -- then complained about the conditions of the contract.

But -- most importantly to me -- the title of the book is very appropriate. He was a storyteller. I remember reading Boy, his memoir of his youth, years ago. It was aimed at a young audience, and I assumed he had simplified some details for them. Sturrock said he did more than that: a lot of it seems to be somewhat imaginary. It's hard to tell whether he was deliberately sprucing up his life story, or genuinely misremembered.

Dahl led a fascinating life outside of his stories, so I understand why so much time is spent talking about his affairs, his relationships with his family and friends, and so many other details. But I do wish there had been more about the writing process itself. It's amazing to know details such as the fact that Charlie was supposed to have a different skin color (and Willy Wonka had a son in that draft, too), or that Mathilda was supposed to die after using her powers to win at the track. Or which incidents in Dahl's life he drew a particular scene from. I would have loved to see even more behind the scenes looks at how his characters and plots evolved.

In the prologue, Sturrock tells of a conversation he had with Dahl over dinner, where Roald complained that all biographies are garbage. As was frequently the case, it's hard to say whether he believed that, or was baiting his guest. I think Storyteller has some flaws, but I think they're flaws endemic to most biographies. In 1975, when describing what made a good children's author, Dahl wrote that children are savvy readers. "But they hate descriptive passages and flowery prose. They hate long descriptions of any sort... But above all, bear in mind that they do not possess the same powers of concentration as an adult, and they become very easily bored.or diverted. Your story must, therefore, tantalize and titillate them on every page..."

By that standard, Storyteller is not for children. It has many fascinating moments, but fails to tantalize and titillate on every page. It starts slowly, describing ancestors Dahl was not aware he had, and how Nordic society changed over the course of the 19th century.I agree the book is authoritative, but feel it would be a smoother read -- and more to Dahl's taste -- if Sturrock had taken out about 50 pages from the work.

Anyway, it's been too long since I've read any of his work, and I've never seen his adult fiction. I'll have to check it out soon. In the meantime, I've taken my copy of The Witches out for rereading.

What's the opposite of a best seller? I have an idea for one.

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine." 

A Study In Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle

I'm in the middle of The Apprentice, by Tess Gerritsen. It's the second novel in the Detective Rizzoli series, which was, loosely, the inspiration for the television show Rizzoli and Isles, a police procedural which is very careful to break no new ground. Not that the show (or the book) is bad, exactly. But it's like every other procedural on television (or in the 'summer reading' aisle, in the book's case). The only suspense on the show is wondering if  Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander are going to confess their undying love for each other. I predict that happens in season 3.

Here are some excerpts from a detective novel I'd like to see. I believe it would sell exactly one copy. However, any publicist who wants to throw their money away, contact me and I'll write more.

Chapter 2
"You look glum, chief. What's up?" Detective John Smith asked.

Chief Joe Green did not reach for a cigarette. After all, he had never smoked, and smoking had been outlawed in police headquarters 15 years ago. He did, however, take a sip of coffee before answering the detective's question. It was delicious; it only took a couple of minutes to brew a fresh pot, so the staff regularly put up new batches throughout the day.

"You're not going to like this John. The FBI called. They want in on your latest case. In fact, there's an agent coming here right now. Should be here any minute. I'm sorry, but it's-- "

John was grinning as he interrupted. "What are you talking about? That's great! The FBI has hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on fancy investigative equipment. It will make our job so much easier."

At that point, a man walked in. He wasn't wearing sunglasses, because it was an overcast day. He was wearing a black suit, which looked good, but not perfectly tailored. John would have guessed it came off the rack at Macy's or somewhere similar.

"Chief Green? Detective Smith? I'm agent David Stone."

"It's a pleasure to see you," John said, shaking his hand.

"Same here," said Stone. "I love it when I get to work with local police departments. We have all this fancy equipment, but it's so useful to have someone who knows the neighborhoods and what local people might be of interest. I think that by working together we'll have a great chance to capture this criminal."

Chapter 5
The killer watched the television intently. Soon he would see what the world was thinking of him. Soon he would affirm how much fear he had struck into the hearts of Detroit.

"Good evening. Welcome to the 10 o'clock news. I'm Grace Casper, filling in for Johann Miles, who is on vacation. Our top story tonight is--"

He licked his lips. What nickname had they come up with for him. Did they base it on the fact he sliced all his victims into seven equal portions. The Unlucky Seven Slayer. That had a ring to it. Or perhaps the toys from his childhood he left at the scenes would create his moniker. The Action Figure Killer. Maybe the coroner had found the orchid stems he left lodged in each victim's trachea, in memory of the greenhouse his mother had kept. The Floral Menace?

"-- the continuing tension in the Middle East. We go now to Sarah Tellington in Washington D.C., where..."

How could this be? Weren't two deaths, both committed on Wednesdays three weeks apart, not enough to be the lead story? Of course, what was happening in Iran was pretty frightening. Maybe he would be next.

"... thank you, Sarah. We have to take a commercial break, but next we look at a story closer to home --"

Yes! This was what he had been waiting for.

"-- how one high school is helping students get ahead."

No! Perhaps he would be on later. But he had to be at work tomorrow. He pressed the 'record' button on his DVR, and went to bed. It was better that way. He hated Sam's Sports Spotlight and would be able to fast forward through it tomorrow. Sam was so insincere. Always pretending the Tigers could pull through this year.

Chapter 9
The crime lab was always brightly lit. John Smith had wondered about that, after watching CSI, but Lucy Dorchester, the chief coroner, had explained it to him one day. "If I'm looking over a body for subtle signs like a needle puncture, I want as much illumination as possible," she had told him. John had always respected Dr. Dorchester, for both her intelligence and her charming sense of humor. But that was as far as it went. They were, after all, both happily married. Besides, it would be a gross breach of departmental regulations to let the relationship go any further.  The idea that a man and woman couldn't have a relationship without it turning into a sexual one had always struck him as bizarre.

Of course, he wasn't with her anyway, because he hadn't come here for autopsy results. He was with forensic detective Anna-Lucia Proppiata, reviewing the evidence from the last crime scene.

"If there were any weird chemicals in the blood, it will be a few days before we know," she said. "To test for this you need the solution to sit for 48 hours."

"I understand," Smith said. "And I know this isn't the only thing the lab's working on. This serial killer may be my main case, but I've got several other things I'm working on myself." Anna nodded, grateful he wasn't trying to demand the impossible.

Smith continued, "How about that oil-like substance we found?"

Anna smiled. "We have identified it as motor oil."

"Great," said the Detective. "It's a sort used by only one car company, right? It will tell us that the suspect drives a custom-built 1994 Jaguar?"

She shook her head. "Sorry. It's the sort sold in every hardware store, convenience store and mega-mart around the country. He could be driving anything. Heck, he could have used it for a lawnmower or boat. It really tells us nothing. Sometimes clues are just a red herring."

Chapter 14
He got the impression the police weren't taking him seriously enough. It was time to get personal. He would stalk the detective investigating his case just like Jeffrey Dahmer had stalked... actually, he didn't know the name of the detective who had arrested him. But he would torture his pursuer's dreams the same way that Ted Bundy had tortured... how had Bundy been caught again?

Well, neither of them had the advantage of Google. Ignoring the search engine's slogan of "Don't Be Evil," he typed in "Detectives in Detroit,"  ready to locate his nemesis and slowly drive him insane.
Now showing results 1-10 of 998,000.

Well, he'd have to narrow it down. Maybe Google was giving him results for private eyes. Maybe if he tried "Detroit Police Detectives" instead... results 1-10 of 7,194,000.

Over seven million hits? How was that possible. No way he was searching for all those. Oh well, he'd just keep killing like he always did.

It was getting late and he had work tomorrow. He really should start planning his killings earlier in the evening, but who had the time? Bed soon, but first the auction sites. Maybe someone was selling a cool toy,

Chapter 28
Dr. Barcus Emptor stared out his maximum security prison cell, barely even blinking. The prisoners in the cell across the hallway avoided his gaze, scared of the cleverest serial killer Michigan had even known. He listened to the inane chatter of the security guards in the hallway.

"I'm telling you, we want to keep at least two people on patrol in this corridor at all times. We've got Doctor Emptor here! He's as bad as Hannibal Lector."

"Who?"

"You're kidding me. You've never heard of Hannibal Lector? From Red Dragon? Silence of the Lambs?"

"What are those? Plays? Radio dramas?"

"They're -- look. Forget it. Let me try another example. Ever see Con Air. He's like Steve Buscemi's character."

"Steve Buscemi? The guy on that Boardwalk show? He's been in other things?"

"Ugh. Okay. Ever watched CSI? Remember the Doll House killer?"

"CSI? Is that the one which shows Masterpiece Theater?"

"No! That's PBS... Gah. Look, the dude is cell 5 is an evil psychopath who's already killed 3 guards who let themselves get distracted when they were dealing with him. Don't -- I repeat, do not -- let your guard down near him."

"Oh. All right."

For the millionth time, Dr. Barcus wondered how, exactly, he had been captured.

Hunger Games Trilogy

I touch the fire and it freezes me/ I look into it and it's black/ Why can't I feel? My skin should crack and peel?/ I want my fire back.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

I just finished the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It's a great page turner, though not without its flaws Technically, they're young adult books, but in a world where Harry Potter and Twilight dominate the best seller lists, and the New York Times saw fit to review Mockingjay this week, so there's no shame in checking them out even if you're not a young adult.

The books are set in the future, in the dystopia of Panem, which was once North America. There, the Capital rules over 12 Districts. Technically, it still is North America, since it's not so far in the future continents have drifted. I assume Collins means it was once the U.S., and maybe parts of Canada and Mexico. It's really not too important to the plot. Other than mentioning that District 12 is somewhere in the Appalachian coal mines, the geography isn't mentioned much. I suppose if I wanted to study the books more closely, or look up a FAQ, I could find out where each was.

Anyway, the Capital controls the Districts with an iron fist, keeping them too poor to rebel. The heroine of the series, Katniss Everdeen, comes from District 12. Even though it's a coal mine, they have to buy fuel to heat their homes at exhorbitant prices. Food is scarce, and Katniss helps supplement her family's meager income by hunting -- which would be punishable by death if she got caught. To make matters worse, once a year, to punish the districts for the rebellion of the 13th, the Capital draws the name of a boy and a girl from each district to compete in the Hunger Games. The 24 competitors are put into a specialty arena, and forced to fight to the death, until only one survives.

When her little sister's name is drawn, Katniss volunteers to take her place. The boy chosen from District 12 is Peeta, who complicates things before they go into the arena by saying he's always loved Katniss.

I don't want to give away too much, though since there's three books, it's safe to say Katniss survives the Hunger Games. The later books take on a bigger scope than the first one, expanding the world beyond her attempt to survive the death match and into an attempt to survive the much bigger death match of life and politics.

If you want a good page turner, I recommend reading the series. I went through the three books in under a week. There is some intense imagery I imagine could disturb people, but I expect cruelty in my dystopias. (Then again, I read 1984 when I was 10 and was unfazed by the scenes of Winston Smith being tortured. So I may not be a good judge of something going too far.) So I'm not too upset by hideous genetically engineered monsters or people slowly dying of horrible wounds.

One complaint: you keep hearing music when you read the series. Every time I looked at the first book, this song came to mind. 

Catching Fire  suffers a bit from middle child syndrome. It's the weakest book in the trilogy, often either repeating things from the first or setting things up for the final. But it does remind me of a song too, which I put in the opening quote of this entry. Rather than post from the original episode, here's the song in a family reenactment of the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, just because it's so weird.

The third book is good, with the most depth of the series. It's also musically memorable:

Also, while Katniss was charismatic and sometimes clever, she's not the sharpest tool in the box. ("Why does she act so dumb?" I asked my sister, who loaned me the books. "She's 16," she replied. That does explain a lot.) Also, as young adult novel, the series doesn't want to go over the heads of its readers. So sometimes things just go on too long. At some points I just wanted to reach into the pages and shake some sense into her.

Read any decent books lately?

Overall I would rate it a C+, OK, not great. As a result, we will not destroy your planet. But neither will we provide you with our recipe for immortality.

Lrrr, Futurama

Normally when I get a book out of the library, I either tear through it or decide it's not worth my time and return it only partially read. "Skirmish," a collection of stories by Clifford Simak, was one of those exceptions. I finished it, but found parts of it slow going. When Simak's prose is good, he really immerses you in the setting. When it's not, it has an awkward, repetitive feel. Also, a lot of the stories cover the same themes, which makes the book feel repetitive if you read it too rapidly. I guess if I were using the Siskel and Ebert scale, it would get one thumb up.

There's some nice stories here, but a lot of them feel dated. While Simak is a science fiction author, they don't feel dated in the same way that Arthur Clarke's 2001 feels off (space stations around Jupiter and frequent flights to the moon did not happen nine years ago). No, many of these feel like period pieces. I could give you the copyright date for this collection of short stories, but it's probably more effective to tell you that the 320-page hardcover cost $6.95.

Here's an example of what I mean by period pieces. This is from "The Big Front Yard," which won a Hugo award in 1959. Hiram, a repairman, has been asked to fix an old television, and tells the owner it might be more expensive than replacing it. Here's what she responds:

"That's just what Henry said," Abbie told him, tartly. "Henry wants to get one of the color sets. But I won't part with this one. It's not just TV, you know. It's a combination with radio and a record player and the wood and style are just right for the other furniture, and, besides --"

I remember when they made TV sets with built in VCRs, but a built in radio or phonograph? That's just weird.

In another story, "The Autumn Land," a character takes photographs of something, because "the camera saw what it saw and could not lie about it; it did not fantasize, it did not rationalize." Anyone who's retouched a digital photo knows how quaint that belief is today.

I really liked "The Autumn Land" though. It felt like it would have made a perfect episode of The Twilight Zone. A man who's lost his job and started driving to Chicago in hopes of finding a better career winds up staying in an idyllic little community where it's always a nice fall day, and the few neighbors are warm and friendly, even if they don't ever learn your name....

Another story, "The Ghost of a Model T," also had a Twilight Zone feel, though the "shocking ending" was pretty obvious after the second page.

Another interesting story is "Good Night, Mr. James," which feels like something Philip K. Dick might have written. A man finds himself on an unfamiliar street, and can remember nothing. He soon recalls he has to kill a dangerous alien whose existence threatens the world. And then, in the middle of the story, it suddenly becomes about questions of identity and individuality.

Sadly, if you want to read Simak's books and can't find them at your library, you're going to need a Kindle (or maybe some other E-reader) or a deep wallet.

* * * * * * *

For those looking for more accessible books, here are two relatively new ones I took out at the same time as Skirmish: Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers, by Kage Bakes, and The Caryatids, by Bruce Stirling.

Black Projects is a collection of short stories about The Company, a 24th century business which sends immortal cyborgs back in time to get valuables -- lost treasures, extinct plants and animals, etc. It's exciting and pretty humorous. While some are straightforward stories of robots from the future trying to pass themselves off as humans to find valuables, there are several which are only tangentially related to this. This is the second book by Baker I've read this year (who passed away in January), and she's very easy to read. I'll just warn you that there is a liberal political slant in her work (though it's silly enough I'm not sure how much she intended it). The 24th century is a dystopia where the government monitors people's health so closely that sugar and coffee are illegal substances, and Shakespeare (or at least the computer recording of his personality) is prohibited from reciting any lines from his own plays, because people might be offended by the customs or language.

The Caryatids is set in an apocalyptic world where pollution, radiation, global warming, and a host of other issues are slowly destroying the world. It follows the clones of an evil European dictator (who is now living on a space station, where she can't be tried for her crimes against humanity). Each of the clones has gone on to leave very different lives. One is rebuilding a devastated island in her homeland. One has become a Hollywood star. And a third has become a heroine of the Chinese people, in a world where China is the last nation and the rest of the globe is run by corporations. My largest complaint about this book is that a lot of issues I had when reading it -- some surprisingly stilted dialog, the attitudes everyone had to some bit characters -- got resolved only in the last few pages, and possibly a bit glibly.

Ares Express

He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar

David Bowie

Ares Express by Ian McDonald is pretty much a fantasy novel, even though it has science fiction trappings. If you like novels filled with wild imagery and strange characters, it's well worth checking out.

Despite its name, it takes 250 pages before it explicitly states the book is set on Mars, and the only scientific fact you really need to know is that a martian year is two earth years long -- since the characters all give their ages in Martian, and you need to know the heroine is a young adult, and not a nine-year-old.

That heroine is Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. The last two parts of Sweetness' name imply that she is the 12th generation of a family of engineers. On this futuristic Mars, trains that dot the surface are manned by the same families for centuries; they inherit jobs such as manning the fusion-reactor boilers, tending to the passengers, or what is (in the engineers' opinion) the creme de la creme, driving the locomotives around the world.

Sweetness is a proud, beautiful girl, and a little mysterious. Whenever they stop at a certain point along the train ride, she has conversations with her dead uncle, whose spirit merged with the planet after he was struck by lightning at a signal crossing. And when she looks in mirrors, she can see (and talk to) someone who looks just like her, but dressed in the clothes she wore yesterday. She calls this person Little Pretty One, and believes she's the ghost of her co-joined twin who didn't make it out of the womb, though we quickly learn Little Pretty One is actually much more than that.

Sweetness has a problem -- only men can become engineers, and her father is planning to turn the reins of the ship over to her younger brother. Worse yet, the family, according to tradition, plans to marry her off to a prominent family of stewards on another train. So she runs away with a boy she's just met who can see Little Pretty One out of his cataract.

This turns out to be a mistake; this boy worships Devastation Harx, a man who runs a mail-order cult out of a flying fortress that uses no computer technology. He's recognized that this isn't a ghost, but the goddess who controls the machines that keep the world safe. And Harx manages to kidnap Little Pretty One in a maze of mirrors, planning to use her power to destroy the world, then throws Sweetness out of the hovering fort.

The rest of the book is the story of Sweetness' attempt to save the world.

 As I said, this is a book you read for imagery. And it's chock full of vivid, fascinating scenes and characters. There's the card game where Sweetness' grandmother, Taal Chordant Joy-Of-May Asiim Engineer 10th, bets years of her life. There's the town which has been infected by a plague that stops people from dreaming, and they've imprisoned a man who has a machine that shares dreams of the evening news broadcasts. There are giant household items -- ironing boards, shoes, fireplace sets -- hundreds of feet tall, scattered around the landscape. There is a scene where Sweetness is angry, and begins swearing -- and McDonald takes two pages to list all the different types of oaths and profanities, of the different societies, that she knows.

It's certainly not a book for everyone. While a lot of exciting things happen, they seem more like backdrops to meet interesting characters, or ways to explore interesting ideas, than action-packed sequences. There are also a few points which annoyed me, but I feel describing them in detail would be giving too much away. If you enjoyed Gormenghast, a trilogy where the first novel only covers the first year of the hero's life, you'll probably like Ares Express.

The Man In The Tree

He cannot write English, said the critics. No matter, said the public; we can read what he does write, and that without yawning. And so Dr Pessimist Anticant became popular.

Anthony Trollope, The Warden

I finished Damon Knight's The Man in the Tree earlier this week. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

Knight, as I mentioned in the post where I said I'd picked this up at a used book store, is best known for the story "To Serve Man," though he was well known in the science fiction world. While The Man In The Tree isn't perfect, it does some things I find very interesting and enjoyable.(I believe the rest of this is relatively spoiler free. Good luck tracking down a copy if you want to read it, though.)

The story focuses on a man named Gene Anderson, tracing his life from when he was born in the mid-1940s until the mid-1980s (when the book was published). Gene always had two things that separated him from other people: he was exceptionally tall, and he had the power to feel other worlds, grabbing duplicates of items from another universe and doing other strange tricks. Interestingly, the oddities affect his life about equally.

When Gene is nine, three older boys begin picking on him. In the struggle, he accidentally kicks one of them -- the son of the small town's police chief -- out a window and to his death. Gene realizes that there will be serious repercussions and runs away. The police chief, Tom Cooley, spends the rest of the novel trying to find and kill him. Because of Gene's special powers, he can survive by himself. He raids a scout camp ground, and duplicates all the food and supplies he needs to survive in an abandoned cabin by the woods, by trees he finds unusual. But Cooley catches up with him and he escapes, leaving Cooley's accomplice dead, though again that's not what Gene intended.

While the pursuit is always a factor for Anderson, it's not always the main factor. With no home or anchor in life, he tries to figure out what to do. He goes to an art school in Los Angeles, hangs out with bohemians in New York, becomes a circus giant, and much more..

My largest complaint with the book is with what I guess I should call the climax. It might, if you go by that basic "intro, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion" formula actually be the falling action. I think the end structure got somewhat muddled. But it's when the Big Things happen; when Statements are made. It didn't work for me; the scope and tone were too different from the rest of the book.

Though the plot didn't completely satisfy, there were many things I liked.

Knight was not afraid to keep things understated. Throughout the book, I kept expecting someone to bring up the Norse myth of Odin and the tree, an obvious parallel for the title and a someone who is more than a man growing up and looking for purpose. (It does, however reference other relevant legends.)  In another example, at one point a woman tells Gene his fortune with Tarot Cards. After that, Knight doesn't feel the need to hit us over the head with Gene's destiny. Perhaps that's why the ending fails for me; it goes from understated to putting all the cards on the table.

Everyone acts intelligently. Have you noticed when reading a novel, people talk about literature and poetry? In real life, television, movies, or contemporary culture are more likely to be discussed. I understand why; in real conversation, you don't want to lose your audience. Suppose I want to talk about satire. People watching Tina Fey know she's satirizing Sarah Palin. If I start talking about Anthony Trollope's character Dr. Pessimist Anticant, most people will not know that I'm talking about a play on Thomas Carlyle. Since "The Man In The Tree" is literature, the characters discuss lots of arts and literature. It makes me feel cultured to read that. Even characters who aren't well read don't behave stupidly. The sheriff of a hick county doesn't buy Cooley's story that Gene "just happened" to shoot Cooley's friend in the heart, though he can't prove otherwise. Cooley uses some clever techniques to track down Gene over the years.

There are a few passages that I just find great, some for reasons I can't identify. One example:

They went to Notre Dame de Paris, in whose vast shadowy vault the rose windows stared down like celestial mandalas. Gene was moved beyond speech. A woman near them was talking loudly and angrily in German.
"Everyone hates the Germans," Claudina remarked afterward, when they were sitting in the sunlight at a brasserie across the street from the cathedral."
"Because they invaded France?"
"No, just because they are German." 

In short, I like The Man in the Tree because Knight respects my intelligence as a reader. He's willing to assume I'll figure things out, rather than whacking me over the head with it.
 

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.