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.
 

Doctor, Doctor, give me the news

John Cleese: I think, one of the most curious things about this piece is its wonderful "afunctionality."
Eleanor Bron: Yes, I see what you mean. Divorced from its function, I think, purely as a piece of art, its structure of lines and color is curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function.
John Cleese: It has no call to be here; the art lies in the fact that it is here. 

Doctor Who, "The City of Death"

Introduction to the main part of this post
I have created a bunch of self-imposed rules for writing this blog. Some, I think, are common sense. For example, I will never write about my work here. I don't think a potential audience of seven billion should see my personal thoughts on my job. I also try to update it at least weekly; if I don't keep some momentum, it would just fade away.

Others are just a reaction to what annoys me with too many internet posts. I try to avoid turning into an encyclopedia entry. I figure if you want to know about something, you'll highlight the terms, right click on them, and use the option that says "Search Google for..." I also try to avoid too many hyperlinks. Used sparingly, they can be interesting, but used aggressively, they just divert the reader from this page onto others.

Consider these two paragraphs:

I just finished the novel "Declare," a supernatural spy story by Tim Powers. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I didn't realize that one of the major characters, Kim Philby, was a real person until I read the author's afterward. I don't know if that's because the Cold War was never a major part of my life, or because the weak American education system made history really boring.

I just finished the novel "Declare," a supernatural spy story by Tim Powers. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I didn't realize that one of the major characters, Kim Philby, was a real person until I read the author's afterward. I don't know if that's because the Cold War was never a major part of my life, or because the weak American education system made history really boring. 

The first one encourages you to stick around on CaveFelix and follow my thoughts on the novel. The second one encourages you to look at LOLcats and Wikipedia and whatever the random words I linked to remined me of.

My mini-review of the novel, by the way: This story, set in the Cold War, with flashbacks to World War II and earlier, tells the story of Andrew Hale, a British agent, and his involvement with a mysterious operation known as "Declare," that the Russians are working to prevent. Complicating the matter is that Declare doesn't just involve the British and Soviet agencies, or even just numerous international agencies. It also involves non-human creatures, alien things that humans sometimes call djinns, sometimes angels, sometimes fallen angels. It's a good spy thriller story, and I like how Powers handles the supernatural in his story; it's not people waving their arms and throwing fireballs; it's people following astrology and subtle superstitions and scared to death of what it might bring. While it's good, I feel that it's a bit too long. Some of the repetition in necessary for the plot and theme, but some of it feels like padding. It's almost 600 pages long, and could have been brought down to 500.

This intro is a little bit longer than I anticipated. I'd planned to just start writing about Doctor Who, and why I like it so much. But I wanted to start out by mentioning something about movie critics, which refers to an essay by Roger Ebert. And if I linked to the Ebert essay, you'd be leaving this site to read his work, and he's got a lot more experience writing interesting things than I do, so you might not come back, and then I'd be sad, just like this lolcat.

The Main Part of this post: Thoughts on seeing the new episode of Doctor Who
One of the late Gene Siskel's favorite movies was "Saturday Night Fever." I'm sure most of you would consider it a decent film, but wouldn't rank it up there with Citizen Kane, and wouldn't make it a point of pride to purchase the white suit from the film at an auction, like he did. Roger Ebert, in a reminiscence on his old partner, said it was because Siskel saw the movie at a particular time in his life, and empathized with the dreams of Tony Manero because of that. It's like the fact that, although the best pop music of all times clearly came out in the 1980s, people of my parent's generation would say that it was the 1960s that had the greatest songs, because that time period holds fond memories for them.

So, while it's possibly just because of when I first saw it, I'd say Doctor Who is the most important television show in history.

I was probably about nine years old when I saw my first episode. My father was watching the show on New Jersey Network. We were watching in the den, the only set in our house at the time with cable. (It was actually possible to watch NJN on UHF. I had an old black and white TV in my room. The main knob had 15 settings, from channels 2-13, and 'UHF.' Once set to ultra-high frequency, you chose the channel you wanted, and hoped the antenna sticking out of the back of the set was up to it. Primitive, yes?) I was only watching with half an eye.

I know it starred Tom Baker, but I don't know which episode it was. All I remember is that the Doctor, and possibly his companion, had to race against the clock to complete a task, or the villain would win. Even at that young age, I was sure what would happen: the clock would get down to one second, and the Doctor would pull the lever or whatever to save the universe. I knew, because TV scripts are horribly formulaic.

So my little pre-teen mind was absolutely blown away when time ran out. The Doctor had to find a completely different way to save the universe. It was like watching an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk fails to get the people who have pink makeup and the people who have blue makeup to realize they're the same species, and they wind up annihilating their planet. It was like watching an episode of a sitcom where someone overhears a snippet of conversation, and rather than jumping to a ludicrous conclusion, just walks in and says "I'm sorry, but did you just say that you're planning to kill someone?" only to be told "No, we're making a surprise party for Helen." In short, it was the most exciting script I'd ever seen on television.

Doctor Who aired in England on November 23, 1963. (In the first episode of the show's reboot in 2005, they showed a photograph of Christopher Eccleston standing in Dallas on that day as a nod to this fact.) Almost immediately, the show was a large hit; the second plotline featured creatures known as the Daleks, homicidal monsters that look like saltshakers on wheels armed with laser beams with the trademark, robotic cry of "Exterminate!"

The basic formula for each show has remained the same over the years: The Doctor and the people he's traveling with at the time, known as his companions, travel in a machine called the TARDIS, which can go anywhere in time and space (unless the plot dictates otherwise). They arrive somewhere and discover a mysterious danger. It might be an alien invasion in the Andromeda Galaxy in the year 2567, or a peasant who found a dangerous alien artifact in 10th century France. In the end, they beat the bad guys, mostly because the Doctor is one of the most intelligent people in the universe.

One of the most interesting parts of the show started in 1966, when William Hartnell, the first man to play the Doctor, became too ill to continue the part. Rather than shutting the show down, or finding a lookalike, the script writers decided that the Doctor was an alien who happened to look human, and had the alien ability to change bodies (called regenerating). So they replaced Hartnell with the completely different looking Patrick Troughton.  And it allowed them to write the Doctor with a new personality; Troughton was a lot more mischievous than Hartnell's crotchety old man.

It's something that's kept the show very fresh over the years. I read one interesting analysis which said that they've always hired first rate actors to play the Doctor. When the show is in a slump, it's more likely because of so-so script writers.When I started watching, NJN was airing shows written by Douglas Adams, author of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

When I started watching, the USA was way behind the curve in Doctor Whos. I was watching episodes that had originally aired in Britain in the 1970s, and the order Americans saw them in depended on how their local public television station negotiated with the BBC to buy the rights. Although the show went off the air in 1989, I probably saw the last episodes sometime in the early to mid 1990s.

When it came back, they had made a few changes to modernize it. To my mind, the biggest difference is not the actual special effects, but the fact that the companions have a totally different relationship with the Doctor. Not only is there sometimes romantic interest, but the original shows almost always had a scene like this:

Doctor (to Companions): I'm going to investigate this. Stay here.
Companion 1 (10 seconds after the Doctor leaves): Let's go wandering off and get captured by aliens!
Companion 2: Great idea!

Now the Companions are much more likely to be useful; often they're needed to keep the Doctor from doing something stupid.

Last night, I watched the first episode of the latest season, which introduced Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor. (Anyone reading this from Britain saw it two weeks ago. I don't know why BBC America delays it for two weeks, but it's better than when I started watching, and there might be a 25 year delay.) If I had to grade it, I'd give it a B or B-. It was enjoyable, but I felt like I'd seen some of it before.

The plot was fine (and I feel this is a relatively spoiler-free summary; it shouldn't affect your viewing pleasure too much): the newly regenerated Doctor discovers a crack in reality in a young girl's room. It leads to an interstellar prison where the guards are on the lookout for an escaped "Prisoner Zero." Unfortunately, since the Doctor has just regenerated, the Tardis is unstable, and he needs to take it on a trip to stabilize it, telling young Amelia he'll be back in five minutes.

One of the staples of the show has been the Doctor always had trouble with fine steering of the Tardis, and this is no exception. The minutes turn out to be years, and Amelia Pond has become plain Amy, a disillusioned young woman, crushed that the mysterious Doctor did not take her away from this boring little town to fairy tale adventures.

This is pretty effective, and a good reason to explain why this companion is interested in the Doctor. But unfortunately, they did something very similar a couple of seasons ago, where the Doctor promised to show a young lady miracles with the Tardis, and miscalculated how long it would take to return.

There was also a bit of foreshadowing that felt formulaic, when the Doctor is told that the season's big bad is coming and will threaten the entire universe. Since the last time we saw villains whose existence threatened all of reality was the preceding episode, where Doctor 10 gave his life, it felt a little unnecessary. An alien monster on the loose and Earth in jeopardy was enough excitement.

While things may have been a bit by the numbers, they were executed well. The acting was good, the action kept moving. Despite some cosmetic changes to the interior of the Tardis and the Doctor's favorite gadget, the sonic screwdriver, I'm not yet sure how Smith is different from his predecessors, but I'm willing to give him time.

Three Coins in the Fountain, which the plumber can fix

Your looks intoxicate me/ Even though your folks hate me/ There's no one like you...

The Turtles

The highlight of my week so far has probably been finding all the giant coins in World 3 of Super Mario Brothers Wii. 

In the last few years, I have played some video games that could probably be described as pretty hardcore. I have played God of War, where you are the antihero Kratos, doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons. He is dead inside, killing as casually as most people blink, and caring about it that much. I have played Shadow of the Colossus, where the smallest foe you face is fifty feet tall, and it's never clear if they would attack you if you weren't trying to kill them. I have played Resident Evil 4, where if you're not careful, xenophobic villagers will take your head off with a chainsaw.

They are nothing compared to a game where your enemies are turtles and mushrooms.

For Hanukkah, I got Super Mario Brothers Wii, which is easily one of the most hardcore and enjoyable games I have played in a long time. That's demonstrated by the fact I've already "won" the game, but keep on playing, and still keep playing it nearly four months later. Don't let the bright colors, bouncy music and nearly non-existent story line fool you. This is a serious game. Nintendo makes getting past a snowball-throwing turtle or an angry cloud just as challenging as a game where you're suppose to be saving the universe. And just as satisfying.

Not long ago, there was a fine article on the Onion A.V. Club, written by someone who had just played the original Super Mario Brothers for the first time. He was enchanted by how fun it was; how just by jumping, you could find hidden boxes; how you could get past rows of spinning, burning blades not by just running gleefully along, rather than careful timing. Nintendo still keeps that feeling of fun in the latest version.

When I got my Wii, it came with Super Smash Bros Brawl, which I could never quite get into. That upset me a bit; I love the concept of the game, but the implementation never really came together for me. One of the big issues was the fan service. They crammed in characters from dozens of games, some of which I'd never played, or which I couldn't recognize in their newer incarnations. Last time I saw Zelda, you met her on the last screen of your game after defeating Ganon, a big blue monster, and she thanked you for saving her and the kingdom. That was it. She didn't transform into a ninja back then -- which she does in SSBB --  and I can't relate to that. And there are other characters in the game who mean little to me, but the game seems to think I'll go "Oh my God, it's that fox in a space suit!"

Super Mario Brothers Wii manages to pay homage to the game while avoiding the feeling of fan service. I recognized many of the enemies from back in the Super Mario Brothers 1 or 3 days, but they were there because they get the job done, not to provoke nostalgia.

The plot, and basic game play, hasn't changed much from SMB 3. Bowser has once again kidnapped the Princess, and it's up to you, Mario, to save her. There are still eight worlds, each with many sub-levels, to go through. Each world has its own theme: water, desert, volcano, ice, bullets, etc. The controls are almost the same as they were 20 years ago, though occasionally you shake the Wii-mote. (Rather than wearing a raccoon suit to fly around, this one has a helicopter suit. Shaking spins your beanie around and launches you.) It does reference a few of the newer additions to the Mario universe; there are a couple of levels where you get to use Yoshi, a sort of dragon-steed. Figuring out how to use him was pretty easy, and watching him move is very entertaining. For example, Yoshi can barely fly; when he does, he's always flailing his feet as if trying to run on air with a look of intense concentration.

The Wii-mote also has one other great feature I wish that my NES controllers had: a wrist strap. Now, after trying to complete the same jump a dozen times and plunging to your death, you don't need to worry about ruining the controller by throwing it across the room. (A friend destroyed my Arkanoid paddle back in the day by doing that. Arkanoid is not the same with a standard controller.)

If I were still a teenager with infinite time on my hands, I'd probably say that this game is easier than its predecessors. Instead, I'd say it's less frustrating. For people who hate getting stuck, they include a cheat option. After dying on a level about a dozen times, you can ask Luigi to play through it and just watch him.  Then you have the choice of replaying the level, or just moving on to the next one. (I watched him to get through a few boards, but always did it myself. But I'm not judging you if you don't.)


Now on to the highlight of my week.

And as with the previous Super Mario Brothers, there's really more than one ending. In the first one, after you beat the game, you were given an option to play again, with harder monsters to "really win." Nowadays, that's considered commonplace, but it was revolutionary at the time.

In each level of this game, there are three giant coins. Some are in plain sight, but require fancy jumping. You might need to bounce off a flying turtle who's at the top of his flight path, for example. Others are hidden, and you need to find the secret tunnel to access them.

If you've defeated Bowser at the end of World 8, and collect all the coins in a world, you get to unlock a new level, on the ninth world.  (There are about 6-8 levels per world.)

I managed to find all the coins in World 1, but the others have proven tricky. I'm still stuck on a few places in World 2, but World 3 was easier. That, or I just took to the ice theme better than the desert theme. In ice worlds, you often get a penguin suit, which lets you swim better, slide down hills, keep your traction on slick surfaces, and shoot ice balls. Plus, you look like a penguin.

I don't know if it counts as cheating or not, but I had to look up the location of one of the coins, hidden in the haunted house. Don't ask me what a haunted house is doing in the middle of a frozen wasteland, but someone apparently thought it was a good idea. Other than that, I found all of them myself, and figured out the appropriate method to collect them.

I'm amazed how satisfying that feels.

World 9, from the two levels I've seen, takes some of what you've seen before, and turns the dial up to 11. I haven't gotten past either of the two I've unlocked, but World 9-3 features Bullet Bills -- bullets with frowny faces. Only these Bullet Bills are heat seeking, and sometimes you have a dozen coming at you at once from all different directions, homing in on you.

And each of these levels have three giant coins. I don't know if I'll ever be able to unlock them, but I'm curious what happens if you collect them all. 

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.