[ Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | June | July | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | 1996 | Review Home ]
Devil's Cub, Georgette Heyer (reread)
Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett
A message is not received by Lord Vetinari, not by Albatross, not from the Counterweight Continent, and not indicating that the "Great Wizzard" (sic) should be sent immediately to them. A struggle for the succession when the aged, decadent and really sick Emperor dies is progressing nicely, a game being played out between Fate and the Lady whose name is never mentioned. Which of the five noble houses is she backing?
What do you think? Fate's backing the obvious winner, but the Lady manages to drag in Rincewind, Twoflower, his offspring, a variety of Luggage, including our old psycho friend, and Cohen's Crowd of Elderly Barbarians. The resulting melee not to say mayhem is, as always, entertaining. The commentary of the relative merits of governmental systems and how the peasantry should be treated is amusingly sharp.
Between the Strokes of Night, Charles Sheffield
Not in any Sheffield universe I know so far, this one includes a Nuclear Winter in which Life as We Know It on Earth comes to an end, but not before a Heinlein-esqe gentleman starts some self-sufficient and highly profitable arcologies in near Earth orbit. The last blast out by Judith Niles and her compatriots at an institute devoted to the study of sleep and metabolism in humans and other mammals is used as cover for a first strike, with the expected results. The fact that it is the culmination of a series of environmental, energy and food crises does not help with the emotional adjustment, but the discovery of S-space -- a dramatically slowed human metabolism with increased subjective lifespan -- enables humans to stick around and see Earth at least partially recover. Not all stay, and the problems that develop between those who live in S-space near Earth and those who left to find and colonize other worlds form the middle part of the tale. The end introduces us to a pressing problem (unknown beings are stellaforming our galaxy into something that will not be habitable by planetbound humans in the millenia to come), and a still slower metabolism (T-space) that will enable at least one of our characters to stick around to the Very End.
Like the best of Sheffield, the characters are nearly perfectly distributed by gender. The handling of subjective time is uniformly excellent and reminiscent of F.M. Busby. The interesting possibilities for N-space humans to wreak havoc on S-space inhabitants reminded me strongly of Phillip Jose Farmer's Dayworld. All in all, a nice treatment of something that for want of a better name I'll call alternate time.
The Wonderland Gambit Book One: the Cybernetic Walrus, Jack Chalker
Bill Beckett gave me this for my birthday. He said the ideas were great but he hadn't finished it just yet so he couldn't say whether it was a good book or not. Like most (all?) Chalker, the characters go through some pretty appalling experiences, and swap gender on occasion. Lots of Lewis Carroll references, and several explicit references to Heinlein (notably "They"). Structurally, it bears some resemblance to Job. Our Hero and Our Heroine are wandering around, jounced from reality to reality, or from body to body, with no explanation, confused and incomplete memories, pursued by two nasty groups who are in turn in opposition to each other, unable to find meaning and certain only that they must stick close to be sure of being together the next time It All Changes. There isn't much resolution (you should be grateful for any when you're reading something so explicitly the first book of a trilogy), and the philosophy is a pretty routine exploration of Pantheistic Solipsism (see what I mean about Heinlein?), complete with Boojums and Snarks. I'd hate to recommend it, but you could do worse.
Godspeed, Charles Sheffield
Young Jay Hara growing up in his mother's house doesn't know much about life, space or puberty. While he's trying to find out, he meets Paddy Enderton, unusual for one of his mother's visitors, but possessor of grand toys and A Plan. Paddy drops dead on the lake, tho, after threatening Jay's life, and the ensuing attack from spacers intent on learning Paddy's secrets motivates Jay's mother and their friend Doctor Eileen to hire a ship and find out for themselves what's going on. As Jay learns a bit about space, more about treachery and hidden agendas, and a lot more about the relationship between Erin, the Isolation and the rest of Maveen system, he skips from one danger to the next.
Jay, at 16, is unusually young for a Sheffield protagonist. The dedication to Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Heinlein indicates that this book should be read in the tradition of Treasure Island and Citizen of the Galaxy. It's a pleasant, if somewhat episodic (picaresque isn't quite the right term) adventure, and we're somehow never too fearful that Jay will turn up all right at the end.
Miss Manners Rescues Civilization : From Sexual Harassment, Frivolous Lawsuits, Dissing and Other Lapses in Civility, Judith Martin
In her usual inimitable style ("I don't want to hear any more lip out of you!"), Judith Martin successfully skewers some of the wackier assaults on etiquette from the past few years. Notable opponents include claims that repressive etiquette contributes to murderous rage. She carefully distinguishes between good and bad p.c. Best of all, she analyzes the economic realities behind the inadequacies of child-rearing today (no time to both have a job and have a life, including children). After personally warning of those who call for a return to the days she finds not at all wondrous, she proposes a new solution: sane work hours and conditions which enable individuals to enjoy both parts of a full human life.
Reading some of this in the context of Love Between Equals is particularly interesting. Miss Manners frequently invokes the principle of parity through gender equivalence (e.g. if a man is sir, then a woman is madam; if a woman is a lady than a man is a gentleman; etc.). It's a nice approach and one I appreciate, when used intelligently by a woman who understands that turning us all into honorary man may not be as bad as being entirely excluded, but certainly isn't much better.
Agent of Vega, James H. Schmitz (reread) (incomplete)
The Past Through Tomorrow, Robert A. Heinlein (reread)
This reread was interesting as several years have passed and I have become more conscious of things like gender parity in numbers of characters, racial stereotyping in minor characters and so on. Stories like The Man Who Sold the Moon contain lawyers who are Jews. Stories like Blowups Happen have black waiters with conspicuous Southern accents. There aren't a lot of these, but there are a few. To Heinlein's credit, there are also indications of black life outside of service to whites. Harriman's chauffeur has a date in darktown, for example.
Delilah and the Space Rigger is always interesting to read, but the ongoing surprise in the Luna City tales (It's Great to be Back and The Menace from Earth) and We Also Walk Dogs is the emphasis on married couples, both of whom work. I would go so far as to say that there are very few married couples where the woman doesn't work who are depicted anywhere nearly as favorably as nearly all the couples where both work. The closest to it is the paean to wives of pilots (title temporarily forgotten), and even that marriage is deeply troubled.
TV may have worshipped the '50s married, by it appears to have been alone in doing so. Talk to nearly anyone over the age of sixty what it was like to live in a town where none of the wives work and they are near unanimity in mentioning the petty backbiting and scandalmongering that occurred amongst bored, unfulfilled adults. Few care to return -- and you can see this sentiment in even the early tales of Heinlein. How enlightened are these tales by today's standards? Well, that strikes me as an unfair and unfruitful question.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein (reread)
This is probably my fifth or sixth reread of the author's cut, and twentieth or thirtieth counting both editions. The surprise this time is a direct result of my completely assimilating the ideas in Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy: Where are the Hindus, the Yogis, the mystics. Thou Art God is pure Hindu mysticism, and Mike's abilities are a catalog of what the best of the Yogis claim: levitation, action at a distance, transferral to another plane, and the ability to be in two places at once, in addition to the more pedestrian abilities like total control of autonomic nervous system and metabolic function.
So Heinlein didn't rederive this from first principles -- he's describing the arrival of a really good Yogi in some unspecified near future America. He's documenting how a bunch of members of various religions which postulate a personal, transcendant deity react to the notion of immanence, of Godhead, of direct apprehension of the Godhead. The only anomaly (and it isn't an anomaly at all when you remember that the Hindus have a hugish pantheon of personal, transcendant deities) is that the immanence is not a denial of other aspects of deity.
But it's taken me 20 or more readings to figure this out, and while I haven't read all the commentary on this book, I have read a lot, and no one has pointed out the fact that Hinduism and Hindus are conspicuously absent from the individuals who meet and react to Mike. What's going on?
A Brief History of American Culture, Robert M. Crunden
Crunden has a refreshingly cosmopolitan view of American culture. He is unusually aware of the importance of religion in shaping American literature, arts and politics (and, for that matter, defining what kind of science could be pursued when). He does display a (to me) distressing tendency to classify the beliefs of some sects as heresies, but mitigates this offense by supplying a neutral definition of the beliefs which are so labeled by more mainstream (read: old) Christian denominations. In practice, his discussion of the role of religion in American history is unusually well-balanced.
[ Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | June | July | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | 1996 | Review Home ]
This file recreated from The Internet Wayback Machine in January 2002. Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created June 3, 1996 Modified: January 10, 2002