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Harm's Way, Colin Greenland
I'm ordinarily no fan of Victorian novels with female protagonists from a repressive and mysterious background on a quest to find their destiny, man or career, littered with improbable coincidence and all too many "Had I but knowns."
Greenland manages to take this genre and merge it with an alternate Victorian universe in which the ether is real and can be sailed. His touch is lightly ironical, rather than broadly farcical. He's managed to work a degree of enlightenment into a strictly gender-divided world. His religions depicted are presented through Sophie's oddly warped view as well as through the unique filtering of other characters, so the reader gets a nicely complex sense of the cultural milieu, more reflective of life as I experience it than any more polemical stance.
All in all, it is not the kind of novel that I like, but it is so well-executed that it is readable, enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Cold as Ice, Charles Sheffield
I've had this one on the shelf for a couple of years. Another one received from Phil, this one came in for a complaint of having "too many women in it", which piqued my curiosity, but not enough to actually read it. A sequel has apparently just come out (or will just come out), and I've been trying to catch up on sf again as part of actively participating in r.a.sf.w. again. Unlike the unfortunate Scarborough novel, this one's quite good. Sheffield is widely described as good hard sf. This is true, but an understatment. His characters are consistently gender split evenly, and women are not consistently relegated to second string positions (quite the contrary). The pov/protagonist slot is shared, and these characters are also about half/half male/female. The characters are uniformly well-drawn and their behavior consistent with their described personality -- in general, Sheffield shows rather than tells, and he does this in world- building, character drawing and plot development. He doesn't tell you about the superior metabolism until you've seen it in action. He doesn't tell you this pair is Machievellian until you've noticed yourself. He doesn't tell you Bat is a nerd of freakish proportions -- you can work it out for yourself. And all of the characters, warts and all, are drawn sympathetically. Like Clarke and Heinlein, there are few evil characters, if any; mostly they are humans just doing their jobs and muddling along. I look forward to more by Sheffield.
Freedom's Champion: Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Paul Simon
Nicholas is somehow related to this abolitionist martyred about twenty years before the start of the Civil War. Simon (the Senator) does a nice job of portraying the political and religious development of Lovejoy, from an ordinary Christian to a devout crusader, from a man ignoring slavery, to one favoring colonization, to an out-and-out abolitionist. Simon doesn't attempt to portray Lovejoy as all good: his anti-Catholic sentiments are given plenty of airing; this is old-style hagiography, warts and all. Simon doesn't stop at the warehouse shoot-out, either, but describes the aftermath for Alton and for the various participants. The research is clearly careful and extensive notes are provided. Simon has made an effort to make this accessible, providing analysis along the way and updating the language in quotations. Unlike the book on the history of the deaf in America which I read earlier this year, Simon avoids the trap of pedagogy and does not lecture the reader in a simplistic fashion. Nicely executed.
Witch Doctor's Apprentice, Nicole Maxwell
This memoir of Maxwell's various trips through the Amazonian jungle is a pleasant blend of travel writing, conservation and plugging of herbal medicines. She may have started out naive and trusting, but by the end of the book, she is more clearly seen as a trouper: nothing stops this woman in her efforts to save the jungle, improve the lot of humanity, and have a lot of fun along the way. She is forthright and honest: she exposes her prejudices about missionaries and how they originated and were eventually overturned. But best of all, she manages to supply an enormous amount of information about types of jungle medicines without getting bogged down in tedious details. In part, this is because for her, the collection of plants is intimately connected with the people who told her of the plants and their uses. A very enjoyable read; I highly recommend it. It works as a memoir of an intrepid woman explorer, an argument for conservation and a description of alternate medicine (especially contraception).
Proteus in the Underworld, Charles Sheffield
After the pleasant experience of Cold as Ice, I bought another, unrelated Sheffield novel (which turns out to be a sequel also, but readable as a standalone novel). While character development does not extend to depictions (or other than joking comments on the subject) of sex, in many other ways Sheffield reminds me overwhelmingly of F.M. Busby. Both novels postulate a major new bio-technique, against a backdrop of system wide colonization. In this milieu, young scientists attempt to do good work despite the machinations of powerful political players.
The Unknown Ajax, Georgette Heyer
The last of a largish batch I picked up used a couple months ago, I started this initially and put it aside as too annoying. The family squabbling in a country house really set my teeth on edge, but upon return, when not so much expecting another glittery romance, but the saga of a family, I enjoyed it a great deal. Still don't know what all the references are to.
Honor Among Enemies, David Weber
In this sixth outing, Honor returns to the Royal Manticoran Navy with a batch of Q-ships and an assignment in the Silesian Confederacy to protect shipping. Her enemies have put her up to it, figuring if she's successful, great; if she dies, better still. Of course, things are both better (better ships and help from a surprising source) and worse (terrible evil people in her crew; nastier pirates than anyone expected) than they seem.
The coincidences run thick and fast in this novel, and there are (still more) characters introduced just enough for us to notice when they get killed. Nimitz gets a girlfriend, whose companion promptly gets killed, which leaves Honor with two treecats, one of them pregnant. One wonders what happens next -- it's hard to imagine Honor retiring to Sphinx with the 'cats until the kid is old enough to foster out.
Ether Ore, H.C. Turk
The jacket material says Our Heroine, Melody Preece, is part Alice in Wonderland, part Dorothy in Oz, and part Barbara Streisand. I never did figure out the last bit, because Melody doesn't sing, nor is she identified as having a large nose. Melody's comic timing is lousy compared to Barbara. I don't get it.
The language of the novel is intentionally bizarre, intended to evoke an alternative universe. It didn't work for me. The society depicted is one in which the Nazis were good guys and all that stuff about the Jews was evil propaganda. Adults have hobbies and children "work" for heuristic credits. When they've accumulated enough credits, they get to retire to a hobby. As near as I can tell, however, hobby is a euphemism for work. The title is a pun; plants grow on Marz which supply a useful fuel: ether ore. The plants are gathered and distilled -- termed mining for no better reason than the pun. The Dorothy/Alice connection shows up in Melody being whirled from one Marz to another, accused of being a witch, gathering companions, etc., complete with lots of surreality. And of course, at the end (spoiler) Melody wakes up in her bed back on Erth.
It's a bad book. Don't waste your time.
Oh, the Places You'll Go!, Dr. Seuss
I watched a tape of Dr. Seuss including the TNT In Search of Dr. Seuss last night, which inspired me to go (re)read this. I notice that there are references throughout to earlier Seuss books (Pontoffel Pock, the dude who meets the pants with nobody in them), in much the same way Heinlein, Asimov and others reworked elements of early works in their last novels. I'm toying with the idea of a Seuss reading binge, but am disinclined to buy all the books, so I don't know precisely what I'll do about this.
One Man's Universe, Charles Sheffield
Hard science fiction at its purest. McAndrew is a physicist who works with kernels: Kerr-Newman black holes, which are black holes with spin and charge (so they could in principle be manipulated, and in the stories, they are). Physics is really all that's going on here, and each story has a sf gadget which is key to the tale. The female character, Jeanie Roker, did not initially work as well for me as the various female characters in the Sheffield novels I have read so far, but this improved as the stories progressed. The relationships between Jeanie, McAndrew, Sven and Jan are subtle, shaded and plausible. There are background indications of the same sort of bio-techniques that appeared in Proteus in the Underworld -- Jeanie suggests that McAndrew should grow more hair this way, and Gliss regrows her arm in this manner.
Trader's World, Charles Sheffield
The third novel by Sheffield I've read and the fourth book shares many of the same characteristics as the previous ones: gender balanced characters, both in number, power, personality; the solar system in the process of colonization; Earth with some disaster in its recent past/our future which disrupted political configurations but did not destroy its technology or significantly slow population growth; bio-techniques which enable survival and recovery from amputation and worse. The similarities do not in any way detract from my enjoyment.
In this one, a young Hiver boy is rescued from an unpleasant and possibly deadly fate, to be raised as a Trader: a negotiater among the varied and largely hostile factions on Earth. His first assignment is in Africa, where while still a student he uncovers trickery on the part of the new Emperor. His second is in Australia, where he meets the freakish Cinder-fella (Jinjer Fathom -- is this an Oz reference?) and finds wonderful bio-techniques which may restore his Mentor Lester to a more human state. Through all this, he is being subtly manipulated by Danny-O (a computer), to satisfy an agenda he does not yet suspect.
The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
One sentence description: a(n anti-) business book written by Dogbert. Yes, it's breath-takingly cynical. No, it doesn't have much prose, and what there is is interspersed with illustrative strips. Adams has some odd ideas about engineers -- especially female ones. The last chapter presents Adams business philosophy/advice/tips. The OA5 model is make it possible for people to do work and not spend all of their time at work. It's sensible and unlikely ever to sell a lot of business books (any more than eat less--exercise more in and of itself ever sells more health/fitness/diet books).
The Triad Worlds, F. M. Busby
The third in the series which began with Slow Freight and continued in Arrow from Earth, the time frame is again overlapped in odd ways with earlier books in the series. Irina Tetzl is briefly mentioned, and Tetzl's World is used as a dumping ground for a people whose planet is about to be bombarded by a huge Comet Swarm. That's a spoiler, of course. The bad guys are, once again, plausibly bad: they've got motivation (money, power, sex, drugs), they've got political backing, and they've managed to get themselves into the Colony Cadre. Unfortunately, the proposed colony world is already inhabited. They've got plans for that contingency, but as usual they don't realize that they're up against a Captain and crew who generally aren't interested in their brand of nonsense -- and who have a total, visceral understanding of what GateLag is all about. Once again, fools get dumped into the Gate after knockout drops are administered, victims thought cornered find themselves a way to escape, and the pacifist aliens turn out to be willing and able to defend their young.
The typical Busby characteristics are present: sex scenes which aren't particularly titillating, which are used to develop character and relationships and show reactions to events in the story. People forgetting things that one would expect people to forget. Extraordinarily competent (and dangerous) people finding out that not knowing the terrain really matters. A great read, this stands on its own fairly well, altho knowing the background helps somewhat.
A Fire in the Mind, George Johnson (incomplete)
The Telzey Toy,Schmitz, James H. (reread)
There's a great Schmitz page. I went to Twice Sold Tales and noticed someone had sold them a bunch of Schmitz, including the Telzey I had apparently loaned out and never gotten back. I now have a healthy number of duplicates, and am only missing A Nice Day for Screaming and other tales of the Hub, which I notice only ever saw a single printing, so no wonder it's so damn hard to find.
Venetia, Georgette Heyer (reread)
Charity Girl, Georgette Heyer
The Black Moth, Georgette Heyer (reread)
On an earlier read of this book, I had not noticed the structural similarities to The Talisman Ring. The same bit with brothers who have confused who it was that committed the crime and the innocent brother forced to become a highwayman is present. This time, however, the innocent brother was an accomplice rather than, strictly speaking, a victim.
So many other romance novelists set the heroine up to be overpowered by this amazing criminal/rake/bad boy, who then reforms his sorry ways. Heyer never writes that. Either (in the case, Devil Belmanoir) the bad guy fails in his efforts, or it is fought to a draw -- the heroine is not victimized/compromised. See also Faro's Daughter, and Devil's Cub for further instances of this phenomenon. I like this much better -- it's not so poisonously misogynistic, nor does it buy into a woman's place is where her man puts her nonsense.
Proteus Combined, Charles Sheffield
Sheffield has let me down! This reworking in one volume of two earlier novels (typical Baen stunt, but at least this time it is labeled as such), Proteus Unbound and Sight of Proteus, does not have the fifty-fifty mix of male and female characters which so enchanted me in Sheffields other tales. This book firmly ties the McAndrew Chronicles to the universe of Proteus in the Underworld.
The first book, Sight of Proteus, tells the tale of Robert Capman, met in Proteus in the Underworld in Logian form and renewing an earlier invite to join him on Saturn. Well, here we find out why Capman was thought to be a murderer of small children (and what he was really doing), and where the Logian form came from, and why the space forms are called C-forms. We have a single powerful female character in the form of Betha Mestel, a Melford ancestress of the Melford we meet in the later novel. We also meet Maria Sun for the first time, an able form change expert in her own right. There is also the secretary who has form changed to the likeness of William Shakespeare, and the other underling who is doing Marilyn. And that's it! A real let down, let me tell you!
The second book, Proteus Unbound, starts out with what I believe to be a ripoff of Spider's "God is an Iron", aka the beginning of Mindkiller and, speaking of Baen books redoing earlier novels, the beginning of Deathkiller, which, like the current volume, is a reworking of two earlier novels, in this case, Mindkiller and Time Pressure. At any rate, the wire is replaced by the Dream Machine, which we first encountered in Sight of Proteus on a USF spacecraft. It's on a medium setting, so Bey isn't really about to die, but we're all really confused about how out-of-character he's acting, and thus not too confused to learn that in fact his insanity is imposed from without, rather than generated from within -- and his relationship with Mary Walton was a hell of a lot healthier than it may have otherwise appeared. We meet Cinnabar Baker, Sylvia Fernald and Aybee Smith (we'll see them all later when Sondra goes haring out to Cloudland to find a software problem which doesn't in fact exist -- and further, we find out why Bey was so convinced it had to be a software problem). The bit with the crow was really obvious, long before the characters found out what was happening. At least this one had more female characters.
I'm still somewhat uncertain whether (and if so, how) this universe connects up to Trader's World and/or Cold as Ice. I'm harboring some suspicions, but I think I have to read a few more books before I'll know for sure one way or the other.
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This file recreated from The Internet Wayback Machine in January 2002. Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created May 6, 1996 Modified: January 10, 2002