Obsolete Your Idols

Island of the Sequined Love Nun is a novel I will confess to buying solely because of the name.  Names, actually.  One name was the title, which was titillating, and the other name was that of Christopher Moore.  I’d previously enjoyed his novel Lamb and so I was interested in reading others by him.  This is the first other one I’ve read and it did not disappoint.

It’s a small scale picaresque of a lovable loser who is driven from scene to scene by the actions of others until he has finally had enough and then his will drives him from scene to scene.  There’s quite a bit to like in this book, from a naked bitch goddess to a cautious and thoughtful tribe chief, from a cannibal to a fruitbat.  This is a fun, fast-paced romp which even has a couple sex scenes, neither one with much romance to it.

Things I liked about this book

• good pacing, chapters weren’t any longer than they needed to be
• a naked drunk petty goddess
• the presentation of an exotic location
• a Brooklyn descended post-mortal protector

Who might like this book

• people who think that Tim Powers is too serious when he writes about spooky cults
• people who’ve always wondered what happens to people who cross Texas matrons
• fans of pilots
• fans of cannibals

Who might not like this book

• men with castration anxiety
• sharks
• strict realists who are looking for a wholesome morally uplifting snore-fest

If there’s one writer whose writing I always get a kick out of reading, it’s my wife.  If there are two writers whose writing I always get a kick out of reading, it’s my wife, and Tim Powers.  I really groove on his blend of American culture and spooky metaphysical intrusions into that culture.  I’ve read nearly every novel he’s published and enjoyed the hell out of each one.

So I recently read Strange Itineraries, a collection of his short stories, including two collaborations with James Blaylock.

This collection is wonderful.  It’s a rising arc of strong writing, weird tales, drunken protagonists and unearthly encounters. Ghost stories galore, a nice time travel paradox story and California flavor.

Who might like this collection

• fans of Tim Powers novels
• fans of Americana ghost stories
• fans of Donnie Darko

Who might not like this collection

• people who enjoy the often long progression to the tipping point in a Tim Powers novel
• people who need every aspect of a story to make sense
• people who are sensitive to mentions of alcohol consumption

People had been telling me about but not exactly recommending M. John Harrison’s novel Light to me for a couple of years.  Having now read it, I think I can see why.  The story of this novel is very convenient, a sort of happy ending where everything fits a nice orderly pattern, but the construction of it aspires to concealing that pattern for as long as possible.  The setting is the near-past and the far future, and the central three human characters are depicted through a common lens of them making non-rational decisions which they then don’t attempt to rationalize to themselves or anyone else.  It revolves around a very large maguffin, indeed.  A strange place in space where every technology you try, works.

I found it a frustrating book.  Other people told me it was frustrating to read but they were talking about the prose style which is somewhat experimental. The language and constructs were much more accessible than those of some writers I’ve enjoyed (Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delaney, Michael Moorcock, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce) and not really an impedance.   The thing which frustrated me about this story is how obliquely the author tries to tell it.  It’s a story I could express to you in thirty words.

The one thing I would like to champion about this book is the future setting.  I do like the idea of a place and time where radical physical form changes are trivial, computation is no longer a scarce commodity for anyone, intersystem travel is rapid and virtual reality addiction commonplace.  All of that is a fun setting to read about for me.

But to have half of the characters consolidated, the grand design revealed to be a trick all along, and the implausible actions of the characters not given some kind of an explanation, left me looking for the rest of this story.  There are fun bits and funny bits and there are sad bits and moving bits in this book.  But on the whole I can’t say I liked it.

Who might like this book

• fans of space opera
• fans of experimental writing, more poem in places than prose
• fans of Brin’s Uplift stories who want something in that vein

Who might not like this book

• people who hate omnipotent alien tampering ala Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation
• people who hate unreliable narrators who won’t even justify their actions to themselves

One of my co-workers handed me a pair of books by Jack McDevitt after having asked me a couple times if I’d read his stuff.  I hadn’t and now I have, at least one of them, Polaris.  So what is Polaris?  It’s a locked space ship mystery.

More to the point, it’s a story about a group of people who disappear out in space but leave behind a functional ship.  Years later some personal items taken from that ship are going to be auctioned off and come into the possession of Alex Benedict, an antiquities dealer, and Chase Kolpath, his lovely assistant.  I gather there’s an earlier book by McDevitt with these two characters but I didn’t feel lost or very confused without having read it.  (There was a moment when a character, Jacob, is speaking and I didn’t realize yet that that’s the name of their house AI; just a tip if you find yourself similarly confused).

The two have a relationship a touch reminiscent of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin if Nero Wolfe were reticent and Archie Goodwin was a spicy spaceship pilot.  This story is like one of the Boy’s SF Adventure stories I read as a kid (YA Heinlein, say) if the active protagonist were female and the nominal male lead were distant and obsessive.  There’s plenty of science flavoring to this tale, with interesting futuristic technology and resourceful juryrigging by Chase.  There is a fair amount of macking on and by Chase but it didn’t divert from the narrative or diminish her capabilities.  Chase Kolpath is badass.  Alex Benedict is truly a fortunate employer.

In the end, I only had one qualm with the answer to the mystery and that is because I felt feinted without cause by one of the scenes along about chapter eighteen.  It seemed to me to undermine one of the needed pieces of the ending.  Even after a re-reading of that scene I still felt tricked, but I can forgive that because the whole rest of it hangs together so well.  You get to figure the mystery out along with the characters and it’s a joy to watch them do so.  This is one of the most solidly put together stories I’ve read in a long time.  Highly enjoyable, strong female protagonist, some nice scenes possible only in science fiction.

Who might like this book

• People who are looking for sf with more than bimbo females, flat-personality rugged-jawed mouthpieces-for-ideas males and hand wavey plot resolutions
• People who like tightly woven mystery plots
• People who are or are likely to become trapped in a decaying orbit with quasars

Who might not like this book

• People who like lurid future sex scenes
• People who think girls are dumb
• People who are sensitive about the money they spend on antiques

One of my original three superpowers after my first superhero origin was the ability to make any source code compile and run on a Unix operating system.  I let that power rust when I became a full time systems administrator but I occasionally like to dabble again in that field.  Towards that end I read a technical book on a related topic recently, Advanced Linux Programming.  It’s been on my shelf for some time, perhaps years.

Despite the age it’s still pertinent to developing in C or C++ in the Linux environment.  It does a decent job of covering the core concepts of different kinds of resources used by processes including threads.  Many code examples make the nitty gritty manifest and it has pointers to even more resources, including a site dedicated to the book.

The target audience of this book is purportedly primarily Windows developers who have decided to develop on Linux.  Right.  Because that happens.  But as it turns out, this book is well targeted for rusty Unix developers and dabblers like myself.

Who might like this book

• C coders who have somehow mysteriously failed to use this ‘looooo-nix’ thing
• Linux system administrators who can shrug off their sick dependency on webmin long enough to look at a command line
• Someone wanting to read about the innards of the Linux environment

Who might not like this book

• Windows users.  It contains no Wizards, bluescreens

I read Commune 2000 AD by Mack Reynolds.  No Powells link to the story because they don’t seem to have ever stocked it.  This is the third book of his I’ve read (others being Ability Quotient and Lagrange Five).  I’m starting to get a feel for how a Mack Reynolds story unfolds and this one is a solid story in that range.

It’s the story of a future (the 2000 AD of the title) where the United States has gotten its act together enough to give (nearly) everyone a living wage though with it comes an almost total lack of privacy and a rather tightly yoked role in society.  That’s the surface, anyway.  Then, this being a Mack Reynolds book, we peel back layers, see some groovy people who are hip to the truth and clue in our protagonist.  This not being a Philip K. Dick story, the revelations don’t destroy the protagonist and all of the drug use is good clean fun used to enhance sex or being alive.

The payoff in this story is all in the Aftermath epilogue at the end but it’s a satisfying wrap on a relatively straightforward story.  Looking back on that future from eight years past it, I’m wistful for how bright the future looked from 1974.  The story is a curiosity and a pleasant read but probably not life changing.

People who might like this book

• Those with an appreciation for retro-futurism.
• Those who like to read politically oriented sf.
• Those looking for old ideas of what newness means

People who might not like this book

• Those who don’t like stereotypes of the early 1970s projected into the future.
• Those who trust implicitly the governors to govern wisely.
• Those who are anti-drug, anti-sex, anti-future, anti-fun.

This is the third Matt Ruff book I’ve read, Set This House in Order.  The subtitle of it is A Romance of Souls and that’s accurate.  The heroic protagonist is dealing with Multiple Personality Disorder so it’s a very little bit like some other such books you might have read, where the hero is sometimes at odds with themself.

The early and middle parts of the story mostly take place in the Pacific North West, in and around Seattle, which I enjoyed very much.  I’ve even been to some of the places mentioned by name.  The only real letdown for me in this story was that I was expecting much more of an explicitly fantastical or beyond reality element.  There wasn’t anything in here which I couldn’t hand-wave away as subject point of view, which is perhaps welcome news for people who hate genre fiction but love to read about people suffering.

There are some fun story twists as the story unfolds and some great thumbnail sketches of characters.  It also leaves a satisfying number of questions unanswered but resolves the major ones I was plagued by, so it’s very nearly ideal for my tastes in that way.

Who might like this book:

• People with alters living in their head
• People who love reading about Seattle
• Fans of cold case mysteries

Who might not like this book:

• People with alters living in their head
• People looking for a more clearly futuristic or fantastic story
• People who hate tricksy stories

I read another Apex book, this one called Hebrewpunk.  It’s a collection of stories and if I had to pick one word to describe this collection as a whole, it would be ‘underripe’.  Not to say these are bad stories, they’re not.  But some of them feel undercooked and some of them feel like they’re the wrong part of the life of the protagonist of the story.

The collection starts off with a heist story named, of course, The Heist.  It has a reasonably engaging though not very detailed criminal undertaking in some fantastical near future setting.  This sounds like the opening adventure to someone’s Shadowrun campaign.  It ends with a bang but not one I found very satisfying, not enough context for me to even understand the ramifications of the crime, the patron, the protector, any of that.

The other three stories in the collection are individual tales of the three criminals from the first story, taking place in their personal pasts.  These are more interesting than the first tale but for my money, the last story is the best, perhaps because of the strength of the source material used.  That tale, The Dope Fiend, calls out a book used as reference and I’m intrigued enough I’ve wishlisted that book.

It’s called Dope Girls and I think it probably factored into the Hand of Glory storyline from The Invisibles.

I’m not sorry I read this collection, but I think I’d rather have read a later Lavie Tidhar collection.

In the meantime, here’s a sad trombone.

Facebook applications I have removed today

• Causes
• Define Me
• Knighthood
• Likeness
• Nazar Boncu?u
• Northwest Trail
• Send Good Karma
• Timezones
• Traveler IQ Challenge

In some cases the application simply fails to work with my operating system and browser often enough that it’s not fun and in other cases I just never found myself playing with it.  Having them there in my profile felt like a mild burden that I can opt out of so I am.

I came back from Wiscon 32 yesterday and on the flight I read a book.

The Next Fix by Matt Wallace.

I have the book at all because I saw Deb Taber as I often do at these places and she made a compelling case for me to buy it along the lines of “gimme your munny!” so then when I got on a plane with nearly no attention span and a powerful thirst for water (yes, I suffered from and continue to suffer from this year’s WisCholera) I figured a collection of short stories would be good flight fodder.  It was.

The foreword identifies the lack of unifying theme for the collection other than them being exploratory works by a developing writer.  Given that, there’s the unevenness to the stories you might anticipate.  Some were created as podcasts and I liked that aspect.  There’s an awful lot of pop culture mashed up in these and while I range from finding it amusing to irritating, I suspect it may soon date many of these stories as time accelerates onward.

Here’s my story by story breakdown reactions.  As many of these are available as podcasts and in other forms, you don’t need to buy this collection to experience them, but at $15 or so, it’s pretty much a steal.

1. Absolution, Insured - good zippy opening but I wanted more from the ending
2. Delve - a remarkable story about the End of Everything (At Least As We Know It), one of my favorite tale settings; I’d pick this as one of the top three in the collection
3. The Losting Corridor - did not like, it felt like an awkward exercise in 4th wall busting if you consider tropes to be a 4th wall.  I find more fun in the tvtropes site.
4. No World For Warriors - I like stories about immortals and immortal perspective.  This one comes with a rumination on the distinction between warriors and soldiers.  It’s pretty good.  You’ll like it if you like that kind of a story
5. Another Man’s Run - another one of my top three pick from this collection, it’s a sort of Damnation Alley / Escape From New York / PKD flavored pony express in space story.  Despite it featuring a Post Office, I don’t think Vy would dig it like I did
6. The Last Frequency - I feel bad about not liking this story.  I just couldn’t get past how irritating I find radio DJs and how this story didn’t feel like it broke any new ground.
7. Mercury’s Magnitude - extremely short sequel to The Last Frequency: liked it even less
8. A Place of Snow Angels - thematically this felt quite a bit like Delve to me but with more imagery; if you find snow more romantic than irritating (eg, you’ve never had to shovel the stuff in order to get out of your home) you’ll probably like it
9. Akropolis - ehn.  It’s a sinister Perry Rhodan story
10. My Caroline - ehn.  It’s a dude who’s monster-whipped with a revenge twist
11. Killing Jars - it’s a horror story.  It reminds me of all those King horror stories people tried to tell me I would enjoy and which I didn’t.
12. Old Tricks - what if Satan didn’t exist but Loki did?  another story I wanted to like more than I did
13. The End of Flesh - the longest and I’d say strongest story of the piece.  This is the third of my top three in this collection.  It’s got noir, for which I am a notorious sucker.  It’s got cannibalism and other taboos.  It’s got a future, one bleak and hungry.  When people tell me about MEAT, the NecroPhasiac event is pretty much what I picture.  Satisfyingly creepy ending.