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Much of this batch is stuff I picked up at Wiscon: after getting stuck without enough reading because of a delayed flight on my way out, I stopped in the dealer's room and got, not only one book I was specifically looking for, but five used books for a dollar each, semi-randomly. (I declined a couple of things because I knew I didn't like the writers, and didn't buy anything I'd already read.) [There are some spoilers here, specifically for Lee Killough's Deadly Silents; Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After; and possibly James White's Tomorrow Is Too Far and Carl Hiaasen's Tourist Season, but I'm cutting mostly for length.]
Carl Hiaasen's mystery novel Tourist Season was the only thing that looked appealing at the very small Borders outlet in the Northwest terminal at DTW. I'd read Hiaasen's nonfiction book about Disney World, but none of his mysteries. This one is somewhat surreal, and a bit of a romp, despite having the police procedural aspects of "how many more deaths will there be". The characters and possible suspects include members of two small terrorist organizations—this being 1986 and Florida, we're talking anti-Castro Cubans, not Al-Qaeda. (The title is, we quickly learn, "season" in the sense of "duck season/wabbit season/baseball season.") Killer alligators and a bizarre armed showdown during the Orange Bowl: this one was fun, without demanding too much attention—useful under those circumstances—and I may read more Hiaasen.
Lee Killough's Deadly Silents is also a detective novel, in the style of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books rather than focusing on a single detective: it's as much about the human police officers, imported from a violent Earth, learning an alien culture, and about the relationships among the police, as it is about the crime-solving. Almost all the aliens are telepathic; humans, it turns out, all send telepathic communication, but cannot receive it. Because of a bad miscalculation when the first embassy was sent to Earth, there's a small group of non-telepaths, called Silents; their inability to send or receive telepathic communication is hereditary, and they're excluded from much social interaction and from any job that significantly involves communication, which is most of them. The aliens hire human police to deal with a series of crimes, including vandalism, because they've never needed police before. The human officers have to learn, or invent, some new communications techniques, as well as a style of policing that combines detective and social work. The mystery plot works, though without great surprises. I recommend this one for the world-building, including the differences between the human police, who are living among the Egara, one human household to a neighborhood, and the embassy staff, who live in a separated Terran enclave, and the convincing description of what happens when one police officer's child starts to fit in with his Egara neighbors well enough to worry his mother.
O Pioneer is a recent Frederick Pohl that also has a bit of the mystery nature, though more "what's going on here?" than a standard whodunit. It's set on an offworld colony shared with several other species: the colony world is the only place the various species interact. Having been persuaded to take the job of mayor of the human colonists almost immediately on his arrival, Evesham Giyt gradually finds that things are not what they seemed, and sets out to figure out what's actually going on. Pohl gives hints of the alien cultures, about as much as a human neighbor would plausibly observe; Giyt's relationships with the non-humans, though sometimes rocky, prove important to his investigations.
I picked up Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After because of a recommendation from someone at the Wiscon panel on "Adventures in Peace." It's an oddly surreal novel about an almost-depopulated post-plague future, set in and around San Francisco. The remaining population of the city is a mix of artists and a few families fishing off of Fisherman's Wharf; much of the city's food supply comes from gardens planted in the old city parks. The city is oddly sentient, and has protective impulses such that almost no outsiders can get in. (The Oakland gangsters are incidental to this; the city protects itself with fogs and ghosts.) We follow the adventures of a nameless woman, a rare exception to that rule, who comes to San Francisco following a vision of an angel after her mother is killed by the soldiers of a would-be military dictator. She becomes entangled both in the artists' lives and in the protection of the city from Fourstar's troops, a fight in which the San Franciscans are trying to minimize casualties on both sides. This one is worth reading for the storytelling and for the images, of butterflies, the Transamerica Pyramid as transformed by Neo-Mayanists, glass mazes, and the wild extravagances of the no-longer-maintained exotic greenhouses.
Tomorrow Is Too Far by James White is another science fiction investigation: the viewpoint character is a persistent security officer at a company that builds rocketships, who starts putting together anomalies like a trash fire in a spot where nobody should have been at that hour, and unlikely slight errors in specifications leading to the manufacture of a large number of parts that won't fit anything the company makes. The other oddity is a menial employee, who appears to be mentally retarded: but Carson notices the tie he's wearing, and drives over to the flying club he'd joined when he got this job and never been to since. He walks in and says he's looking for "Mr. Pebbles"; told he's not there yet, he has a pleasant lunch with another member, and the next thing he knows finds that he has signed up for flying lessons—with Pebbles as his instructor. From there, we see Carson in the odd position of trying to decide whether his loyalty to company and country mean he should, or should not, try to provide security for a project so secret that it's not on the books anywhere and he's not supposed to know about it. Eventually the researchers notice him, and he finds out quite a bit, at the risk of his own, and Pebbles's, life and sanity. From this, White, who was definitely an optimist, produces a slightly surprising happy ending, on levels both personal and world-political.
Looking for something entirely different in the library catalog, I found A Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution by Larry Gonick. Since I liked the earlier volumes of A Cartoon History of the Universe, I ordered this. Gonick is still up to form, with lots of information presented in a mixture of written text and good, clear drawings, many footnotes (some of them just lurking at the bottoms of pages without being linked from the text above), and plenty of citations. For example, in the section "Sikh and Mughal," Gonick shows some Portuguese Catholics complaining about Emperor Akbar: "This prince has the common fault of the atheist, who refuses to…subordinate reason to faith, and…is content to submit to his own imperfect judgment matters transcending the highest limits of human understanding." Just below this is a box: "'If this is the defnition of an atheist, the more we have of them the better.'—Nehru; the bibliography offers a 1940 book by "Nehru, J."
As with the earlier volumes, I was mostly amused by the sections on topics I already knew, without feeling that Gonick was playing fast and loose with the facts, and learned about other things, some more significant than others: The only official with absolute power in the Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth-century was the Chief Water Officer. Royal governors could be ignored, but the dikes have to be maintained. Conversely, I can't find anything else online about Enrique Malaka, who Gonick claims was the first person to sail around the Earth: a Filipino who had been taken to Africa as a slave, wound up in Magellan's crew, and jumped ship when they got to the Phillipines. Again, Gonick enjoys irony: The Treaty of Augsburg gets "And so, thanks to France and the Pope, the Protestant churches would survive." There's a bit more commentary on contemporary politics than I remember noticing in the previous volumes. Chapter 3 ends with a nice drawing and the text "The V in Carlos V should have stood for Victory." In the corner of the page, two figures: "Er, what does W stand for?" "Wish I knew."
John M. Ford's The Princes of the Air is a fine adventure story; we see the title characters at three different stages of their lives and careers. At the start, they're hanging out in an arcade on their desert homeworld playing space travel simulations, while studying to be a diplomat (one of them) and running con games (mostly the other two). The studies, simulators, and street cons all come into play later, as Orden Obeck works his way up in the bureaucracy, and his friends prove to be skilled and dangerous pilots. The Realm comprises fifteen worlds, nine of them close in, plus the "Separated Six," which take longer to reach and are not as closely controlled by the government on Novaya. It's the details that made this one for me, as much as the plot, though the plot works (and is straightforward compared to some of Ford's work). We have Obeck explaining to one of his friends that all of the ribbons on his dress uniform are real, and mostly trivial: for example, one of them is "for being from Ziyah Zain." In the same section, he's wandering around the palace after an audience with the Queen, because his "let him be here" pass won't expire for a few hours, and walks into a courtyard. Two or three sentences of description, and suddenly a vivid sense of place: I knew exactly where Obeck was, because I've spent time in that courtyard. (It's not blatant, and if you didn't know New York, or happen to think of that connection, you wouldn't be deprived of anything important.) Ford does a good job of showing characters who are, essentially, romantics and never lose that. They aren't so driven by those images that they can't cope with the world around them, but it hurts when what they need to do conflicts with those romantic ideas and images.
Carl Hiaasen's mystery novel Tourist Season was the only thing that looked appealing at the very small Borders outlet in the Northwest terminal at DTW. I'd read Hiaasen's nonfiction book about Disney World, but none of his mysteries. This one is somewhat surreal, and a bit of a romp, despite having the police procedural aspects of "how many more deaths will there be". The characters and possible suspects include members of two small terrorist organizations—this being 1986 and Florida, we're talking anti-Castro Cubans, not Al-Qaeda. (The title is, we quickly learn, "season" in the sense of "duck season/wabbit season/baseball season.") Killer alligators and a bizarre armed showdown during the Orange Bowl: this one was fun, without demanding too much attention—useful under those circumstances—and I may read more Hiaasen.
Lee Killough's Deadly Silents is also a detective novel, in the style of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books rather than focusing on a single detective: it's as much about the human police officers, imported from a violent Earth, learning an alien culture, and about the relationships among the police, as it is about the crime-solving. Almost all the aliens are telepathic; humans, it turns out, all send telepathic communication, but cannot receive it. Because of a bad miscalculation when the first embassy was sent to Earth, there's a small group of non-telepaths, called Silents; their inability to send or receive telepathic communication is hereditary, and they're excluded from much social interaction and from any job that significantly involves communication, which is most of them. The aliens hire human police to deal with a series of crimes, including vandalism, because they've never needed police before. The human officers have to learn, or invent, some new communications techniques, as well as a style of policing that combines detective and social work. The mystery plot works, though without great surprises. I recommend this one for the world-building, including the differences between the human police, who are living among the Egara, one human household to a neighborhood, and the embassy staff, who live in a separated Terran enclave, and the convincing description of what happens when one police officer's child starts to fit in with his Egara neighbors well enough to worry his mother.
O Pioneer is a recent Frederick Pohl that also has a bit of the mystery nature, though more "what's going on here?" than a standard whodunit. It's set on an offworld colony shared with several other species: the colony world is the only place the various species interact. Having been persuaded to take the job of mayor of the human colonists almost immediately on his arrival, Evesham Giyt gradually finds that things are not what they seemed, and sets out to figure out what's actually going on. Pohl gives hints of the alien cultures, about as much as a human neighbor would plausibly observe; Giyt's relationships with the non-humans, though sometimes rocky, prove important to his investigations.
I picked up Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After because of a recommendation from someone at the Wiscon panel on "Adventures in Peace." It's an oddly surreal novel about an almost-depopulated post-plague future, set in and around San Francisco. The remaining population of the city is a mix of artists and a few families fishing off of Fisherman's Wharf; much of the city's food supply comes from gardens planted in the old city parks. The city is oddly sentient, and has protective impulses such that almost no outsiders can get in. (The Oakland gangsters are incidental to this; the city protects itself with fogs and ghosts.) We follow the adventures of a nameless woman, a rare exception to that rule, who comes to San Francisco following a vision of an angel after her mother is killed by the soldiers of a would-be military dictator. She becomes entangled both in the artists' lives and in the protection of the city from Fourstar's troops, a fight in which the San Franciscans are trying to minimize casualties on both sides. This one is worth reading for the storytelling and for the images, of butterflies, the Transamerica Pyramid as transformed by Neo-Mayanists, glass mazes, and the wild extravagances of the no-longer-maintained exotic greenhouses.
Tomorrow Is Too Far by James White is another science fiction investigation: the viewpoint character is a persistent security officer at a company that builds rocketships, who starts putting together anomalies like a trash fire in a spot where nobody should have been at that hour, and unlikely slight errors in specifications leading to the manufacture of a large number of parts that won't fit anything the company makes. The other oddity is a menial employee, who appears to be mentally retarded: but Carson notices the tie he's wearing, and drives over to the flying club he'd joined when he got this job and never been to since. He walks in and says he's looking for "Mr. Pebbles"; told he's not there yet, he has a pleasant lunch with another member, and the next thing he knows finds that he has signed up for flying lessons—with Pebbles as his instructor. From there, we see Carson in the odd position of trying to decide whether his loyalty to company and country mean he should, or should not, try to provide security for a project so secret that it's not on the books anywhere and he's not supposed to know about it. Eventually the researchers notice him, and he finds out quite a bit, at the risk of his own, and Pebbles's, life and sanity. From this, White, who was definitely an optimist, produces a slightly surprising happy ending, on levels both personal and world-political.
Looking for something entirely different in the library catalog, I found A Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution by Larry Gonick. Since I liked the earlier volumes of A Cartoon History of the Universe, I ordered this. Gonick is still up to form, with lots of information presented in a mixture of written text and good, clear drawings, many footnotes (some of them just lurking at the bottoms of pages without being linked from the text above), and plenty of citations. For example, in the section "Sikh and Mughal," Gonick shows some Portuguese Catholics complaining about Emperor Akbar: "This prince has the common fault of the atheist, who refuses to…subordinate reason to faith, and…is content to submit to his own imperfect judgment matters transcending the highest limits of human understanding." Just below this is a box: "'If this is the defnition of an atheist, the more we have of them the better.'—Nehru; the bibliography offers a 1940 book by "Nehru, J."
As with the earlier volumes, I was mostly amused by the sections on topics I already knew, without feeling that Gonick was playing fast and loose with the facts, and learned about other things, some more significant than others: The only official with absolute power in the Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth-century was the Chief Water Officer. Royal governors could be ignored, but the dikes have to be maintained. Conversely, I can't find anything else online about Enrique Malaka, who Gonick claims was the first person to sail around the Earth: a Filipino who had been taken to Africa as a slave, wound up in Magellan's crew, and jumped ship when they got to the Phillipines. Again, Gonick enjoys irony: The Treaty of Augsburg gets "And so, thanks to France and the Pope, the Protestant churches would survive." There's a bit more commentary on contemporary politics than I remember noticing in the previous volumes. Chapter 3 ends with a nice drawing and the text "The V in Carlos V should have stood for Victory." In the corner of the page, two figures: "Er, what does W stand for?" "Wish I knew."
John M. Ford's The Princes of the Air is a fine adventure story; we see the title characters at three different stages of their lives and careers. At the start, they're hanging out in an arcade on their desert homeworld playing space travel simulations, while studying to be a diplomat (one of them) and running con games (mostly the other two). The studies, simulators, and street cons all come into play later, as Orden Obeck works his way up in the bureaucracy, and his friends prove to be skilled and dangerous pilots. The Realm comprises fifteen worlds, nine of them close in, plus the "Separated Six," which take longer to reach and are not as closely controlled by the government on Novaya. It's the details that made this one for me, as much as the plot, though the plot works (and is straightforward compared to some of Ford's work). We have Obeck explaining to one of his friends that all of the ribbons on his dress uniform are real, and mostly trivial: for example, one of them is "for being from Ziyah Zain." In the same section, he's wandering around the palace after an audience with the Queen, because his "let him be here" pass won't expire for a few hours, and walks into a courtyard. Two or three sentences of description, and suddenly a vivid sense of place: I knew exactly where Obeck was, because I've spent time in that courtyard. (It's not blatant, and if you didn't know New York, or happen to think of that connection, you wouldn't be deprived of anything important.) Ford does a good job of showing characters who are, essentially, romantics and never lose that. They aren't so driven by those images that they can't cope with the world around them, but it hurts when what they need to do conflicts with those romantic ideas and images.
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