Gibberish in Neutral

Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria 2 by Eiji Mikage

2011-07-07T10:03:00.001-04:00

Hakomari 2 can be read here.

A few months have passed since Hakomari Part 1, and Kazuki's life is approaching normal again. Except that Maria is still around. She knows that the mysterious 0 still has an interest in Kazuki, so she's not going to leave his side until they have a chance to defeat this enemy once and for all. Of course, sticking close to him creates all kinds of rumors that Kazuki would rather avoid, but what choice does he have?

His life suddenly deviates from normal again when both Maria and Kokone receive texts from him professing love. Maria quickly deduces that this is the work of 0 -- he's given someone a new Box and they're using it to take over Kazuki's body. Too bad Kokone didn't get the memo. This new User soon manages to alienate all of Kazuki's friends, and though Maria remains on his side, even she can't trust him when she doesn't know if she's speaking to the real Kazuki or the User.

This volume isn't nearly as claustrophobic as the first, which felt as though it was taking place entirely within a small room, even when characters were outside -- which makes perfect sense given the nature of the Rejecting Classroom. This time the world is more expansive as the characters aren't so constrained in their options. But that doesn't mean the story is any less creepy. But instead of Kazuki being trapped by the Box, this time the uncanny sensation comes from his body being possessed by an unknown force and used to destroy his life. There's one point when the User does ... something to Kazuki's sister and then sends a voicemail of her crying in an attempt to get Kazuki to cooperate.

My only complaint with this installment is that it falls prey to the Law of Conservation of Characters, which is odd in that it normally only applies to movies and TV shows where additional characters cost money. Here Mikage doesn't create enough new characters, so the number of suspects is limited; whereas the User in the first book was a surprise, I figured this one out before I even got a quarter of the way into the story. I'll admit that Maria's investigation was nothing short of brilliant -- the way she manipulates the User-possessed Kazuki is amazing -- but the way the story's structured made it redundant: the culprit can only be [SPOILER] or Sir Not Appearing In This Story; and, surprise, it turns out to be [SPOILER]. There's enough good stuff in this book to counterbalance this complaint, but the story would've worked better with a few more suspects.

Toradora! Series by Yuyuko Takemiya

2011-07-07T09:46:00.000-04:00

(I've come to realize that reviewing all ten books of the Toradora! series would be way too much work, so I'm just going to do an overview of the entire series.)

First, note that these novels haven't been licensed in the US, so you have only two options for reading them -- (1) learn Japanese and import them from Amazon.co.jp, or (2) read the bootleg translations from Baka Tsuki. I opted for the latter, and while the translations are kinda rough in places ("Where's the delinquent Takasu!? Come and help us.") they're entirely readable, to the point that I managed to devour volumes 5 and 6 in a single day (roughly equivalent to reading a 500 page book in one sitting).

The plot is a straight-forward rom-com set-up: Taiga and Ryuuji are high school students in love with the other's best friend. Upon figuring this out, they decide to help each other out, but in the process end up falling in love with each other. There are lots of incidents along the way, most of them standard tropes for a Japanese school series (summer vacation, the class trip, the school festival).

But what elevates this series is the characters. Upon first introduction, everyone seems to fit into standard archetypes that should be familiar to anyone who's watched even a little anime: Ryuuji is the Ordinary High School Student; Kitamura the Class Representative; Taiga the tsundere[1]; Ami the Libby; Minori the Cloudcuckoolander. But Yuyuko Takemiya isn't content to let her characters languish as stock figures, but instead uses the story as a psychological study to examine what such characters would be like in real life.

Take Taiga. We first encounter her when she decks Ryuuji for simply bumping into her in the hallway. A little later she nearly beats him to death in order to retrieve a love letter she stuck in his backpack by mistake. Even once they become friends, she continually refers to him as a "dog" and slaps him around if he gets out of line. All of which is typical tsundere behavior, and most authors would treat it as simply humorous. And as with a tsundere, Takemiya slowly reveals that this attitude is armor that shields Taiga's soft, gooey interior, but she then proceeds to ask the question that other authors ignore -- what sort of screwed up circumstances would lead a girl to act this way.

The answer is that Taiga has severe abandonment issues: her father kicked her out of the house for not getting along with her step-mom and set her up in a luxury condominium with a large monthly stipend, and her natural mother wants nothing to do with her. When we finally meet Taiga's father, he turns out to be one of the few totally despicable characters in the series. His explanation for why he abandoned Taiga is absolutely gut-wrenching -- she's blood, so she has to love him whatever he does, while his wife requires effort to keep around. Can you blame her for being a bitch?

Ryuuji has the inverse problem. His mother ran away from home when she became pregnant with him in high school. She now works as a hostess in a businessmen's bar (i.e., she's paid to flirt with customers and get them to buy lots of drinks), and comes home every morning so drunk she's lucky if she makes it to her bed before passing out. All the burdens of taking care of her and maintaining the household -- cooking, cleaning, shopping -- fall upon Ryuuji. And he does it gladly, because he's a good boy. And when he sees the state in which Taiga lives, he instinctively begins taking care of her as well, going to extraordinary lengths to make her life better. Because he's a good boy. When he finds out Ami has a stalker, he immediately offers to help her. Because he's a good boy. When his friend Kitamura faces a personal crisis, Ryuuji tries to help him. Because he's a good boy. As the story progresses, Ryuuji takes on more and more burdens to help others, often at the cost of his own goals, until in the final three books the weight becomes too much and he begins cracking under all the pressure.

But by far the most fascinating character in the series is Ami, a famous teen model who's been forced to take a break from her career because of a stalker. Her genuine personality is acidic yet strangely likeable, but as a teenager working in a world of adults, she's cocooned herself with a fake persona, Ami-chan, a cute, sweet airhead. When she returns to the world of her peers, she no longer knows how to act, and for the first few books she's the closest thing the story has to an antagonist as she takes a dislike to Taiga and tries to get at her through Ryuuji (though it's never clear, even to her, whether she's doing it out of spite or if she has feelings for Ryuuji). But her real problem is, having spent so much time around adults, she understands nuances that the other characters are still discovering, giving her an uncanny ability to understand what's going on around her. Yet her attempts to warn Ryuuji are either ignored or end with someone getting hurt. The more she tries, the worse things get and the more she loathes herself.

Minori is an enigmatic character, seeming to be aloof and wacky, yet we get occasional glimpses of the depths she's hiding, such as in the fourth volume when Ryuuji finally gets up the nerve to ask if she has a boyfriend, and she replies with a seeming non-sequitur about ghosts and UFOs. But as she goes on for several pages on the subject, we begin to see that she's actually using a spectacularly extended metaphor to explain her feelings on love. But these revelations about Minori's inner mind are sporadic, and she remains a puzzle far longer than any other character. Even the ever-insightful Ami doesn't fully comprehend the extent of Minori's mask until the end of book 8, and when she finally figures it out she is astounded:

"Amin, why are you mentioning this?"

Hearing this question, Ami's response was: "Because you've always been playing dumb. I. Think. You. Are. Truly. Amazing. You can just pretend as though nothing has happened, say whatever suits you just to get through the occasion.... You really know how to act like a goody-goody."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I wonder, what was that supposed to mean?"

By contrast, Kitamura is a simple character. Although he too wears a mask (if you can't tell, the mask is a central theme to this series), it's more straightforward than the others -- at school, where he's the student council vice president, class representative, and captain of the softball team, he's serious and businesslike, but get him away and he becomes a wild-and-crazy guy with an penchant for exhibitionism. He does have a reason for this dichotomy, and once that reason is removed he relaxes his mask at school.

Honestly, these are some of my favorite characters in all literature. I would place Ryuuji, Minori and Kitamura at the same level as Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood, while Taiga and Ami come close to toppling Samwise Gamgee from the top spot.

The other thing I love about this series is that there are no significant villains. Sure, Ami's antagonistic when she first appears, but it's not because she's a bad person -- and in truth, it's Taiga who's the biggest obstacle to peace between them. There's also Ami's stalker, but he's little more than a plot device to bring the characters together. Even the one significant fight in the series, Taiga vs Kano Sumire, begins with Taiga thinking,

Was this the wrong thing to do? It could be the wrong thing to do, but Taiga didn't know.

She only knew that she wouldn't stop.

She was already unable to stop.

The only character who is an out-and-out bad guy is Taiga's father, and he only appears in a single book.

Hegel once observed that the truest form of tragedy is when two equally correct but mutually exclusive ideals come into conflict. Though this series isn't tragic, Takemiya takes a similar approach to create a situation where no matter what anyone does, someone will get hurt. What keeps the story going is that these characters are all good people, and when they're presented with the choice of hurting someone else or getting hurt, they choose to take the pain upon themselves. The whole series could've ended by book 7 if even one character decided to act selfishly.

But despite the lack of villains, Takemiya still finds a way to end each book with a cathartic climax (except #4, which is a quiet character study with an insignificant climax followed by a satisfying denouement). Most of these are major heart-breakers, such as the revelation of how big a jerk Taiga's father is in book 5, Taiga deciding to take down Kano Sumire in book 6...

...and her near-death experience in book 8. But the best of them is book 7, which is like getting kicked in the gut repeatedly by Malcolm McDowell. The anime adaptation is on a level with the dog episode of Futurama and that's heavily watered down compared to the novel.

And speaking of the anime, if you enjoyed it you should definitely read the books. The series did a good job of showing all the main points in the story, but there are lots of great details that had to be discarded, such as Minori teaching Ryuuji to ski, or the full extent of Taiga's plan to win the swimming contest. The worst is the treatment of Koigakubo-sensei -- in the novels, she's an unbelievably excellent teacher who just happens to have a horrible social life, while the anime turns her into a complete butt-monkey whose entire raison d'etre is to find a man and get married. Ami suffers to a lesser extent in the last third of the series as the last part of her character arc (in which she comes to hate Ryuuji and herself for the trouble they've caused) is abandoned in favor of making her another harem girl. (Although I do have to credit the anime writers for giving her the best line of the series: "Talking to you is like having my period.")

The anime does improve on one thing from the novels -- Taiga's delirious speech at the end of book 8 rambles on far too long after revealing the key piece of information, while the anime boils it down to the simple but effective declaration:

None of this should be taken as a slam against the anime -- it truly is one of the best series ever done, it just isn't as good as the novels, which deserve proper American releases with a good marketing department behind them so they're read by people besides geeks.

[1] Tsundere is a Japanese term that can be roughly translated as "bitch bitch, lovey dovey" -- basically a character that behaves like Princess Leia does around Han Solo.

Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria 1 by Eiji Mikage

2011-07-06T09:55:00.002-04:00

You know what's amazing? It's only been 18 years since the film Groundhog's Day popularized the infinite time-loop story [1]. Less than two decades, but the concept has become a staple of sci-fi television -- it's hard to think of any SF show that hasn't had a Groundhog's Day episode. And yet there are surprisingly few literary takes on the concept, and off the top of my head I'm not aware of any novels that use the concept.

(You! Yes, you. The guy who's about to say, "What about Ken Grimwood's Replay?" Don't. Being able to relive large portions of your life isn't the same as being forced to repeat a short time-span ad nauseum. A single day or a week doesn't allow much variety for your experiences, or time to see any effect from your actions.)

Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria (0's Maria and the Box of Oblivion) is the first lengthy prose work I've encountered that tackles this idea. And whereas most TV series that use the concept follow Groundhog's Day approach and treat it as comedy, Eiji Mikage chooses instead to focus on the horror of the situation [2]. It helps that the characters are all high school students, which greatly limits their freedom of movement. Just imagine being trapped not just in trigonometry forever, but having it be the same lesson. A show like Stargate can have Jack and Teal'c go through hundreds of repetitions and come out unfazed, but Mikage knows that anyone in this situation would be going crazy after the first thousand cycles.

Most Groundhog's Day stories go in one of two directions -- either everyone is ignorant of the looping at first, but then gradually begin to experience deja vu; or the protagonist is aware of it from the get-go and has to reconvince those around him in each iteration. However Mikage takes the story in a direction I've never seen before (though the "Endless Eight" story in Haruhi Suzumiya did something sorta similar): Kazuki Hoshino, the main POV character in this book, is actually one of the poor dumb bastards who doesn't know what's going on, and he's constantly perplexed by Maria, the only person aware of the loops (other than the person causing them).

But some of Kazuki's actions make Maria suspicious that he's the one causing the loop, which draws her attention across multiple repetitions. After a while, her constant attention starts to break down the barriers to his memories and he's able to retain some information across resets.

The book is really well structured. Because Kazuki's memories are imperfect -- even once he gains the ability to remember past iterations, the power is inconsistent -- Mikage can use anachronic order to withhold info from the reader without it feeling like a cheat. Every time the story starts to get comfortable, he slips in a revelation that changes everything. The first of these came as quite a shock as it seemed to give too much away -- only 20% into the book and he's already revealed who's responsible for the loops. But then the next revelation would come along and call into question what had gone before.

This pervasive uncertainty, combined with paranoia about who is causing the loop, gives the story a very creepy Phillip K. Dick feeling that suits the plot much better than Jack and Teal'c shooting golf balls through the Stargate.

[1] The concept itself dates at least to the 1973 short story 12:01 P.M. which was actually turned into a telefilm the same year as Groundhog's Day, however only anal-retentive geeks like me know of 12:01 P.M. while everyone's familiar with the Bill Murray movie.

[2] I understand that early drafts of Groundhog's Day actually did treat the subject seriously, even suggesting that Phil spent thousands, if not millions of years repeating that day.

Book Girl and the Famished Spirit by Mizuki Nomura

2011-07-05T09:51:00.000-04:00

The Seijoh Academy Literary Club (which consists entirely of book-munching goblin Tohko Amano and the burned-out prodigy Inoue Kanoha) is back, and this time they're trying to catch a ghost that's been leaving creepy letters in their mailbox. Their investigation leads them to Hotaru Amemiya, a girl who seems to be possessed by the ghost of her dead mother and is apparently being abused by the uncle who's raising her. But the more Our Heroes investigate, the more complex the situation becomes.

Plot-wise this is a vast improvement upon the first volume, which had some serious pacing issues. And while the supernatural elements this time too turn out to be explicable through ordinary means, there aren't any of the abrupt tonal shifts that plagued the previous book -- once we find out the truth of what's going on, it doesn't get any less creepy.

Where this book lags behind The Suicidal Mime is the characters. Inoue and Tohko are still well drawn, but the guest stars aren't as interesting as Takeda and Kataoka, and the sections told from their point of view lack the power of the Dazai-inspired diary entries. I'm also disappointed in the handling of the secondary characters. Akutagawa is relegated to a walk-on role -- if this were a TV show, I'd think the studio had some contractual obligation to write him in -- and while Kotobuki gets some good moments early on (which confirm that even though her lips say, "tsun tsun," her heart says "dere dere") she's sidelined halfway through. OTOH, Maki, who was little more than a plot device in the first book, does get more screen time here, and the les-yay of the first book is cranked way up.

Taken as a whole, I'd place this book on a par with the first -- the improvements in one area match the problems in the others, so all told it's a wash. If you liked The Suicidal Mime you'll probably like this as well; if you didn't, you won't.

Toradora! Volume 2 by Yuyuko Takemiya

2011-06-17T11:44:00.000-04:00

The story so far: Takasu Ryuuji and Aisaka Taiga are the most feared kids in their high school. In Taiga's case this is a well-earned rep, but Ryuuji is a good kid who had the misfortune to inherit his yakuza father's mean looks. Ryuuji and Taiga are both in love with the other's best friend (Kitamura Yuusaku and Kushieda Minori) and agree to help each other. Along the way Ryuuji ends up taking care of Taiga, who has been abandoned by her parents in a luxury apartment next door to the Takasu's tenement. By the end of the first book, Taiga was practically living in the Takasu place, only returning home for bed (when she didn't fall asleep in front of the TV). This causes problems when other students notice the situation and conclude Taiga and Ryuuji are a couple. Which, you know, kinda puts a damper on their romantic plans. Nonetheless, they'd developed enough of a codependent relationship by that point that they couldn't quit each other, so they had to settle for convincing Kitamura and Minori that nothing's going on.

Book 1 ended with the establishment of a status quo, which is death for romantic stories, so Book 2 begins with a complication. Raymond Chandler once said that if you can't think of what happens next, have a man come through the door brandishing a gun. The rom-com version is to have a beautiful woman come through the door in a sexy dress. And so the book opens with Ryuuji and Taiga having lunch at a restaurant when Taiga notices a beautiful woman enter. And not any beautiful woman -- this is Kawashima Ami, the famous fashion model. And she's accompanied by Kitamura! They join Taiga and Ryuuji, and Kitamura explains that Ami's an old friend of his family who's in town visiting.

Ami seems like a sweet girl if a bit of an airhead, but when Kitamura and Ryuuji go to the bathroom, she reveals her true, bitchy self to Taiga. They get into an argument that ends with Taiga slapping "the stupid chihuahua" ("Sorry, you had a mosquito on your cheek. Oh, you have a fly on the other one.") But the guys didn't really go to the bathroom -- Kitamura knows about Ami's mask, and he wants Ryuuji to see it as well.

We find out why the next day in class when the teacher introduces a new student, none other than Kawashima Ami. The situation quickly deteriorates as Ami decides to crush Taiga -- and unfortunately for Ryuuji, she picks him as the tool for doing it.

Ami makes a great addition to the cast. Takemiya does a wonderful job portraying her dual personalities -- and making her inner bitch more likable than the "stupid chihuahua" facade. Sure, she's mean, petty and mercenary, but no worse than Taiga. It's her "Ami-chan is so cute," act that makes her such a perturbing character. There's a scene where Ryuuji and Ami get caught in the rain and her mask slips, which is the first time they're able to have a real conversation instead of Ami manipulating him with smiles and gentle caresses, and for a moment, before she falls back into her act, it seems they could be friends.

As a foil for Taiga, Ami is perfect. Anyone else, Taiga could simply intimidate, but if she tries that on Ami, the other girls in class, who absolutely adore Ami-chan, would turn on her. All Taiga can do is wait for Ami to make a mistake and pounce, such as a moment when Ami tells the class that she's just naturally thin and doesn't need to diet, which of course pisses the hell out of all the girls who eat salads at lunch and spend hours at the gym.

The first book was essentially a prologue that established the set-up for the series. This volume is where the real story kicks in. While it contains a plot in its own right, with a beginning, middle and end, it also establishes an ongoing conflict between Ami and Taiga, of which this is merely the first installment.

(NOTE: Don't expect to find this book on Amazon or in your local bookshop. From what I've read, there's no interest from American publishers in the series (most of the companies that publish Japanese fiction focus on sci-fi and fantasy). Even the anime adaptation only got a half-hearted release -- the distributor didn't even spend money on a dub track, a sure sign that they weren't expecting it to be a mass success -- so it's unlikely that an official release will happen in the foreseeable future. However, all ten books have been translated by fans, and you can easily find them by googling "Toradora epub".)

Toradora! by Yuyuko Takemiya

2011-06-17T11:43:00.002-04:00

Toradora! is just your typical romantic comedy. You know, boy meets girl, girl punches boy, girl breaks into boy's apartment and tries to murder him, girl makes boy her slave and forces him to clean her apartment and prepare her meals. Classic Tracy and Hepburn stuff.

Ryuuji is a nice boy. Really he is. You'll never find somebody as kind, even-tempered and clean as Ryuuji (seriously, this guy is OCD about mold). He takes care of his mom, a hostess at a businessman's bar who spends her life alternating between being drunk and hungover with no period of sobriety between. Unfortunately he inherited his looks from his deceased yakuza father, particularly a pair of eyes that make him look like he's going to murder anyone who pisses him off. It took him most of his freshman year in high school to convince his classmates that he's not a thug, and now that he's starting his sophomore year with a new class, he's afraid he'll have to start over.

On the first day of school he discovers that Kitamura Yusaku, one of his friends from the year before, will be in his class, which is good. Even better, Kushieda Minori, the girl Ryuuji has a crush on, is there as well. So maybe this won't be such a bad year after -- hey, what's this! As he's entering the classroom, Ryuuji bumps into (literally) the only person in school more intimidating than himself: Aisaka Taiga, more commonly called "the Palmtop Tiger" for her diminutive size and fierce nature. Students immediately gather round to witness a clash of the titans, only to be disappointed when Taiga delivers a first round TKO. Well, at least everyone's less inclined to believe Ryuuji's a hardass.

A few days later, Ryuuji's doing his homework when he finds a love note from Taiga to Kitamaru in his bag. Apparently she screwed up and put it in the wrong backpack. The problem is, she realizes her mistake and breaks into his apartment that night to retrieve the letter. When Ryuuji catches her, she tries to beat him to death with a kendo sword. He fends her off and placates her by fixing her dinner. Turns out she's living on her own (in the posh high-rise apartment across the street, no less) and though her parents give her plenty of money to survive on, she has no housekeeping skills and has been subsisting off convenience store food. This is the first genuine meal she's had in weeks.

Ryuuji tries to cheer her up by showing her the box full of poems, mix tapes (well, mini-discs) and letters he's made for Minori. Finally he offers to help her get with Kitamaru -- or at least that's what he thinks he offers, though Taiga thinks he's offering to become her "dog". And Ryuuji's intimidated enough to go along with her demands, cleaning her apartment, cooking her dinner, and concocting ways for her to talk to Kitamaru. But these plans fail because, under her tough exterior, Taiga is actually a shy girl who gets nervous as hell when she's around a boy she likes. And to make matters worse, rumors start circulating that she and Ryuuji are a couple ...

I was a little trepidatious about picking this up since a ten volume rom-com epic isn't normally my thing. (Ten books might sound like a lot, but they're all what the Japanese refer to as "light novels" of only ~200 pages apiece. 2000 pages is still a lot for a romantic comedy, though it's short by light novel standards.) However, after about ten pages I was flying through the story. Ryuuji and Taiga make an hilarious odd couple, with him as the beleaguered straight-man to her insane tsundere, but with a genuinely sweet friendship that develops as Ryuuji comes to realize that beneath her hellcat exterior, Taiga is broken and lonely, and that for all her talk of him being her slave, she genuinely needs him to keep her from falling apart.

As a side note, don't expect to find this book on Amazon or in your local bookshop. From what I've read, there's no interest from American publishers in the series (most of the companies that publish Japanese fiction focus on sci-fi and fantasy). Even the anime adaptation only got a halfhearted release -- the distributor didn't even spend money on a dub track, a sure sign that they weren't expecting it to be a mass success -- so it's unlikely that an official release will happen in the foreseeable future. However, all ten books have been translated by fans, and you can easily find them by googling "Toradora epub".

Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime

2011-06-09T11:35:00.001-04:00

Konoha Inoue is a high school sophomore with a dark secret. Tohko Amano is a book scarfing goblin. Together, they fight crime.

No, that's not right. Together, they make up the entirety of the Seijoh Academy's literature club. Club activities consist almost exclusively of Konoha writing stories for Tohko to consume (great literature is yummy, but printed works just aren't as fresh as a handwritten story). However, Tohko's getting bored with things, so she's experimenting with ways to attract new people to the club.

Enter Chia Takeda, a first year who wants the Literature Club to help her write love notes to a boy she's fallen for. The boy in question is Shuji Kataoka, apparently the dreamiest member of the archery team. Konoha reluctantly agrees -- or, more accurately, Tohko agrees and Konoha doesn't feel like contradicting her, so he spends the next several days composing the best love note ever. Unfortunately, he tells Chia that it's just something he dashed out over lunch, so when the note goes over well she asks him to write one every day. This wouldn't be so bad if she didn't come to his class each morning to get the note. Given that she's barely pubescent, this leads Konoha's classmates to speculate that he might be into lolicon, particularly Nanase Kotobuki who becomes deeply antagonistic towards him. (This being the first volume in a series, I'm guessing she's going to turn tsundere soon enough.)

Eventually Konoha grows curious about Shuji, so he asks a classmate from the archery club about the guy -- but the classmate has never heard of him. Konoha and Tohko investigate and determine that there's no such person at Seijoh Academy. When they confront Chia, she gives them a note Shuji wrote to her, a very dark, disturbing letter that would send any sane woman running away in fear. But not Chia. Tohko recognizes several passages in the letter as being influenced by Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, which I gather is an existential novel similar to The Stranger or Notes from Underground.

Things get even more mysterious when Chia takes Konoha to an archery practice to meet Shuji. Some alumni from the team show up to watch as well, and they rush to Konoha when they see him. Turns out, he looks exactly like an old team mate of theirs who committed suicide ten years ago -- Shuji Kataoka! Dun-dun-dun!

This popped up on my Amazon recommended list after I bought the Haruhi Suzumiya books. The description -- book club, weird girl, magic -- sounded like a knock-off, but I decided to give it a try anyway. Despite some superficial similarities, the two are very different. Tanigawa's series is a sprawling, genre-bending parody of anime/manga tropes, whereas Nomura plays things pretty much straight. I was quite surprised by how dark the book was -- to me "suicidal mime" is a funny concept, but it turns out to be a metaphor Shuji uses (taken from Dazai?) to describe the mask he wears to hide his true sociopathic self. Although when I say, "dark," I don't want to give you the impression that this is a bleak tale about how the world is a giant crapsack. Rather, it's dark in the way Byron and Emily Bronte were dark -- a key moment near the end involves Tohko explaining how most of Dazai's books are actually fun, and anyone who judges him on No Longer Human alone is missing the point.

My biggest disappointment with the story comes two-thirds of the way through when we find out exactly what's going on, and it turns out to have a rational (if convoluted) explanation. Such a Radcliffian twist seems out of place in a story with a Goblin who eats books. Nonetheless, I pushed through to the end, partly due to the fact that the book's only 180 pages, and partly to see how Nomura would fill the remaining pages after the main mystery was resolved. I'm glad I did, for after a brief lull the story picks up again with a twist that makes up for the main plot fizzling out.

The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya by

2011-06-07T11:30:00.001-04:00

The sixth volume in the saga of Haruhi Suzumiya turns out to be yet another short story collection, this one focusing on events from November through January.

Live A Live is essentially an epilogue to the second book, picking up exactly where Sigh left off. It's the day of the Cultural Festival and Kyon has just delivered the final cut of The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00 to the film club. Not having any breasts, he's not part of Haruhi's marketing strategy for the movie, and his class only conducted a lame survey for the festival, so he's free to enjoy the rest of the day. He grabs Taniguchi and Kunikida and they head for lunch at the cafe Mikuru's class is running.

Afterwards, Kyon, who stayed up all night editing the film, decides to rest in the auditorium where various student bands are performing. Just as he's dozing off, he sees Haruhi and Nagato take the stage as part of an all-girl rock band. As though that's not a big enough shock, the band turns out to be really good.

On Monday Kyon learns the whole story from Haruhi -- the band's lead singer/guitarist broke her wrist that morning and couldn't play. Haruhi overheard the band members trying to figure out what to do, and on the spur of the moment she volunteered her services as a singer; she also figured that Nagato would know how to play guitar and dragged her into the band. But the experience has weirded Haruhi out -- she's used to being the oddball, and having people appreciate her for her talent is a foreign experience. The story ends with a touching moment between Haruhi and Kyon.

The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina Episode 00 is a summary of the infamous film produced by Ultra Director Haruhi Suzumiya. It's hard for me to judge this story because by the time I read it I'd watched the anime version, which is just so perfect that the short story is like reading a Wikipedia summary.

Charmed at First Sight LOVER, despite the awful Engrish title, is the best story in the book. It begins just a few days after the end of Disappearance with Kyon resting at home when he receives a phone call from Nakagawa, a classmate from middle school -- not a friend, just a guy Kyon sorta knew. A few months back Nakagawa saw Kyon walking with a girl and immediately fell in love. Kyon naturally assumes he means Haruhi or Mikuru and is going to warn him off when he receives a shock -- Nakagawa's fallen for Nagato.

After some cajoling, Kyon agrees to copy out a message to deliver to Yuki, though he instantly regrets it when he hears the drivel Nakagawa spouts -- the guy feels he is in no position to take out the goddess Nagato at the moment, so he asks that she wait ten years so he can go to college, get a job and start his own business, at which point he'll be rich enough to treat Yuki as she deserves.

When Kyon delivers the message the next day, Yuki's reaction is as expected -- no. Unfortunately for Kyon, he doesn't dispose of the letter properly and Haruhi discovers it. She immediately leaps to the wrong conclusion and tries to strangle him. When he finally explains what's going on, the other Brigade members agree that Nakagawa's request is ridiculous, but they are nonetheless interested in him -- even Yuki admits that, though she can't wait a decade for him, she would like to meet him. So that night Kyon calls Nakagawa and arranges for the Brigade to attend a football game he'll be playing the next day.

But this is the Haruhiverse, so there's more going on here than a simple date.

Where Did the Cat Go? is a sequel to both "Remote Island Syndrome" and "Snow Mountain Syndrome." It's New Years Eve and the gang is still at Tsuruya-chan's ski chalet, recovering from the encounter at the mysterious mansion from SMS. Koizumi had promised to put on a new murder mystery for Haruhi -- but this time everyone knows from the start that it's all a game.

The whole cast from the island returns -- Mori, Arakawa and both Tamaru brothers, though all Keiichi does is lie in bed pretending to be dead while Yutaka ... well, honestly I don't remember him doing anything. And that's the problem. For this grand mystery that Koizumi's supposedly been working on since summer, it turns out to be too simple. He gets his cohorts from the Agency to reprise their roles from the previous mystery, but they don't do anything, except for Arakawa and Mori answering a few questions while serving food. I know Tanigawa can write a decent mystery because he did it with RIS, and he can make a game interesting as he did with "Boredom" and "Day of Sagittarius III," but here he fails on all levels. It feels as though he's mentioned this party enough that he has to show it, but he doesn't have his heart in it.

The Melancholy of Mikuru Asahina is a much needed remedy to the flanderization poor Mikuru's gone through. In the first book she was the most intriguing Brigade member after Kyon and Haruhi -- a time traveling secret agent who becomes infatuated with Kyon despite not being allowed to have a relationship in the past, who must subject herself to Haruhi's bizarre whims as part of her mission, and whose boss is her future (badass) self. But as the series has progressed, she's become little more than a giant doll for Haruhi to dress up on whim. She exhibits no agency of her own and acts like she's stepped out of The Perils of Pauline. This is of course why Haruhi chose her -- the brigade needs a moe character to attract new members. But even when the Ultra Leader isn't present, Mikuru isn't that useful. Nagato and Koizumi and even Kyon figure out what's going on long before Mikuru, and when an actual danger appears, such as in "The Mysterique Sign," she doesn't do anything.

At this point in the series, she's starting to fade into the background as nothing more than a piece of eye-candy that Haruhi drags everywhere. This story largely fixes that by examining why Mikuru acts the way she does.

The plot begins with Mikuru asking Kyon to accompany her to the tea-shop on Sunday, which he interprets as a date. Alas, it turns out she's doing this under orders from the future, and her mission is to bring Kyon to a certain street corner at a certain time where he must perform a certain action that will be important to the future. Mikuru doesn't even know what that action is until after it happens, at which point she's shocked to discover how important her mission was. Yet she wasn't allowed to perform the action herself -- seems the time travelers don't want to interfere with the past directly, though their definition of "interfere" strikes me as mighty strange.

Overall this is one of the weaker installments in the series. It suffers from an inverse Star Trek syndrome -- the odd numbered stories are good ("Charmed" is more than good) while the even ones are weak. That's still 60% good, but it's a letdown after the previous two volumes.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

2011-06-01T11:27:00.001-04:00

The story so far: On the surface Haruhi Suzumiya seems to be an ordinary if hyperactive Japanese schoolgirl, but in reality she is a being of immense power, possibly even God herself. Luckily for the rest of the us, she doesn't realize any of this. She's surrounded by the SOS Brigade, a club she started for the purpose of discovering aliens, espers, sliders, and time travelers. Ironically, the Brigade is filled with exactly the kind of people she's seeking, though none of them have any intention of telling her. Yuki Nagato is an android created by the alien Data Overmind; Itsuki Koizumi is an esper with highly specialized powers for dealing with Haruhi's reality-warping; and Mikuru Asahina is a time traveler. The only normal Brigade member is Kyon, the guy who had the misfortune to sit in front of Haruhi in class.

Disappearance begins a week before Christmas. The SOS Brigade has been in service for about seven months, and the stress of keeping Haruhi in check is starting to take its toll on Kyon and one of the other Brigade members -- though not who'd you expect. After listening to Haruhi's grand plans for a Christmas party (plans that violate a number of school rules and the fire code), Kyon returns home and falls into bed.

The next day begins normally enough, but on his way to school he notices a number of oddities, most notably that his entire school seems to've come down with the flu overnight -- except his classmates insist that that the epidemic started a week ago. Even Haruhi is absent.

Or so he thinks.

At lunch, SHE arrives. The girl who sits behind him in class. Except SHE isn't Haruhi. SHE is someone who should not be here -- cannot be here. Yet no one else notices anything wrong. They think SHE has been here all along. When he asks about Haruhi, no one knows what he's talking about. He rushes from class to find the other Brigade members, only to discover that Koizumi's whole class -- the classroom included -- has disappeared. When he approaches Mikuru, she doesn't know who he is and his attempt to convince her he knows her by revealing personal information -- yeah, going up to a girl and telling her you know she has a mole on her breast, not a good idea. Even Nagato seems to be an ordinary school girl now, sitting quietly in the Literature Club room reading, exactly as she used to before Haruhi took over the room.

Kyon faces a tough decision -- this is the ordinary world he's been craving since Haruhi forced herself into his life, yet it's not his world. This is what he's wanted for the last three books, but now that he has it, he has doubts. And so he sets out to restore the world to the way it was, and he must do it without the help of the other Brigade members.

This book is amazing. Up until this point, I've found the Haruhi Suzumiya series amusing but fluffy. The first volume was an origin story, so it got away with being a bit plotless since the focus was on establishing the world and characters. The second novel was an old-fashioned, "Let's put on a show!" story right out of the old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney Musicals, with the added spice of Haruhi's reality-bending powers blurring the line between film and reality. It succeeded primarily because the characters were so much fun to be around, but by the end I was doubting how far these sorts of stories could carry the series before it would become nothing but inconsequential incidents more fitting for a daily comic strip than a novel series.

I have no more doubts. Put it this way, the anime series adapts four of the first five books. This is the one they skipped. Why? Because they were saving it for the movie. That's not to say this is some grand epic -- it's actually the shortest volume so far, at a mere 180 pages, and the only major fight happens off stage. There's a lot crammed into the story, but it's almost entirely introspective as Kyon comes to terms with the altered reality.

The most memorable moments are Kyon's interactions with the alt-Nagato. With the real Yuki's alieness removed, what remains is a sad, shy girl so lonely that one act of halfhearted kindness will make her fall in love.

Just as with the real Yuki, this Nagato hardly ever speaks, but unlike the real version she's able to convey her feelings with small gestures that reveal the depths of her misery -- tugging at Kyon's sleeves, handing him an application for the Literature Club in the hope that he'd come back and see her even though any sane woman would be filing a restraining order.

The revelation about what this alt-Yuki is and what Kyon must do to her to restore the world is absolutely heartbreaking to the point that I'm not sure he made the right choice, though he does make up for it somewhat in the penultimate scene when he discusses events with the real Nagato and reveals how far he'd go to save her.

(As a side note, the movie version hasn't received an official US release yet, but it is -- ahem -- available. The TV show was a pretty good adaptation of the books, but ultimately just light entertainment. As such, I was completely shocked by how powerful the film is. They completely nail it. Howard Hawks once defined a great film as having three great scenes and no bad ones, and this certainly meets his criteria and more.)

Gods in Alabama

2011-05-26T11:24:00.000-04:00

Talk about misleading cover blurbs. To read the marketing description, you'd think this book was a white trash version of a Tyler Perry movie -- white chick leaves her redneck little Alabama town, promising God that she'll never again lie, fornicate, or return. Ten years later her black boyfriend wants to get married, but he won't do it if he can't meet her family first. So they head down south for what's sure to be a wacky encounter with wacky relatives, full of wacky culture shot. Hoo-hoo-hoo. This is sure to be a laff riot.

Yeah. Not so much. There are some laughs, but the plot turns on the reason Our Heroine left town -- mainly she killed the high school's star QB and hid the body in some kudzu. Those promises she made -- they were in return for God keeping the murder a secret. All the humor in the book comes in scenes set in the present, which play out in a manner reminiscent of My Cousin Vinny, but the flashbacks to the murder, which account for about half the content, are pure Southern Gothic, and while no one's going to mistake Jackson for Faulkner or O'Connor, the book's certainly better than Charlaine Harris.

The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya

2011-05-23T11:20:00.002-04:00

The third volume of the Haruhi Suzumiya series turns out to be a collection of short stories set between the first two novels. This is a bit confusing as the events of some of these stories were referenced in Sigh, so really you should read this first -- except that Kyon is telling these tales retrospectively sometime after the Cultural Festival, and makes reference to the events of Sigh. So, yeah, anachronic order is a bitch.

Anyway, the stories:

The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya: Haruhi decides to enroll the SOS Brigade in a local baseball tournament. There are, of course, two problems here. First, no one in the Brigade has any real experience at baseball except Haruhi, who, if you'll recall from the first book, is a master of all sports but finds sports teams as boring as any other school club. Secondly, the Brigade only has five members. That last obstacle is solved by recruiting outside the club -- Mikuru gets her friend Tsuruya (who is, unbelievably, an even bigger Genki Girl than Haruhi) to join, while Kyon drafts his friends Taniguchi and Kunikida, and his little sister.

Why would he ask his little sister to participate in a tournament against adult baseball players? Well, he really wants the SOS Brigade to get elliminated in the first round. He sees the whole tournament as a huge chore, and the sooner they get out of it the better.

Unfortunately Haruhi doesn't share his perspective, and once their team starts losing she goes into a funk -- and when Haruhi's in a funk, the whole world trembles.

Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody: Mikuru takes Kyon back in time three years where he helps a younger Suzumiya perform a certain act of vandalism that was mentioned at the start of the first book. There are a few complications, but really, that's all there is to the story. Why Mikuru does this is never fully explained, though it's clear that in doing so she creates a big timey-wimey ball in which Kyon's actions are what start the whole series in motion.

The Mysterique Sign: The SOS Brigade finally gets a client. A girl named Kimidori comes to the literary room to ask the Brigade to find her missing boyfriend -- who just happens to be the President of the Computer Society. Haruhi delights at the chance to play at Scooby-Doo but quickly grows annoyed when there's no obvious solution. Which is ironic, because it turns out something supernatural is going on. But then, the last thing the other Brigade members want is for Haruhi to find out that the supernatural exists, so they're more than happy when she leaves in frustration and they can solve the mystery without her.

Remote Island Syndrome: Summer vacation is here, and Koizumi invites the Brigade to visit his uncle's villa on a remote island. Haruhi's read enough books to recognize the setting of a cozy mystery and leaps at the offer. And sure enough, the day after arriving, an unexpected typhoon hits the island, and then Koizumi's uncle turns up dead...

The stories in this volume are entertaining, but they have a certain filler quality about them. There's certainly some good character development, particularly for Nagato in the middle two stories and Koizumi in the last, but by the end of the book it's starting to feel like The Famous Five Go out for Icecream. The only story here that feels consequential is "Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody," which does in fact turn out to be integral to the plot of the next book -- and that book is so awesome that you absolutely have to read this one, flaws and all.

The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya

2011-05-17T11:12:00.000-04:00

So, the SOS Brigade is back, and this time Haruhi decides they should make a film for the school's cultural festival. The fact that she knows nothing about film-making doesn't deter her in the least -- that's what her favorite buttmonkey, Kyon, is for. She tells him what to shoot, and he damn well better shoot it, or else. As for what he shoots -- no surprise, it involves Mikuru in a variety of absurd costumes.

The film's plot (to the extent it has one, which it doesn't really) centers on a battle waitress from the future named Mikuru (played by Mikuru, naturally) sent back to protect an esper named Itsuki Koizumi (played by Koizumi) from an evil alien witch named Yuki Nagato (played by, yes, Yuki). The fact that Haruhi has somehow assigned everyone roles nearly identical to their real selves, despite the fact that she's not supposed to know about them, disturbs the SOSers. To make matters worse, as they film the movie, aspects of the story begin to take on reality. Now the Brigade must find a way to stop Haruhi from using her powers -- but if they just outright refuse to participate, she might destroy the world! (Dun-dun-dun!)

If there's an overall plot to the series, we really don't get much of it here. We get some insights into Yuki, Mikuru and especially Koizumi's views of Haruhi's powers and some hints about how their superiors differ in their goals, but there's no real advancement plotwise. The next book is a series of short stories, so I don't expect much more from that, but the fourth volume sounds like it gets deeper into how the universe works.

The Naked Dame by Jason Bovberg

2011-05-16T15:00:00.000-04:00

Fun hardboiled thriller in the style of early Spillane. Guy Redding is a detective who's going through a bad patch after his last peep-job ended with his client murdering his cuckolding wife. To make matters worse, Guy took the opportunity to cuckold the client himself, and now the client, who, oh yeah, is a mobster, has a grudge against him.

But all that is prologue. The story begins when Guy, while stumbling home from a night of drinking, discovers the titular naked dame, beaten and bloody hiding in an alley. Being a man who is not himself mean, Guy takes it upon himself to find what happened to her.

But this is the dark city, and nothing is ever that simple. Before long, Guy's been crossed, double-crossed, and triple-crossed.

The book, as with all good pulps, is short and to the point. Bovberg's taken Elmore Leonard's advice and didn't write any of the parts that everyone skips. The plot moves through its convolutions at a fast pace, and builds to one hell of a climax. My only qualm is that I figured out the set-up about twenty pages before Redding, though I must note that Redding was drunk and more than a little messed up by that point.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

2011-05-16T11:16:00.002-04:00

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is about a 14 year old Japanese schoolgirl.

(Well, there's a surprise. When was the last time you came across a light novel that didn't have a teenage girl as the protagonist? Japanese authors write about schoolgirls the way Americans write about middle aged white guys.)

True. Although to be fair, Haruhi isn't really the protagonist. She's more a force of nature. The real protag of the story is the narrator, Kyon. He doesn't want to be the hero -- he'd rather be a Nick Carraway type, watching interesting action from the sidelines and occasionally hanging out with the real hero. But on the first day of high school, he's assigned a seat in front of Haruhi and is thus sucked into Cloudcuckooland.

Haruhi is the sort of weird girl who, in an American movie version, would be played by a young Winona Ryder/Christina Ricci type. She hates the ordinariness of her life and wishes to encounter something interesting -- aliens, espers, sliders, time travelers. She'll talk to her fellow students just long enough to determine there's nothing interesting about them, then ignore them. But Kyon somehow gets past her defenses and she ... "takes a liking to him" isn't quite it. Drafts him as her first buttmonkey captures the relationship quite well. Soon Haruhi, inspired by one of Kyon's offhand remarks, decides to form a new school club, the SOS Brigade (that's the "Save the World by Overloading it with Fun Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade," which has to be the worst acronym since Calvin founded Get Rid of Slimy Girls).

Instead of chartering the club the proper way, Haruhi simply takes over the Literature Club, which has only one member, a girl named Yuki Nagato. Haruhi also shanghais an upperclassman, Mikuru Asahina who happens to have the qualities Haruhi wants in an SOSer -- i.e., big boobs. Later, when she hears about a mysterious transfer student named Itsuki Koizumi (all transfer students being mysterious in Haruhi's mind), she pressgangs him into the Brigade as well.

So what does the Brigade do? It's complicated, but mostly it involves Haruhi forcing Mikuru into revealing outfits (which wouldn't be so bad if she didn't do it in front of the guys. Yeah, for a YA novel, there's some real ickiness here.) They also make occasional weekend excursions to hunt mysterious phenomenon, though they fail to find any, much to Haruhi's frustration. Which is ironic, because it turns out every Brigade member beside Kyon is a mysterious figure working for mysterious organizations who were sent to keep an eye on Haruhi.

And why does Haruhi need to be surveilled? That's really complicated and should best be discovered by reading the book (though skip the back cover, because it gives away the big secret).

Apart from the supernatural elements, the book reminds me a lot of my high school years, when walking across the library could end with me getting shanghaied into a bizarre adventure with women of questionable sanity. Ah, those were days.

2011-05-03T00:08:00.001-04:00

Words you don't normally see together: "mummified Playmate." http://lat.ms/jbqOLT

2011-05-02T01:52:00.001-04:00

Big news of the day: Canadian election comes down to Conservatives vs NDP; Liberals totally suck. http://bit.ly/lNECQb

2011-04-29T15:04:00.001-04:00

SF author Joanna Russ (1937-2011) http://bit.ly/miIC0T

A Fallen Companion

2011-04-19T23:21:00.000-04:00

BBC reports that Elizabeth "Sarah Jane" Sladen is dead. She was only 63 and looked much, much younger.

A beautiful woman and one of the Doctor's best companions. She will be missed.

What I'm Listening To: Mates of State

2011-04-19T10:57:00.000-04:00

What I'm Listening To: Esben and the Witch

2011-04-09T12:55:00.002-04:00

Esben and the Witch are an English with a very dark and droning prog sound that pushes right to the edge of goth.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

2011-03-31T02:16:00.000-04:00

I've been seeing this book in stores for years, but I never bothered picking it up, figuring Red Dwarf is best in thirty minute bites and can't sustain an extended storyline. But Audible had this on sale recently, and it is read by Chris Barrie, so I decided to give it a shot.

Storywise, the book is a mash-up of several episodes across the series' first two seasons, along with a significant portion of new material at the beginning. This new stuff, detailing how Lister joined the RD's crew (and what happened to poor McIntyre), is the best part of the book, giving us our only real glimpse into human society prior to "The End." Once Lister signs up, the book more or less follows the plots of the various episodes incorporated into the story ("The End," "Future Echoes," "Me^2," "Kryten" and "Better than Life"). Grant and Naylor do try to stitch these parts together, but while they add connecting material the result is still an rambling, picaresque tale.

That's not to say that if you've seen the series you should skip the books. There are times when the text is little more than the script with some "he saids" added (which makes the audiobook somewhat bemusing, with Rimmer's voice speaking Lister, Holly and Cat's lines). But Grant and Naylor change things up enough to keep you on guard. Captain Hollister becomes a woman with the misfortune to be named Kirk. The events of "Me^2" are tied into the discovery of Kryten with the Kochansky subplot jettisoned. The biggest change, apart from the beginning, is at the end when we enter Better than Life. On the show, BtL was essentially one long gag with no more depth than the backwards Earth, but in the novel Grant and Naylor take the opportunity to flesh out the world and show the sort of lives Lister and Rimmer lead there. In doing so, BtL becomes more insidious than it was ever presented on the show, and the story ends with a surprisingly sad twist.

Death's Daughter by Amber Benson

2011-03-31T00:58:00.000-04:00

When Death is kidnapped, his daughter Susan Sto -- er, Calliope Reaper-Jones has to take over the family business. On the plus side, this means she has an excuse to skip out of work. But it also means missing a killer sale at Macy's!

If that last line reminds you of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it probably should. Amber Benson spent three years on the show as Tara, the sexy Willow's even sexier lesbian lover. Mmmm. Remember that great scene in Once More with Feeling? Yeah. I'll be in my bunk.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Joss Whedon, you jerkwad, how dare you kill Tara. Her character was about the only bright spot in the post-graduation episodes! No, wait, that's not it. Ah. I know.

Calliope is certainly a Whedonesque character, ready to bombard her enemies (family, friends, the pizza delivery guy) with a stream of sarcastic quips. Benson isn't as skilled with such dialogue as Whedon (Wayne's World was like 20 years ago -- nobody says, "Not!" anymore) but she still manages to make the text 80% witty by volume. Calliope also spends the bulk of the novel horny -- any time she encounters a being with something resembling a penis, her first instinct is to wonder if she has any chance of getting laid. Yet, despite being an apparently attractive young woman, she doesn't seem to've had a sexual encounter in recent memory, and her luck doesn't really change in the course of this story.

As for the course of the story -- there's not much here. Calliope has to complete a set of tasks before she can become the new Death, and of course she's really worried about her dad and spends most of the book searching for him. No, wait, that's what you'd expect from the book. But actually, she spends more time thinking about her chances of boffing the hot guy in her office than worrying what happened to her dad. Even in her quest, she's entirely reactive. She has several people to help her along and tell her what she needs to do, and these same people bail her out when she screws up. Even when these characters get knocked out of the narrative, she still finds someone to rescue her from dire situations, including, at one point, God himself.

And there we come to my one major reservation about this book. God exists in this universe, as does the Devil. We're even told the Devil was kicked out of heaven in something resembling the standard Miltonian version of events. All fine and good -- I have no problem with fantasy that assumes Christian myths are true anymore than I have a problem that involves Greek or Norse gods. But then this story does involve Greek and Norse gods -- and suddenly we're facing the Xena Problem: how do you reconcile these incompatible mythos?

Benson's answer is a variant of the Small Gods approach, where a deity's vitality is dependent upon how many adherents it has. This still doesn't square with (the apparently Judeo-Christian) God and Devil being the prime movers in the afterlife, but I can live with it. Until Kali shows up.

See, Calliope goes to meet the board of directors for Death, Inc. As she's on her way, one of her companions explains that the board is made up of gods who no longer have worshipers -- in fact most of the afterlife is run but such defunct deities. And this board is made up of Wotan, Persephone, and Kali.

Kali doesn't have worshipers? Bad enough to have a Hindu god serving in the afterlife at Jehovah's behest, but to do so by implying that Hinduism is a defunct religion and the Indian gods are has-beens -- what? This is just one step up from crazy ignorance of Temple of Doom. (On a sidenote, I listened to the audiobook, read by Benson, and for some reason her voice for Kali started out with an East Indian accent but kept changing to West Indian.) Though a minor world-building detail, this really detracted from the story for me.

Glowing Text in GIMP: A Technique for Making Titles Stand Out on eBook Covers

2011-03-30T02:25:00.000-04:00

People say, "Don't judge a book by the cover," but while there's wisdom in that expression, the truth is if you're in a bookstore and a cover pops out at you, you're more likely to pick it up. If this weren't true, why would professional publishers spend so much money on spiffy artwork?

The same principle applies to ebooks, but with an added challenge -- you need a cover that stands out when reduced to a 160-pixel tall thumbnail. Worse -- a black-and-white thumbnail for people browsing with the Kindles. There's a lot you have to cram into that postage stamp image -- a cool picture, a title, and the author's name. If possible you'll want the title and author to be legible even in the thumbnail, though both of these will be listed next to the image in most ebook stores.

If you look at self-published ebooks, many authors simply take their cover image, select a font, a color, and a size, and write the title across the picture. In many cases, this looks perfectly fine, but if you don't have high contrast between the text and background color it's easy for it to disappear in the thumbnail.

This tutorial will demonstrate some simple techniques for making text jump off the screen.

Open the image you're going to use.
- Select Text Tool.
- Select the area where you want to place your title
- Select your preferred font and size.
- Set text color to white.
- Type in your title. Do any tweaking of the layout now, because if you change your mind later, you'll have to redo from start.
Click "Path from text".
- Make your foreground color black.
- Layer->New Layer
- Name the layer "Title".
- For "Layer fill type" choose "Foreground color".
- Click "Okay".
Disable the text layer (click the eyeball next to the layer)
- Select--->From path (The outline of your title should appear doing an ant-crawl.)
- Make your foreground color white.
- Click bucket fill Bucket Fill.
- Make sure the Title layer is selected (not the text layer)
- Click your pointer within the outline of your title (zoom in if necessary).
- Filters-->Blur-->Gausian Blur
- Set the blur radius between 3 and 10 pixels. The smaller the text you're working on, the smaller the radius necessary. Too small and the effect won't be noticeable, too high and the end result will be too blury.
- Click "Okay".
- Colors-->Color Balance
- For midtones use the following settings:
  Cyan/Red +100
  Magenta/Green +30
  Yellow/Blue -30
- Click shadows and use the following settings:
  Cyan/Red +100
  Magenta/Green +30
  Yellow/Blue -30
- Click highlights and use the following settings:
  Cyan/Red +100
  Magenta/Green 0
  Yellow/Blue -100
- Click "Okay" (This should give the text a nice, fiery glow. You can experiment with other settings -- for example, if you push the settings towards cyan, green and blue, you can get a nice electric glow.)
- Select-->Invert
- Hit delete.
This step is optional.
- Make sure you still have the Title layer selected
- Layer-->Duplicate Layer
- Filters-->Distorts-->Emboss
- Click "bumpmap".
- Click "Okay".
- Since the title is on a light background, it looks fine now. If it's on a darker background, you can lower the opacity until the glowing layer shines through the emboss.
This is another optional step:
- Click on the Title layer.
- Filters-->Light and Shadow-->Drop Shadow.
- And here's the image with drop shadows and opacity on the embossed layer set to 40%:

What Is Wrong with This Poll?

2011-03-27T13:08:00.000-04:00

Seen on Goodreads:

April Fantasy Theme: Asian and Middle Eastern Flavoured Fantasy

Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was, by Barry Hughart

50 votes, 22.7%

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, by Alison Goodman

47 votes, 21.4%

Across the Nightingale Floor, by Lian Hearn

39 votes, 17.7%

The Bhagavad Gita, by Anonymous

25 votes, 11.4%

Monkey: A Folk Novel of China, by Wu Cheng'en

18 votes, 8.2%

The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

16 votes, 7.3%

Snake Agent, by Liz Williams

15 votes, 6.8%

Heart of the Ronin, by Travis Heermann

10 votes, 4.5%

So out of eight "Asian and Middle Eastern flavored fantasies," only two are by actual Asians, and both of those predate Shakespeare. I know very little modern Asian literature gets translated into English, but surely there are enough that you don't need six white guys to fill out the list. Where're Uehashi, Miyabe and Ogiwara?

The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss

2011-03-26T15:21:00.000-04:00

This is what history should be -- short, concise, and no long digressions on the history of sandals or the archaeological significance of potsherds. When Strauss discusses motivations of various figures, he tells us what ancient sources said, what modern scholars think, his own view, and he makes clear that this is all speculation. Likewise, if the record is unclear about where or when an event took place, he gives the evidence and lays out the most likely answers -- but, again, he lets the reader know that this is conjecture.

After reading far too many histories where the author makes sweeping claims as though stating facts instead of speculation, this was a nice breath of fresh air.

Wow, It'll Be Like I'm 14 Again

2011-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

The Good News: 120 Minutes is coming back!

The Bad News: It's on MTV2.

The Other Good News: Matt Pinfield's hosting.

The Other Bad News: It'll only be on once per month.

I have fond memories of staying up till all hours of the morning watching 120 Minutes in it's original run, and I kept with it even after they cut it back to an hour, dumped Jim Shearer and changed the name to Subterranean.

This Book Is Not About the Thing the Book Is About

2011-03-14T01:45:00.001-04:00

I really hate these bait-and-switch history books that promise a detailed look at some obscure but interesting subject, only to use that as a jumping off point for a more general history.

The history of the machine-gun is an expansive enough topic for an entire book, particularly its use as a tool of colonial oppression and slow metamorphosis into a weapon of "civilized" combat. In the Victorian era, machine-guns were seen as dirty pool, which was okay when fighting those pesky natives in Africa, but which no self-respecting European would use on his fellow white-man (well, maybe the Slavs. Possibly Wops and Greeks, too, but they don't really count as white). Then Archduke Ferdinand got himself shot in Sarajevo, and, well, time makes fools of us all. This is a fascinating subject that often gets retrospective coverage in histories of the First World War. A study of how the use of machine guns and public perception of them changed over time would make a great book. Alas, that's not what Keller gives us.

Oh, she covers all that, but in no more detail than you'd get from Barbara Tuchman or Niall Ferguson (both of whom she cites copiously (Ferguson haters be warned; she also cites Jared Diamond uncritically), suggesting that I'm reading a second-hand account of books I've already read). She also gives us a biography of Richard Gatling, but while she tells us what he did -- his early work inventing farm equipment, development of the Gatling gun, his difficulties selling it to the Union government, years spent improving the weapon so it wouldn't be supplanted by rivals -- she never gets inside his head, never reveals his personality. At one point she describes a machine he designed for planting seeds that sounds like it used principles later worked into the Gatling gun, but she doesn't draw a parallel, doesn't even try to explain where Gatling got his inspiration. Her account of his life is more like an itinerary than a diary.

But what's unforgivable about this book is that the history of the machine gun and biography of Gatling make up only half the narrative. The rest of the time she's sidetracked into dissertations on the history of the US Patent Office, or how steamboats spread smallpox -- both interesting subjects, but not what I picked up this book to read about. I wish historians would learn to pick a subject and focus on it.

American Rebel

2011-03-10T23:58:00.002-05:00

This is a breezy, shallow biography with little in the way of insight or original research.

Discussion of Eastwood's films is virtually non-existent -- Eliot gives a small plot synopsis and a rundown of pre-production, followed by a summary of critical reviews that seems to be gleaned from Rotten Tomatoes. There's hardly any discussion of filming, unless you count rumors about which co-star Eastwood was boffing, and he doesn't seem to've interviewed Eastwood's co-stars, even though most are still alive, relying instead upon already published material. Want to know about the difficulties of filming Kelly's Heroes in Yugoslavia? Not in here. How about behind-the-scenes stories about Hackman, Freeman and Clint on the set of Unforgiven? Nope. Details on the filming of the Dollars trilogy? Again, only info on pre-production and reception. Nor does Eliot offer any detailed analysis of Eastwood's films beyond the trite and obvious -- does anyone need to be told that Eastwood likes terse loners?

Eliot focuses a good part of the book on Eastwood's personal life, and although we hear about his many affairs and bastards, we never get any idea of Eastwood as a parent -- how did his children turn out, how much of a role did he have in their lives. If you're going to examine the man's whole life, examine the whole thing, not just the salacious details.

In the afterword, Eliot takes to task Eastwood's other biographers, Schickel and McGilligan, the first for being too kiss-ass and the other for being overly catty, but for all their faults they turned out books with original insights (books upon which Eliot relied for his own book), not just lazy rehashings of other people's research.

OK, Cupid, What Are You Trying to Say?

2011-02-27T02:15:00.001-05:00

A couple years ago, I created an account on OK Cupid just to check it out. I've never really done anything with it, but every once in a while I'll get bored and check it out, see what sort of women the system recommends I meet. When I checked last spring, the site identified a really bizarre hippie woman (as in she identifies herself as a "feline sapien" and has pictures of herself licking grass) as someone I should go out with -- I don't just mean she was my top match, but the system singled her out and said I should totally send her a message -- and in fact, she ended up sending me message soon thereafter. Now, I like crazy women, probably more than is healthy, but even by my standards "feline sapien" is too kooky. But even ignoring that, there was another problem in her profile -- you see, she's married. Her profile says it's an open, polyamorous relationship, but y'know, that's just not my thing. Good luck and all, hope it works for you, but I have no desire to be named in the divorce suit if it falls apart.

Flash forward to this week when I check out the site again, and what do I find -- a recommendation for yet another hippie chick who had rated my profile four-stars. And once again, she's in an open, polyamorous marriage.

Apparently there's a check-box somewhere that I didn't click that will limit my matches to actually single women. But leaving that aside, what does it say about me that a dating website thinks I should hook up with married women, and that the married women agree?

Hey, It's My Blog, I'll Use It for All the Shameless Self-Promotion I Want

2011-02-27T01:07:00.001-05:00

Another new short story is up, "The Testament of Lady Silvie," in which I retell Cinderella from the POV of the kinda bitchy but not really wicked step-mother. Once again free on Smashwords and $.99 on Amazon..

Here's the cover:

I found the image on Shutterstock and knew it was perfect for the story. Unfortunately the red and gold patterning and the dark shading on the dress makes it damn near impossible to put the title on the image -- the only colors that didn't blend in to the picture clashed horribly. White was the only thing that worked, and that made the cover look cheap. Putting the title sideways in a black band is the best fix I could come up with. It works pretty well, I think -- the text is pretty small on thumbnail images, but the model stands out.

And the story's only been on Smashwords for twelve hours and it already has two five-star reviews, so I got that goin' for me, which is nice. ("False Colored Eyes" also has a five-star review.)

Gape at My Amazing Psychic Powers

2011-02-26T23:22:00.002-05:00

On a certain webforum that I frequent, there are some foolhardy individuals who post asking advice about their love lives. Why they do this, no one knows -- it never ends well. About half the people in the forum respond with good advice -- which usually amounts to, "Dump her. Dump her now, then take off and nuke the site from orbit" -- while the other half offer suggestions that, if followed, would end with the original poster in jail. The OP usually ignores all advice and ends up being dumped in favor of an ex-con five days after paying the girl's rent and buying her a new laptop (that is not a made up hypothetical).

Recently, one of these threads took a truly spectacular turn. Back in December, a poster named mhg83 met a girl while waiting for a commuter train. He saw her on the platform. She smiled at him. He went over to talk to her. She ended up giving him a handjob right then and there. He got her number and asked her on a date.

After reading this story, several people responded, "You know she has a penis, right?" A couple weeks later, we got a followup in which he confirmed, she did indeed have a dick. But mhg83 was down with this and soon enough he had a new girlfriend.

Artist's recreation based upon one of mhg83's posts

On New Years Day I posted in response to his story:

I dunno. A girl who hangs around train stations waiting to give hand jobs and god knows what else to random Republicans -- what are they teaching in gym these days? Three months from now, we'll be diagnosing what STD he caught.

One month, 25 days later, mhg83 posts a new thread entitled, "YASTDT: Diagnose Me":

So I'm at the gym today getting my workout in when i get a text from my gf:

"I have a question do u have an std'i noticed something on your palves on sunday? It did not look like a rash."

Okay what the hell is palves??? she has yet to respond when i asked why the fuck she didn't say something on Sunday and waited this long?! imo waiting five days of not telling me is a sign of guilt!

So i looked and the only thing i see is three red spots in the middle between my belly and penis. I have no irritation in the area but i'm still gonna get it checked out to be on the safe side.

So diagnose me otter. What do i have?

Suck it, bitches. I'm a veritable Nostradamus, just like my great-uncle Bill who was a psychic for the Natioanal Enquirer.

Our Musical Savior Is Come!

2011-02-24T14:11:00.001-05:00

So Rufus Wainwright and Lorca Cohen just announced the birth of a baby girl. (Yeah, I'm scratching my head over that one.) So the kid is not only the son of Rufus, but the grandson of Loudon Wainwright III and Leonard Cohen. If Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sean Lennon would get together and have a son, we could breed the Kwisatz Haderach of music in another generation.

Buy My Book! Buy My Book!

2011-02-23T23:13:00.000-05:00

For the past few months I've been reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog posts on the future of publishing. Recently she's taken the view that new writers should put their efforts into self-publishing and then see if they can get a good print deal once they've established themselves. So, what the hell. I'm currently polishing off some of my short stories and putting them online.

I just published my second ebook, "False Colored Eyes," one of my stories written in frustration at the lack of fantasy that isn't set in some European expy. Instead, it's set in a Persian expy (with a few Ottoman elements) and shows why harems aren't as fun as we'd like to imagine. I like it in general, though I think the style doesn't match the setting. You can read it free on Smashwords, or buy it for $.99 on Amazon.

Here's the cover:

Purty, eh? Yeah, I wish I'd found a way to get rid of the moon, and the stem of the "y" is too dark, but not bad for someone who'd never used the Gimp before last week.

(What's that? Oh, yes, I did say "False Colored Eyes" was my second ebook. What was the first? Well, I've heard that "erotica" is the easiest way to make money with ebooks. So far I'm not seeing it, but the piece I put up is pretty short. I'm trying to come up with something in the 40k word range to see if that does better. And no, I'm not going to provide the link, pervert. :-P )

A Sad Day for Quantum Leap Fans Everywhere

2011-02-03T23:52:00.001-05:00

The Cabal (TINC) has announced plans to shut down a slew of abandoned newsgroups, mostly obsolete comp.* groups -- comp.sys.amiga.networking, comp.sys.apple2.gno, comp.unix.pc-clone.16bit -- but they're shuttering a few rec.* hierarchy too -- rec.music.artists.ani-difranco, rec.music.artists.danny-elfman, rec.arts.sf.tv.quantum-leap.

They're all dead groups, but it's kinda sad to see the lights starting to go out on Usenet. Luckily alt.sex.bestiality.hamsters.duct-tape is still a going concern -- as long as there's pervy animal porn on the Internet, Usenet will live on.

The Apex Book of World SF

2011-02-03T15:24:00.003-05:00

The Apex Book of World SF is a mixed bag. It has a good variety of authors -- much better than the old World Treasury of Science Fiction, which had a heavy emphasis on Anglophone authors -- but many of the stories fall flat. However, the best stories -- The Bird Catcher, Wizard World, and Into the Night -- make up for the duds.

(Note: The ebook doesn't contain Compartments by Zoran Zivkovic)

S.P. Somtow - The Bird Catcher *****: A young boy in post-War Thailand befriends a serial killer. There's nothing SFnal about this story -- if anything, I'd compare it to Peter Straub's writing in the late '80s and early '90s, particularly Houses Without Doors -- which makes it an odd choice to lead off the book, though the quality of Somtow's writing make up for that.

Jetse de Vries - Transcendence Express *: You ever have that experience after finishing an anthology where you look at the table of contents, and there's one story that you know you must've read, but you have absolutely no memory of it? This is it.

Guy Hasson - The Levantine Experiments ***: Evil scientists with undefined goals keep children isolated in featureless white rooms. One day one of the girls in the experiment notices a crack in the wall of her chamber, which both terrifies and fascinates her. Conceptually this is an interesting story, but the execution is flawed. The little girl is strangely uncurious before the crack appears -- supplies are delivered to her room while she sleeps, but she's never tried to find out where they come from. She doesn't even seem to've created a story to explain it. Why would a crack in the wall inspire her imagination, but not the rolls of toilet-paper?

Han Song - The Wheel of Samsara **: A more fantastical version of "The Nine Billion Names of God," but ultimately just as silly as the original.

Kaaron Warren - Ghost Jail *: In a dystopian Fiji (sadly lacking in sheep with water wings), a couple dissident reporters hole up in an abandoned village that's filled with ghosts. Warren does a horrible job with the world building -- the nature of the ghosts remains vague despite being important to the plot; the dystopian nature of Fiji is more assumed than shown -- all we get is government goons harrassing the reporters, who are such jerks that it's hard to care (the protagonist has gone beyond aggitating for change and started burning down houses).

Yang Ping - Wizard World *****: I think we have a new genre on our hands: stories about people who play MMORPGs. We have This Is Not a Game and Deep State by Walter Jon Williams, Slum Online by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, and this story. In Wizard World, Our Hero, a sysadmin for the titular game, is lured to what's supposed to be a really awesome custom level, but which appears to be a badly rendered implementation of Zork -- except the house is designed to be a virtual death-trap. Turns out there's a bug in the system -- it's possible to register a new profile in the name of a character who just died and gain access to that player's account. The window to do this is so small that the game designers decided it wasn't worth fixing, figuring it would never happen by chance and would be impossible to use in a malicious attack. They forgot the first rule of computer security: Never underestimate the tenacity of a hacker with too much time on his hands. Soon the hacker has Wizard World on the verge of shutdown, and millions of nerds cry out in agony at the thought of having to get up for something other than Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

This story is awesome. From a literary standpoint, it's not as good as The Bird Catcher or Into the Night, but it's by far my favorite story in the collection.

Dean Francis Alfar - L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars) ***: A girl falls in love with a young astronomer, but he's so obsessed with the stars that he doesn't notice her, so she asks the greatest kite-maker in the city to build a kite that she can fly on. He tells her this is impossible, but when she insists he gives her a list of necessary parts. She then embarks on a quest that takes her half a century and around the world to complete.

I really enjoyed the style of this story, which is very reminiscent of S. Morganstern without the pomposity, however the plot eventually devolves into an itinerary -- she goes here to get that, and then there to get this, but than she loses that and has to backtrack.

Nir Yaniv - Cinderers ***: A very strange story about a schizoid pyromaniac.

Jamil Nasir - The Allah Stairs ***: A very good dark fantasy about a boy who escapes into a magical realm to get revenge on an abusive father. Has the feel of Victorian weird fiction, where two guys are walking down the street and they spot something weird that they don't fully comprehend.

Tunku Halim - Biggest Baddest Bomoh ***: A poor office schlub is in love with his boss's secretary, but she won't give him the time of day. After a co-worker tells him about a Bomoh -- a magician who can give him whatever he wants -- he sets out to get a geas placed on the secretary. The story starts out well, but is ruined by a Twilight Zone ending.

Aliette de Bodard - The Lost Xuyan Bride ***: An alternate history where China colonized North America in the early 15th Century and allied with the Aztecs to keep the Spanish out. Nevertheless, the United States exists and Richard Nixon is President (well, she doesn't go that far, and she does make the US much poorer than in our timeline). Our Hero in this story is an American PI who's set up shop in Xuyan (Chinese North America), and is hired to find a runaway bride. The case leads him to uncover shocking connections between the the wealthy and organized crime, ya-dee-ya-dee-ya-da. Decent enough mystery, the idea of the alternate universe is interesting, but I think the world building could be improved. In particular, I have a problem with the idea that in a world that diverged so significantly would still have a World Wide Web that uses domain.tld/file.htm addressing.

Kristin Mandigma - Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang **: This story is about the thing the story is about. If you understand the thing the story is about, you will probably like the story. Me? I don't get it.

Aleksandar Ziljak - An Evening In The City Coffehouse, With Lydia On My Mind ****: Meet Our Hero, a sleazy pornographer. But unlike sleazy pornographers today, Our Hero locates attractive women online and then inserts microscopic flying cameras into their homes without their knowledge. One day his cameras discover a prostitute who has sex with exotic aliens. When the aliens find out, they send goons to kill him and he has to take it on the lam. The first 9/10 of the story were great, but Ziljak ruins it with a deus ex machina at the end.

Anil Menon - Into the Night *****: This is the Singularity story I've always wanted to read, about an old man who doesn't understand the new technology that surrounds him, who is befuddled by all the people walking around in consensus reality and having conversations with the air. That old man, the Hindu equivalent of a fundy creationist, believes his biologist daughter has abandoned her heritage and worships a Western god called Evolution. When he tries to learn the new technology, he blunders around and, in an almost Mr. Magoo like misunderstanding, ends up doing the future equivalent of hooking up with someone on MySpace. This is far and away the best story in the book.

Melanie Fazi - Elegy **: After a woman's children disappear, she becomes convinced they've been eaten by a demonic tree. Yeah. This is one of those horror stories told in a stream of consciousness style that hints at the delusional mind of the narrator. It's told well enough, but ultimately she's rehashing Poe and Maupassant.

A Lesson in eBook Marketing

2011-02-02T21:28:00.002-05:00

Here's a book I just stumbled across on Amazon:

ATTENTION! If you have a problem with:

* Public masturbation
* The vandalizing of innocent property
* Drug use
* Cockiness and borderline narcissism
* Internet terrorism
* Misogyny, prostitution, and STDs
* The emotional destruction and belittlement of a teenage girl
* The disobeying of direct military orders
* Badly dubbed Asian movies
* Failing
* Falling from grace

...THEN DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!

This book was SPECIFICALLY meant to appeal to:

Both civilian and military men and women with a fucked up sense of humor who’ve:

* dealt with depression and suicidal thoughts
* a sense of anarchy, rebellion, or long for their individualism back
* been through any kind of special forces training (particularly for the Navy SEALs)
* an unorthodox approach to life
* a masochistic personality
* a problem being left alone to their own devices
* people with SERIOUS anger and insecurity issues
* lived in dysfunctional homes growing up
* been ashamed of their own race

As well as:

* Japanese Anime fans (Otakus)
* Gamers
* People who like reading potentially offensive controversial opinions about race, religion, & sexuality

Fighting For Redemption is an underground, self-published, anti-hero story…spun with direct and obvious influences of Japanese cartoons, video-games, and Hong Kong cinema. It is written with a brutal honesty about the main character/writer, and the other characters I encounter along the way. It’s based off a true story…but it’s DEFINITELY NOT meant for everyone.

So basically, your target audience is Eric Harris, Nidal Hasan, and Jared Loughner? I suppose this is an attempt to be so outre that someone will buy the book just to see if it lives up to the hype, but that only works if people start talking about how messed up it is. Otherwise you're left with Uwe Boll's Postal.

Important Note

2011-02-01T12:00:00.001-05:00

Never do a Google Image Search for a cartoon character and Rule 34, especially with safe-search off. Do not search "Daria Rule 34." Do not search "Zapp Brannigan Rule 34." And especially do not search "Shrek Rule 34." Just don't do it.

You have been forewarned.

New Computer

2011-01-30T13:18:00.001-05:00

My computer died last weekend. This is the second machine to crap out on me in the last year. The first was a laptop my mother gave me for Christmas about three years ago. It had been a pretty good machine, but the fan died, and, as we all know, replacing parts on a laptop is next to impossible, so I switched back to my old desktop. This was an seven year old PC which still worked well enough, though I had to cut back on my habit of running five bajillion applications at once. However every time I updated iTunes and Firefox, the machine got slower and slower as they ate up ever more RAM. I often had to keep the Task Manager open so I could kill them when they locked up the computer.

I should've bought a new machine much sooner than I did, but you know how it is -- why spend money when you have something that works, even marginally. I kept an eye on Dell.com and Woot for a good deal, but they only came up at bad times.

But last Friday the computer froze and didn't recover, even with repeated ctrl+alt+deleting, so I tried a hard reboot. Unfortunately this corrupted the master boot record and I couldn't find the XP CD to fix it, so I said, "Screw it," and bought a new computer.

Luckily Staples had a really nice machine on sale for $450 -- an HP with a 3.something gHz, quadcore 64 bit Athalon processor, 4 gigs of RAM and a terabyte hard-drive. Oh yeah, that's an improvement. Every one of those specs is at least double my laptop, and makes my old desktop look like a pocket calculator. This is the first computer I've had where Firefox and iTunes boot up instantly (well, within a couple seconds) -- hell, Gravity is up and running before the splash screen even comes up. However, it's really easy to see why these programs were killing my old computer -- iTunes 10 requires 250 megs of RAM just idling, which while a paltry amount on this system, is still crazy. If Foobar supported Audible, I'd ditch this piece of bloatware in a minute. Even Firefox tops out at only 200 megs, extensions, tabs, memory leak and all.

My only complaint is the amount of crapware that HP preloaded on the system. There were three toolbars when I ran IE, which is bad enough, but when I installed Firefox, those same toolbars appeared there. I don't even know how that's possible -- toolbars that add themselves to software installed after them? And then Firefox pops up a warning that these toolbars are known to cause stability issues and should be uninstalled. Thanks a lot HP. I understand that OEMs use bundled software to subsidize the cost of their computers, but is it too much to expect them to have some QC?

Sidenote: I went a couple days without a computer, during which I tried out the browser on my Kindle. I've used it a few times for looking stuff up on Wikipedia or Memory Alpha, but this was the first time I put it to any significant use. And'll be the last. Most webpages are 10% too wide to fit on the screen, navigating through a page is a PITA, and, oh yeah, it crashes like Launchpad McQuack. And when it crashes, there's a good chance it'll take the Kindle with it, forcing you to do a reset. Resetting the Kindle doesn't delete the books, however it does have to reindex the content afterwards, which eats up the battery.

Giving New Meaning to Blue Screen of Death

2011-01-12T19:41:00.001-05:00

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger by Lucy Snyder

If you've ever encountered one of those geeks who insists upon installing Linux on everything from his new iPhone to a BetaMax he found at a thrift store, this title should elicit a laugh. Unfortunately the actual book doesn't live up to the promise of the title.

The title "essay" explains how to do the actual installation with a combination of technology and eldritch magic. Conceptually, this is a great idea, but if you've ever read a how-to on installing Linux, you know how dreadfully boring they are, and even changing Ubuntu to VuDu doesn't make it more readable. The essay is followed by numerous news articles and press releases that riff on the idea, such as teenage hacker gangs using their undead badgers for trouble with a capital T -- everything from sneaking webcams into sorority houses, to foiling Homeland Security's attempt to obtain library records (there are several topical political digs like that which are already looking dated and will undoubtedly confuse the hell out of anyone who reads this book in twenty years). These stories do create an interesting world, where necromantic technology allows corporations to "in-source" jobs to linux-zombies, but there's no narrative, and although they may've been amusing when they first appeared in magazines, collected together like this the joke gets tiresome.

Luckily Snyder breaks form in the last third of the book with three narrative stories in this universe.

* The Great VuDu Linux Teen Zombie Massacre is essentially an attempt to give a plot to the titular essay. We follow a reporter who's travelled to Texas (which has been overrun by zombies) to interview a guy who installs Linux on dead badgers. Why does she have to go to Zombieland for this? We never find out. But if you ignore that (and let's face it, zombie stories have never been strong on plot-logic) this is a pretty good horror story.

* Wake Up Naked Monkey You're Going to Die is a story where stuff happens, I guess. There are some frat boys who've been kidnapped by some sort of supernatural beings, but I didn't care enough to actually remember what happens after that.

* In the Shadow of the Fryolator is about a cook at a diner who is approached by a Cthulhuoid creature who wants to marry her. Seems she's descended from some other Lovecraftian beastie and is destined to marry this monster and reign with him over subjugated mankind, bwa-ha-ha-ha. This is the strongest entry in the book, though not great by any means. It does highlight something that bugged me about many of the news items -- this book is clearly set in a mythos universe. There are references to Miskatonic U. and various eldritch abominations -- but all those abominations are given fake Lovecraftian names, including the Cthulhuoid creature, H'telred (get it?) from Y'harneth, a great city in the "briny depths of the Esoteric Trench. If you're going to do the Mythos, do the Mythos. Call the guy Cthulhu of R'lyeh.

This is an entirely mediocre collection, though Snyder does show some promise as a writer if she works on her narrative skills.

Bonjour Tristesse

2011-01-07T12:34:00.001-05:00

When it comes to the decadence of Western Civilization, most people think of the 1960s and '70s America -- Haight-Ashbury, Studio 54 and the rest of that Boomer tripe -- or more exotically of Swinging London. But for my money, nothing beats Post War France. A whole society trying to put the Vichy Era behind them while their empire crubles arounds them until the country lurches towards the precipice of civil war. Good times. It was the age of Camus, Sartre and Sagan; Bresson, Bazin and Goddard. And what came of American decadence -- Jim Morrision, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey.

Bonjour Tristesse is a fantastic time capsule of that era. A simple tale of a teenage girl, Cecile, and her father Raymond, whose relationship is perhaps a little creepy. The father is a playboy, flitting from one relationship to the next as whim takes him, and Cecile is exactly what you'd expect from such an upbringing. But then one of these relationships catches Raymond and he decides to abandon his rakish ways for the stability of marriage before he grows to old for his lifestyle. Cecile is less than enthused by this turn of events, especially as Anne, Raymond's new love, holds their old ways in disdain and announces her intention to end Cecile's delinquent ways. Cecile takes none too kindly to this and hatches a scheme to wreck her father's relationship with little thought to the consequences.

Sagan adeptly takes a limited first person narrative and creates a multilayered narrative, showing us both Cecile's motivations for her actions at the time and her retrospective view of her deeds, all while leaving enough hints that we can construct an outside perspective on all that transpires. And she does this in a breezy style that lulls the reader into thinking the tale is utterly frivolous until things suddenly turn serious at the end.

Star Trek Colon Myriad Universes Colon Shattered Light

2011-01-07T00:15:00.001-05:00

A fun collection of three novellas showing alt.history versions of the Star Trek universe.

1) The Embraces of Cold Architects (David R. George III) shows what would've happened if Best of Both Worlds had been a one part episode that ended with the Enterprise blowing up the Borg cube with Picard still on board. Or at least that's what it appears to be at first, though we soon learn that the real point of departure occurred months earlier and launched the Federation on a path almost as dark as a Borg victory. Once more Commander Riker has doomed us all.

2) The Tears of Eridanus (Steve Molmannand Michael Schuster) is the most radical departure. While the other stories in this volume show us alternate versions of the Federation, Tears imagines a galaxy in which Vulcans never embraced Surak's philosophy of logic and instead remained a dangerous child race, content to remain on Minshara nuking each other into the stone age. As a result the Andorians become the dominant civilization in the region, becoming the nucleus of the Interstellar Union. Nor does the Romulan Star Empire exist, the Romulans having remained on Vulcan to participate in the fun, which left extra room for the Klingons to expand in. But that is ending as the Klingons run out of breathing space and turn their gaze to the Union, which without the Romulan War to challenge it militarily, is much weaker than the Federation. Now Commander Sulu of the starship Kumari must contact the savage inhabitants of Vulcan, which lies on Klingons' most likely invasion corridor ...

3) Honor in the Night (Scott Pearson) is the best story of the bunch, but has the most seemingly inconsequential point of departure -- what if there'd been no tribbles on Space Station K7? At first glance, the only difference would seem to be in the number of lame puns Scotty gets to make, until you remember that it's the tribbles that twigged Kirk to the fact that the Klingons had poisoned the quadrotriticale. No tribbles, Kirk doesn't take the threat seriously and thousands of colonists die on Sherman's Planet, opening the way for the Klingons to grab that strategically important world. More importantly, it really pisses off Nilz Barris, who vows revenge against both the Klingons and Captain Kirk.

Silent Screams

2011-01-06T23:04:00.004-05:00

Excellent overview of horror movies through the silent era. Unsurprisingly, America gets most of the attention, though Haberman devotes two chapters to European cinema -- one (the longest in the book) to German film, and one to the rest of Europe, though really he only mentions three films (Haxan, The Lodger, and a mediocre French production of The Fall of the House of Usher). When Haberman turns to the United States, he gives a quick overview of the genre up to 1920, which pretty much consists of adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and then a rough summary of American horror in the 1920s. After this, the book focuses on Lon Chaney's career, devoting two chapters to his horror films, with the second focusing on his collaborations with Tod Browning. There follows an entire chapter on Willis O'Brien and the development of stop-motion animation for The Lost World. The book concludes with a discussion of the Old Dark House genre of horror comedies (The Bat, The Cat and the Canary, etc.), most of which were made by the European directors discussed in the early chapters.

This is an extremely dense book, with every paragraph of its short 250 pages packed with information, but Haberman keeps it readable for the most part -- some of his summaries of the films he's discussing, though absolutely necessary when dealing with the more obscure films (and let's face it, for most people, any silent film is obscure), can be a bit hard to follow, particularly the high melodramas where the stories are nothing but contrivance layered upon contrivance. My one complaint is the way in which Haberman passes judgement on Browning's London After Dark, a film that's been lost for decades. Although what's known of the plot sounds absurdly convoluted, and Browning did a talkie remake (Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi) that's highly mediocre, it's unfair to criticize the original sight-unseen.

The book is subtitled "Chronicles of Terror Volume 1," and Haberman's afterword ends with a perfect segue into the Universal horror films of the 1930s, however this volume was published in 2003 and there's no sign on the 'net of a followup, which I find highly disappointing (though, given that I'm the first person to even rate the book on Goodreads should't be surprising).

Stupidity Never Dies

2010-12-31T15:21:00.000-05:00

Stupid American History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions
by Leland Gregory

Gregory's previous book, Stupid History ws so much fun to nitpick that when I saw this one listed as free on KindleIQ I decided to pick it up. To his credit, Gregory's research has improved so there are far fewer falsehoods, and he even cites sources occasionally. However, the number of errors in the book remains attrocious.

* He claims the phrase "a more perfect union" is bad grammar since nothing can be better than perfect, ignoring the obvious interpretation of the phrase as "closer to perfect," which has been obvious to people for about 225 years now.

* He claims the Battle of New Orleans was pointless since it took place after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, and Andrew Jackson's subsequent use of the battle to bolster his reputation was thus dishonest. Never mind that Jackson had no way of knowing what was happening at Ghent, as Daniel Walker Howe points out in What Hath God Wrought, if the Brits had secured New Orleans, giving them effective control of all trade flowing out of the Mississippi basin, the treaty wouldn't've mattered.

* He claims that Dr. Spock was never jailed for his anti-Vietnam views, then says that Spock was arrested and convicted of telling young men how to avoid the draft, though the conviction was thrown out on appeal. So in that process, he never set foot in a jail cell?

* "We are led to believe, in our abbreviaed versions of history, that all slave-holding state seceded from the Union during the Civil War, or else they gave up the practice of slavery. But that's just not true. Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware remained in th Union but continued to allow citizens to own slaves.... [They] were joined by West Virginia when it was admitted to the Union in 1863." Several problems here. While it's true Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union, they also seceded -- both states had rival governments throughout the war, with delegations to the congresses in both Washington and Richmond. Maryland and West Virginia both abolished slavery on their own before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. The only slave state that didn't secede and didn't give up slavery on its own was Delaware, which had only a few hundred slaves in its territory. Gregory goes on to say that "this demonstrates that the Civil War was anything but black and white," showing sympathy, as he did in Stupid History, with the Lost Causers who seek to portray the Civil War as about issues besides slavery.

* He repeats the erroneous etymology of "red light district," stemming from railway workers who would hand red lanterns in front of whorehouss so they could be found in case of emergency.

* Claims that Francis Scott Key didn't write the Star Spangled Banner -- he wrot The Defense of Fort McHenry, which was excerpted for the Star Spangled Banner. The difference is?

* Claims that America didn't have taxes until the Civil War. No, we didn't have a Federal income tax. There are of course many other types of taxes. What does he think the Whiskey Rebellion was about?

* Claims that Jimmy Carter was "the first Southerner elected to the presidency followng the Civil War." No, that would be Woodrow Wilson who actually grew up in the Confederacy in a slave-owning family. Wilson was followed by Truman from Missouri and LBJ from Texas.

* Defines "revisionists" as "people who want to rewrite history to make it more politically correct." No, revisionism is the process of reevaluating history as more information become available. For example, the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis has been significantly revised in the last twenty years thanks to newly declassified documents from both the US and Soviet Union. We've discovered that, far from the original narrative of Kennedy staring down Kruschev, they reached an accomodation, whereby the US agreed to remove IRBMs from Turkey and to never attempt another invasion of Cuba. This is factual correctness, not political. It is true "revisionism" is sometimes used pejoratively to describe politically motivated reconsiderations, but such are as likely to be used for non-PC purposes, such as claiming the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

* "Julia Ward Howe sold her poem, Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was later set to music, to the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 for $5." No, she wrote the lyrics specifically for the music. The tune was a popular spiritual in the years leading up to the Civil War. At the start of the conflict, soldiers set new lyrics, known as John Brown's Body, to the tune. These lyrics were extremely coarse ("John Brown's body is mouldering in the grave"), and Howe disliked them, so she penned new religiously-themed words for the song. Why Gregory would go for a mundane piece of trivia when the full story is more interesting, I can't imagine.

* While claiming Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he points to various attempts at creating steampowered cars, which he notes didn't work. He never mentions the people who actually did invent the internal combustion engine.

* He makes the horrors of Andersonville sound like mere mismanagement.

* Discusses the fact that Alvin York tried to get out of the army as a conscientious objector. But the only reason anyone remembers York these days is because of the Howard Hawks film, which uses that as a primary element of the story. Why is Gregory mentioning this in a compendium of supposedly little-known facts?

* Claims that a Samuel Slater was, in addition to the founder of the American industrial revolution, created child labor. But child labor has been around since time immemorial. The reason people used to have so many children wasn't just the lack of condoms -- kids could be used to lessen the workload of the parents.

* He mentions Victor Berger's attempt to abolish the Senate but fails to note any of the more interesting facts of his life.

* Claims that no sitting President has lost a reelecton campaign in time of war. Only true if you don't count LBJ dropping out of the primary once he realized he couldn't win.

* The crown jewel of Gregory's shoddy research -- he claims that when the Titanic struck the iceberg, passengers were watching a D.W. Griffith film called The Poseidon Adventure. No such film exists. The Poseidon Adventure was a 1969 novel first filmed in 1972, 60 years after the Titanic sank. He appears to have gotten his facts from this Snopes page, but failed to check the references, which leads to this page which explains the story was made up by Snopes to demonstrate the importance of checking sources instead of reflexively believing everything you read. Heh.

The Title Doesn't Lie

2010-12-23T15:16:00.000-05:00

Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages
by Leland Gregory

The title doesn't lie. This is a book of stupid, easily disproven trivia, often with an absurd Amerocentric or Eurocentric slant. Among the highlights:

* It's impossible to fight in chariots since the reins require two hands. Luckily ancient cultures were smart enough to design -- get this -- chariots with room for passengers. Gregory claims Hollywood invented this "myth" -- apparently in his world, Homer was a script writer, considering the numerous examples of chariot battles in the Iliad.

* Lizzie Borden didn't kill her parents. The evidence for this claim -- why she was acquitted. Just like Klaus von Bulow and OJ Simpson.

* Horseshoe crabs "are survivors of a species that became extinct 175 million years ago." Leaving aside the question of how this is "history," how exactly can an extinct species have survivors? Maybe he means that they're descended from a species that is now extinct, but then so are humans.

* He gives a really garbled interpretation of what the Emancipation Proclamation accomplished, followed by that Lincoln quote that neo-Confederates like to throw around because, removed from context, it makes Lincoln sound like a political opportunist who didn't care about slavery.

* "On November 8, 1918, the United Press Association reported that Germany had signed a peace agreement, thereby bringing World War I to an end.... But the story was wrong. It all started when someone, now believed to be a German secret agent, called the French and American intelligence offices to report that Germany had signed an armistice.... The war did't officilally end until June 28, 1919, with the signing of the Treaty of Versaille[sic]." Technically correct, but otherwise wrong. Fighting on the Western Front ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918 -- this is the event commemorated in America as Veterans Day, and known in the rest of the world as, yes, Armistice Day. The news report was three days premature, not seven months. And the treat of Versailles didn't end the war -- it set the terms of peace between Germany and the Anglo-French alliance. There were many more powers involved with the war, and as many treaties ending the conflicts between each country.

* An account of the 1657 fire in Edo (which Gregory anachronistically calls Tokyo) based upon legend instead of fact.

* "August 8, 1945, two days after the US Army Air Force dropped the nuclear bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima and one day after Fat Boy [sic] devastated Nagasak, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. By doing so, the Soviets were able to partake of the spoils of the Pacific war without actually having to fight in it." The second bomb was Fat Man, and it was dropped on August 9, the day after the Soviets declared war. But far more importantly, the Soviets did fight against Japan in the week between their declaration of war and Japan's surrender -- and in fact, many historians argue that their entry into the conflict was as important to Japan's capitulation as the nuclear strikes.

* He gives a silly explanation of the phrase "sow wild oats," placing its origins in the Middle Ages, when in fact it dates back to antiquity.

* A story about a newspaper that accidentally included a picture of John Wayne Gacy in an article about National Clown Week. A quick google turns up lots of references to the story but no original source -- a classic hallmark of an urban legend.

* He gives a ludicrous account of the Emperor Claudius' death. Too bad no one knows what happened to Claudius -- most historians agree he was murdered, but how, or even where, is a matter of conjecture. Gregory's account is based upon just one of the contradictory versions found among ancient sources.

* "On April 24, 1898, Spain declared war on the United States.... The United States delared war the very next day but, not wanting to be outdone, had the date of the declaration of war read April 21 instead of April 25." April 21 was the day the US declared a blockade against Cuba; Congress backdated the declaration to give post hoc legitimacy to what had been an act of war.

* He repeats the story of Davd Rice Atchison who was allegedly President for one day. The tale is based upon the fact that in 1849 inauguration day fell on Sunday and Zachary Taylor decided to delay his oath for one day. Okay, if Taylor didn't become President on March 4, 1849 because he didn't take the oath, how did Atchison become President if he didn't take the oath either? A careful reading of the Constitution will show that Taylor did in become President on March 4, but couldn't exercise his powers until he took the oath the next day.

* Several examples of battles that didn't take place at the site they're named after. Okay, so what? Land battles are usually named for the strategic objective or a notable landmark in the vicinity.

* Several stories of nuclear bombs being involved in crashes and miraculously not detonating. Nukes are finicky devices -- if they don't go off in a very particular way, there will be no nuclear reaction.

* He claims the term "flea market" comes from the Dutch term for valley market and has nothing to do with fleas. No, it's a direct translation of a French term meaning, "flea market."

* He says sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage" in World War II. Close -- that happened in WWI.

* A downright racist story about the Emperor Menelik II ordering electric chairs be installed in Ethiopia without realizing they needed electricity. Ho, ho, ho, those stupid darkies and their savage ignorance. Gregory must imagine Menelik as something out of a Tarzan movie -- a guy in a loincloth and necklace of bones presiding over primitives from his grass hut. A little googling shows how stupidly offensive this story is.

* He repeats the legend of the Great Military Leader who grew tired of his soldiers wiping snot on their coat sleeves and ordered buttons sewn on to stop them. The story is normally attributed (without source) to Frederick the Great, but Gregory pins it to Napoleon -- during his campaign against Russia. Because it's not like the quartermasters had anything better to do than sew superfluous buttons on hundreds of thousands of uniforms.

* "The confusion abou Napoleon's size arose because after his autopsy, it was reported that he measurd five feet two. The problem is, he was measured based on the old French system of pied de roi ... which was shorter than the modern foot." Do the math. If Gregory's facts are correct (hah!), Napoleon would be shorter than 5'2 in modern units.

It Came from Schenectady

2010-12-23T14:46:00.003-05:00

Barry Longyear is one of the best science fiction authors that nobody knows. He's won just about every major SF award, including a rare triple-crown (Hugo, Nebua, Campbell), yet the work most people will be familiar with is Enemy Mine -- not for the story, which won the aforementioned triple-crown, but won a second Hugo when WorldCon held a retrospective vote to determine the best of the best, but for the second-rate movie starring the not-crazy Quaid brother and the poor-man's Morgan Freeman in horrid makeup.

It Came from Schenectady (a great title that captures the tone of book) is a collection of Longyear's stories from the '70s and '80s (though not Enemy Mine). There are a few clunkers, but on the whole it's a great compilation of golden age-style stories.

We start off with "Collector's Item," which is the most golden agey of the stories, about a teacher who discovers several of his students are having disturbingly similar dreams of an apocalyptic future. This feels very much like a great episode of X-Minus One.

"Dreams," is a Mathesonesque style story about a man who discovers a world of dreams with real-world consequences. Not the best story in the lot -- it could be improved ifthe dreamworld had been more original -- but perfectly entertaining.

"The House of If" is about a security expert hired by the government to text effectveness of prisons. So far he's never found a place that's impregnable, but he may have met his match in an inventor who's created a device for inducing prisoners to experience an entire prison sentence in a matter of minutes. Would be better without the psychobabble towards the end, but otherwise a fine story.

"The Initiation" is more of a long joke than a short story. Amusing.

"The Portrait of Baron Negay" has my vote for the best story in this collection. It's the tale of an artist who has the secret to a unique artform that allows him to paint pictures that induce specific feelings in all who look upon them. But when he's coopted by a brutal regime, he faces a difficult decision.

"SHAWNA, Ltd." is an inconsequential story about space ships powered by philosophy. A little too cute for my taste.

"A Time for Terror" is a servicable tale about terrorism on the moon. Good but nothing special.

"The Homecoming," tells of what happens when a race of space-faring dinosaurs return to Earth after 70 million years to discover that tasty rodents have evolved into humanity. Longyear explains in the introduction to this story that it was an idea given to him by an editor, and he wasn't very keen on it himself. It shows. The story is good, but it feels as though something's missing -- something subtle, downright ineffable, yet tangible nonetheless.

"Twist Ending," is a second take on "The Homecoming," this time with time travel instead of spaceships. In this case, Longyear takes the opportunity to poke fun at the idea of the story. On the whole it's not as good as the previous story, but it does has that missing vivre.

"Catch the Sun," is a wonderful first contact story set on a slowly-rotatng planet where civilization has to keep moving to remain in the narrow habitable zone.

"Adagio" feels like a Twilight Zone story written by George R.R. Martin. (Why, yes, I am thinking of Sandkings, though there are a number of classic TZ eps that fit the mould as well.) A ship crashes on an alien world, and the survivors are bored stiff waiting for rescue. One crewman discovers that certain rocks in the area are in fact slow moving creatures. The man uses his speed to convince the creatures that he's a supernatural creature and orders them to engage in bloody wars against each other.

"Where Do You Get Your Ideas," is another too-cute joke, though as a coda to the book it's somewhat forgivable.

Making the List

2010-11-11T00:20:00.000-05:00

Picked this up after Kristine Kathryn Rusch mentioned it on her blog. A breezy read -- about 50% is bestseller lists, with the rest being commentary on trends in the list over a decade. As someone who listens to a lot of Librivox and other public domain audiobooks, I especially found the lists prior to 1923 interesting -- many authors of that period I only know because they're out of copyright and have no idea how popular they were. Finding out that E. Phillips Oppenheim and Mary Roberts Rinehart were the Clive Cussler and Mary Higgins Clark of their day is fascinating.

The one drawback of the book is that it limits itself to hardcover bestsellers, so all the paperback originals of the 1940s and '50s are left off, including Mickey Spillane who is one of the all time bestselling authors.

Lady Hamilton's Virtue

2010-11-07T00:01:00.001-04:00

You know what I like about historical biographies? There's no sensationalistic scandal-mongering. Biographers can't pay a maid $5000 to dish dirt. There aren't any former-friends or school-mates who can come forward with an axe to grind. Historical biographies are histories and deal in facts, not gossip.

Well, normally.

In England's Mistress, Kate Williams does her damnedest to bring Kitty Kelley-style biography to the 18th Century. The book is more supposition and innuendo than fact.

This is apparent right from the get-go. Emma Hamilton's childhood is shrouded in the obscurity. Just look at her Wikipedia entry and note how little info there is about her early life. Yet Williams spends several chapters here, spinning a salacious story out of nothing.

We start with Emma's father. Practically nothing is known about him apart from his name (Henry Lyon), occupation (blacksmith at a local mine) and that he died shortly after Emma's birth. Williams concludes that he didn't die in a work related accident. Her evidence for this is that there's no record of an accident (reasonable but hardly conclusive) or that Emma's mother received a pay-out from the mine (more compelling, but still not conclusive). Williams also discounts the possibility that Henry was tubercular, based on the premise that Emma's mother, Mary, wouldn't have married him if he were (reasonable, but women have been known to behave unreasonably out of love). But then Williams doesn't discuss any other diseases that might've killed a working man in the 18th Century; she jumps straight to her preferred theory -- that Henry died from alcoholism or a booze-related incident. Her evidence is simply that alcohol-related deaths were quite common among the working-class of the time.

Okay, all that's fairly reasonable, and if Williams just left it there I'd be fine with it. Henry's dead, doesn't matter how, let's move on. But Williams doesn't do that. Instead, she builds an even more tenuous theory on top of her already shaky conclusion, and decides that either Henry must've committed suicide, or Mary killed him. The evidence for this is simply that Mary left the town where they were living and moved in with her parents -- she must've had something to hide!

Because, y'know, a young, widowed mother would never move back to her parents for financial reasons. The most absurd part comes when Williams claims, no source provided, that widows at the time were often suspected of witchcraft and it would've been dangerous for Mary to remain in the mining town. Um ... what? Henry died in 1765, thirty years after England repealed the laws against witchcraft. I suppose some ignorant hicks might've clung to old superstitions, but such an assertion needs good sources, which Williams doesn't provide.

Then for the next several chapters, Williams keeps mentioning Mary's dark secret. Everything about Emma's early life is filtered through this unproven theory, until I reached the point of throwing the book across the room. Alas, it's an audiobook, so I had nothing to throw.

Jailbait in Space

2010-10-26T15:24:00.000-04:00

Rocket Girls
by Housuke Nojiri

The Solomon Space Agency, a semi-private enterprise trying to put a man in orbit, has a problem: their newest rocket design just doesn't work. It keeps exploding on the launchpad. With their backers threatening to cut funding, Director Nasuda decides upon a desperate course -- they'll switch back to an older, more reliable model. The only problem is, the old rocket doesn't have enough payload capacity. By stripping down the capsule to bare essentials and putting their astronaut on a severe diet, they should be able to get into orbit by the end of the year.

Unfortunately, astronaut Yasakawa isn't too keen on this plan -- he thinks 110 pounds is a little to thin. But the SSA has a stroke of luck when they stumble upon young Yukari Morita, a Japanese school girl who came to the Solomons to look for her dad, who went missing many years before on his honeymoon. Twisting her arm, Nasuda soon has Yakari in astronaut training.

Sound silly? It is. Yukari is the only sane person in the entire book -- rocket scientists, physicians, even cosmonauts, behave like boobs. Nor is it simply that this is a YA novel where the kids are smart and adults idiots, because when SSA recruits a second teenage astronaut, she proves just as spacey as everyone else. I had a hard time with the humor at first, but that changed around page 40 when Yukari had her first class with Flight Director Kinoshita, who couldn't believe that a 14 year old girl didn't know integral calculus and reverse Polish notation.

"It doesn't have an equals button."

"Of course it doesn't!" He looked like he might burst a vein. "Haven't you heard of reverse Polish notation?"

Yukari brought her hand down on her desk with a bang. "Obviously not!"

"Then I'm going to spend the next five minutes drilling it into your head. When I'm finished, you'll never want to touch a normal calculator again."

I don't know why, but that scene flipped a switch in my head and suddenly I got the humor. When the next scene came and the chief of security put Yukari into a live-fire exercise on her first day of survival training, I had no problem with the absurdity.

Yet despite all that, the book is hard-SF -- Nojiri strains plausibility occassionally, but the technology is mostly stuff that exists, only better. The biggest stretch (so to speak) is the skin-tight spacesuit SSA designs for Yukari. It's only intended for use in the capsule, but it does work in vacuum provided the wearer is shaded from the sun. Nojiri notes in his afterword that when he originally wrote the book in '95, he considered the suit to be impossible tech, but MIT is conducting research into similar technology.

Overall the book reads like an old fashioned Heinlein juvenile, except Yukari could kick Podkayne's ass back to Mars.

The Lord of the Sands of Time

2010-10-06T23:14:00.002-04:00

Japan, AD 248

(A story set in Japan before the emergence of samurai? Oh, Issui Ogawa. That explains it.)

Miyo, the oracular Princess Himiko, has left the palace to walk through the countryside with her bodyguard Kan. They climb Mount Shiki and spy the distant harbor of Suminoe. Kan wonders if any of the ships they see might be from Wei, or Kentak, or Roma.

(Roma? Did the 3rd Century Japanese know about Rome?)

Miyo answers that the distance makes it unlikely -- the embassy she sent to Roma had lost half its ships on the roundtrip voyage.

(Diplomatic contact between Japan and Rome? That doesn't sound right at all.)

But sea trade has been improving, and it's only a matter of decades before permanent trade routes can be established. Already Japan has had contact with the red-skinned men of Kentak beyond the Eastern Ocean.

(Wait what?)

The men of Kentak and Roma had been eager to exchange laws and discover that Japan, like all lands they know, follow the Law of the Messenger, an ancient commandment for all people to cooperate with their neighbors to ward of the Disaster that must eventually come.

Suddenly a mononoke, a giant insect-like monster appears and tries to kill Miyo. Kan defends her, but he's no match for the beast. Then a mysterious figure appears and slays the mononoke. The man introduces himself as O, a messenger from the future, and warns Miyo that this mononoke was just the vanguard of an army that's gathering beyond her borders.

O, we soon learn, is an android from the year 2598. The mononoke, or ETs, have wiped out all life in the inner-solar system, and humanity has retreated to the outer system and extra-solar colonies. The war had stalemated, with what little momentum remained on the side of humanity, so the ETs constructed time machines to take the war into the past. Humans respond by dispatching an army of androids to the past to defend the timeline.

All fairly standard stuff. But the book is much better thought-out than most time-war stories I've read. For one thing, neither side mucks about with subtelty -- no one bothers with covert-ops to kill great leaders before they're born, or to wreck some important historical event. In fact, the Messengers have totally written off their original timeline and only wish to establish a victorious future. When they emerge in a past era, they immediately contact the powers that be, tell them the situation, and ask for help. Unfortunately this doesn't always help, and many of the new timelines fall to the ETs. And even if the Messengers do emerge victorious in one era, the ETs can just travel downwhen a few more centuries and start over.

As both sides move further into the past, they deplete their supplies. The ETs have to rely upon what they can build in each time, while the Messengers bootstrap local cultures to a level that can stand against the enemy. By the time both sides reach the 3rd Century ... well, things are pretty grim for both sides.

However, no matter how bad the situation gets, the book itself remains optimistic. Our Heroes may be fighting against a massive zerg rush with their backs literally to the sea, but the tone never flips to "Doomed, doomed, doomidy-doomed" mode. Just as in Tolkien, you know there's a eucatastrophe waiting to happen. When it finally comes, it borders on a deus ex machina, even though it follows logically from the rules laid out for time travel.

One thing I dislike about much SF is the way protagonists always have a post-Enlightenment mindset no matter what sort of culture they're from. Ogawa avoids this nicely, having Miyo be more alien than O. At one point, O describes the American Civil War to her and Kan, and they both respond in horror at the cruelty of the North for wanting to free slaves (they believe slaves would die without masters). Although Miyo's a strong female character, she is in no way a feminist in the way Robert Jordan's or George R. R. Martin's women are. She dislikes her position of mystic royalty, for which she was selected Lama-like, but she doesn't whine about it the way most Western heroes in the Campbellian style do. Instead of avoiding the Call to Adventure, she shoulders the responsibility because it's her responsibility.

O, for his part, is more than human without any of the pinnochioisms usually found in such characters in Western science fiction. He's not the sort to ask, "What is this love which you speak of?" He does have a quest for meaning in his life, but it's an entirely human one, not much different from what Mandella goes through in The Forever War.

The ETs, however, get no development whatsoever. They're nothing more than your typical bug horde, with no signs of reasoning despite their obvious technological prowess. We eventually discover that they were created by an alien race to wipe out humanity for reasons that would make the Minbari say, "Dude, that's screwed up."

The book is a mere 200 pages but packs more in than a thousand page doorstopper. One subplot of the book involves a Messenger who's composing a novel about caterpillars defending a tree from crabs that want to prune it. This allegory of the war, even half finished, is said to be longer than the Mahabhrata. We're given ten pages about timelines that Harry Turtledove could turn into a ten book series, and glimpses of dozen more equally epic. But Ogawa restrains himself to keep the story on track.

The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made

2010-08-23T12:49:00.000-04:00

This was a horribly disappointing book. While there are a few chapters devoted to interesting sci-fi ideas that never got off the ground, or books that were optioned for films and never made, mostly it tells the tales of good ideas that became bad movies. Except not even that. For example, there was never a good idea attached to Alien 3 -- the studio just wanted a sequel by a certain time, story be damned.

Almost all the information in this book can be gleaned from other sources. Want to know what went wrong with Alien 3? Read Wikipedia and the IMDb trivia page, find William Gibson's script online, and watch the 2.5 hour docu in the Quadrilogy boxset, and you'll know as much as David Hughes, since I suspect that's what his research consisted of. Among the sources he cites in the Alien 3 chapter is the "Alien 3 Movie Special," which, if I'm not mistaken, was the EPK that HBO ran before the movie came out. Elsewhere he quotes sites like Coming Attractions and Ain't It Cool News. If you're a movie geek, you probably know everything in this book already. If not, you probably won't care.

Time Traveles Never Die

2010-06-17T00:08:00.000-04:00

Time Travelers Never Die is about a science fiction writer named Jack McDevitt who's read a bunch of historical biographies and decides to write a novel that incorporates them all, even though there's no rhyme or reason why a time traveler would pick these random points in history.

The "story" begins with David attending his friend Shel's funeral, only to find, upon returning home, that Shel is waiting for him. Shel and Dave are time travelers, so the fact that they die at some point in time doesn't mean much as long as they avoid going to that point in time.

We then get the obligatory flashback to explain how they became time travelers, and eventually learn how Shel died. Shel's dad, Michael, actually invented the time machine, building it into an iPod -- er, sorry, "qPod". When Michael doesn't show up for dinner with his son, Shel goes over to his house and finds it empty. The police are no help, but Shadowy Government Agents show an interest in Michael's disappearance.

Shel gets a hold of some of his dad time machines and, after figuring out how they work, goes back to find out what happens. Dad gives a big infodump, explaining that this storyverse uses a completely deterministic model of time travel, so anything that will have happened has had happened already and we're just not aware of it. If a time traveler attempts to change anything, he'll either suffer a heart attack or his machine will malfunction and dump him somewhere "safe" for the timeline. Thus Shel's very act of going back to warn his father creates a causality loop that prevents his father from showing up.

Dad says not to worry, he'll just make a note to skip ahead in time and show up after Shel went back to warn him. But first he's going to go through with his plans to tour history.

Shel returns to his home-time, but his dad never shows up. Deciding that his father must've gone back to visit his hero, Galileo, Shel recruits his friend Dave, who knows Italian, to help him out. But Galileo turns out to be a dead end. So they try the civil rights march in Selma, which Michael had also expressed an interest in. When that doesn't work, they try the Library of Alexandria, and this and that and the other place. Eventually time travel becomes as much a hobby to them as a quest.

There's really not much of a plot here. McDevitt might as well have thrown in some musical numbers and Dorothy Lamour and called the book The Road to Alexandria. Occasionally one of the travelers will get in trouble with the locals and the other fellow will have to come to his rescue using the Bill and Ted theory of temporal mechanics -- i.e., if you want to get into a locked room, just promise yourself that once you're inside, you'll go back ten minutes and unlock the door.

Some of these adventures are interesting, but their accumulation doesn't add up to a plot. Even the search for Shel's dad comes off as a threadbare MacGuffin, and the explanation for Shel's death is just an excuse for a Bill and Ted style heist wrapped up in a big timey-wimey ball.

The other major problem with the book is that it's like that joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about how time travel has made all times the same. People in Renaissance Italy and ancient Greece don't even seem like foreigners, much less people from pre-modern societies -- in fact, they come across as more modern than the redneck yahoos in Selma, who are the only characters who seem historically realistic. Shel and Dave make little attempt to blend in on their travels apart from learning languages -- which they do preposterously fast, even with dead languages -- but people just accept that they're travelers from distant lands. When Shel shows people a photo of his father, they just say, "Wow, I've never seen a portrait like that! What is it?" And Shel explains that it's some new technique from his land, which satisfies everyone. He even flashes his qPod around a few times without consequences.

Overall, the book's a quick, short read, never boring, yet nowhere near as interesting as the premise should be.

Cacaphonous Babblings!

2010-05-31T14:50:00.000-04:00

Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe
by Donald Burleson

When you pick up a book by a college professor about H.P. Lovecraft, you might expect an analysis of his stories, his cross-referencing of other authors' works, his philosophical views, not to mention some of his ookier ideas on race.

Donald Burleson does none of this. Instead, he spends 160 pages babbling non-sense like an undergrad trying to finish a 1000 word paper on a book he didn't read. A typical example:

"The striking thing, immediately, about the title 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' is the particular manner in which it describes the text. Since the story, in form, is a statement -- Randolph Carter's legal statement to the questioning authorities, perhaps even under oath -- the title refers very closely to the text itself, not so much like a label that merely reads 'Milk' on a bottle of milk, but more like a label on such a bottle that goes so far as to say, 'This Bottle of Milk.' The story 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' is the statement of Randolph Carter, as its title pointedly proclaims."

Burleson goes on like that for three pages, before finally deciding that maybe the title means that Randolph Carter is the statement.

Gott in Himmel!

Dude, Lovecraft wrote a story in the form of a statement to the police, and titled it for what it is. There's really nothing more to it.

Every chapter is like that. The one for "The Colour out of Space" contains a lengthy meditation on the Indo-European root of the word "colour". "The Cats of Ulthar" -- well, "Ulthar" is kinda like "ultra," and "alter" and thus "alternate" and "altercate."

I can understand an undergraduate spewing this non-sense, since they by and large spend their days drunk or stoned, but Burleson is paid for this sort of navel-gazing "analysis."

(NOTE: I have an English degree. I stuck to medieval and Renaissance literature and creative writing as much as I could to avoid this stuff.)

City of Dragons

2010-05-31T12:38:00.000-04:00

Kelli Stanley tries very hard to make City of Dragons a hardboiled mystery in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The problem is, the story is based around a colossal cop-out.

It's set in San Francisco of 1940, an era of racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the other nastiness that used to be an accepted part of our culture.

Now, there are several ways for an author to deal with such a period. One is the honest approach of James Ellroy -- acknowledge that your characters are all bigoted jerks, even the supposed liberals who support the civil rights movement. But having such blatantly hateful characters is a turn-off to many readers, so most authors take the alternate route of just ignoring the nasty parts of history. Sure, they might throw in details indicating that things aren't as peachy as they seem, but they avoid having characters deal with any of the ookier aspects of society. This is certainly a cop-out, but it's not unreasonable -- many novels of the period did the same thing. If the author's focus is on the story or characters and not the socio-political problems of the era, it's okay to do this.

But Stanley tries to have it both ways. Her version of San Francisco, 1940 is full of racial strife. Whites look down on blacks, Asians, Mexicans, and even people from the swarthier parts of Europe. The Chinese hate the Japanese and vice versa. Women who get out of line are all considered whores or sluts. That's all realistically done. But her central character, Miranda Corbie, is none of that. She was a nurse in Spain. She's an ex-prostitute who sympathizes with her former coworkers. She gets along with homosexuals. She's upset by the treatment of Jews in Europe. She cares about the Rape of Nanking. She even opposes those who mistreat Japanese-Americans for what their relatives are doing across the sea.

In short, Miranda is a completely modern character who's been transported back to the 1940s. There's not even a minimal attempt to explain why she doesn't share the prejudices of the time -- we're just supposed to accept her anachronistic world-view. This allows Stanley to portray the world as realistically bigoted, while winking at the reader and saying, "Weren't these people awful," like a kinda Mary Sue who's there so the reader doesn't have to sympathize with a realistically unpleasant character.

That's just the biggest problem I had with the book, but there are several others.

For one, Miranda is a chain smoker. Nothing wrong with that in a character. But Stanley feels a need to inform us every time Miranda lights up, which is on average once per page. And it's hardly ever, "She lit a cigarette." No. It's "She lit a Chesterfield," except for a brief period when she has a pack from a different brand. I swear, "Chesterfield" probably occurs in the text more often than "Miranda." An editor could easily have removed two-thirds the references to her smoking, and Miranda still would've come off as a chimney.

In an afterword, Stanley discusses how much research she did for the book -- every phone number, every address, every business mentioned in the story, she claims, existed in 1940. If an author is going to claim that level of research, it would do not to have any obvious mistakes in the text. Like, oh, referring to a gun as a "22 millimeter." Okay, 22 mm is just about one inch -- that's a bullet twice as wide as what a .50 callibre machine gun fires. What she meant is a .22 callibre gun, which fires a bullet about 6 millimeters. I've never even touched a gun, and I know that.

This is one of the worst books that I've ever read all the way to the end.

Attack of Jury Duty

2010-05-09T23:24:00.001-04:00

So last month I had the wonderful experience of jury duty. And I don't mean I wasted a morning sitting in a court room only to be rejected during voir dire. No, I got selected to hear a two week long civil case involving everyone's favorite subject -- highway safety.

I'm going to skip the whole selection process -- everyone who's called for jury duty and rejected tells that part, whereas I made it through all that to the part that's interesting. The only thing I'll say is, if you walk into the courtroom and the bailiffs are bringing in extra tables because there isn't enough room for all the lawyers, RUN AWAY.

I'll start with the basic facts, the things none of the parties disputed.

Back in 2004, Michael Snyder, a recent college graduate, took a job directing traffic at road construction sites. On the morning of July 19, Lee Crawford was driving down the road where Michael happened to be working. Crawford was chewing tobacco at the time, and as he approached the work-zone, he couldn't locate his spit-cup. He took his eyes off the road for about six seconds, and when he looked up again he was bearing down on Michael. Crawford slammed on the brakes and tried to steer out of the way, but it was too late. The car struck Michael at 40+mph. When the paramedics arrived, they pronounced him dead at the scene.

A simple but tragic accident, right?

Now here's the name of the case:

David and Mary Snyder on behalf of the estate of Michael Snyder
vs
Huntfield Estates, LLC
Ryan, Inc.
CHS Traffic Services
Lee Crawford
VIP Limo
Glen Lee and
The estate of Heather Strachan

(According to the depositions we saw during the trial, there were actually two additional defendants at some point. Whether the Snyders dropped the case or the parties settled out of court, I have no idea.)

So how do you get from a very straight-forward accident to a lawsuit against seven (or nine) parties?

Well, Huntfield Estates is a huge subdivision in the area, full of quarter million dollar homes. At the time of the accident, Huntfield was still under construction. Because of the size of the development, the state Department of Highways required they add turn-lanes around the entrance. Huntfield contracted the job to Ryan, the company laying the roads inside the development.

Now something I didn't know until this case -- road construction companies don't put up any of the signs, cones, Jersey barriers, or other safety equipment you see around work areas. That's all handled by specialty subcontractors, which also provide any flagmen necessary to direct traffic. In this case, all that was handled by CHS, the company for which Michael was working.

DOH recommended that the companies employ Traffic Safety Plan Case A-9, which specifies a certain layout to the work site. Under A-9 there were supposed to be four signs in the direction Crawford came from:

Roadwork Ahead
Shoulder Work Ahead
Lane Ends 1000 Feet
A sign with a flagman glyph

The first two were supposed to be semi-permanent signs with blinkers on top that would remain in place for the entire duration of the project. The second two were supposed to be temporary signs that would go up only when the work-zone was active. On the day of the accident, the first set of blinkers were dead, and the Lane Ends sign was not in place. If the site had been set up properly, the Snyders claim, the accident wouldn't've happened.

On the day of the accident, Crawford was allegedly working for VIP Limo. Despite the title, the company has nothing to do with limos -- it's actually a taxi service for Medicaid patients. Glen Lee is the owner of the company, and Heather Strachan was Crawford's alleged supervisor. Medicaid rules say that companies like VIP have to use vans to transport clients, but Crawford was driving Heather's mother's car at the time of the accident. He had two of VIP's alleged clients in the car -- a mentally disabled boy who used VIP to get him to a special school, and an older woman who was on her way to a doctor's appointment. Medicaid required that someone other than the driver be in the car to supervise the child, so Heather was there too.

Notice all those allegedlies in the last paragraph? That's because what I've been describing so far is the plaintiffs' version of events. Some of the defendants had radically different stories, with VIP's side of the case entering Peyton Place territory. And on top of that, with all the parties involved you can guess that there was a lot of finger pointing among the defendants.

For example, Crawford's entire defense was pretty much to agree with everything the plaintiffs' lawyer said. That's because the way the trial was set up, the jury's job was to apportion responsibility between Crawford, Huntfield, Ryan, CHS, and Michael, with the payout being proportionate to their liability. In other words, if we found Crawford deserved 70% of the blame, Huntfield and Ryan 5% each, CHS 15%, and Michael's own actions giving him 5% of the responsibility, and then we awarded the family $1,000,000, Crawford would have to pay $700,000, CHS $150,000, etc. And if we found VIP/Glen Lee, and Heather Strachan liable, they'd be on the hook for at least some of the judgment against Crawford. So it was in Crawford's best interest for the jury to put as much blame on the other parties as possible.

The problem was, Crawford wasn't a credible witness. He's a doddering old man now, and I got the feeling that if one of the lawyers said, "If I represented to you that the sky was green, would you agree?" he'd say, "yes." He'd done several depositions which contradicted what he said when the plaintiffs questioned him, and when defense lawyers confronted him about it, he seemed completely lost.

And of course the other defendants wanted to put all the blame on Crawford. Which was pretty easy since in those depositions, he admitted to not only seeing the three signs that were present, but seeing Michael as well, though he wasn't sure if Michael had been standing in the road or on the side.

Now the plaintiffs' brought in an expert who calculated that, given the terrain, Crawford would've seen Michael at 500 ft -- which even the expert admitted was twice the distance Crawford needed to stop. The state police did their own study and concluded that the sight-line was over 700 ft, while CHS brought in their own expert who went out to the site and took pictures that showed that someone standing where Michael had been, would've been visible from the waist up at 650 ft, and from the knees up at 600 ft.

Huntfield, Ryan, and CHS all joined together in their main defense, which was that any reasonable person who sees someone standing in the road, or even on the side of the road, would keep his eyes forward and be prepared to stop, even if there weren't ANY signs around. Huntfield and Ryan also had the additional defense of, "Hey, we hired CHS to keep our people safe. They're the experts on traffic safety. We shouldn't have to double check their work -- if we were qualified to do that, we wouldn't need them."

CHS's defense was that Michael, though he'd only worked for the company a couple months, had passed not only the flagman exam but the traffic manager test. He was, in fact, in charge of the site on the day of the accident, and any missing signs or inoperative lights were his fault.

And then we come to VIP's defense. cue soap opera music VIP is headquartered in a town called Keyser, which is about 80 miles from here, and at one time they employed both Crawford and Heather as drivers. The company found that they had enough clients in this area that they decided to open a local office. Around the same time, Heather had her license suspended, so Glen Lee decided to do her a favor by making her the manager of the new branch. Instead of obtaining proper office space, VIP decided to rent a house, install an office in one room, and sublet the rest of the place to Heather. Crawford began working out of this branch, and he'd stay at Heather's place during the week and return home to his family on weekends. Soon enough, he and Heather were more than just co-workers, if you know what I mean.

In June, the Keyser office began to receive complaints about the way Heather was operating her branch. At the end of the month Glen Lee went down to meet with her. A huge argument ensued, and Glen fired her. He couldn't kick her out of the house because she had a lease, and he didn't want to go into the place and retrieve VIP property, so he didn't have access to the branch's client list. He had to reconstruct it from Medicaid paperwork. He also set about getting all the phone-lines transferred to Keyser.

In the meantime, he learned that Heather wanted to set up her own Medicaid transport company with Crawford as one of her drivers. So he gave Crawford an ultimatum that expired on Friday, July 16. When the day came, Crawford turned in his keys and his company cell phone. Thus on the following Monday, when the accident took place, Heather and Crawford were acting on their own, using Heather's mom's car to transport two VIP clients who didn't know about the changes. Heather hadn't yet set up her own company, and without a Medicaid contract she had no way of getting paid for the run. She and Crawford were just hoping to retain the clients when they got the new business going.

Of course, the plaintiffs' claimed that this was all a load of horsehockey. One of the VIP vans had broken down the week before, so the company needed an extra vehicle on Monday. After the accident, VIP fabricated the whole story, not only to avoid liability in Michael's death, but because Medicaid required they use vans -- if they admitted Crawford was working for them on that day, they'd lose their contract! Allegedly.

The evidence for this alleged conspiracy was pretty thin. One point was that the company cut a check to Crawford on the 20th, and mailed it out with a letter forbidding him from setting foot on the branch office. VIP's response was that they normally do payroll on Tuesday morning, and in fact they didn't even hear about the accident until that afternoon. They told him to stay off the property just to screw with Heather -- since she was subletting the property, VIP had no power to keep Crawford out of anything but the actual office, but they were hoping to scare him off.

Then there was the phone thing. The plaintiffs called Glen Lee's wife as a witness, since she was the office manager in Keyser, and presented her with a blow-up of the bill for the company cellphone issued to Heather. The lawyer had a whiteboard covered with various numbers for VIPs offices, and went through pointing out all the places they appeared on the bill.

At first, this was really exciting, because I was expecting some great Perry Mason moment where the lawyer would put together all the pieces and prove a conspiracy. It never came. One problem, which none of the lawyers nor the witness pointed out, but which everyone on the jury noticed, was that most of the calls to VIP were billed as one minute. Which we all know means they lasted between 1 and 59 seconds. There was one 15 minute call, but that came at the end of the month when, according to VIP, they'd transferred the number to a new phone.

When the plaintiffs called Crawford to testify and his own lawyers cross-examined him, they tried to bring up that he'd been using VIP's lawyers during the depositions, when his story had been more favorable to VIP. However, VIP's lawyers objected that the line of questioning wasn't appropriate for cross-examination. At first the judge was willing to make an exception since Crawford's health was so bad that he couldn't come back for the defense portion of the trial. But after a sidebar, the judge reversed himself and told us to disregard the questions.

All this about VIP came out during their cross-examination of plaintiff witnesses. Then came their turn to present their side of the case. They probably should have just rested and let the weakness of the plaintiffs' case speak for itself. But instead they called two former employees, a husband and wife, to corroborate their side of the story. Everything was going fine until the plaintiffs started cross-examining these people. Turns out that the two had been fired because the wife had been embezzling from the company. Under cross, they also admitted to lying on their mileage sheets and using company vans to shuttle people to Atlantic City on weekends.

So, yeah, that's how I spent half of April. In a few days I'll do another post on actual deliberation process (including the idiot woman who didn't understand basic concepts like "preponderance of the evidence," and "burden of proof").

Stormy Weather

2010-03-22T12:30:00.001-04:00

This is extremely disappointing for a Carl Hiaasen novel. It's as funny as Hiaasen's best, but the plotting is horrible. This is one of those books with two storylines that eventually converge, but they do so in the most haphazard way, and afterwards it's not clear why the characters don't just go their separate ways.

Both plots center upon a massive hurricane that strikes Miami. In one we have a tourist couple, a pair of newly weds who were honeymooning at Disneyland. When the hurricane comes, the husband, who's a bit of a schmuck, decides to tour the disaster area. After an encounter with an escaped monkey, husband and wife become separated, and the husband ends up in the hands of deranged ex-governor James "Skink" Tyree, who will be familiar to readers of Hiaasen's other books. Skink kidnaps the husband for, well, no reason other than to make a tourist suffer. It's his thing.

The wife hooks up with a man named Augustine, the owner of the escaped monkey whose interests include long walks on the beach, donating money to charity, and juggling skulls. Together with a state trooper, who happens to be Skink's ex-bodyguard, they arrange to get the husband back.

Meanwhile, we have a second, more interesting plot, involving criminal low-lifes (this being a Hiaasen novel, you can be sure they're terminally stupid) who want to cash in on the hurricane by pulling some insurance fraud. Matters are complicated because one of the men involved is a mobile home salesman, and another a building inspector. Both were lax in their jobs -- the salesman lying through his teeth about the ability of trailers to withstand hurricanes, and the inspector having conducted his inspections from his car. A number of people have had their homes destroyed because of these yahoos, and some of them want revenge.

What strains credibility is that these two men didn't know each other before they got involved in the scam, yet they've angered the same man who comes looking for both of them.

You spend the first half of the book wondering how these two plots will come together, and when they do you'll be asking, "Wait, that's it?" One plot line gets resolved halfway through the book, and then the characters from that story get drawn into the other part of the book for no good reason. They're like, "Oh, wow, that looks like an interesting story, and we have nothing to do now that we've finished our plot, so let's jump into that for no reason."

As entertaining as the book is, I just can't recommend it as highly as Hiaasen's other books.

The Return of Harper Blaine

2009-09-24T00:15:00.002-04:00

Poltergeist by Kat Richardson

Harper Blaine is back. This time she's called upon to investigate a paranormal experiment at a local university to determine if any of the participants is faking supernatural phenomenon. But then one of the particpants, a ringer put in by the professor to monitor the experiment from the inside, turns up dead, Harper has to face a vengeful poltergiest created by the collective unconscious of the groups.

Poltergiest fixes many of the complaints I had about the first book in the series. The too-good and boring boytoy spends the entire book out of the country (though the much more interesting Quentin is relegated to just a handful of scenes). Harper has had time to learn about the world of the weird and no longer goes around asking things the audience guessed five pages before. Plus the nature of the supernatural problem in this volume isn't such that anyone who's seen a few horror movies can guess.

The major problem I had here was that the experiment isn't well explained. At first we're told that the professor has gathered up a group, told them about a (fictitious) dead woman he wants them to contact and locked them in a room to conduct a seance. Sounds like an interesting psychological study to see how the group manufactures a personality for the ghost, or how the power of suggestion makes them see evidence for the ghost's presense, and the professor's consternation makes sense. Only about halfway through the book does it become clear that purpose of the experiment is to find evidence of paranormal phenomenon. The set-up makes little sense for this -- the professor has rigged the room so he can simulate some supernatural effects and get the group in the right mind, which would only make the Amazing Randi scoff twice as hard.

Still, this is hardly the first mystery novel where the details don't make sense upon examination. The important thing is that following the detective's process is entertaining, and Harper is that.

The Hunters out of Space by Jack Kelleam

2009-09-24T00:07:00.002-04:00

Gutenberg text

Audiobook

Jack Odin returns to the underground world of Opal only to find it in ruins. The nefarious Grim Hagen has turned traitor, laid waste to the kingdom, kidnapped the princess ~~Dejah Thoris~~ Maya -- and fled in his spaceship. With the help of the faithful dwarf Gunnar, Odin obtains his own ship and pursues Hagen across the galaxy.

The first thing you have to know about The Hunters out of Space is, it makes absolutely no sense. Maybe if I'd read the previous Jack Odin story that'd be different, but I doubt it. I mean, people living in a Hollow Earth building a space ship? It's like Kelleam set out to write a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs then switched to Doc Smith halfway thorugh. And what's with everyone having names straight out of the Volsungasaga/Nibelungenleid (Gunnar, Hagen, Neeblings, etc.)? It's like a really bad episode of Lost in Space, but less coherent.

Six-Shooters and Bug-Eyed Monsters

2009-09-23T23:41:00.001-04:00

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

Cole is a cut-rate Han Solo. Hell, he's a cut-rate Lonestar. At least Lonestar had his Winnebago with wings; Cole lost his spaceship because he didn't have enough money to pay for parking Investco IV. This is bad news because Cole owes a lot of money to Kenneth, a multi-eyed, multi-tentacled alien who's threatened to lay eggs in Cole's brain if he doesn't pay up by morning -- which is, oh, about three hours away.

Running out of options, Cole decides to steal his friend Teg's spaceship. Teg -- not a cut-rate Han Solo. Teg's the real thing. He's so good at it that his ship is festooned with advertizements. But Cole nonetheless manages to get the ship.

There is, however, a catch. Teg's already made a deal with Philip and Nora to transport some goods to planet Yrnameer, and they're in no mood for Cole's shennanigans. He reluctantly agrees to help them, as soon as he figures out how to work the damned ship.

Meanwhile, Yrnameer (which is a contraction of "Your Name Here," the official designation for all planets without corporate sponsorship, of which this is the last, legendary, example) has problems of its own. A spaceship full of bandits has crashed near the main township, and the leader demands the Yrnameerians turn over all their crops to feed his men. If only some good-hearted rogue would fall out of the sky to help the Yrnameerians ...

And then there's the corporate research satellite where experimental brain implants have gone haywire and turned everyone into ravening zombies (this is a known hazard of modifying humans, whether through neural enhancement, life-extension, or singing penises (a technology that is thankfully mentioned but never seen)).

As you might guess, Rubens is trying to be an American Douglas Adams. The result is mixed success. The biggest problem is that Rubens doesn't have Adams' ear for funny product names. Guns are called "fire sticks" and FTL is handled through devices called "bend boxes"; companies all have names like InVestCo, which is never going to compete with Sirius Cybernetics.

Rubens other problem is that he's a writer for The Daily Show. While this might sound like a good sign for a humor author, there is a huge difference between writing a funny monologue and a funny novel. Repetitious features of his writing can go unnoticed on TDS because they get spread out over many days and weeks, whereas books get read in a handful of sittings. There's an alien race whose name is unpronounceable by humans (the audiobook renders it by plucking what sounds like a rubberband and sproinging a spring), which gets repeated well past the point where it's amusing.

Nor does writing for a late night talk show give Rubens much experience with plotting. TSoY is highly episodic, with at least one subplot introduced only to be dropped on the next page. But the book is actually best when it's episodic -- whenever the story approaches too near the plot, Rubens tends to get bogged down and forgets to be funny. But individual sections, especially the parts on the zombie space station and the introduction of Peter the 'Puter are hilarious.

Still, the problems are mostly on the level of first novelitis, and while the book isn't up to the standards of Adams or A. Lee Martinez, it's better than much of Pratchett's early work, including the first few Discworld novels. Hopefully in a couple more novels, Rubens will be a solid recommendation.

A Book You Really Can Refuse

2009-09-01T01:42:00.001-04:00

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

"The book is always better than the movie" is one of those truisms that people repeat uncritically. But anyone who's widely read knows that's not true at all -- many great movies are based upon awful books. The two most commonly cited examples are Peter Benchley's Jaws and Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Now personally, I don't even think Jaws is that great of a movie, so reading a book that's even worse has no appeal to me. But the supposed awfulness of The Godfather interests me. So when I found a copy of the audiobook for $6 I decided to give it a try.

I overpaid.

The characters have less depth than Mr. A. Square. All the complexity they have in the film is due to the cast. The book tells us how Vito went from a hard-working immigrant kid to the head of a major crime family, but we don't know what went on in his head as he made the decisions. He just moves through the stations of the plot however it serves Puzo's purpose. Likewise with Michael, you can imagine how the death of his girl would push him towards becoming a ruthless mafioso -- and imagine is the only choice you have since Puzo refuses to provide any details of his thoughts.

And then there are the pointless subplots that compose a good quarter of the book -- like the chapter devoted to a minor female character who has a loose vagina. I'm not making that up -- about a twelfth of the book deals with this girl's gynecological problems. It has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot -- the girl's own connection to the story ended fifty pages before, and even that wasn't much more than a couple dozen paragraphs that could've been excised without the slightest effect on the story.

And these are only the artistic flaws with the novel. There are numerous technical and factual errors, such as a girl in 1947 referring to James Dean, eight years before his big break in East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. Puzo wrote the book in the late '60s; this error is akin to an author today referring to Tupac as a popular musical act in the '80s.

Most of these errors center upon the fictionalized Sinatra character. His plotline -- another one that's barely connected to the main story -- concerns him trying to get a role in a big war movie. But in 1947 Hollywood was done with war films -- they figured no one would be interested now that the war was over. Films like Battleground only got made when there was a director willing to go to the mat to get it made. And the film not-Sinatra wants into is clearly From Here to Eternity -- after the production finishes, he contacts the author (i.e., James Jones), who'd been screwed around by the studio, and kisses his ass so he can get the rights to the guy's next book (Some Came Running), which has a part perfect for not-Sinatra's pal Nino (Dino). But, as with the Dean error, the book is set a decade before FHtE came out.

Reading this train-wreck of a novel, it's no wonder Robert Evans had so much trouble finding a director for the film. Evans was the only guy to realize that the film adaptation could transcend the source material.

How Tough Are Nails, Anyway?

2009-08-21T22:42:00.001-04:00

Rachel Morgan is a sexy, tough-as-nails private-eye --

("Wait, wait, wait. Didn't you just review this book?"

"No. You must be thinking of Greywalker."

"What's the diff?"

"That was about Harper Blaine, a dark haired greywalker who fights crime. This is about Rachel Morgan, a red-headed witch who--"

"Red-headed witch? You haven't even started the review and I don't see how this can get much worse."

"It does. I have two words for you -- 'Mary Sue.'"

"Dear god."

"Well, I don't know for sure that Rachel Morgan and Kim Harrison have the same personality. But the photo on Wikipedia shows Harrison as a red-head. And Rachel inspires an amazing amount of loyalty from her colleagues despite the fact that she's bumbling, incompetent, and quite possibly mentally disabled."

"Care to expand on that last part?"

"There's this one scene -- actually it's several chapters long -- where she turns herself into a mink --"

"A sexy mink."

"Ahem. Yes. A sexy mink. To sneak into the villain's headquarters. She gets caught quite easily and put in a hamster cage. The whole time she's held prisoner, she keeps shouting at her captor any time he does something insidious."

"So she retains the ability to talk despite being a mink?"

"No, that's just it. She knows no one will understand her."

"Are you sure she wasn't just talking to herself?"

"No, her comments aren't asides -- they're attempts to communicate, as though she expects people to respond."

"Well, she is a mink. You can't expect human-level intelligence."

"Nope, she retains human-level intelligence when in rodent form. Although 'human-level' is giving her a bit too much credit. She's constantly walking into traps when everyone around her is shouting, 'Don't do it! It's a trap!'"

"So the other characters are better?"

"More intelligent, but annoying in their own ways. There's Jenks the pixie who spends all his time either complaining or prying into people's personal lives. And Ivy the vampire, who has some creepy sado-sapphic attraction to Rachel, whom she blames for enticing her. Oh, and there's Keasley, the kindly old next door neighbor who offers them sage advice throughout the book."

"What, like Wilson in Home Improvement?"

"Yeah, apart from race he's exactly like Wilson."

"Apart from ... dear lord, you don't mean he's a magical negro?"

"Well, he's magical and black, but there's no need to use that kind of language."

"No, no, 'magical negro' is a term Spike Lee coined to describe characters like Bagger Vance and Mother Abigail -- kindly, seemingly mystical blacks whose entire raison d'etre seems to be to offer wise words to white people."

"Then yeah, he's a magical negro."

"This really does sound dire. Is there at least a compelling plot?"

"Not really. Rachel, Ivy and Jenks are officers in a magical police force until one day they decide to go into business as P.I.s. Ivy has enough money to buy her way out of her contract, and pixies are freelancers, so they're free to leave. But Rachel breaks her contract against her boss's will, so the cops send hitmen after her."

"So they kill anyone who quits the magic police? I thought this was urban-fantasy set in a world similar to our own?"

"It is, but it's alt-history in a world that's undergone a major plague. See, in this timeline Crick and Watson have a female partner who makes a major breakthrough in DNA that shifts the focus from physics to biology. Genetic engineering takes off instead of things like rocketry."

"Ah, so the geneticists unlock the genes that allow humans to do magic?"

"Oh no. Witches, vampires, and whatnot have been living in secret among humanity since the beginning of history. They just made their presence known after a gengineered plague wiped out the majority of humanity."

"Okay, let me see if I have this straight -- the book is an alt-history that uses a science fictional point of departure to establish a fantasy world -- which is in fact a secret history?"

"Yeah."

"That's a bit convoluted, don't you think?"

"Just a tad."

"There's no way this book can be as bad as it sounds."

"It's not bad, really. Kinda silly and too soft-boiled for my taste, but if you need something to read on a plane-flight, it'll do."

"So that's you're review."

"Yeah. This isn't a book worth spending more than a couple paragraphs on.")

The Grey Lady of Seattle

2009-08-19T22:22:00.001-04:00

Greywalker by Kat Richardson

Harper Blaine is a sexy, tough-as-nails private-eye. After one of her cases ends with her having a near-death experience, she begins to see odd things. Her doctor can't find anything physically wrong with her head, but he recommends she talk to his friend Ben Danziger, a paranormal researcher at a local university.

Ben and his witch wife Mara tell Harper that she's seeing the Grey, a netherworld between our plane and the afterlife. At first Harper blows them off as flakes, but as weird things continue to happen, and her two newest cases take on supernatural aspects, she returns to them for advice.

The key to a good mystery novel is that the audience can't figure things out faster than the detective -- it can happen occasionally, but more than once per book and the detective starts looking like a dimwit. The problem with Greywalker is that the audience knows going in that it's a fantasy novel, but Harper doesn't figure it out until fifty pages in and she takes another hundred to accept it -- and even then, she remains slow on the uptake. There are numerous points in the book where it's clear to readers that, hey, that guy who called you while your phone was disconnected is a ghost, and that mysterious pale guy over there is a vampire, and yet Harper takes another twenty pages to figure things out.

But she's an interesting enough character that she's able to overcome this flaw -- as long as it doesn't become a recurring theme in the series, like Harry Potter's continued ignorance of the Wizarding society even seven years after he entered it.

She's also helped along by a colorful supporting cast. Ben and Mara make for interesting mentors, especially in that they aren't very good at it. Greywalking is a rare power which neither of them have. They can give more generalized advice about the supernatural, but when it comes to the Grey they rely upon second-hand sources. Harper's also aided by Quinton, a computer hacker who hooks her up with a DIY security system after her office is broken into. He is by far the most interesting character after Harper -- and maybe not even after her. Despite being extremely smart, he doesn't seem to have a steady job, subsisting as a freelance technical trouble shooter. He also evinces a degree of paranoia -- not the "can't sleep, clowns will eat me" sort, but the practical kind of someone who has good reason to believe someone is out to get him. In many ways, he resembles what Harry Caul might've become after the events of The Conversation. Then there's Will, an auctioneer whom Harper meets in the course of an investigation and takes a romantic interest in. He's the weak link among the secondary characters. His defining characteristic seems to be that he's really good looking and makes Harper feel all tingly. His personality is so whitebread that he doesn't even have crust. It's as though Richardson set out to create a character more bland than Riley from the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And speaking of, we also have vamp characters. They aren't the pure evil found in the Buffyverse, but neither do they sparkle or spend their time moping like Lestat. These are scary guys who lose their humanity as they get older, but they don't become unreasoning and they can be bargained with as long as you have something to offer them.

But the odd thing is, Harper meets this entire supporting cast for the first time in this book. Even though she's already an established PI when the story begins, she apparently didn't have any friends or professional acquaitances apart from one cop who's only mentioned in passing. Then in the course of a week she meets all these people who become important figures in her life. At times it seems like she didn't exist before the first page of the book.

I suppose I'll have to read the sequels to find out if Richardson fixes this problem.

Mary Shelley's Lolita

2009-08-17T02:12:00.001-04:00

Mathilda by Mary Shelley

When Mathilda's mother dies giving birth to her, Mathilda's father is so overcome with grief that he abandons his new-born daughter to relatives and departs England for ... well, that's never quite explained. Maybe he goes to fight Turks, or becomes a slaver in Africa, or a whaler in the South Seas. I like to think he becomes a gentleman adventurer.

Mathilda in the mean time grows up to be a sensitive young woman who spends a lot of time in the woods, rather like a demonic woman in an Arthur Machen story. (Mathilda was never published in Mary Shelley's lifetime, and didn't see print until the 1950s, so it couldn't've been an influence on Machen, but the style of narration is very similar to The White People.) Mathilda only has a handful of books to read growing up -- Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Cowper and Livy. Fans of Shelley's more famous creation may recognize an echo here -- in Frankenstein the monster educated himself by reading the sole contents of an old hermit's library -- Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Plutarch.

One day, Mathilda's father returns and takes her under his care. At first all is well as her father tries to make up for all the years he's missed. But Mathilda looks a little too much like her mother, and this stirs uncomfortable feelings in her father. He sinks into a deep meloncholia and refuses to explain its cause to Mathilda. As he seems on the point of wasting away, Mathilda goes to him and demands the truth. He tries to disuade her, telling her the truth will ruin their lives. But like the wives of Adam, Lot, and Bluebeard, Mathilda can't leave well enough alone and she badgers her father until he confesses his incestuous thoughts.

Displaying some sensibility, Mathilda immediately locks herself in her bedroom. But the next day she finds her father has departed the house, leaving behind a note saying that this time he plans to never return. Mathilda, her horror having subsided, decides to follow him, but by the time she catches up, he's killed himself.

Mathilda returns to the custody of her relatives, but she decides to fake her death and run away to start a new life. She buys a house on a heath, which from the descriptions sounds like it's just down the road from Heathcliff and Cathy. While there, she encounters a young poet who falls in love with her. But even though her father never did more than express his feelings, Mathilda is emotionally disturbed and unable to have a normal relationship.

Although the book contains no hint of the supernatural -- not even the Radcliffian spooky stuff that turns out to be a skeevy old priest trying to frighten Our Heroine -- it is as clearly Gothic as The Monk or The Castle of Otranto. If Mathilda has more psychological depth than the poor besotted women who populate most Gothics, that doesn't change the nature of her character from the poor innocent who is sexually menaced; likewise Mathilda's father is, to large degree, a more sympathetic, Byronic version of Manfred or Ambrosio. (And is it any coincidence that the object of Ambrosio's lust was a girl named Matilda?) The poet who falls in love with Mathilda is the same sort of callow youth who fills so many of Radcliffe's novels, though here he has no hope of winning his love's interest.

Although not a ripping-yarn like Frankenstein, Mathilda is a fascinating and perverse slice of Shelley's mind.

Lester Del Rey vs Healthcare Reform

2009-08-17T01:14:00.001-04:00

Badge of Infamy by Lester Del Rey

Daniel Feldman is a pariah -- once a successful doctor, his lisence has been revoked after he performed a life-saving operation outside a designated hospital zone. With nothing for him on Earth but a life of poverty, Feldman stows away on a ship to Mars.

Mars is ... well, you know the deal. Colony world kept in hock to Earth, receives only the minimal resources necessary to keep it profitable, limited medical facilities, etc. The colonists, naturally, are willing to accept even a pariah doctor. And Medical Lobby tries to stop him, but legal shenanigans keep him out of jail.

In the meantime, an ancient Martian plague has been unleashed, but terrestrial authorities are slow to react and refuse to listen to Feldman's warnings. Can he find a cure before it's too late for both planets?

Is the Pope Catholic?

The story lumbers along as though blindfolded, blundering into the plot seemingly by accident. Feldman spends much of the book being acted upon instead of acting -- or even reacting. He's like Candide, minus the humor or ironic insights, which is like a pizza without any cheese, sauce or toppings.

The other characters are as much plot-puppets as Feldman. His ex-wife goes from irrationally hating him ("How dare you save a man's life! You should be cast out of society!") to realizing how wonderful he is, with no plausible reason for the change of heart. It's as though she had a switch in her brain that randomly flipped from "shrewish haridan" to "devoted love interest." But at least she had a character arc. Everyone else just serves to push Feldman where he needs to go.

About the only bit of interest in the book is the huge infodump that forms Chapter 2, which seems oddly apt given current events:

There had been a medical lobby long before, but it had been a conservative group, mostly concerned with protecting medical autonomy and ethics. It also tried to prevent government control of treatment and payment, feeling that it couldn't trust the people to know where to stop. But its history was a long series of retreats.

It fought what it called socialized medicine. But the people wanted their troubles handled free--which meant by government spending, since that could be added to the national debt, and thus didn't seem to cost anything. It lost, and eventually the government paid most medical costs, with doctors working on a fixed fee. Then quantity of treatment paid, rather than quality. Competence no longer mattered so much. The Lobby lost, but didn't know it--because the lowered standards of competence in the profession lowered the caliber of men running the political aspects of that profession as exemplified by the Lobby.

The Crying of Lot 48 by Thomas Pynchon

2009-08-06T02:19:00.000-04:00

One of Pynchon's weaker works. After establishing an interesting mystery, the answers come too quickly and are nowhere near as good as the set-up. This is a book that could stand to be five times as long -- under 800 pages and Pynchon doesn't have enough canvas to express his craziness.

The fact that his new book doesn't require a forklift to carry has me worried.

Spacial Delivery by Gordon R. Dickson

2009-08-06T01:01:00.001-04:00

The planet Dilbia lies in the Neutral Zone between the Federation and Klingon Empire, and according to the terms of the Organian Peace Treaty, control of it will go to whichever power can prove they can best develop the planet.

Er, no. Wrong universe. But the similarity is strong enough that I wonder if David Gerrold had crumbs of this book in his mind while writing "The Trouble with Tribbles," the episode that established the terms of the Organian Peace Treaty.

Anywho, Dilbia is a star system strategically located between human and Hemnoid space. Its inhabitants are a rustic, ursine race that is suspicious of both races, though they feel they have more in common with the bellicose Hemnoids.

When the human ambassador insults the Streamside Terror by saying he's not worthy of marrying the Mayor of Humrog's daughter, the Terror responds by kidnapping Ty Lamorc, a human sociologist who's been studying the Dilbians. To get her back, someone must first satisfy Dilbian honor by besting the Terror in a fight.

Enter John Tardy, a decathlete and biochemist who is drafted by the government for this most important mission. But the Terror lives high in the mountains. To reach him, John needs a guide. Someone who knows the wilderness. Someone who is so well respected that no one would dare hamper him.

Someone like Hill Bluffer, the postman.

And so John, now given the Dilbian nickname of "Half-pint Posted," is strapped to the back of a bipedal bear and carried through the wild country of Dilbia so he can eventually wrassle an even bigger bear.

Although written as a science fiction novel, the story resembles nothing so much as Robert E. Howard's Breckinridge Elkins series -- no one's quite as dim as ol' Breck, but both feel like a tall-tale that's being told with the same sensibility as the comic scenes in a John Ford movie. Which is great if you're a person who finds that sort of thing funny, and completely baffling if you aren't.

Me, I think Ken Curtis and Hank Worden are the best parts of The Searchers.

Grrr, Arrrgh, Teenage Sex

2009-08-05T02:16:00.001-04:00

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

Mary's having a bad week. First Travis, the boy she's in love with, asks her best friend, Cass, to marry him. Then her mother strays too close to the fence around their village and gets bitten by a zombie. Mom opts for exile beyond the fence instead of being put to death. When Mary's brother Jed returns from patrol, he blames her for not killing mom herself and kicks her out of the house. With no home and no husband, there's only one option open to Mary -- the Sisterhood, the religious order that rules the village.

Well, the Sisterhood does give Mary one other choice -- she can join her mother beyond the fence. Not surprisingly, Mary chooses the Sisterhood, though her curiosity soon brings her in conflict with Sister Tabitha, the head of the order. Mary grew up with tales passed down from her great-great-great grandmother about life before the zombiepocalypse, and she dreams of one day finding the sea, but the Sisterhood claims that there is nothing beyond the fence but the forest and zombies.

One day the Sisters discover a girl beyond the gate. They keep her existence secret, fearing that the news will undermine their power. Mary manages to talk to the girl once, but learns little save that her name is Gabrielle and she came from the world outside. Then Gabrielle disappears.

A few days later a new zombie appears in the woods. This one is a rare kind of mutant zombie, faster and smarter than the others. And it wears a red jacket just like Gabrielle had. Soon thereafter the zombies breach the fence and overrun the village. Mary, Jed, Cass, Travis, and several others escape onto the path beyond the gate. The path is itself enclosed with a fence, so they're safe as they make their way from their village. But is there anything at the other end of the path? Can Mary use a clue left by Gabrielle to find a place of safety? Or was their village really humanity's last holdfast?

The Forest of Hands and Teeth is being marketed as a YA novel, which seems rather odd given that the zombie genre is typically the most nihilistic and gruesome in existence, beating even the nuclear war genre. Ryan keeps the gore fairly minimal -- entrails don't get strewn around like crepe paper at least -- but the bleakness remains high throughout, especially after Mary's village is destroyed. The ending is somewhat happy, in the way the original Dawn of the Dead was upbeat.

The YA aspect is most pronounced in the romantic subplot -- which at times seems to be the main plot -- which involves a love quadrangle between Mary, Cass, Travis, and Travis's brother. These scenes really made me appreciate how well J. K. Rowling handled the romances in the Harry Potter books. Here the romantic bits all read like that scene in Angel where Cordelia and Wesley try to explain Buffy and Angel's backstory.

Yet despite many scenes where Mary ends up with her body pressing against Travis or his brother, with long descriptions of their skin and body-heat, she never gets around to having sex, even when she's barricaded in a house with Travis for a month and they both declare their love to each other.

The world-building in the book is often weak. The villages and paths are surrounded by fences -- but fences that zombies can reach through, grab people, and bite them. I guess chain-link was too expensive during the apocalypse. No one's thought to build a second line of walls, ramparts, or entrenchments behind the fence, so all it takes is one breach to cause major problems for the village. Bill and Josella Masen could do better in a week, while these people have had at least six generations. During breaches, the villagers hide on flets until they can repel the zombies -- one village Mary encounters even has an elaborate series of walkways connecting the flets, yet the people still resided in houses under ordinary circumstances. No one's thought to build Baba Yaga huts as their primary dwellings.

Mary's village had a group called the Guardians who maintain the fences, including those along the paths outside the village. Mary's band gets beyond the maintained area in a few days of travel yet never encounters a path that's become impassable -- not even around abandoned villages. Robert Frost's statement about walls applies just as well to fences -- all it takes is one washout, or a persistent tree root, or even an acorn falling on the path, and in a few years the fence is going to fall over.

But for all these flaws, the book is enjoyable. And at least the zombies don't sparkle.

Waiter, What's This Fantasy Doing in My Political Thriller?

2009-07-29T18:50:00.001-04:00

Olen Steinhauer's been getting a lot of praise for his new novel The Tourist, so I decided to give him a try. But I'm not going to blind-buy a hardcover novel, so I opted for one of his older and cheaper works: Liberation Movements.

This is a story about Armenian terrorists blowing up a plane en route to Turkey, and the police investigation at the departure point. Fairly standard stuff, except that the police are state security officers in an Eastern European Ruritania during the Cold War[1].

The police learn that the terrorists had simply intended on hijacking the plane and making demands, but something spooked them into detonating their bombs. Then the police become interested in one passenger in particular, a woman who had been held in a mental institution until a few weeks before. But when they try to find the hospital, they discover it doesn't exist. This in turn leads to a startling discovery -- the "hospital" was a front for a counter-intelligence operation.

You see, the "patients" at the hospital were all supposed psychics, and the security service had leaked to the Western powers that the staff had made extraordinary breakthroughs in harnessing telepathic powers. This was enough to lure spy after spy to the facility, where the security service murdered them. Steinhauer's obviously been listening to too much Coast-to-Coast AM -- whatever experiments the CIA did with psychics, it was never given high priority, and the idea that they'd risk numerous agents to infiltrate the East Bloc equivalent is far fetched. But we're still within the realm of possibility.

And then comes the big twist -- the girl on the plane was really psychic. She had the power to, like, tap into the cosmic-all, man, and see the connections around us. Synchronicity, dude, synchronicity -- like when you're thinking about a plate o' shrimp, and then someone says "plate" or "shrimp." Or "plate o' shrimp". And, like, she used this power to extrapolate the future, so she knew the terrorists would hijack the plane, and she knew what she had to ensure everything ended peacefully.

Except it didn't quite work out that way -- the puny human mind isn't capable of comprehending the allness of the cosmos, and it only took one overlooked fact for events to spin out of her control.

This twist came late enough in the book that I finished it instead of hurling it against the wall -- but it was a close call. This sort of last-minute genre-bending twist is very angry-making. I've read numerous fantasy, horror, and science fiction novels with similar plot elements, but in those cases the authors tell you up front, "This isn't a book set in the mundane world. Crank your suspension of disbelief to 11." I'm fine with that. But when a writer grounds the story firmly in reality and then reveals in the last chapter, "By the way, this is actually a fantasy," it ruins the whole thing.

But there's a subtler problem -- the way Steinhauer presents the twist, you get the sense that he doesn't see it as a violation of reality. It's like the difference between The Dead Zone and The Ghost Whisperer, or the Illuminatus! and The Da Vinci Code -- one is written by people who know they're spinning a yarn, while the other feels like the writers believe the premise. This adds an earnestness to the story that undermines my suspension of disbelief.

I know Steinhauer isn't the first author to do something like this, but I'm blanking on other examples. There are tons of TV shows as examples, but what about literature?

[1] This is apparently the hot new genre in mysteries and political thrillers. Steinhauer's written five novels in this setting, and Tom Rob Smith has two mysteries set in the Soviet Union of the 1950s.

Rocket Men by Craig (not T.) Nelson

2009-07-20T15:48:00.001-04:00

http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Men-Epic-Story-First/dp/0670021032

Rocket Men is a rather preposterous novel about the United States sending a space craft to the moon in 1969. The story begins with the rocket on the launchpad, waiting for blast off, with brief flashbacks to the launch prep, as the administrators make last minute checks on mission readiness and the "astronauts" undergo final training.

(The astronauts are named -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And "Buzz" isn't a nickname -- that's the character's legal name. Thankfully the third astronaut isn't Al American. He's Michael Collins. Why Nelson would name a character after a prominent member of the Irish Republican Army is beyond me.)

Then, just before lift-off, the story goes into an extended flashback. First comes a big infodump on the history of rocketry, from Oberth, Goddard, and Tsiolkovsky, to the German development of the V2. And this is where the book goes off the rails, launching into an absurd conspiracy wherein the Nazi scientists flee from the Red Army and seek asylum in America, where they're welcomed with open arms. This introduces a bizarre subplot involving these former Nazis settling in a small town in Alabama, where they establish themselves as members of the community while working on new rocket systems.

At the same time, the Soviets launch a bit of tinfoil into space with a radio transmitter. They follow this up by launching a crockpot with a dog inside, and cooking it on reentry. These feats, combined with a perceived Soviet superiority in ballistic missiles, prompt a young American President to brashly promise that the US will place a man on the moon within ten years.

What follows would be, in a movie, a musical montage, as the American space agency perfects the technology necessary and locates the best-of-the-best to fly the ship. The book loops around on itself as we finally get back to the launch and the mission proceeds.

And what a bizarre mission. Instead of building a ship that can go from the Earth to the Moon, land, take-off and return to the Earth, the US has built a vessel that will go into lunar orbit and then launch a shuttle craft for the actual landing. Nelson offers some technobabble about why this is a better design, but it never entirely makes sense. To his credit, though, Nelson does make the engineers dubious of the idea when it's first proposed, having them point out all the flaws.

The upshot of this mission profile is that one of the astronauts -- Collins -- has to stay on the ship while the other two take the shuttle to the surface. Exactly what Collins does while they're gone is never explained. Sounds like the most boring job in the world -- the ship is too small for him to do much, and the computers are absurdly weak, so he can't even play chess or solitaire.

The best part of the novel is the landing sequence, which features several technical flaws that almost derail the mission. First, the flight computer has insufficient RAM to deal with the sensor input and keeps freezing up. Then, despite the best laid plans, the crew finds their pre-picked landing site covered with boulders. Armstrong has to use an enormous amount of fuel to stay aloft, only sighting a flat piece of ground when he's within seconds of having to abort. The scene strains credibility, but Nelson's writing makes it exciting despite itself.

The actual time on the moon is rather anti-climactic. You'd think something exciting would happen there, but no. No aliens, no disasters, no Great Discoveries that change the way we see the world. The biggest problem faced by the crew is that the touchdown was so soft that it didn't trigger the shock-absorbers and retract the landing struts. As such, there's a three foot gap between the ladder and lunar surface. This renders Armstrong's first words on the moon ironic -- "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." (That's the exact quote -- you'd think an editor would've caught the missing article in the first clause. As it stands, the sentence doesn't make a lot of sense.) The other challenges faced are pretty minor -- the top-soil (if you can call it that) is so thin the astronauts have a hard time getting the flag to stand up; Buzz describes a rock as looking like mica, which pisses off the geologists at mission control.

The crew lifts off and makes an unremarkable rendezvous with the mothership, followed by an uneventful return to Earth.

The characters are borderline cardboard -- everyone who works for this NASA organization is an uber-professional expert who seems to have stepped out of the 1950s. Nelson even mentions this, explaining that the scientists, engineers and astronauts are so focused on their jobs that they don't pay attention to the changing world outside. The only exception is the, uh, let's say "feisty," Buzz. One memorable scene has him arguing about whether he or Armstrong should be the first on the surface. Unfortunately for him, plot-logic dictates that the guy named Buzz must be the wacky sidekick and Armstrong the jut-jawed hero. You just know that in the movie, Armstrong would be played by Leslie Nielsen and Buzz by Earl Holliman. Too bad there's no room for Anne Francis.

The book does well enough in depicting what space might really be like, but this whole "mundane sci-fi" movement does nothing for me. No Robbie the Robot, no sale.

Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay

2009-07-10T14:15:00.001-04:00

Librivox Audiobook
Gutenberg etext

Mars. Barsoom. Desert Planet.

After decades of human settlement, Mars remains an inhospitable place where people are confined to pressurized environments. All trade must go through the Mars Corporation, which is more interested in maximizing profits than making life comfortable for the colonists. Terraforming and adapting crops to Mars are given low priority.

Years ago, a secret organization, the Order of the Phoenix, tried to break the Mars Corp. monopoly. Their leader, Albus Dumble -- sorry, wrong Order of the Phoenix. The Order divided into two groups, both devoted to making humans more like the native Martians. One group, headed by G.O.T. "Goat" Hennessey, wanted to gengineer humans to survive in the low-pressure atmosphere; the other, run by Dark Kensington, sought to unlock powers in the human mind that would allow people to teleport goods directly from Earth. But then Goat betrayed the Phoenix. The government crushed the group and Dark Kensington disappeared, presumed dead.

Now the Order has reformed, operating out of a barber college of all places. And then one day, Dark reappears, apparently unaged and with no memory of the last twenty-five years. At the same time, S. Newell Eli, an agent of the Martian government, with the help of a Terran agent, Maya Cara Nome, are investigating the resurgent Phoenix.

Rebels of the Red Planet is Golden Age pulp at it's finest -- there's nothing too deep here, but it's hard not to get drawn into the rollicking adventure of it all. The characters are standard-issue, but well developed, especially Maya Cara Nome as the plucky secret agent and Newell, who could almost be Thomas Nau's brother.

Monster by A. Lee Martinez

2009-07-07T14:19:00.001-04:00

Judy works the overnight shift as a stockgirl at a grocery store. One night when she goes to the freezer aisle, she finds a yeti eating all the rocky road ice cream. Her manager is nonplussed by this and doesn't know what to do, so Judy takes it upon herself to call animal control.

They send out a cryptobiological containment specialist, a working class stiff named Monster. Monster is a cognizant, one of the lucky few whose mind can process supernatural events. Due to a magical accident early in his career, he has a supernatural power -- or powers; he changes color every time he goes to sleep, and each color gives him a different ability, often of dubious usefulness. His partner is Chester, an extra-dimensional entity who manifests in our world by possessing origami dolls. Monster also has a girlfriend from hell -- literally; she's a succubus. Her demands for constant sex have drained all the fun from Monster's life, but breaking up with her could be even worse.

Monster dispatches the yeti easily enough, but over the next few days he finds himself encountering Judy again and again as she's attacked by more and stranger creatures. Monster realizes Judy is a light cog -- unlike normal people, her mind doesn't just gloss over the supernatural, but neither does it have the structures to retain knowledge of it, so she soon forgets the things that happen to her, creating stories to explain away the damage.

But Judy is also more than a light cog -- she's in the eye of a cosmic hurricane, and the target of an old woman, Mrs. Lotus, who wants to use her for nefarious purposes. And by "old" I mean, older than this universe, and several that came before it. Soon Judy, Monster and Chester are caught up in an epic battle that will decide the fate of the entire universe.

The biggest flaw with Martinez's books is the endings. I don't mean that in the Stephensonian sense where the story just halts without any resolution. Indeed, Martinez is very good at structuring his endings. But in the last fifty pages of his books, the plot always overwhelms the funny, and it's no different here. In a serious novel -- even something as light as Harry Potter -- the final confrontation between Monster, Judy and Lotus would be entirely satisfying. But here it's a detour from the witty banter that makes Martinez's writing so entertaining.

On the other hand, the delightfulness of Martinez's writing covers some flaws in the world building. Chester, Lotus, the angels and demons, and cryptobiological critters seem to belong to different mythoses. There appear to be several layers of creation in this universe, but it's not clear which is superior to which. Are the angels and demons from a different meta-level of reality than the cryptobiologicals? Is Chester's alternate dimension a higher meta-level than heaven and hell or Lotus's reality? They seem like pieces from different puzzles that have been forced together.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the denouement is how it represents a complete game-changer. Most urban fantasies can be classed as either secret histories -- like the Buffyverse, where ordinary people have some sort of block that prevents them from noticing the supernatural phenomenon around them -- or alternate histories -- Marc del Franco's paranormal detective series, for example, where fairies and magic are accepted parts of reality. Monster actually swings both ways -- most of the novel is a secret history, where only the cogs understand what's really going on with the universe, but the climax serves as a point of departure, after which everyone becomes cognizant. Sequels exploring this sudden change could be quite interesting.

Unfortunately, Martinez isn't big on sequels, though I'd certainly buy more books about Monster or Duke and Earl.

Earth Has Been Found by D. F. Jones

2009-07-07T12:29:00.001-04:00

Imagine if John Wyndham had written Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That's Earth Has Been Found in a nutshell.

Planes are disappearing in mid-air and reappearing months, years, or even decades later on the other side of the world. Many of the pilots crash from disorientation, but several manage to put down safely. The passengers and crews have no recollection of the intervening time, and timepieces show that no more than a minute passed between the disappearances and reappearances. The US government labels the phenomenon as ICARUS and tries to keep it secret, though that proves impossible as more and more planes disappear.

The time travelers show no ill-effects -- in fact, they're healthier than ever. But Mark Freedman, a doctor in Abdera Hollow, New York, the home of a tour group that has been affected by ICARUS, notices something odd: many of his patients have developed a desire for raw liver. These patients soon drop into comas and develop cysts that hatch alien creatures.

These critters, named Xenos by Doc Freedman, are intelligent but non-sapient bugs. In their larval form, they're able to shoot a lethal venom from their tails, but after pupating they become vampiric as well. Scientists conclude that Xenos are not responsible for ICARUS, but are instead parasites that, in a reverse of War of the Worlds, were accidentally sent to Earth by the ICARUS entities.

The book follows a three act structure -- the first details the ICARUS mystery; the second the emergence of the larval Xenos; and finally the government's attempts to contain the Xenos -- with a framing story in the far future which -- well, let's just say, the John Wyndham comparison isn't for nothing. The prologue and epilogue have a very Chrysalids vibe.

One of the more interesting threads in the last half of the book is how people begin to think the ICARUS entities, with their ability to bend time and space, might be gods. This is a nice reversal of all those Arthur C. Clarke novels where first contact turns everyone into atheists -- here atheists suddenly start to believe. Unfortunately, this isn't handled well. For one thing, a god with lice isn't much of a god. (To be fair, Jones has a character make this point, though no one pays him any mind.) For another, no one ever says, "Sure, they *could* be gods. Or they could be aliens with sufficiently advanced technology." The Soviet leadership reacts as though ICARUS is definitive proof of god and refutation Marxist materialism. In the hands of someone like Robert Charles Wilson, this subplot could be great, but Jones flubs it, which undermines the ending.

The Ultimate Weapon by John W. Campbell

2009-06-21T01:02:00.001-04:00

Space patrol responds to a distress call on Pluto and finds a scout ship from an unknown alien race attacking the colony there. The patrol ship is destroyed but two of the crew survive -- who, thankfully, are sooper scientists who can deduce how the alien weapons work based on minimal evidence. They return to Earth and begin developing countermeasures for when the aliens return in force.

And inevitably, the aliens do return. After a little fine-tuning, the countermeasures do work, but the aliens adapt, and humans adapt to the adaptations. Rinse, repeat.

In concept, The Ultimate Weapon bears some similarity to Clarke's Superiority -- only without the irony, wit, and characterization. Which, let's face it, is what makes Superiority a classic of the genre. The Ultimate Weapon is, instead, filled with enough technobabble about magnetic fields, element-90, and proton beams to fill an entire season of Star Trek: Voyager. About 40,000 words worth of technobabble, to be exact. It's a wonder Campbell found room for any plot.

Nor is the technobabble scientific, even by the standards of the Campbell Era. There are more howlers in here than the monkey-house at the zoo. For example, Campbell comments that gravity on Deimos is so light that a man can move a 100,000 ton spaceship by himself. Ignoring for a moment that Campbell is ignorant of the difference between weight and mass, such a ship would still weigh 40 tons on Deimos.

And that's nothing compared to the ending, in which Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allows the Earthicans to build an Infinite Improbability Drive.

Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting

2008-03-18T18:12:00.002-04:00

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the last surviving Golden Age SF authors, is dead at age 90.

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I Never Realized How Much Garfield Sucks Until Now

2008-03-13T12:31:00.002-04:00

Far too many more here.

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BREAKING NEWS! DANNY KAYE STILL DEAD

2008-03-04T19:25:00.000-05:00

You think Fox News is bad? At least you don't live in Wales (unless you do, in which case I'm terribly sorry for you).

Mar 4 2008 by Tony Woolway, Western Mail

HOLLYWOOD star Danny Kaye, who starred on screen, stage and television for more than 40 years, died yesterday at the age of 74.

Kaye, who entered Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon, died of heart failure brought on by intestinal bleeding and hepatitis.

Kaye’s wife, composer Sylvia Fine, and their daughter, Dena, had been mounting a vigil at his bedside. Kaye died at 11.58am London time.

Danny Kaye would have been the envy of Walter Mitty, the fictional dreamer portrayed by Kaye in one of his most memorable film roles, as the comic actor rarely repressed an urge to master a new skill.

[...]

Born David Daniel Kaminsky on January 18, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, Kaye was the son of an immigrant Ukrainian tailor. After leaving high school at 17 without a diploma, he got early experience as a comedian on the so-called Jewish circuit of summer hotels and camps in the Catskill Mountains.

Now those of you good with the maths might note that 2008-1913=/=74. In point of fact, Danny Kaye died 21 years ago yesterday. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a story.

Now excuse me, I'm going to edit his Wikipedia page to reflect this news story.

Resolved: The Breakfast Club is Fascist Propaganda

2008-02-28T01:29:00.001-05:00

The 1980's. The decade that gave us such classic films as Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Goonies. Alas, it is also the decade that gave us the evil of John Hughes. Now, I know a lot of you are going to say, "Hey, Ferris Bueller was cool!" and "I liked Weird Science." Well, I have news for you: you've fallen victim to John Hughes' brainwashing. Hughes' films present a distorted portrait of America, with disturbing undertones about the individual's place in society. Hughes' almost fascist view of America has helped create a culture where you must fit in -- or else.

Right now, let's focus on The Breakfast Club, Hughes' allegorical film about an American high school. One Saturday morning, five teenagers show up at school for detention. Now by coincidence, each student represents a major social clique in the school. The characters are so archetypal that they don't even need names, just titles: Molly Ringworm is the prom queen; Emilio "The Forgotten Sheen" Estevez is the jock; Judd "Rodimus Prime" Nelson is the tough guy; Anthony Michael "Type Cast" Hall is the (surprise!) nerd; and Ally "What Happened to My Career?" Sheedy is the freaky girl. At first they all hate each other, but as the day progresses they bond, get stoned, destroy each other emotionally, and have lots of wacky adventures (all set to catchy pop-tunes).

Typical '80's teen-comedy, right?

That's where the subversive elements come in. The movie is funny. Funny enough that you don't realize the insidious message until much later. You see, as with most comedies, The Breakfast Club ends with the characters forming couples. However, simple math shows that the five characters can only form two couples, with one person left out. Now, most people who've survived high school would expect for the prom queen to hook up with the jock and the freak to hook up with the nerd, or, maybe, the tough guy. After all, freaks are usually nerds who got teased too much in elementary school and started wearing black.

But Hughes doesn't fulfill these expectations, instead offering a twist with disturbing, almost McCarthyesque undertones. You see, the prom queen gives freak girl a makeover in the last five minutes, making her look beautiful (well, as beautiful as Ally Sheedy can be). Suddenly the jock falls in love with her, completely forgetting her kleptomaniacal tendencies, inability to tell the truth, and use of dandruff in art. The lesson here girls: if you style your hair and wear the right clothes, you can get a date with a big brawny guy who has the brains of ... well, Emilio Estevez. No one cares if you're insane, so long as you look normal and do your best to fit in.

The nerd, at least, has the brains to recognize the situation. He notes that when they get back to school, no one will talk to him, pretending they never bonded with him. He rails against the unfairness of the system, but no one offers to give him a makeover, and he's left, in the end, writing the assignment the group had been given at the beginning of detention. So, here we're told that the duty of a nerd is to do the work of everyone else. The lesson Hughes offers in The Breakfast Club is essentially that personality and intelligence don't matter, just superficial qualities like appearance. Compare to Starship Troopers where the beautiful fascist kids are glorified, and Doogie Howser is tolerated only for his psychic powers.

Thundercats vs Silverhawks

2008-02-28T01:15:00.003-05:00

An old article I dug up from my days on the college newspaper:

Cartoon Network, which is the coolest channel for drunken college students to watch while pretending they're still ten years old, has recently started showing Silverhawks. For those of you reading this who were too young to enjoy the great cartoons of the '80's, the Silverhawks were a group of cyborg space cops in the Limbo Galaxy who fought the evil Monstar. The show was produced by the same people who brought us the Thundercats - oh, wait, if you don't remember the Silverhawks, you probably don't remember the Thundercats, you cultural philistine! Okay, the Thundercats were a group of space refugees fleeing to Third Earth, where they fought the evil Mumm-ra. As you can tell, the two shows are completely different.

But, as I was rewatching some old Silverhawks episodes this last week (Man, this is what college is all about!), I noticed how much cooler the Silverhawks are, even though they never quite achieved the popularity of the Thundercats. Let's break it down:

Quick Silver vs. Lion-o - This is no contest. Both were leaders of their groups, but Lion-o was a wimp who couldn't find his Sword of Omens if you shoved it through his puny little chest. Quick Silver came up with plans. Quick Silver could actually win fights without someone coming to his aid. Quick Silver wupped ass.

Blue Grass vs. Panthro - The technical geniuses of both teams are well matched in terms of intelligence, but Panthro has to win for two reasons. (A) He came up with the Thundercat vehicles on his own, while Blue Grass was a glorified mechanic, and (B) Panthro didn't have a guitar-laser he used to play country music, unlike a certain mohawked cyber-redneck.

Iron Heart & Steel Will vs. Tygra and Cheetara - The male/female pairs of both teams. Now, I know a lot of boys had crushes on Cheetara, the leotard clad babe of the Thundercats, but let's face it, Tygra was wuss. In the Silverhawks, both of the male/female pair had the ability to kick mucho butt. But, there's an added twist: Iron Heart and Steel Will are brother and sister, making the duo (and anyone who's watched the show should agree with this) incestuous. Five points right there for subverting the minds of America's youth.

Copper Kid vs. Wily Kat and Wily Kit - The annoying children in the Silverhawks and Thundercats. The Copper Kid has the added annoyance of being from the planet of the freaking Mimes, but there are two Thunderkittens, and no single character in the history of cartoons can be as annoying as Wily Kat and Wily Kit.

Stargazer vs. Jaga - Both Quick Silver and Lion-o had a mentor/boss character. Stargazer was the head of law enforcement for the Limbo Galaxy, and thus told the Silverhawks what to do, and not much else. Now, it wouldn't take much for the Thundercats to top him, but they don't. Why? Because their mentor character was a glowing blue ghost. Yes, that's right, the Thundercats relied upon an Obi-wan rip-off to help them through trouble. Dude, that is not cool!

Monstar vs. Mumm-ra - Admittedly these two could be long lost twins, but I have to give Monstar a slight edge in coolness. When Mumm-ra transforms, he goes from a decrepit mummy, to a strong mummy, while Monstar changes from an ugly psycho guy, to a psychotic cyborg. I mean, who's cooler, a mummy or a cyborg?

The Evil Henchmen of Monstar vs. the Mutants - Any cartoon of the '80's stands on how good the villains are. Now, no show ever quite matched Megatron and Starscream (Woo-hoo!) from the Transformers, or even Cobra Commander (Yeah!) on G.I. Joe, but they still had to try if they wanted to be cool. Now, the problem with the mutants on Thundercats was that they were the biggest set of bumbling idiots outside of a Pink Panther movie. But Monstar's henchmen, while bumbling, at least had brains. The only reason the mutants were ever a threat to the Thundercats was that they took orders from Mumm-ra. But Monstar's henchmen actually thought for themselves, and were able to pose credible threats to the Silverhawks on their own.

So as you can see, the Silverhawks are far superior to the Thundercats. On almost every point, the Silverhawks prove better. If you don't believe me, let me just add this: The Silverhawks had no Snarf character.

Fear for the Future -- Fear for Us All

2008-02-26T12:51:00.001-05:00

Cali Lewis giggles with glee as she announces that the world is one step closer to a fully functional coin-operated boy -- the Beijing Bubby Robot Technologies Co., Ltd. has unveiled their new breast massaging robot. The inventors claim this device is for, the "female who is having the period, want to release the swelling pain of breasts," "women, who are under pressure, want to relax themselves," "Women who want to improve the quality of their sex activities," "women who want to have pretty breasts," and "girls who are reaching or having reached puberty, hope to improve the growth of breast," but this is clearly cover for their real purpose -- the elimination of men. This device comes less than a year after scientists announced that they had successfully transformed an ova into sperm. If scientists invent a robot that can open jars of pickles, fix leaky faucets, and be manipulated into going to expensive restaurants for vague promises of sex, women will have further need for men.

Cameron Diaz Should Never Open her Mouth

2008-02-24T23:08:00.001-05:00

Listening to Cameron Diaz present the Oscar for Best Cinematography and talking about Sunrise, the first film to win in the category, it's quite clear that she doesn't know anything except what's on the cue cards. "Ooo, the characters in the film were called the Man and the Woman. Isn't that crazy!" I'm reminded that the Anna Farris character in Lost in Translation was based upon her. I wonder if she knows the difference between F.W. Murnau and Evelyn Waugh?

Does Anyone Know ...

2008-02-23T19:08:00.001-05:00

...where Barack Obama was on 22 November 1963? I've looked all over the Internet, and I can't seem to find anything on the subject. I find it a highly suspicious omission. What is his campaign trying to hide?

Live in Boston? Want to Earn Half a Million Dollars?

2008-02-21T02:12:00.001-05:00

Man, American celebrity scandals suck in comparison to Hong Kong's.

It's been called the equivalent of the 9/11 disaster for the Hong Kong entertainment industry.

Just as the Fatty Arbuckle scandal was the equivalent of the Somme.

Sexually explicit pictures and a steamy video shot by Cantopop icon Edison Chen with female singers and actresses who have shared his bed have spread like wildfire around Asia over the past few weeks.

In a business that carefully grooms starlets with innocent, virginal images, the scandal is threatening to destroy careers and fortunes.

More than 1,000 stolen pictures are circulating of the 27-year-old Chen and eight well-known women, including Maggie Q, Bobo Chan, Cecilia Cheung and Gillian Chung of the Twins duo.

Lucky bastard.

Really lucky bastard.

God damned lucky bastard.

Sonuvabitch.

This week, the Beijing Association of Online Media censured Baidu.com (nasdaq: BIDU - news - people ), China’s dominant search engine, for delaying taking effective action to block the availability of the images to Chinese Internet users, who have caused a spike in traffic in their zeal to find them. It called for Baidu to make a public apology for the harm it has done to the society.

Shot with a Samsung digital camera and stored on an Apple laptop, the photos weren't intended for public consumption by Chen, who has appeared in over 20 Hong Kong movies, including the popular Infernal Affairs trilogy. The pictures were reportedly swiped from his computer when he took it in for repairs at a shop in downtown Hong Kong.

The photos quickly became favorite fodder during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, causing a surge in Internet traffic across China, Taiwan and Hong Kong as the curious rushed to download them.

The affair has proved to be a shocking revelation of the private lives of a new generation of celebrities, many of whom have been portrayed by PR agents as models for today’s youth.

A survey in Hong Kong found more than 30% of high school students have passed the pictures around among themselves and 74% of them brought the issue up with their parents.

"Daddy, what are you looking at?"

"Nothing"

"Is that a picture of Maggie Q?"

"Um ... yes."

"What type of lollipop is she licking?"

"It's a ... testcicle. But they don't taste very good. Or so I hear. You wouldn't like them. EVER."

A lingerie producer on the island of Hainan has rung up roaring sales of knockoffs of the lacy underthings worn by Maggie Q in the pictures, according to the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis newspaper.

Maggie Q should've taken a lesson from Britney Spears -- slimy businessmen can't sell knock-off knickers if you don't wear undies.

For Chen himself, the price he pays for the episode might be far more than lost sponsorship deals.

Hong Kong criminal groups, which are deeply involved in the local entertainment industry, are said to be upset by the damage done to the singers they have cultivated. On Wednesday, the Apple Daily newspaper reported that an underworld figure is offering a reward of half a million Hong Kong dollars to anyone who hacks off one of Chen's hands.

But I guess Britney and Lindsay should be grateful they don't live in Hong Kong.

"I Should Be in a Museum"

2008-02-06T13:53:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to keep an open mind about the new Indiana Jones movie, but really ...

... Indy shouldn't look like he's yelling at kids to get off his lawn.

Better Sex Through High Heels

2008-02-06T13:03:00.001-05:00

Finally, a scientific explanation for why high heels are sexy.

Experts found the high heels toned women’s legs and strengthened pelvic muscles.

In tests, Dr Maria Cerruto, of the University of Verona, Italy, discovered that wearing a pair
of ‘‘moderately high heeled shoes’’ had beneficial effects for a woman’s sex life.

‘‘Heels work the pelvic muscles and reduce the need to exercise them.

‘‘Wearing heels during daily activity may reduce the need for the pelvic floor exercises necessary
to keep that part of a woman’s anatomy toned and elastic,’’ Cerruto said.

She asked 66 women under 50 about their sex lives, exercise regime and shoes.

In tests, their pelvic muscles were more relaxed in higher heels, increasing their strength
and ability to contract.

‘‘Women often have difficulty in carrying out the right exercises for the pelvic zone and
wearing heels could prove to be the solution,’’ Cerruto said.

Manolo Blahnik, whose shoes are worn by Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, said: ‘‘This is wonderful news. I’ve been hounded for years about how bad it is for posture, but
. . . when you put on a high heel it makes life more exciting. For women, it’s a way to appeal to
the male species.

‘‘There’s a limit. Anything over 11.5cm, you can’t walk properly; it’s no longer elegant.’

The Crusader of Clean in the Adventure of the Underage Girls

2008-01-28T16:33:00.001-05:00

Say what you will about Mormons, they sure do give us some salacious news stories.

A Utah retailer of family-friendly tapes and DVDs - Hollywood films with the "dirty parts" cut out of them - has been arrested for trading sex with two 14-year-old girls.

Orem police say Flix Club owner Daniel Dean Thompson, 31, and Issac Lifferth, 24, were booked into the Utah County jail on charges of sexual abuse and unlawful sexual activity with a 14-year-old.

CBS Station KUTV in Salt Lake City reports that the shocking discovery came when a mother found a $20 bill in her daughter’s room last week and questioned her about where the money came from.

The girl confessed that she and a friend had been paid for sexual favors by an older male.

Lifferth was additionally charged with patronizing a prostitute and was also in possession of a prescription drug medication without a prescription.

Thompson's Flix Club was one of several Utah-based video outlets that traded in edited versions of R- and PG-13-rated films, catering to clientele who wanted to watch hit movies without nudity, sex, language or graphic violence.

Such video editing operations came under the gun of Hollywood studios and the Directors Guild of America.

In a case brought by the DGA, a federal judge ruled in 2006 that editing out material (such as Kate Winslet's bare breasts in "Titanic") violated copyright laws. The decision was against a Utah company called Clean Flicks.

Thompson, who was a franchise operator for Clean Flicks, opened Flix Club last year, similarly trading in edited videos but claiming that such editing was for "educational use."

Yeah, he cares about education so much it hurts -- or at least it will soon, in the ass.

Barack vs Bad-Back Jack

2008-01-27T18:19:00.001-05:00

Caroline "My Greatest Accomplishment Was Half of Me Getting Squirted out of My Daddy's Cock" Kennedy is endorsing Barack Obama.

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

Obama is like JFK? How? Obama's father isn't a mobbed-up bootlegger who did business with the Nazis, and is now buying his son an election. His hair isn't shellacked in place. There aren't any slutty actresses even half as classy as Marilyn Monroe around, so who's he going to screw? Lindsay Lohan? Britney Spears? I don't think so. I'm not aware that he has a brother with political ambition, and even if he did Congress outlawed Presidential nepotism after Kennedy. If she's suggesting that he's going to screw up early foreign policy challenges, thus encouraging our enemies to take advantage of him until he has no choice but to play a game of nuclear brinkmanship, I'd hope she wouldn't be endorsing him. I certainly hope Ms. Kennedy isn't suggesting that Michelle Obama will marry Richard Branson or Rupert Murdoch after her husband is assassinated by a left-wing kook. So what exactly does Ms. Kennedy mean, except, "Everybody loved my daddy, so you should listen to what I think."

The Worst Movies You've Never Seen

2008-01-27T13:09:00.001-05:00

Mac's Cutting Edge Technology

2008-01-26T11:15:00.001-05:00

Freak on a Leash

2008-01-24T13:46:00.001-05:00

Don't you love it when people insist on displaying their sexual fetishes in public?

Given that she describes herself as a human pet – and is happy to walk around on a lead – Tasha Maltby is used to odd looks and even odder remarks.

But nothing had prepared her for the reaction of the bus driver who allegedly told the self-styled Goth and her boyfriend: "We don't let freaks and dogs like you on."

Miss Maltby and her fiance Dani Graves were so angered they have complained to the bus company of being "victimised".

The music technology student had this defence of her lifestyle.

"I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life," she said.

"I don't cook or clean and I don't go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It's my culture and my choice. It isn't hurting anyone."

The bus driver, however, has obviously not been listening.

He has repeatedly refused to allow Mr Graves, 25, and his "pet" on to his bus in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Last month, with Miss Maltby on a leash as usual, the couple tried to board a bus at the bus station.

The driver, who was off duty, was standing near the door.

Mr Graves alleged: "He shoved me off the bus. He called us freaks and he called Tasha a dog.

"He said, 'We don't let freaks and dogs like you on'.

"He basically grabbed my T-shirt and slammed me backwards.

"I got a bit angry and called him a fascist pig."

In a separate incident, police were called when the driver, who has not been named, refused to allow other passengers on board after the couple ignored his orders and sat down.

The couple, who live on benefits in a council house and plan to start a family, have been friends for years.

They started going out together in July and became engaged in November.

Paul Adcock, of bus company Arriva Yorkshire, said: "We take any allegations of discrimination seriously.

"Mr Graves has already contacted us directly and as soon as our investigation has concluded we will inform him of the outcome."

Now people like this deserve to be mocked, but denying them access to public transportation is a bit much. As long as she doesn't piddle on the seat, it's no big deal -- and if she does, then she's a bad girl who deserves to be spanked good and hard ....

Mmmmm.

Wait, what was I saying?

Still, I think this story has a very important take-home lesson -- even the ugliest unemployed dork with a horrible sense of style can get a really hot chick to sleep with him.

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Smoke of the Divine Wind on the August Water

2008-01-24T11:42:00.001-05:00

For some reason, I want to hear these guys do the James Bond theme.

Asshats Never Rest

2008-01-23T02:24:00.001-05:00

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Britney Spears Strikes Again

2008-01-22T19:21:00.001-05:00

EXCLUSIVE!

Gibberish in Neutral has learned that Britney Spears struck a deal with the Devil last week to stave off her imminent death from overdose. To effect this, Spears had to agree to let one young, more talented star die for every week she lives past her expiration date. This is why Brad Renfro died last week, and why Heath Ledger died today. (Sadly, though Ms. Spears is infinitesimally talented, Paris Hilton and everyone associated with American Idol is less so.) We at Gibberish in Neutral call upon Britney to rescind her pact and embrace the healing power of Jebus, before more young celebrities die and ruin Terry Gilliam movies.

I Like Tin Butts and I Cannot Lie

2008-01-22T18:50:00.001-05:00

One thing I've learned from Battlestar Galactica and the new Terminator series is that fembots are teh hawt. And if you don't like their personality, you can just reprogram them -- perfect. If God truly loved mankind, he would've done it this way from the start

But given all the possibilities, which model would I select -- a nice pneumatic Six?

Nice, but not really my taste. Perhaps a bot with a little meat on her bones:

Nah, their exhaust ports are too big. Besides, the Crushinator is too high class. Maybe a nice Taminator.

Now we're getting close, but she's a bit too lean. Let's take a look at the D'anna Biers model.

Ah, that's more like it. Meaty but without being too thick. She'd make a nice pair with one of those exotic Boomers:

She's pretty nice too. It's a tough call. And then there's a nice replicant twofer:

Now the Rachel model is exactly to my taste, and I'm betting the Pris cleans up well -- just remove the gunk around the eyes. I think I'll take the pair of them, the D'anna, two Boomers, and a Taminator. Then we can make lots of these:

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Holy Vingean Terminators, Batman!

2008-01-21T21:41:00.001-05:00

Okay, I'm now a confirmed fan of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: John Connor just started talking about the Singularity. I believe this is the first time Vernor Vinge has ever made it on prime-time television.

Airplane vs. Conveyor Belt

2008-01-20T00:56:00.001-05:00

This promises to be the best Mythbusters ever:

My prediction -- the airplane is thrusting against the air, and will therefore move forward regardless of the conveyor belt moving the other way -- essentially the landing gear will spin twice as fast for the same thrust.

The AFI Top 10 Top 10 Lists List

2008-01-19T19:53:00.001-05:00

I've never been a big fan of AFI's endless Top 100 lists that just trot out the usual suspects, but even by their standards this is a pretty crappy list. The top 10 films for 10 genres? And what genres -- "Courtroom Dramas"? Why not just fold that into drama? Sci Fi and Fantasy get separate categories, but there's no horror? They're truly scraping the bottom of the barrel for their lists, and should probably retire the whole thing -- if they want to continue their television specials, why not focus on great actors and directors -- give us a one hour special on Alfred Hitchcock or Cary Grant! Oh, wait, those don't appeal to their demographics.

Criswell Predicts

2008-01-18T22:37:00.001-05:00

You know, I really wish I lived in a world where Criswell's predictions were correct.

Former Child Star Dead -- Not Britney Spears

2008-01-15T23:30:00.001-05:00

Whoever had him in the Dead Pool must be psychic:

Brad Renfro, the former one-to-watch whose acting work was often overshadowed by reports of drug abuse and legal troubles, was found dead Tuesday morning at his Los Angeles home. He was 25.

The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office said that paramedics pronounced him dead at 9:00 a.m. after friends he had spent the previous evening with called 911. Cause of death has not yet been determined and an autopsy could take place as early as Wednesday.

Coroner's Office chief investigator Craig Harvey said that Renfro had been drinking alcohol last night but it's too soon to tell whether that was a factor.

Renfro made his big-screen debut opposite Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon in the adaptation of the John Grisham bestseller The Client when he was 12. He worked steadily over the years but never quite recaptured the buzz that surrounded him as a child star as reports of his struggles with substance abuse outweighed all other publicity.

An L.A. Police Department spokesman said there was no suspicion of foul play, but declined to say whether drugs or related paraphernalia were found in the actor's home.

Renfro's more recent behavior, however, suggested that the Knoxville, Tennessee, native was working hard to get his life back on track.

About a month after agreeing to enter a drug-diversion program in March 2006 in order to avoid jail time on an attempted heroin-possession rap, he told reporters that he had 30 days of hard-won sobriety and was "tired of paying the consequences" for his destructive behavior.

The last film he did, inappropriately enough, an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers.

Holy Child Molesting Spammers, Batman!

2007-12-30T19:32:00.001-05:00

Do spammers become pedophiles because no adult woman would sleep with them, or do pedophiles become spammers because that's the only appropriate job for scumbags? That's the question raised by this thread in a car forum. Short version: guy starts a thread to plug his gambling website, not realizing that his real name is included in his profile and his home address is available through a WHOIS search. A poster puts the spammer's name into Google and discovers that he's a registered sex offender. Much hilarity ensues.

Thus proving Terry Austin's Second Law: Spammers are stupid.

Technorati Tags: stupid spammer, pedophile, chris hansen

Doomed, I Say! Doomed!

2007-09-20T16:51:00.000-04:00

Remember the days when the US dollar was worth something? Like, 2000? Then the BEP decided to make the dollar look like Monopoly money, and now it's worth about the same.

The Canadian dollar reached parity with the U.S. dollar on Thursday for the first time since November 1976.

Known as the loonie because of the bird pictured on the one-dollar coin, the Canadian dollar has been gaining ground on its American counterpart since hitting an all-time low of 61.79 U.S. cents on Jan. 21, 2002.

This week the loonie rose sharply against its U.S. counterpart after the Federal Reserve announced a dramatic half-point cut in its benchmark interest rates. The Bank of Canada, meanwhile, has kept its equivalent rates stable.

Well, at least we finally know Bush's plan for stopping illegal immigration.

Oh Ha-Fucking-Ha

2007-09-16T23:41:00.000-04:00

When Robert Jordan first began writing The Wheel of Time series, it was intended to be a trilogy. But then he decided he had more story to go, and it expanded ... and expanded ... and kept expanding. He kept promising fans that it'd only take three more books to tell the story, but he said that after every freakin' installment. But each volume took longer to write, and less happened in them -- in fact, it got to the point where some of the books were starting before the previous one finished and covered only a week of time, with no plot progression of note.

Then came the eleventh book -- yes, eleven door-stop novels, and still the series was on going -- and tremendous movement took place towards the ending, so much so that people complained it was too rushed and resolutions came out of nowhere. Around this time, Jordan announced he was dying, but intended to finish the series before he died.

He didn't.

He could've completed the series in a timely manner, but he decided instead to draw it out for more money, and now we'll never get the proper conclusion.

I'm never going to start another book series that isn't already finished.

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