All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi (F&SF Oct/Nov 2005) is set in a future where genetically-engineered crops have become ubiquitous, pushed by global corporations after the energy collapse to the point where these crops are all that are grown. In this world, Lalji and Shriram go up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to find someone who can upset this balance of power. The premise is something that has been much discussed lately, and to some extent the interesting part of the story is that someone named Paolo Bacigalupi is writing a story about people name Lalji and Shriram on the Mississippi River. This is yet another example of science fiction writers coming to terms with the fact that the future United States will not be populated entirely with people named Tom, Dick, and Harry, or even Arcot, Wade, and Morey.
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi ("Fantasy & Science Fiction" 02/04) is about soldiers and a dog (again!). But the soldiers are genetically engineered so that they are no longer really human--they can regenerate lost limbs, and eat anything (including the sand and slag of the title). The dog is *not* engineered, and the soldiers have never had any experience with a natural dog. This is probably a good story, but it is also very unpleasant.
THE PIG THAT WANTS TO BE EATEN by Julian Baggini:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/18/2008]
THE PIG THAT WANTS TO BE EATEN by Julian Baggini (ISBN-13 978-0-452-28744-0, ISBN-10 0-452-28744-8) is a collection of a hundred "thought experiments". A lot of them are science fictional in nature or origin, such as "Pre-emptive justice" from Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" and whether "human rights" extend to aliens and/or intelligent non-human Earth species. Others are more mundane--should a Prime Minister accept a ten- million-pound bribe to provide clean water for hundreds of thousands of people in Africa in exchange for a knighthood? This is the sort of book that one cannot read straight through--you want to read one "experiment", then stop and think about it for a while.
To order The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten from amazon.com, click here.
"The Empress of Mars" by Kage Baker:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/25/2004]
"The Empress of Mars" by Kage Baker is a good second choice, with more emphasis on the social and political aspects of Martian exploration and colonization than on the technological issues.
THE BOOK LOVER by James Baldwin:
I like to have a supply of "small" books on hand. These are usually older books, collections of essays or one long essay, printed a hundred years ago or so, that will fit in a pocket easily and are convenient for traveling or just carrying around. There are usually a few, on topics of literature or science, to be found for a dollar or so, at most used book stores. Admittedly, my reviewing them might seem useless, because the chances of you being able to find the same one are pretty slim. But my comments on THE BOOK LOVER by James Baldwin (not the author of FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN) are more general than a review.
Though Baldwin touches on the value of reading, the love of books, etc., his main purpose is to provide a lists (or lists) of books worthy of being read, being collected in one's library, etc. In this he predates Clifton Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan", Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon", and innumerable other books. And reading Baldwin, one can see all too well why these later attempts, those diverting enough, are doomed to ultimate oblivion.
Baldwin wrote THE BOOK LOVER in 1884. (My edition is from 1897.) He can therefore be forgiven for not including works written after 1880 or so. So Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (coincidentally also published in 1884) is not on the list, and Twain is represented only by THE INNOCENTS ABROAD. (At least he made the list with that.)
Baldwin has a basic list of seventy or so books for every teacher and scholar. On this list are George Herbert's poetry and John Keble's THE CHRISTIAN YEAR, but not Walt Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS. (Indeed, Whitman is not mentioned at all, even in the extended lists.) He chooses Charles Dickens's DOMBEY AND SON over his GREAT EXPECTATIONS or A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and includes such classics as CORINNE by Madame de Stahl, HYPATIA and ALTON LOCKE by Charles Kingsley, James Fenimore Cooper's "Leather-Stocking Tales", and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novels. Since then, Twain has pretty much demolished Cooper, and Bulwer-Lytton is known more for giving his name to a bad prose competition than for writing books worthy of being in a "core" list.
When one leaves the area of what might be generally categorized as literature, Baldwin's lists are even more dated and obsolete. Greek history has Herodotus, but no Thucydides. Roman history has Bulwer-Lytton's THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, but no Suetonius. For the period of the American Revolution, he has room for Cooper's novels, but no Thomas Paine or THE FEDERALIST PAPERS. Though he quotes Benjamin Franklin at length earlier, Franklin's AUTOBIOGRAPHY is not on the list either.
(I sent the list for the Roman Republic and early Empire to a friend who is somewhat of an expert on that era. Of the several histories listed, he recognized only one, which he hadn't read. He agreed with the choices of Livy and Plutarch, and added Polybius, who Baldwin had also ignored. On the whole, he seemed unimpressed with the list.)
Political economy has no mention of Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels. Science appears only as "natural history" and omits Charles Darwin. For geography, there is no Richard Francis Burton, though John Hanning Speke, Henry M. Stanley, and David Livingstone are all represented. (Later, Baldwin gives us the list of books Stanley took with him on his expedition. It includes Darwin. Stanley relates how he started with 180 pounds of books, but as the expedition progressed, and illness, desertion, and hunger necessitated lightening their load, he was forced to discard books until finally he was left with only the Bible, Shakespeare, Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus", Norie's Navigation, and the Nautical Almanac for 1877.)
Needless to say, the readings in religion are almost entirely Christian, and when they do include other religions, are often works written or selected by Christian authors.
Now, one must accept that Baldwin was writing in his time and for his time, and that classics, particularly those of the sciences (in which here I include history), will change. So let's look briefly at Clifton Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan"--or at least the version I have, written in 1960.
On the whole, it seems to have held up well, although Fadiman felt even then that he needed to justify the inclusion of John Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. Is D. H. Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS really so core these days? Or Sigrid Undset's KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER? Yes, she won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1928, but if one examines the list of Nobel prize winners up to that time, one discovers that only Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw seem to have stood the test of time.
Alfred North Whitehead's SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD has probably been superseded by other, more contemporary books. THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION by Will and Ariel Durant would probably still make the cut, because of the lack of any serious contender. (In 1960, it was still only by Will Durant, and was only six of its final eleven volumes. The projected volume 7, "The Age of Reason" ended up as volumes 7 through 10: "The Age of Reason Begins", "The Age of Louis XIV", "The Age of Voltaire", and "Rousseau and Revolution". And you thought this sort of thing happened only in epic fantasy series!)
So Fadiman holds up better, but then again, his list is only forty years old, not a hundred and twenty.
And this is precisely why reading this sort of book from decades ago serves as a cautionary tale regarding all the "hundred best," "world's classics," and other such compilations we see today. Harold Bloom may have the right idea--he limits his canon specifically to Western literature, and he makes his list so long that he is unlikely to have any major omissions. What he probably does have--in addition to a list so long as to be fairly useless in choosing core reading--are many books which will fall out of favor in another fifty or a hundred years.
As I said, these lists are interesting, and have some value in the short term. But they shouldn't be considered as set in stone, and labeling such a list as a "Lifetime Reading Plan" is probably only valid for shorter lifetimes than most of us want to contemplate.
To order The Book Lover from amazon.com, click here.
LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD by Jen Banbury:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/05/2004]
Jen Banbury's LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD is a mystery centered around a bookstore and a first edition Jack London, but the first edition is more of a Maguffin than a book--it could just as easily be a bag of flints. And I guess I prefer "cozies" to mysteries with graphic violence. (I haven't gotten to John Dunning's bookstore mysteries yet--I hope they're better.)
To order Like a Hole in the Head from amazon.com, click here.
THE GIRLS' GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING by Melissa Bank:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2008]
My regular book discussion group chose THE GIRLS' GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING by Melissa Bank (ISBN-13 978-0-140-27882-8, ISBN-10 0-140-27882-6) for this month. It is supposedly a humorous novel (or rather, a collection of related humorous stories) but I didn't find it funny at all. I just found the characters either boring or annoying.
To order The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing from amazon.com, click here.
WHEN THE FAT LADY SINGS by David W. Barber:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/31/2003]
I read a humorous (but basically accurate) history of opera, WHEN THE FAT LADY SINGS by David W. Barber. For example, when he writes, "Rossini wrote his last opera, 'Guillaume Tell' ('William Tell'), in 1829," he footnotes it with, "You know: it's the one about The Lone Ranger."
To order When the Fat Lady Sings from amazon.com, click here.
BERTRAM OF BUTTER CROSS by Jeffrey E. Barlough:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/02/2008]
BERTRAM OF BUTTER CROSS by Jeffrey E. Barlough (ISBN-13 978-0-978-76340-4, ISBN-10 0-978-76340-8) is the fourth of Barlough's "Western Lights" books, the first three being DARK SLEEPER, THE HOUSE IN THE HIGH WOOD, and STRANGE CARGO. Those were published in trade paperback editions by Ace, but apparently they did not sell as well as Ace hoped, so this volume (and the upcoming ANCHORWICK) is being issued by Gresham & Doyle.
While the books are part of a series, they each stand on their own. The back-story of the series is that the last Ice Age did not end, so Pleistocene mammals still survive: mastodons, smilodons, and short-faced bears, among others. There are also Lovecraftian touches, connected in part with "the Sundering", which has destroyed all but a small area of civilization, now stuck in a Victorian Era culture--hence place names such as "Yocklebury Great Croft" and "Upper Lofting, Butter Cross, Wuffolk".
I am really glad that there is a publisher willing to publish Barlough, because I love his style. Here, for example, are the opening paragraphs of BERTRAM OF BUTTER CROSS:
"In the springtime of our grandparents--that is to say, when our grandmothers and grandfathers all were very young--there occurred in the town of Market Snailsby, in Fenshire, a mystery of singular character and incident. More precisely, it was the unraveling of this mystery that occurred, for the mystery itself had been a staple of popular legend for a good many years, during which time it had resisted all solution. This is the story of the working out of that mystery, and of what was discovered in Marley Wood, and who discovered it and how, and what came of it all in the end."
"Market Snailsby was one of those long, lazy, meandering sorts of towns that are often met with in the marshlands. Its quaint old houses and ancient cobble streets were scattered in profuse array along the banks of the River Fribble near its junction with the River Lour. The Fribble was rather wide for a Fenshire river, but not very deep, and navigable only by the lighter barge traffic. It was a good eel-river, though, and a fine one for fishing, and of much benefit to the townspeople. There was a beautiful old stone bridge crossing it, at a point midway between the Market Square and the Church of All Hallows. On the other side of the bridge, on the river's south bank, stood the pretty little ivy-covered posting-inn called the Broom and Badger. It was here at the Badger that the drivers of the mastodon trains used to put themselves up, after putting their teams out behind it on the broad, open stretch of meadowland that was Snailsby Common."
If that doesn't grab you, well, then maybe this is not for you.
One difference that has occurred with the change of publishers is that this book (at 270 pages) is considerably shorter than the pevious ones (484, 318, and 481 pages, respectively). Whether this is Barlough's choice, or whether Ace asked for the previous novels to have a certain minimum length longer than this, I do not know, but at least now I have the feeling that Barlough is able to write the novels the way he wants to. (ANCHORWICK, I notice, seems to be back in the longer range--387 pages)
I loved this book, and I eagerly await ANCHORWICK in October.
(I noted in my review of STRANGE CARGO that Barlough seems to be part of the movement called by Frederick John Kleffel "The New Victoriana", which includes books by such authors as Tim Powers, Neal Stephenson, and Susanna Clarke. See http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/09-03-04.htm for more on this movement.)
To order Bertram of Butter Cross from amazon.com, click here.
STRANGE CARGO by Jeffrey E. Barlough:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/29/2004]
STRANGE CARGO (ISBN 0-441-01160-8) is Jeffrey E. Barlough's third novel, all of which are set in some strange not-quite-our-world which has mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, Lovecraftian creatures, Wellsian inventions, and a cast of characters (and a plot) right out of Charles Dickens. In STRANGE CARGO Frederick Cargo is trying to find a Mr. Jerrold Squailes named as an heir in Frederick's grandfather's will, while Mr. Threadneedle and Tim Christmas (now there is an obvious nod to Dickens!) are busy tinkering at something, and Miss Wastefield has a terrible secret. We also meet the Rev. Giddeus Pinches and his sister Griselda Pinches, Mr. Moldwort, Mr. Jobberly, Mr. Kix, and Mr. Lovibund. The background world does not bear close inspection. The blurb describes it as "set in a world where the Ice Age never ended and only a narrow coastline of civilization survives," but it is clear that this world's history is the same of ours--without Ice Age-- through at least Classical times, and there is at least some basis for assuming it is the same considerably later. One character claims the situation arose about two hundred years earlier due to the impact of a lost spaceship--but that hardly accounts for the existence of the mammoths and saber-tooths. The only solution is just to "go with the flow" and do not try to analyze it too closely. I love Barlough's books for their atmosphere and settings, and recommend them to anyone who likes Dickens.
(Barlough seems to be part of the movement called by Frederick
John Kleffel "The New Victoriana", which includes books by such
authors as Tim Powers, Neal Stephenson, and Susanna Clarke. See
To order Strange Cargo from amazon.com, click here.
ONE FOR THE MORNING GLORY
by John Barnes (Tor, ISBN 0-812-55160-5, 1996, 319pp, mass market paperback):
"Drawing a pismire from his swash, he stepped over the corpse,
leaned far out the window, and peered upward. A lone pigeon was
still circling its way upward, as they will when they look for
altitude and have a long way to go. It was barely more than a
speck, and no one knew the limitations of a pismire better than
Slitgizzard, but nonetheless he tested the lovelock, cocked the
chutney, rested one wrist upon the other, held his breath, and
squeezed the trigger very gently. The pismire spat fire. ... The
pigeon hit the parataxis and bounced onto the tiled roof of the
clerihew, where it lay still."
Well, I suppose one could say this takes place on an alternate
world. Firstly, magic works, and secondly, the English language
seems to have evolved differently. Barnes does violence to the
language, yes, but measured, precise violence. If a pismire is a
weapon here, it's a weapon everywhere it's mentioned. That's part
of what makes this book such a pleasure to read, but there is one
drawback. This is not the book to give an adolescent. It's not
the violence, or the sex, but the vocabulary: it could have a
permanent effect on her vocabulary, and not a good one.
The plot is a somewhat standard fantasy one of Prince Amatus and
his four companions Golias, Mortis, Psyche, and the Twisted Man.
They have to perform the usual sorts of tasks--fighting goblins,
defeating the evil neighboring king, and so on--but have the
additional problem that, as a result of a childhood accident,
Prince Amatus is half invisible. Barnes knows the plot is
standard. In fact, even his characters know it, and comment on it.
In spite of all this tongue-in-cheekiness, however, this is not a
completely light-hearted fantasy. Good people have bad things
happen to them, and good people die. Though Barnes does seem to
reign back on the malapropisms during the more serious scenes, this
still means the reader may at times be torn between the humorous
tone and the serious content.
I am not a regular reader of fantasy, or at least not a reader of
what I think of as "regular" fantasy. So when I say that One for
the Morning Glory is unusual, I could be wrong. But I found it a
well-crafted variation on the usual fantasy mores. Whether or not
you enjoy it will depend more on what you think of the use of
language, though, than what you think of the story itself. (Two
other books that did different things with language are Riddley
Walker by Russell Hoban and Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks. I
liked the former, but not the latter.)
To order One for the Morning Glory from amazon.com, click here.
EALING STUDIOS
by Charles Barr:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/13/2005]
Charles Barr's EALING STUDIOS (ISBN 0-520-21554-0). Okay, that
doesn't seem like much of a review, but frankly, with a book like
this, either the title will tell you that you want to read this
book, or (more likely) have you asking, "What is Ealing Studios?"
(Or perhaps even "What are Ealing Studios?") If you don't
already know something about what is one of the greatest British
studio, this book will probably not appeal to you. So this is
more like a "Hey, this book is out there for those who are
interested. You know who you are." (But be prepared for
disappointments when you want to watch a lot of the films
mentioned--they're not readily available in the United States.
Of the sixteen I looked up in Netflix, they had only three.)
To order Ealing Studios from amazon.com, click here.
JANE AND HIS LORDSHIP'S LEGACY
by Stephanie Barron:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/08/2006]
JANE AND HIS LORDSHIP'S LEGACY by Stephanie Barron (ISBN
0-553-58407-3) is another Austen biblio-mystery, but in this one
it is Austen herself who is the detective, not one of her
characters. This is the eighth in the series, and appears to
depend a lot on at least the previous volume (where I assume Lord
Harold Trowbridge was introduced). Also, Barron has an irritating
habit of writing "though" as "tho'" and "although" as "altho'". I
realize this is an attempt to duplicate the spelling of Austen's
time, and complaining about it seems to contradict my earlier
complaint about possible anachronisms in Bebris, but here it
seems an affectation. (Barron does use English spelling
throughout, which is certainly a point in her favour.)
To order Jane and Hi Lordship's Legacy from amazon.com, click here.
EVERY BOOK ITS READER: THE POWER OF THE PRINTED
WORD TO STIR THE WORLD by Nicholas A. Basbanes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/24/2006]
The title for EVERY BOOK ITS READER: THE POWER OF THE PRINTED
WORD TO STIR THE WORLD by Nicholas A. Basbanes (ISBN-13
978-0-06-059323-0, ISBN-10 0-06-059323-7) comes from
S. R. Ranganathan, who was appointed the chief librarian at the
University of Madras in 1924, and who wrote "The Five Laws of
Library Science":
(Unfortunately, I cannot find a copy of the complete work "The
Five Laws of Library Science".)
Basbanes's book covers a variety of topics: lists and collections
of "great books," censorship and book monitoring, books owned by
famous people, marginalia (a term brought into English by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge), translating and translations, the Bible and
related works, the Library of America, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Harold Bloom, the writings of physicians, and reaching the public
with books. As such it is more accessible than some of
Basbanes's earlier books, which focus more in depth on single
topics.
To order Every Book Its Reader from amazon.com, click here.
A SPLENDOR OF LETTERS: THE PERMANENCE OF BOOKS IN AN IMPERMANENT WORLD
by Nicholas A. Basbanes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2004]
Nicholas A. Basbanes has finished his trilogy of books on books,
following A GENTLE MADNESS and PATIENCE & FORTITUDE with A
SPLENDOR OF LETTERS: THE PERMANENCE OF BOOKS IN AN IMPERMANENT
WORLD. This last (as the subtitle indicates) is primarily about
the survival of books and the destruction of books (which includes
both the destruction of libraries as acts of war and the "de-
accessioning" of books and periodicals by libraries). (Basbanes
has another book, AMONG THE GENTLY MAD, which is apparently not
considered part of this series, being about book collectors rather
than about books.)
As part of his discussion of how it is not just the primary
content of a book that is important, but all the other aspects,
such as dust jacket and title page, Basbanes gives the example he
gives is DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol. If one looks at the first
(Russian) edition of the book, the title page says in very small
print at the top "Chichikov's Adventures", then underneath that in
the smallest possible italics the word "or", then under that "Dead
Souls" in big, bold letters. Why? Well, the Russian censor, a
devout Christian, objected to the implication that immortal souls
could die. When Gogol said that the title referred to serfs who
had died, the censor decided it was an attack on the serfdom
system and didn't like that either. But Gogol was a well-
respected author, the censor compromised by saying Gogol could
keep "Dead Souls" but only as a secondary title. Even if the full
title is kept on an edition these days, the fact that "Chichikov's
Adventures" was in very small print is probably not.
I was quite surprised that in all his discussion, Basbanes did not
mention the National Yiddish Book Center, which has been rescuing
Yiddish books for about twenty years now. They have rescued well
over a million volumes and are redistributing many of them to
libraries around the world. They are also digitizing them for
both print-on-demand and on-line access, and deal with a lot of
the issues Basbanes talks about, such as the need to destroy a
book by cutting off the spine in order to scan the book in, or the
question of what to do about ephemera (e.g., ticket stubs found in
books, Yiddish playbills, or old letters).
I found the discussion of books on various media particularly
relevant, as I am currently in a "cataloguing crisis." Well,
crisis is perhaps too strong a word. But it is confusing. It
used to be that a book was a book, a magazine was a magazine ("New
Destinies" notwithstanding), and as far as text went, that was it.
Oh, there was the occasional "spoken word" LP, but most people
didn't have to worry about that.
Of course, we had lots of spoken word cassettes, but those were
all old-time radio shows.
Now I find myself trying to figure out if the 23-CD unabridged
audiobook of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" should be
catalogued in our book catalog, or with the radio shows. And what
about the CD of an abridged version of "Middlemarch" I got in
England a couple of years ago? Now to mention the CD-ROM of the
1993 Hugo nominees, or an episode of a radio show included as an
extra on a DVD, or a CD-ROM bound into a book, ... well, you get
the idea.
To order A Splendor of Letters from amazon.com, click here.
THE WIZARD OF OZ
by L. Frank Baum:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/12/2007]
Everyone knows the 1939 version of THE WIZARD OF OZ, but there
were several others before that. (Yes, I realize these aren't
books, but there is at least a literary connection.) I just
watched a 1925 version, excerpts from a 1910 version, and a 1933
cartoon version. The 1925 version, co-authored by L. Frank
Baum's eldest son, had Oliver Hardy before he teamed up with Stan
Laurel. It also had some extremely racist views of blacks. (The
mildest shows a black character eating watermelon in a field.) It
also has an odd view of Kansas, with the Kansas fields surrounded
by cactus! The 1925 version has very interesting set design,
obviously influenced by expressionism, and heavy use of colored
filters. Neither is particularly true to the story--for example,
the 1910 version has Dorothy discovering on her 18th birthday that
she is actually a princess from Oz left with Auntie Em and Uncle
Henry as a foundling to protect her from evil-doers in Oz. The
1933 cartoon version is probably the most accurate of the lot.
(The less said about THE WIZ, the better.)
A POUND OF PAPER: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK ADDICT
by John Baxter:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2004]
Of interest to science fiction fans and film fans is John Baxter's
A POUND OF PAPER: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK ADDICT. (Yes, this is
John Baxter, the film critic.) The publisher has decided to give
it a Dewey Decimal classification in "Book collecting" rather than
"Biography", but it is more the latter, and talks at length about
Baxter's growing up in Australia, how he first discovered books,
and films, and science fiction, and science fiction fandom.
Baxter relates how he got started writing for the pulps, and how
his attempts to craft a writer's life in Australia that matched
what he saw in Hollywood films were less than entirely successful.
(As he put it, "My career as Australia's answer to Noel Coward
didn't last.") Baxter has all the same interests as I (and many
science fiction fans) have, and I heartily recommend this book.
To order A Pound of Paper from amazon.com, click here.
COALESCENT
by Stephen Baxter:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/06/2004]
Stephen Baxter's COALESCENT (ISBN 0-345-45785-4) is about a
centuries-old secret society hidden in Rome. Wow, you're
thinking, there's an idea that hasn't been used in, oh, the last
five minutes. But in the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of
Virgins, Baxter has come up with something very different than
your standard, run-of-the-mill secret society. I liked the
concepts behind it, but there are two major problems, one
stylistic and one technical. The stylistic one is that most of
the book, particularly the parts set in fifth century Britain,
feel like giant info-dumps. The technical one is that the
evolutionary changes seem to occur much more rapidly than they
possibly could--particularly given one of the society's rules,
"Sisters matter more than daughters." The implementation of this
rule would mean that there would be fewer generations in a given
time span (perhaps two a century rather than four), and hence the
time for the evolutionary changes is effectively cut in half (it
would require twice as long for the same number of generations).
In fact, the whole idea behind the rules "sisters are more
important than daughters" is to *preserve* genes, while the result
Baxter describes seems to be massive genetic change. Ultimately,
I think the situation Baxter describes is like the old brain
teaser: A king tries to increase the percentage of girls in the
kingdom by saying women may keep having children until they have a
boy and then they must stop. At first glance, this sounds like it
would work, but when you map it out, it will have no effect on the
male-female ratio. Similarly, an emphasis on sisters rather than
daughters will have no effect either. (There is some hand-waving
about all this being because of pheromones rather than innate
genetic effects, but I found that unconvincing.)
There was also a lot of extraneous material--strange events in the
Kuiper Belt and a couple of chapters at the end centuries later
which seem completely disjoint from the rest of the events of the
novel--but since this is the first book of "Destiny's Children" it
may all get tied up later. I guess I would give this a
conditional recommendation--Baxter is generally very readable, and
the society and its history are intriguing enough to make it
worthwhile.
To order Coalescent from amazon.com, click here.
EMPEROR
by Stephen Baxter:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/04/2007]
EMPEROR by Stephen Baxter (ISBN-13 978-0-441-01466-8) is "Time's
Tapestry Book One". It consists of several sections--we get
about a hundred pages of someone's story, then the book skips
forward a few generations and we get another story, perhaps of
that person's descendent, perhaps of someone else connected to
the main thread. The first time I saw this technique--and still
my favorite--was James Michener's book, THE SOURCE. However, I
will note that in spite of Baxter's book being subtitled "An
Alternate History Epic" and having S. M. Stirling say, "Baxter
produces something new and subtly different in the time travel
genre," there is no alternate history or time travel in this
volume. There is a hint at the end that someone from the book's
future is sending back messages to the past trying to divert
history from our own timeline, but so far they have not been
successful. (A friend who has seen the next two novels and
spoken to the series's editor has said that it does eventually
become alternate history, but if that is what you are interested
in, I would certainly wait for the entire series to finish.)
To order Emperor from amazon.com, click here.
"Last Contact"
by Stephen Baxter:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/27/2008]
"Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter (THE SOLARIS BOOK OF NEW SCIENCE
FICTION) is a sort of classic British disaster story, with the
disaster coming from cutting-edge physics rather than something
like a plague or a meteor collision. The problem is that there
seemed to be far more British "stiff-upper-lip-ism" and far less
chaos than one would expect these days.
THE TIME SHIPS by Stephen Baxter:
[From the MT VOID, 11/24/1995]
This is the first authorized sequel to H. G. Wells's Time
Machine, though there have been many unauthorized sequels.
(See my Intersection convention report for a summary of
Baxter's talk on these.)
The problem that British authors have is that if their books
are published in Great Britain before they come out in the
United States, they end up missing out on the Hugo nominations,
since the voters are overwhelmingly North American. So listen
up:
NOMINATE THIS BOOK.
(Actually, it used to be the kiss of death for me to recommend
a book for a Hugo, but after I pushed for Michael Bishop's
Brittle Innings and James Morrow's Towing Jehovah
and both made the ballot, I figure that maybe the voters are
coming to realize my wisdom.)
But back to The Time Ships. It begins where The Time
Machine leaves off, right after the Time Traveller has told
his story to his friends. They are skeptical, and he is
feeling guilty about abandoning Weena to the fire and the
Morlocks, so he packs a bag, hops into his time machine and
heads back to 802,701 to rescue Weena, help the Eloi, and get
proof of his travels.
But things don't go as planned.
I don't want to reveal too much. One of joys I had in reading
this book was that, because it hadn't been released in the
United States, I hadn't read much information about it. (I
must have read enough in Locus to know I wanted to get
it, but not much more than that.) But I can say that Baxter
does a good job of writing in the style of Wells. After all,
his story is still being told in the first person, by the Time
Traveller, and so needs to retain the Victorian language that
Wells used. Baxter does this, leavening it just a bit to avoid
sounding obviously archaic. The result is something that
readers familiar with Wells can "flow" into, but newer readers
won't see as strange-sounding.
Baxter said at Intersection that there were some things Wells
didn't do that he (Baxter) wanted to, and he does that here.
Other speakers at Intersection--held this 100th anniversary
of the original novel--point out that Wells ignored time
paradoxes, and Baxter takes a stab at some of those, as well as
introduced some ideas about time travel formulated since
Wells's time. Yet he doesn't do this in a "pasted-on" fashion,
and it works. The reader might even start to think that Baxter
is trying to cover too much and too wide a range, and certainly
there have been authors who attempted similar and failed, but
Baxter ties it all together so well that in the end he cannot
be faulted in this regard.
One minor complaint I had was the use of post-Wells historical
figures (which at times did seem awkward). But Baxter's
use was not, on the whole, gratuitous, and my objection may be
just a side-effect of my seeing this done so often in alternate
histories.
I have studiously avoided telling you more than the bare
minimum of the plot so that you can discover the story as it
unfolds. Go read this book.
(HarperPrism will be publishing this book in January 1996,
which means it will probably be in the stores in December 1995.
This is good news for United States fans, and also for Baxter,
who may get the Hugo nomination he deserves.)
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/10/2006]
Sitting on my shelf tempting me for a while has been THE TIME
SHIPS by Stephen Baxter (ISBN 0-061-05648-0). I had read this
sequel to H. G. Wells's TIME MACHINE when it came out in 1995, but
it came up in a conversation recently and I decided to re-read
it. I enjoyed it as much as when I first read it ten years ago,
and I am pleased to note that it did in fact get the Hugo nomination
it deserved.
To order The Time Ships from amazon.com, click here.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ
by Pierre Bayard:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2008]
About HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ by Pierre Bayard
(ISBN-13 978-1-59691-469-8, ISBN-10 1-59691-469-6) my
recommendation is to make this self-referential. The writing
style seems aimed more at academics than at a popular audience,
and at times seems quite divorced from the book's topic. Why,
for example, does Bayard spend ten pages in this 185-page book
describing the plot of GROUNDHOG DAY? It has something to do
with wanting to use comments about books one hasn't read as part
of a seduction, but surely that doesn't take ten pages of
detailed plot synopsis to explain.
To order How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read from amazon.com, click here.
SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS WRONG
by Pierre Bayard (translated by Charlotte Mandell):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/13/2009]
I picked up SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS WRONG: REOPENING THE CASE OF THE
HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES by Pierre Bayard (translated by Charlotte
Mandell) (ISBN-13 978-1-59691-605-0, ISBN-10 1-59691-605-2) at
the library. More fool I--I hadn't noticed that this was by the
author of HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ, about which I
said, "My recommendation is to make this self-referential. The
writing style seems aimed more at academics than at a popular
audience, and at times seems quite divorced from the book's topic.
Why, for example, does Bayard spend ten pages in this 185-page book
describing the plot of GROUNDHOG DAY?"
Well, that applies to this book (except for the term "self-
referential"). Bayard spends twenty-seven pages out of a hundred
eighty-eight recounting the plot of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
in detail. And the writing style has the same problem: "The
subjective incompleteness of the world in the work encourages us to
suppose that there exists around each work, produced by the limited
nature of statements and the impossibility of increasing the
quantity of available information, a whole *intermediate world*--
part of which is conscious and another part unconscious--that the
reader develops by inferences so that the work, completed, can
attain autonomy: a different world, a space with its own laws, more
fluid and more personal than the text itself. but indispensable if
the text is to achieve, in the limitless series of its encounters
with the reader, a minimal coherence." (page 67)
I'm all for achieving a minimal coherence--I just don't think
Bayard manages it.
To order Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong from amazon.com, click here.
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