All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
I guess this is the Year of the Robot. In the novella category we had "Identity Theft" by Robert J. Sawyer, and in the novelette category, we have "I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow (THE INFINITE MATRIX, Feb 15, 2005). Doctorow's story is set in Toronto, which is also where Sawyer lives, so maybe it's something in the air in Toronto. This is probably best described by Doctorow himself, who says, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of FAHRENHEIT 451 to make FAHRENHEIT 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/24/2007]
Our discussion book this month was RAGTIME by E. L. Doctorow (ISBN-13 978-0-812-97818-6, ISBN-10 0-812-97818-8). Re- reading it, I am struck by how little of the book made it into the movie: Houdini got only a few newsreel scenes, Emma Goldman was dropped altogether, and Younger Brother's role so trimmed as to make a lot of his actions seem far more arbitrary. And the plot has been simplified (e.g., the modification of Walker's demands and how that plays out is much changed in the movie). This is not to say that the movie is bad, but it simply does not capture the whole panorama of the book. (This is similar to my feeling about John Steinbeck's book THE GRAPES OF WRATH and the film made from in, as I wrote in the 04/13/07 issue of the MT VOID.)
One technique Doctorow uses is that of the fictional characters, the only ones with names are Coalhouse Walker (and his son), Sarah, and Willie Conklin. Everyone else with a name is a real historical personage. (This is not maintained in the film, when a few additional minor characters are given names.) The effect of this is that almost all the principal characters--Mother, Father, Younger Brother, Tateh, and so on--seem to represent not just a single character, but an entire type, an entire group of people. Tateh is *all* immigrants, Mother is *all* repressed women, and so on. (There are other theories on this, of course.)
Doctorow makes at least one error, though: the incident of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan was in 1915, yet in the book, that event precedes Diaz's overthrow in 1911 and Wilson's inauguration in 1913 (among other events). However, Doctorow may have wanted to mention the Frank incident in spite of its anachronism because of its parallels with Walker. (The movie also has problems with chronology, with events of 1914 seemingly happening only a few weeks or months after events of 1908.)
To order Ragtime from amazon.com, click here.
THE HORUS KILLINGS by P. C. Doherty:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/31/2004]
I picked up P. C. Doherty's THE HORUS KILLINGS (ISBN 0-425-18293-2) at a dollar store, and while it was certainly worth that price, I didn't find it enthralling enough to recommend paying cover price. This may be a problem I have with mysteries in general. I generally see most of them as puzzles, and would not want to re- read them. The ones I would recommend would be the more literary ones that warrant multiple readings. (And I was pleased to read someone's description of John Dickson Carr recently as an author who wrote entirely for the puzzle aspect of how the murder was done, with no style or characterization or even much motivation. I thought I was the only one who thought that.) Anyway, this was what I would call a good "beach read" (or would have, before this week's events made beaches no longer the relaxing places they used to be).
To order The Horus Killings from amazon.com, click here.
THE FORGER'S SPELL: A TRUE STORY OF VERMEER, NAZIS, AND THE GREATEST ART HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Edward Dolnick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/25/2008]
THE FORGER'S SPELL: A TRUE STORY OF VERMEER, NAZIS, AND THE GREATEST ART HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Edward Dolnick (ISBN-13 978-0-06-082541-6, ISBN-10 0-06-082541-3) is primarily about Han van Meegeren, a painter who forged several Vermeers which fooled even the leading art critics of the day. Dolnick goes into a lot of technical detail of how van Meegeren did this, and even more on the psychology of convincing people that forgeries are real. He also explains how critics in the 1930s were fooled but we can tell immediately these are fakes. One reason, he says, is that van Meegeren's women have features that were considered beautiful in the 1930s when he painted them, but not now. So while his audience saw beauty, we do not. He actually makes a science fiction connection, saying, "science fiction always tells as much about the era when it was created as about the era it tries to imagine. In the future as it was portrayed in the fifties, for instance, husbands commuted to work in personal rockets and wives stayed home and cooked up meals in a pill. For a decade or two, readers found it all quite plausible." (page 221)
One might compare this to films. We can look at a film made about Troy for example, and be able to tell whether it was made in the 1930s, the 1950s, the 1980s, or the 2000s. Even if someone tries to make a film now that looks old, there are often things that give it away. Some are technical, but others are harder to define. The Timothy Hines version of WAR OF THE WORLDS was made to look Edwardian--though obviously no one was making color sound films then--but it is clearly a product of the 2000s rather than, say, the 1950s.
I have two quibbles with THE FORGER'S SPELL. One is that the book is told in a strange order. For the first hundred pages Dolnick talks about Nazi art looting and thefts, then he jumps back to the creation and selling of forged Vermeers in the 1920s and 1930s. As each major character is introduced Dolnick has to jump back in time again to give the background of that character, which gives the narrative a "stop-and-start" quality. Then he finishes with the discovery of the forgeries, after the war. So Dolnick tells the middle chapter of the story, then the beginning, and then the end.
It is not until the epilogue that Dolnick addresses why a painting thought to be by painter X is worth millions, but when it turns out to be by painter Y, it is worth $1.98. (Actually, good forgeries are worth more than that, but as curiosities rather than as art.) We have this idea that art should be valued as art, but it seems that much of it is valued as relic. Van Meegeren asked, "Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it from free. But the picture has not changed. What has?"
Dolnick's answer is three-fold. First, "the world was full of people who thought of themselves as art lovers but were in fact merely snobs." Second, he quotes Alfred Lessing, who said that Vermeer was great because "he painted certain pictures in a certain manner at a certain time in the history and development of art." And lastly, Dolnick says, "When we praise a work of ark, we have in mind not only the finished product but the way that product was made. ... [The] forger has the unfair advantage of working from someone else's model." (page 291)
To order The Forger's Spell from amazon.com, click here.
I RODE WITH STONEWALL by Henry Kyd Douglas:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/08/2004]
Henry Kyd Douglas's I RODE WITH STONEWALL (ISBN 0-891-76040-7) is one of many first-person Civil War accounts I picked up when one of the local used bookstores closed. Douglas was on Jackson's staff, and so there is a lot more about the major personalities and anecdotes and less of details about battles than one would find in a foot soldier or line officer's account.
To order I Rode with Stonewall from amazon.com, click here.
UNCLE PETROS & GOLDBACH'S CONJECTURE by Apostolos Doxiadis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/12/2003]
Apostolos Doxiadis's UNCLE PETROS & GOLDBACH'S CONJECTURE is a novel that started out with some intriguing characters, and I had high hopes for it. Unfortunately, it turned into a thinly veiled book describing Goldbach's Conjecture, the history of efforts to solve it, and observations about mathematics in general and number theory in particular. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I would have preferred a straight non-fiction book for this purpose. When I pick up a novel, I had a different set of expectations than when I pick up a non-fiction book, and I had to re-adjust those when I realized what was going on. (In science fiction jargon, I guess you could say that the book was one massive infodump.)
To order Uncle Petros & Goldbach's Conjecture from amazon.com, click here.
THE EXPLOITS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/27/2002]
In regard to my comments about MORE HOLMES FOR THE HOLIDAYS, long-time reader Ian Gahan writes: "Did you ever read the book THE EXPLOITS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES written by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr? ... It consists of 12 tales that are based on the unsolved cases that Dr Watson refers to in the original tales. Adrian was the son of Arthur. To a non-Sherlock expert they seem to be well up to the standard of the originals. Some of the titles are 'The Highgate Miracle', 'The Abbas Ruby' and 'The Deptford Horror'."
Yes, indeed, I have read that. In fact, when I started reading Sherlock Holmes stories, those were the *only* non-Canonical stories available. Now I have an entire bookshelf of pastiches, and I by no means have all of them. THE EXPLOITS are still among the best, however. Among the newer ones, I find the novels add a lot of extra baggage to Holmes (romantic entanglements, political axe-grinding, etc.) while the short stories are often too light-weight and insubstantial.
To order The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes from amazon.com, click here.
THE ADVENTURES OF BRIGADIER GERARD by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/26/2003]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's THE ADVENTURES OF BRIGADIER GERARD is a humorous picaresque novel of a French soldier of the Napoleonic Wars, who is a first-person narrator who doesn't realize he's a rascal and a bit inept, but manages to let us know. Doyle is, of course, better known for creating Sherlock Holmes. Though he said he expected to be remembered for his historical novels, I'm not sure this was one of the ones he was thinking of.
To order The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard from amazon.com, click here.
THE ANNOTATED LOST WORLD by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with annotations by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/07/2006]
THE ANNOTATED LOST WORLD by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with annotations by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin (ISBN 0-938-50123-2) is notable as much for its illustrations as for its annotations. Frequently one page will have the illustration from the Strand publication, and the next will have an illustration from a scientific journal which clearly served as the model for it. Reading it while reading Theodore Roosevelt's THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS does point out that Doyle did a very good job of writing the journal of an expedition to the South American wilderness.
To order The Annotated Lost World from amazon.com, click here.
THE POISON BELT by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/19/2007]
THE POISON BELT by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ISBN-13 978-0-8032-6634-6, ISBN-10 0-8032-6634-0) is the second of the "Professor Challenger" stories (the first being THE LOST WORLD). On the whole, it is not very good as a story, with quite a few errors in science and a "happy" ending that is only happy in the same sense that the ending of H. G. Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS is a happy ending. The premise--that Earth passes through a belt of poisonous aether--seems unlikely now that aether has been discredited, but it may have inspired Poul Anderson's BRAIN WAVE.
There is one quote that fits in very well with Mark's comments on the scale of the universe in the 08/31/07 issue of the MT VOID. Doyle compares our solar system to a bunch of connected corks floating on the Atlantic, and then says, "A third-rate sun, with its ragtag and bobtail of insignificant satellites, we float under the same daily conditions towards some unknown end, some squalid catastrophe which will overwhelm us at the ultimate confines of space, where we are swept over an etheric Niagara, or dashed upon some unthinkable Labrador."
To order The Poison Belt from amazon.com, click here.
HEADS TO THE STORM edited by David Drake and Sandra Miesel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/09/2007]
HEADS TO THE STORM edited by David Drake and Sandra Miesel (ISBN-10 0-671-69847-8, ISBN-13 978-0-671-69847-8) is a "tribute to Rudyard Kipling," but I suspect you have to be more of a Kipling fan than I am to see the influences in some of the pieces. Some of the introductions explain the connections, but a lot are more about how the author discovered Kipling. Unfortunately, there is a certain sameness to these--the "Just So" stories, then the "Jungle Book" stories, and so on. Kipling fans will undoubtedly like this better than I did, though.
To order Heads to the Storm from amazon.com, click here.
THE TWO GEORGES by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove (Tor, ISBN 0-312-85969-4, 1996, 384pp, hardback):
The cover describes Dreyfuss as an Oscar winner, and Turtledove as a Hugo winner. Of the two, the latter is perhaps more germane to the book--Dreyfuss won as an actor, not a writer. But Turtledove has said that Dreyfuss contributed heavily to the dialogue, so perhaps this is a more equal partnership than last year's team of Gingrich and Forstchen. However, this book does have the (apparently) obligatory sex scene. Mercifully, this one is shorter.
The premise of The Two Georges is that there was no American Revolution. The exact details of how this occurred (or perhaps more accurately, failed to occur) are not spelled out. This is actually a good touch, because too often the background is given as a sort of "lump," something like, "Fred mused how different the world would be if Queen Mary had died earlier and her bastard sister Elizabeth had become Queen of England." There's actually something refreshing about not getting all the details.
Of course, Dreyfuss and Turtledove don't entirely avoid this sort of thing. There are a fair number of references to what Washington or King George (the two Georges of the title) did and how that affected the present. Given that we rarely find ourselves thinking how different our world would be if there were no American Revolution, at least in our daily routine, this does feel a bit artificial. And the main character at one point is reading The United Colonies Triumphant, an alternate history book about our world.
The book is alternate history but the plot is strictly mystery: the famous Gainsborough painting "The Two Georges" has been stolen while touring the North American colonies and just before King-Emperor Charles III was due to speak in front of it. The radical separatist group, the Sons of Liberty, has stolen it and is demanding a ransom for its return, and Colonel Thomas Bushnell and Samuel Stanley of the RAMP are assigned to recover the painting, which is a major cultural icon (sort of like the original Declaration of Independence).
Turtledove is good at research, so it's hard to find errors per se. One of my complaints is more a stylistic one: I find it difficult to believe that two hundred years after the break point we would have any of the same people as we have in our world, and in very similar positions. In particular, I find it difficult to explain how Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been as involved in politics in a society with far fewer racial problems that our own as he was in ours. I also question whether the Irish would be as prominent, since a change in politics preventing the American Revolution might very well have prevented the Irish Potato Famine as well. Other references that served more as stumbling blocks than stepping stones were Beethoven writing his Third Symphony to celebrate Napoleon's uprising against Louis XVI, and the use of "To Anacreon in Heaven" as the North American anthem. Language-wise Dreyfuss and Turtledove sick fairly closely to British English (with references to serviettes rather than napkins, for example), but do occasionally slip, calling trousers pants, or vests undershirts. (I am reminded of the recent report of the British MP who was found dead in "pants and suspenders." To most Americans, this doesn't sound too shocking; however, the American translation is that he was found in "undershorts and a garter belt.")
Unfortunately, the mystery part of this novel, which is the main plot, is not particularly well-constructed. Clues are telegraphed, and in general there is a lot of fairly standard stuff going on. There is also a fairly standard romance with Bushnell meeting a professional woman with whom he initially does not get along, and so on.
I liked the background of The Two Georges, even with my reservations, and would recommend it for that reason to alternate history fans. But it is the alternate history aspect that makes this book worthwhile. If that aspect doesn't appeal to you, you can skip it as a mystery.
To order The Two Georges from amazon.com, click here.
"The Heloise Archive" by L. Timmel Duchamp:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/2004]
I recently read two novellas, L. Timmel Duchamp's "The Heloise Archive" and Michael Moorcock's "The Mystery of the Texas Twister", for the Sidewise Award. Both, alas, fell victim to political/social agendas.
"The Heloise Archive" (in LOVE'S BODY, DANCING IN TIME, ISBN Aqueduct Press, ISBN 0-974-65591-0) has Heloise (of Heloise and Abelard) have a visitation by an "angel" (apparently the image of either a time traveler or someone from another world-line or both). This visitation convinces her to reform the Catholic Church to be much more feminist. Since this feminism is of the sort that emphasizes a Goddess rather than a God, I cannot help but feel that the scenario is somewhat unlikely.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/12/2005]
L. Timmel Duchamp, "The Heloise Archive" (LOVE'S BODY, DANCING IN TIME, ISBN 0-974-65591-0): The premise is that Heloise (of Heloise & Abelard fame) is visited by visions which direct her into forming a new, more feminist branch of the Catholic Church. As one might suspect, this series of letters leads heavily towards being a bit too preachy.
To order Love's Body, Dancing in Time from amazon.com, click here.
INTO AFRICA: THE EPIC ADVENTURES OF STANLEY & LIVINGSTONE by Martin Dugard:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/28/2005]
INTO AFRICA: THE EPIC ADVENTURES OF STANLEY & LIVINGSTONE by Martin Dugard (ISBN 0-7679-1074-5) reveals more of the negative sides of the two explorers than most people know, while at the same time respecting their achievements. The revelation that the American Henry Morton Stanley was really John Rowlands from Wales will not be a surprise to many people--this has been somewhat widely known for a while. (Oddly, the index does not have any entry for "Rowlands, John"--not even a "see Stanley, Henry".) But the details of the political machinations, and their dealings with slave traders (by both Stanley and the staunch abolitionist Livingstone), and their interest in the local women are probably new to most people. (I have read Henry M. Stanley's THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT as published by Dover, but Dugard says, "the emotions set forth in [Stanley's] books were often revised from his more honest journal entries.") Sidi Mubarak Bombay is mentioned often; in fact, other than Stanley and Livingstone, he is one of the people with the most index entries. Burton, Speke, Stanley, and Livingstone have all had reams written about them-- has anyone done a book about Sidi Bombay? (Quick answer--not that I could find in amazon.com.) [-ecl]
To order Into Africa from amazon.com, click here.
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO by Alexandre Dumas:
One of the stories much abridged by Hollywood (and, for that matter, by most publishers) is Alexandre Dumas's THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. (Well, okay, this ran 1237 pages in my unabridged edition.) The basic story remains in the various film versions, but a lot of the elaboration and detail is gone. Mark thinks that Bob Kane might have gotten some of the inspiration for "Batman" from this, with the idea of a wealthy man who is secretly avenging wrongs. While the movies are enjoyable enough, they can't compare to the book.
To order The Count of Monte Cristo from amazon.com, click here.
ELLA MINNOW PEA by Mark Dunn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/10/2003]
Mark Dunn's ELLA MINNOW PEA is subtitled "a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable." It is set on the island nation of Nollop, whose founder wrote the famous panagram "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which is inscribed on a plinth in the center of the capital city. One day, the letter 'Z' falls off and the council decides this is a sign that means that henceforth no one should use that letter in either speech nor writing. A few weeks, later 'Q' also falls, and so on. The book is a combination of lipogrammatic writing (i.e., writing that avoids one or more letters), a cautionary tale against losing one rights a bit at a time, and also a criticism of theocracies which claim to know the will of God. However, the last two are a bit obvious, and the first starts out clever, but becomes a bit of a cheat. (At some point, the council decides that people can write words that had the forbidden letters by spelling them differently--e.g., when they can no longer use 'U', they can write "yewniverse".) There's also a secret underground trying to construct a sentence shorter than "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" that uses all the letters of the alphabet, because if they can, that will prove that Nollop was not divine, and the falling of the tiles shouldn't be taken as divine signs. I will leave the details of the attempt for the reader to discover. (This is in a broad sense fantasy, by the way, and I discovered it through a review in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION.)
To order Ella Minnow Pea from amazon.com, click here.
IBID: A LIFE / a novel in footnotes by Mark Dunn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/17/2004]
Mark Dunn's IBID: A LIFE / a novel in footnotes (ISBN 1-931561-65- 6) is just what it says. The introductory material explains how the actual book was accidentally destroyed, and only the footnotes are left. (There was, of course, no such book.) The book was/is about a three-legged man and his life. The problem is that the gimmick wears thin quickly, and the view of his life is as one seen through a strobe, with brief unconnected vignettes that were footnoted. Dunn's earlier book ELLA MINNOW PEA, in which gradually each letter of the alphabet is discontinued, transcended its gimmick by having a fairly straightforward story to carry it. But in IBID: A LIFE the anecdotes are too bizarre and the story too fragmented to keep my attention.
To order Ibid: A Life from amazon.com, click here.
ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA by Jonathan Rigby (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95)
NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES: THE MODERN ERA by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp, $17.95)
BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE SUPERNATURAL FILM by Jeremy Dyson (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/06/2003]
Last year I read Jonathan Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95). Then a couple of weeks ago, I read NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES: THE MODERN ERA by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp, $17.95). And when Mark saw me enjoying that, he said I should also read Jeremy Dyson's BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE SUPERNATURAL FILM (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown).
The first point worth noting is that only one of these are British, which is surprising when one considers that when one talks about "Gothic horror films" or "supernatural horror films," often the studio name that first comes to mind is Hammer Films. Ironically, Dyson doesn't cover the Hammer era at all, but instead concentrates on the Universal/RKO era of the 1930s and 1940s. Wright, on the other hand, focuses on the Hammer period from 1957 to 1976 but covers American and Continental horror films as well as British, while Rigby takes an approach orthogonal to both and covers a century's worth of films, all English.
All three have one thing in common--they concentrate on the "horror film" rather than the "terror film." Their goal is not to write about slasher films, or stalker films, or psycho films, but about "supernatural" horror--horror that is based on something beyond the world we know. (Wright makes the distinction at the end between Gothic and Grand Guignol styles, saying the latter emphasizes our physical existence in this world, while the former postulates a structure of good and evil in which we move.)
On to specifics. Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC is a very thorough coverage of its topics, with particular value for the pre-Hammer era which tends to be ignored or skimmed over in works of this kind. Rigby does not cover every film in detail, but at least references and puts in context the films for which he doesn't give detailed plot synopses and analyses.
Wright's NIGHTWALKERS is much less thorough, even for the period it covers, though he spends a bit more time on the films he does cover in depth. And Dyson covers even fewer films, but each again in yet more depth, with entire chapters devoted to "King Kong" and "Cat People", for example.
The real problem with all of these, of course, is that after you have finished reading about a film, you'll want to pull out the DVD (or videotape) and watch it again. After reading about what Wright called "the Cornish horrors" ("The Reptile" and "Plague of the Zombies"), for example, I suggested to Mark that this would make a good Sunday afternoon double feature. Luckily, he agreed, and since it just happened to be Sunday afternoon, that was one problem solved. :-)
All three books are somewhat difficult to find in stores, though on-line booksellers have made it relatively easy on-line. If you are going to get only one of the three, ENGLISH GOTHIC is probably the best choice. BRIGHT DARKNESS is the most academic, with NIGHTWALKERS being the most "pop culture" of the three, though hardly a fluff coffee table book.
To order English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema from amazon.com, click here.
To order Nightwalkers: Gothic Horror Movies from amazon.com, click here.
To order Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Film from amazon.com, click here.