All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"The Dictionary of Received Ideas" by Gustave Flaubert:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/02/2007]
If you liked Ambrose Bierce's THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY, you will probably also enjoy "The Dictionary of Received Ideas" by Gustave Flaubert, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (in BOUVARD AND PECUCHET, ISBN 0-140-44320-7).
For the flavor, I will give you an example that appears in both, "diplomacy":
Bierce: "The patriotic art of lying for one's country."
Flaubert: "A fine career, but best with difficulties and full of mystery. Suitable only for aristocrats. A profession of vague importance, though superior to trade. Diplomats are always subtle and shrewd."
One thing I wonder about is the translation process. Krailsheimer does indicate a couple of spots where he took liberties. For example, he has "SPICE: plural of 'spouse'; an old joke but still good for a laugh," with a note "[chacal/shakos in French]." "Chacal" is "jackal", but I cannot find "shakos" in my dictionary. I could not understand how "DIANA: Goddess of the chaste (chased)" could work in English and French--the French verb is "chasser" and the adjective is "chaste" (with a 't'). So I looked it up, and an on-line version of "Dictionnaire des idees recues" has the definition "Diesse de la chasse-tete", or something like "Goddess of the leader of the hunt" with a pun on "chastete" ("chastity"). So Krailsheimer was in fact not adding a pun, but coming up with one in English that would reflect the one in French. Still, for several, I wonder if the cliches exist in French (such as "WIT: Always preceded by 'sparkling' or IMAGINATION: Always 'lively').
[French readers will find links to it online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14156. Sadly I cannot find it online in English. People who enjoy them may also enjoy the delicious "Maxims of La Rochefoucauld". They also hard to find in English, but some five hundred of La Rochefoucauld's maxims can be found in English at http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=la+rochefoucauld. --mrl]
To order "The Dictionary of Received Ideas" from amazon.com, click here.
MADAME BOVARY'S OVARIES: A DARWINIAN LOOK THROUGH LITERATURE by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash:
MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/22/2006]
The book about reading literature through the lens of biology I mentioned in my review of DOM CASMURRO is MADAME BOVARY'S OVARIES: A DARWINIAN LOOK THROUGH LITERATURE by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash (ISBN 0-7394-6351-9). Before reading this, I read MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert (ISBN 0-553-21341-5), although it turns out that the Barashes spend only a small amount of time on Madame Bovary. I guess they chose her for the title on the basis of a clever word rhyme, rather than as the main topic of their book. The book is more about biology, really, and how our genes influence our actions and emotions, than about literature per se. The literature merely reflects real life. For example, there is plenty of jealousy in the real world, and "Othello" just reflects that. This seems more of an attempt to bridge the gap between C. P. Snow's two worlds (science and art) by introducing science to people who might not ordinarily pick up a science book than to preent some radically new literary theory.
Oh, and MADAME BOVARY? I think I am in the camp that asks why this book is a classic. Flaubert is very good at descriptions, but the plot is very pedestrian. BOUVARD AND PECUCHET by Gustave Flaubert, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (ISBN 0-140-44320-7) gives Flaubert a better way to display his descriptions by doing away with plot almost entirely. The title characters are two clerks who take their savings and go off to try various professions and hobbies: agriculture, philosophy, and so on. They are incompetent at all of them, and Flaubert uses this as his means of attacking the pretensions of the French of his time. This was certainly more entertaining than Emma Bovary's peccadilloes.
To order Madame Bovary from amazon.com, click here.
To order Madame Bovary's Ovaries from amazon.com, click here.
KIPLING'S POCKET HISTORY OF ENGLAND by C. R. L. Fletcher & Rudyard Kipling:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/10/2003]
C. R. L. Fletcher & Rudyard Kipling's KIPLING'S POCKET HISTORY OF ENGLAND is an odd duck. The preface by the authors says, "This book is written for all boys and girls who are interested in Great Britain and her Empire," and it is clearly intended for a young audience. The writing is straightforward, the vocabulary relatively limited (compared to most histories), and facts are somewhat cleaned up. All gruesome details are omitted and anything that England or Britain did that might have been considered negative was either toned down or left out entirely. (For example, Edward I's expulsion of the Jews is omitted, and the only mention of Jews is how they were finally given the vote in 1853.)
And the prose is interspersed by poems about the various events, undoubtedly Kipling's contribution. One verse from "The Reeds of Runnymede" goes:
At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede:
"You mustn't sell, delay, deny,
A freedman's right or liberty,
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw 'em roused at Runnymede!
But if the whole is somewhat sanitized, the last chapter's discussion of the Empire can only be called at best raging jingoism, and at worst outright racism. For example, they say, "In Canada we had really little difficulty in making good friends with our new French subjects, for they hated and feared the pushing Americans.... In Australia, we had nothing but a few miserable blacks, who could hardly use bows and arrows in fight." Referring to Africa, they say, "The natives everywhere welcome the mercy and justice of our rule...." And most egregious is their description of the Caribbean: "The population is mainly black, descended from slaves imported in previous centuries, of mixed black and white race; lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement, or of work except under compulsion. In such a climate a few bananas will sustain the life of a negro quite sufficiently; why should he work to get more that this? He is quite happy and quite useless, and spends any extra wages which he may earn upon finery."
Well, what can I say? Clearly this history isn't suitable for children these days, and not useful as a history for anyone else. But as an example of cultural attitudes of its time (1911), it perhaps has something to say to us.
To order Kipling's Pocket History of England from amazon.com, click here.
THE MIDDLE TEMPLE MURDER by J. S. Fletcher:
THE MIDDLE TEMPLE MURDER by J. S. Fletcher (1918) introduces some of the more important characters a bit farther into the story than modern readers might be used to, but is still better written and more engaging than a lot of the more recent works. (Maybe for me, the Golden Age ended around 1920.)
To order The Middle Temple Murder from amazon.com, click here.
GRANTVILLE GAZETTE II edited by Eric Flint:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/13/2006]
GRANTVILLE GAZETTE II edited by Eric Flint (ISBN 1-416-52051-1) does not have the advantage of many anthologies which give the reader a variety of stories--it consist entirely of stories set in (and non-fiction about) Eric Flint's "1632" universe. (This began with the novel 1632 in which a chunk of current-day West Virginia is suddenly transported to Europe in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, and has been continued in several books and stories.) The stories all assume a familiarity with the earlier works, and the whole thing seems to have become very self-contained, with special electronic bulletin boards established by Baen Books, including one that Flint requires all story submissions be posted to before he will even consider them for publication. In addition, the proofreading is execrable, with such errors as 'a next thing' instead of 'a near thing', and several spots where two words are run together.
To order Grantville Gazette II from amazon.com, click here.
"The Clapping Hands of God" by Michael F. Flynn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"The Clapping Hands of God" by Michael F. Flynn ("Analog" 07- 08/04) is a first-contact story, with the twist that the humans come from a future in which Islam is the primary religion. It's well done, though I'm not sure the twist is not just that--a gimmick rather than an integral part of the story.
IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND by Michael Flynn:
[MT VOID, 11/30/1991]
IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND by Michael Flynn (IBN-13 978-0-765-34498-4, ISBN-10 0-765-34498-X) falls into that interesting category of "secret history"--interesting to me, at any rate, because it frequently straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction. For example, Michael Baigent's HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL supposes that Europe is really ruled by a secret society led by a descendent of Jesus, and the book is marketed as non-fiction. Well, IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND is marketed as fiction, but there's nothing *impossible* in it.
The premise is that Charles Babbage completed his analytical engine, but news of its success was suppressed by a group of social scientists who decided to use it to predict historical trends. If this sounds like Isaac Asimov's "psychohistory," it is, and Flynn's characters even discuss the similarity. In present-day (or very near future) San Francisco Sarah Beaumont stumbles across the existence of a secret society which has been using the engine, and now computers, not only to predict trends, but to try to change them. While she is trying to accept this idea, she is told there is at least one other group with a similar plan--and it is more ruthless in what it will do to effect change. This second group wants to kill Sarah to protect itself, and Sarah finds herself in an uneasy alliance with the first group to try to block the second.
Through the book there is a lot of discussion and philosophizing on the morality of all this. While in some books this sort of thing might seem preachy, it works here, because the plot requires someone to try to convince Sarah to help the society. (Even so, there are a few occasions when even this is strained, including some classroom sessions reminiscent of of ones from Robert A. Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS.) And Flynn also managed to win the Libertarian "Prometheus Award" without having more than a smattering of violent sex, an element that I had come to think was almost a requirement for that award (two past winners were J. Neil Schulman, who wrote THE RAINBOW CADENZA, and L. Neil Smith, who wrote THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE and acknowledged his debt to Schulman in the acknowledgements of that book). Maybe some Libertarian out there can explain why there seems to be a correlation.
However, as I said, Flynn avoids this, and sticks to the subject at hand. The characters are well-drawn and more varied (racially, ethnicly, and otherwise) than most authors bother to do. This may seem like a minor point, but it helps give the novel a more realistic feel than many novels have. The book does drag a bit at the end and devolves from philosophy into a chase sequence, but on the whole it is a satisfying book with some ideas to think about when you're done.
(Is Charles Babbage making a comeback? William Gibson and Bruce Sterling recently wrote THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE in which the adoption of Babbage's *difference* engine--not analytic engine--by the British government leads to a very different world than our own. And did you know that Babbage also invented the cow-catcher?)
(A note on the proofreading, or lack thereof: This is the worst proofread book I have ever seen, with the possible exception of some cheap porno novels. "Assesor" should be "Assessor" (page 54), "Hickock" should be "Hickok" (pages 63 *and* 67), the typeface should have returned to Times Roman in the middle of page 101 (not stayed italic), and there is at least one line missing in paragraph six on page 107. After that, I stopped keeping track.)
To order In the Country of the Blind from amazon.com, click here.
THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH by Ken Follett:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/02/2004]
Ken Follett's historical novel THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH is set in twelfth century England during the time of the wars between Stephen and Maud and revolves around the building of the cathedral at Kingsbridge. If you're into architecture and architectural history (particularly of Gothic cathedrals), you'll almost definitely enjoy this book. (I'm sure someone somewhere has described it as "historical fiction with rivets.") There's also the requisite amount of love, sex, violence, and so on. My one objection might be that the characters seem to be like Harry Turtledove's Basilos (in his "Agent of Byzantium" stories)--they appear to invent a major new commercial concept (e.g., dealing in wool futures, becoming an intermediate trader, etc.) every few weeks.
To order The Pillars of the Earth from amazon.com, click here.
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/09/2004]
The best of the six nominees for Hugo for Best Novelette was "The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford, about a man with synesthaesia (as in the punch line of "The Man with English",the classic science fiction story by Horace L. Gold: "What smells purple?"). There seems to be an increase in the number of stories about diseases, or more specifically, mental conditions. Recently, for example, there has been Elizabeth Moon's THE SPEED OF DARK and Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME about autism, and now this. And, yes, this is in fact science fiction, although that doesn't become obvious until the end.
1945 by Newt Gingrich & William R. Fortschen (Baen, ISBN 0-671-87739-9, 1995, 382pp, paperback):
I suppose it's only fair to state up front that Newt Gingrich is not one of my favorite people. I still think I can be objective about this review, but I thought I should at least say that.
It's also worth noting up front that on page 382, the book says "To Be Continued...," and indeed ends rather abruptly in the middle of events, though the jacket does not indicate anywhere that this is the first book of the series. This leads people to ask where Gingrich is going to find the time to write the sequel, which in turn leads them to ask how much of this he actually wrote. Who knows? He was a professor of history, so he does have the background for developing the concept, but it's not unreasonable to assume that most of the actual writing was Forstchen's.
The premise of this alternate history is that at the time of Pearl Harbor, Hitler was in a coma from a plane crash and so could not declare war on the United States. As a result, the Pacific War was quickly won by us, while Germany overran Europe, leaving only England standing against it. This could be a fascinating examination of the world that would have resulted, but instead it's an excuse for long descriptions of armaments and the use of incredibly stale cliches ("The film [of the death camps] had run counter to everything he had ever thought he knew about a culture that could produce Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller."). And it falls into the trap of preaching: "There were times when a man had to lay his life on the line, and that meant not just his physical life--most servicemen understood and accepted the probability that from time to time they must step in harm's way--but his career as well, which far too many were afraid to risk." And on top of everything else, what puts our country at risk? The fact that the government has taken away the guns of people in a certain area. Who is going to save the day? The good ol' Southern boys who still have guns.
The one positive thing I can say is that while the famous excerpt about the "pouting sex kitten" turning into "Diana the huntress" is still here--and indeed is the prologue to the book--the rest of the book is not in that style. (And a good thing it is, too, since that style is very un-1940s: it is very jarring to read a historical novel in too modern a style.) In fact, the whole "subplot" of that prologue is somewhat unnecessary, at least in this volume, and appears only once more, and then briefly, making the whole thing appear like a crash publicity stunt to gain attention for the book.
For me, the appeal of alternate history is to see what sort of world, what sort of society, might develop if something were different. As I noted, though, we see next to nothing of the world--almost the entire book is spent in government offices, on military bases, or in battles. There's no description of how life is different in the United States, no description of how life is different in Germany, and next to nothing about the result of the quick war in the Pacific. In short, there's nothing that \fII\fR can recommend here.
To order 1945 from amazon.com, click here.
HOW TO READ LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR by Thomas C. Foster:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/21/2003]
If you want something simpler than Fintan O'Toole's SHAKESPEARE IS HARD, BUT SO IS LIFE, try Thomas C. Foster's HOW TO READ LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR. This seems to be a very strange entry in the self-help field. Basically, Foster gives you a series of chapters with "rules" for interpreting literature. In case you have difficulty in figuring out the rules from the chapters and examples, Foster gives you the rules in bold-face type. And what are the rules? Well, the first few include, "The real reason for a quest is self-knowledge," "Whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion," and "Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires." The problem with all this is that if you're someone who finds these "rules" new, it's unlikely they're going to make a big difference in how you read. Actually, it's unlikely in that case that you'd pick up this book in the first place (although it may have the same intended market as those "Bluffer's" books). Even I, who loves to see lists of things, find this approach to literature a bit strained. But the last rule is worth remembering: "Don't read with *your* eyes." By this, Foster means that one must at least partially judge a book by the standards of its intended audience--relatively easy for this week's best-seller, not so easy for Homer's "Iliad".
To order How To Read Literature Like a Professor from amazon.com, click here.
THE ECONOMIC NATURALIST; IN SEARCH OF EXPLANATIONS FOR EVERYDAY ENIGMAS by Robert H. Frank:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/03/2008]
THE ECONOMIC NATURALIST; IN SEARCH OF EXPLANATIONS FOR EVERYDAY ENIGMAS by Robert H. Frank (ISBN-13 978-0-465-00217-7, ISBN-10 0-465-00217-X) proposes answers to such questions as "Why do drive-up ATMs have Braille keypads?" and "Why do most states enforce mandatory kindergarten start dates?" Some of the answers are obvious, and others are arguable, but on the whole this is at least an amusing book.
To order The Economic Naturalist from amazon.com, click here.
ON BULLSH*T by Harry G. Frankfurt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/12/2005]
Harry G. Frankfurt's ON BULLSH*T (ISBN 0-691-12294-6) is a slim volume which I had hoped would be about the eponymous topic and its manifestations in today's society. Instead, it was almost entirely an analysis of the origin of the term and its precise definition. At about 9000 words, it's a long analysis, but not worth buying a hardback for, even at $9.95. (If it were a science fiction story, it would be at the low word-count end of the novelette category.) I suspect this will be purchased mostly to give as gifts with inscriptions either warning the recipient to watch out for bullsh*t, or telling the recipient to stop spreading it so much.
To order On Bullsh*t from amazon.com, click here.
WHITE-COLLAR SWEATSHOP by Jill Andresky Fraser:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/19/2004]
Jill Andresky Fraser's WHITE-COLLAR SWEATSHOP was published in 2001, and apparently written before the technology companies' meltdown. In a sense, then, she was writing about the good old days, when people had jobs they could be overworked and mistreated at. (Though she does describe a lot of layoffs--I think the difference is that many of the people in the book who are laid off find jobs at other companies where they will be equally overworked. Nowadays that doesn't seem to be happening.)
But the negative practices she describes aren't exactly new, though she seems to imply they came along in the 1980s. For example, she talks about one bank's "Adopt-an-ATM" program, where employees were asked to volunteer to clean up around one of the bank's ATMs near their home--on their own time and without pay. (The Department of Labor put the kibosh on this one.) But when I worked for Burroughs in 1973-1974, similar shenanigans went on. For example, they would require that I visit a customer four hours away (spending eight hours there) without an option to stay overnight, and would even dispute paying for breakfast. They would send employees to classes where accommodations were dormitory-style and you were assigned to room with a total stranger. During the gasoline crisis, they required that each of us do two trips a week to San Francisco to deliver or pick up card decks for compiling. (And when I tried to choose both trips on the same day, so that I needed to drive to work only once and could take the train the other four days, I think that was disallowed.) And the list goes on. My point is (in case you lost track) that a lot of the "sweatshop" conditions that Fraser decries as new are new merely in companies that had been reasonable before--but that this "reasonableness" was by no means universal.
To order White-Collar Sweatshop from amazon.com, click here.
THE TIN MEN by Michael Frayn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/22/2007]
In his introduction to EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY, John Carey discusses THE TIN MEN by Michael Frayn (ISBN-10 0-006-54102-X, ISBN-13 978-0-006-54102-8).
Now, the one thing that can be said about having a ridiculously large science fiction collection is that when I read a reference to a book such as THE TIN MEN, one can go and pluck it off the shelf. (Or in my case, out of the box.) This is a social satire reminiscent of those of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. At the William Morris Institute of Automation Research, people are busy trying to find ways to automate everything. Rowe, for example, is working on coming up with programming that will produce the descriptions and results of sporting events without the actual inconvenience of playing the games or running the races. What Carey is talking about, though, is Goldwasser's job: automating the production of news. One sample would be a file he picks up which is labeled "Child Told Dress Unsuitable by Teacher" and reads: "V. Satis. Basic plot entirely invariable. Variables confined to three. (1) Clothing objected to (high heels/petticoat/frilly knickers). (2) Whether child also smokes and/or uses lipstick. (3) Whether child alleged by parents to be humiliated by having offending clothing inspected before whole school. Frequency of publication: once every nine days."
There is also a great sequence which is basically a flow- chart/state diagram of an article. One starts with "Traditionally," and then chooses an event: weddings, deaths, births, and so on. "Weddings" leads to "are occasions for rejoicing"; deaths leads to "are occasions for mourning." "The wedding of X and Y" is followed by a choice between "is no exception" or "is a case in point." And so on. (Now you know where all those cliches come from!)
All this is combined with a plot about the Queen's visit, which starts out as a brief stop and escalates through the efforts of dozens of committees, overlapping and duplicating each other's work. This was probably true to some extent when Frayn wrote THE TIN MEN (1965), but has grown and expanded enormously since then.
(Frayn is probably best known these days as the author of the play COPENHAGEN.)
To order The Tin Men from amazon.com, click here.
THE STONEWARE MONKEY & THE PENROSE MYSTERY by R. Austin Freeman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/28/2006]
R. Austin Freeman is best known for his shorter "Dr. Thondyke" mystery stories; the mostly widely available collection has been THE BEST DR. THORNDYKE DETECTIVE STORIES (ISBN 0-486-20388-3), but Freeman also wrote several "Dr. Thorndyke" novels, including THE STONEWARE MONKEY & THE PENROSE MYSTERY (issued in a single volume, ISBN 0-486-22963-7). The first story, according to E. F. Bleiler, is the only mystery novel to trigger a genuine archaeological dig. And both are well worth reading.
To order The Stoneware Monkey & The Penrose Mystery from amazon.com, click here.
LONGITUDES & ATTITUDES by Thomas L. Friedman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/14/2005]
Thomas L. Friedman's LONGITUDES & ATTITUDES (ISBN 1-400-03125-7) is a collection of Friedman's essays about the world situation, from shortly before 9/11 to the present. Friedman's position in brief is that the Arab world in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular, needs to accept that the conditions in their countries are what led to the 9/11 terrorists, and that they need to start thinking about providing better living conditions for their people, which means better education, which will inevitably mean more freedom and democracy as well. He is strongly critical of Yasser Arafat because Arafat failed to work on any sort of infrastructure for a Palestinian state, but instead focused on the conflict with Israel. At the same time, Friedman says that it has been an enormous mistake for Israel to allow, or even worse, encourage, settlements in the occupied territories. Since all Friedman's columns were written before Arafat's death, it will be interesting to see how that situation plays out. The main problem with the book is that because it is a collection of columns written about the same subject, there is a fair amount of repetition. Whether or not Friedman is correct in his conclusions is impossible to say, but it is clear that he has studied and thought about the situation enough to be worth listening to.
And if you want a science fiction connection, how about this? You remember the Babel fish, about which Douglas Adams said, "If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language. ... Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." Well, Friedman writes, "Thanks to translation services like those of MEMRI or 'Middle East Mirror', you now get instant feedback on what commentators in Arab newspapers are saying about you and vice versa. The Saudi ambassador to London publishes a small poem in praise of a Palestinian suicide bomber in and Arabic paper in London, and I've got a translated copy in my e-mail the next morning. We are all right up in each other's face now, with no walls from behind which we can refine our messages at home, or scream to ourselves in private and then communicate calmly with each other. Instead, I write something in a white-hot rage and it gets right into someone's face in the Middle East or Europe, and then they write back in a white-hit rage, and we both end up angrier than we might have been had we not been so easily connected." Or as he summarizes, "It's as though God suddenly gave us all the tools to communicate and none of the tools to understand."
To order Longitudes & Attitudes from amazon.com, click here.
CHILD OF THE EAGLE by Esther Friesner (Baen, ISBN 0-671-87725-9, 1996, 312pp, mass market paperback):
Alternate histories are about "what if"s, but even so I was skeptical of this one. After all, the premise is that Venus (the goddess, not the planet) comes down and convinces Brutus to save Caesar from the assassination attempt. This could be a pretty silly idea, but Friesner manages to avoid the pitfalls. Venus is not just a silly love goddess, but the more accurate serious deity of Greek mythology. And her intervention is kept to a minimum.
Friesner also manages to come up with a plausible alternate history--perhaps someone more familiar with the period could pick holes in it, but I found it believable. I also found the motivations interesting, though the ending was a bit telegraphed. (Does saying that constitute a spoiler?) But Friesner is never one for the simplistic and manages to cast an unexpectedly mythic interpretation and motivation to it all.
Don't dismiss this one as just another silly-premised alternate history. Unusual the premise may be, but Friesner develops it with seriousness and diligence, and more than a little philosophy. I won't argue that Shakespeare's treatment of Julius Caesar and Brutus isn't greater, but I would recommend this book to those interested in historical fantasy.
Oh, and while it's true that Charleton Heston was in two film versions of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, he never played Brutus (or any of the other conspirators), which appears to be how Gary Ruddell depicted him on the cover.
To order Child of the Eagle from amazon.com, click here.
THE PSALMS OF HEROD by Esther M. Friesner (White Wolf Borealis, ISBN 1-56504-916-0, 1995, 478pp, trade paperback):
If Esther Friesner can write something like this, why is she wasting her time on Chicks in Chainmail?
Well, okay, I'm sure that Chicks in Chainmail pays the rent, while a serious novel like The Psalms of Herod pays for espresso. It's the way of the world. I could be wrong. I hope I am. But judging by the number of articles mentioning on Chicks in Chainmail on the Net (forty-one) compared to the number mentioning The Psalms of Herod (eleven, six of which are announcements from bookstores), I suspect I'm not.
But back to the book.
I will try to avoid giving away too much of the plot, which will probably make this a bit vague. The time is the future, and there has been some sort of holocaust. The world is much more sparsely populated, and there has been a return to a more pioneer society--and a more religious one. There are identifiable elements from present religions but, not surprisingly, there have also been some changes because of the changed situation. Friesner doesn't have an "expository lump" to tell the reader what the society is like, but relies on the reader picking up on the details as they are given as part of the story. The society is not a likable one--not the cozy families of the post-holocaust novels of the 1950s or even the survivalist discipline of more recent works--but it is consistent. There are echoes of Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz here, as well as of George Stewart's Earth Abides, but only echoes--Friesner has looked at the paths others have taken in this genre, and struck out on her own.
There are a couple of problems. The main problem is that turns out to be yet another first book of a bleedin' series. And there is no warning of this on the cover or anywhere in the book--except on the last page, where they advertise the next book, Sword of Mary, due out in October of 1996.
The other problem is that I am not entirely convinced about the likelihood or even possibility of the basic assumption of the book. With a lesser author this might be more of an objection, but Friesner handles the plot and characters so well that I am willing to suspend my disbelief in this regard.
I am trying to avoid revealing too much, and the result is probably somewhat incoherent. Come back and re-read this after you've read the book and it will be much clearer.
[Note: This is a trade paperback, but it is the size that one thinks of as "mass market." "Trade" and "mass market" have meanings based on distribution methods, not size. In other words, don't go looking for an oversize book.]
To order Psalms of Herod from amazon.com, click here.
MAKING HISTORY by Stephen Fry (Arrow, ISBN 0-09-946481-0, 1997, 553pp, A$14.95; Random House, ISBN 0-679-45955-3, 1998, 400pp, hardback):
This book will be printed in the United States, but I was ordering something else from Australia anyway, so I figured I wouldn't wait. I'm glad I didn't.
At first it seemed fairly standard stuff--hero uses time machine (of sorts) to eliminate Hitler. It's been done before, with varying results, but all pretty much of the "no-World-War-II-or-the-Holocaust" sort, and whether or not paradise results, the result is usually arguably better than our timeline in which 54,000,000 people died as a result of World War II.
Fry takes a different approach. His main character, Michael Young, meets Leo Zuckermann, whose father was at Auschwitz, and as a result Zuckermann wants to eliminate Hitler. Because the only time travel capability Zuckermann can invent is the ability to send small packages back in time, they come up with a fairly interesting (though very heavily telegraphed) method of accomplishing that. After Michael Young sends his parcel back through time, he suddenly finds himself somewhere else. He's not in Cambridge, he's in Princeton. And though he's the same person, somehow he's different--or at least the person he is in this world is different. And this world is not better. How Fry manages to do all this and make this a humorous novel as well is a feat in itself.
Fry does a good job of showing Young trying to cope in a world with which he is unfamiliar. Unlike the all-too-usual hero who immediately figures everything out, Young makes mistakes. In fact, he makes a mistake practically every time he opens his mouth. He does eventually resort to that tried-and-true approach, finding history books in the library to explain everything to him, and of course to us as a side-effect.
One of the things that Fry does is to make it clear that he thinks our world is pretty good. At one point Young tells another character, "I haven't told you about Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch and fundamentalists and infant crack addicts with Uzis. I haven't told you about lottery scratchcards and mad cow disease and Larry King Live," to which the other character replies, "You told me about political correctness and gay quarters in towns and rock and roll and Clinton Eastwood movies and kids not having to call their dads "sir" but saying "motherfucker" and "no way, dude" and chilling off in Ecstasy dance clubs. I want some of that. I want to be cool. ... I want to wear weird clothes and grow my hair long without being fined by the college or having a fight with my parents. If you want to do that here, you live in a ghetto and the police round you up and harassle you. ... Give me a chance to use these words and live this life." How you feel about the book may depend on how you feel about this philosophy.
Making History is a good blend of alternate history and British humor that I would recommend to fans of either.
To order Making History from amazon.com, click here.
ADIOS, HEMINGWAY by Leonardo Padura Fuentes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/20/2006]
ADIOS, HEMINGWAY by Leonardo Padura Fuentes (translated by John King, ISBN 1-84195-642-2) is a murder mystery set in present-day Cuba, though the murder took place over forty years ago. The police have unearthed a body on the former estate (and now museum) of Ernest Hemingway, and Padura Fuentes interweaves two threads to tell the story. The main character in the present is Mario Conde, an ex-cop asked to investigate the murder; the main character in the past is, not surprisingly, Hemingway. (Padura Fuentes has written a series of books featuring Conde.) These is a lot more emphasis on the Cubans around Hemingway than one has seen before, but there is still enough about Hemingway to make the reader completely dislike him. I doubt that was Padura Fuentes's goal; his characters agree that Hemingway was not a good person. but they seem readier to forgive him than most readers may be. This is a good choice for those who like "bibliomysteries", though nowhere near as good as BORGES AND THE ETERNAL ORANGUTANS.
To order Adios, Hemingway from amazon.com, click here.
"THE THINKING MACHINE" by Jacques Futrelle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/18/2005]
Jacques Futrelle's "THE THINKING MACHINE" (ISBN 0-8129-7014-4) (edited by Harlan Ellison) includes the most famous of the stories about Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen ("The "Thinking Machine"), "The Problem of Cell 13", as well a selection of other stories. While some of the stories have interesting twists, none of them are up to "Cell 13", and all of them are pretty unlikely if you think about them. For people who are curious about the evolution of the detective story (and the puzzle story), I suppose this as good a selection as any, but I think the average reader could give this a miss. (Ellison apparently wanted to re-title many of the stories, but in several cases his suggested title gives away the "twist". so if you read this, I'd suggest not reading his list until after you read the stories.)
To order "The Thinking Machine" from amazon.com, click here.