All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
FRAGILE THINGS by Neil Gaiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/15/2006]
FRAGILE THINGS is a collection of thirty-one stories and poems by Neil Gaiman (ISBN 0-06-051522-8). Among them is a Hugo winner ("A Study in Emerald" and three Locus poll winners, along with one story never before published. Of course I recommend this. Even the physical book is well done--the cover is a translucent paper that goes well with the title "Fragile Things". (No, it is not really fragile, but it has a delicate look.) My one complaint is that the page headings are all "Fragile Things", rather than the individual story titles. This makes it hard to flip through the book to find a story.
To order Fragile Things from amazon.com, click here.
M IS FOR MAGIC by Neil Gaiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/07/2008]
M IS FOR MAGIC by Neil Gaiman (ISBN-13 978-0-06-118642-4, ISBN-10 0-06-118642-2) is the latest collection of Gaiman's short fiction. It includes the Hugo-nominated "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" as well as many other excellent stories from various regular sources, and some deal with fairly adult issues of aging and so on, yet is marketed as "Young Adult" (and is catalogued this way in my library). All of which means that if you are looking for Neil Gaiman books, you have to check several locations in your bookstore or library. This may be another way that amazon.com is an improvement over a brick-and-mortar bookstore: you type in "Nail Gaiman" and it shows you *all* his books, not just a fraction of them.
To order M Is for Magic from amazon.com, click here.
NEVERWHERE by Neil Gaiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2004]
Somehow Neil Gaiman managed to stay off my radar until he was nominated for a Hugo for AMERICAN GODS. As soon as I read that I started looking for other works by him. The latest I've read is NEVERWHERE (ISBN 0-380-78901-9) from 1996. Richard Mayhew is just an average guy in London until one day he helps the wrong person and finds himself in the London Underground. Not the "subway", though that figures into it, but a shadowy world that exists below London in the same way that Faerie exists next to our world. This Underworld, however, is connected to the "real" Underground: Knightsbridge is "Night's Bridge" and there is an Earl holding court at Earl's Court, for example. NEVERWHERE may not as mythic or encompassing as his AMERICAN GODS, but the latter is a classic. NEVERWHERE is still highly recommended.
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SMOKE AND MIRRORS by Neil Gaiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/02/2004]
I'm catching up on Neil Gaiman's writing with his collection of a few years ago, SMOKE AND MIRRORS, and can say that his Hugo- winning AMERICAN GODS was not a fluke. (Well, since he won another Hugo the next year for CORALINE, I guess that's obvious.) Somehow, though, he seems to have burst upon the traditional fiction scene with it. Previously I knew him best for his work in graphic novels, and for co-authoring GOOD OMENS with Terry Pratchett. Yes, I knew he had other books out there, but he seemed to be below a lot of poeple's radar.
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STARDUST by Neil Gaiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/2004]
Neil Gaiman's STARDUST (ISBN 0-060-93471-9) is yet another great fantasy novel from Gaiman, this one about a farm boy's experiences in Faerie when he goes there to retrieve a fallen star for the girl he loves. In addition to the usual fantasy tropes, Gaiman does a wonderful job of incorporating the concept of the importance of words, and precision is using and interpreting them. Time and again, readers will discover that what they *thought* one character had said was really only the interpretation that they put on it, and that the character had actually said something else entirely.
To order Stardust from amazon.com, click here.
"A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/09/2004]
With "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman looks likely to make it three years in a row as a Hugo winner. Yes, I like Sherlock Holmes, but most Holmes stories these days are pale imitations of the Doyle. Gaiman's is new and fresh and different, and not just because it includes Lovecraft's "Old Ones" (though of course that helps). And this is an alternate history as well, in which the Old Ones rule England (shades of Kim Newman!). This story is so far ahead of the others that I recommend it even more strongly than usual.
THE MOON MAID AND OTHER FANTASTIC ADVENTURES by R. Garcia y Robertson (Golden Gryphon, ISBN 0-9655901-8-6, 1998, 275pp, hardback):
Garcia y Robertson writes novelettes rather than short stories, so this collection (the second publication of Golden Gryphon) contains eight stories rather than the usual eleven to fourteen. Most of his stories can best be described as science fantasy rather than science fiction, which does point to a narrower target audience.
The first story, "Gypsy Trade," used a standard science fiction device, time travel, but overlays it with gypsy curses and tarot cards and "Four Kings and an Ace," set in Nineteenth Century San Francisco, also uses forms of magic. On the other hand, "Cast on a Distant Shore" is strictly science fiction, with humans on an alien world hired by other aliens to collect zoological specimens.
The remaining stories ("The Moon Maid," "Gone to Glory," "The Wagon God's Wife," "The Other Magpie," and "The Werewolves of Luna") are fantasy in varying degrees: prehistoric fantasy, science fantasy, and so on.
On the plus side, Garcia y Robertson has a good grasp of characters. He seems particularly able to write female characters--reading his stories, I kept thinking that they were written by a woman. (I have no idea precisely what I mean by that. But if Robert Silverberg could say that he found Tiptree's writing "ineluctably masculine," I figure I can get away with this.)
This collection suffers from the fact that all its stories have appeared in either Asimov's Science Fiction or The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Readers who like this type of fiction, or Garcia y Robertson in particular may well have all the stories in magazine form. On the other hand, for readers who don't subscribe to one or both of those, but who enjoy this subgenre, this would be an excellent collection. And both this and Golden Gryphon's previous volume, Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly, would make good gifts to your friends who read novels but haven't discovered the joys of short fiction.
To order The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures from amazon.com, click here.
"The American Civil War" by Gary W. Gallagher:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/16/2008]
We recently listened to the Teaching Company course "The American Civil War" by Professor Gary W. Gallagher, and I have a few comments (No surprise there, right? :-) ). An observation he made in one of the early lectures on the causes of the Civil War was that the North perceived the South in certain negative ways, and vice versa. For example, the South saw the North as uncultured, unrefined, and greedy. Whether these perceptions were accurate or not, Gallagher said, is rather beside the point: in generating conflict, perception is more important than reality.
Although the South maintained (even after the War) that their secession from the Union was legal and not in violation of the United States Constitution (Thaddeus Stephens wrote a very long and turgid work arguing this point), the Confederate Constitution explicitly forbade secession! I can see where the Confederacy would want this clarified, but it's ironic that the "gentlemen's club" argument seen in the film GETTYSBURG is completely negated by this. (The "gentlemen's club" argument goes like this: The states are like men who have joined a gentlemen's club. After a while, the club starts making rules about how the gentlemen's private homes may be run. Not only that, but the club refuses to let anyone resign from it.)
Gallagher notes in a closing lecture that no Confederates were tried for treason after the Civil War, and gives as possibly the main reason that no one wanted to actually argue in a court of law as to whether secession was legal. We had just finished fighting a bloody war which de facto determined it was not, and having a court rule on it at this point was either superfluous or incendiary.
The first Confederate Presidential election was held in 1861 for inauguration in 1862. In my comments on the alternate history film C.S.A., I noted a possible mistake: there would not have been a Presidential election in the CSA in 1880, because the Presidential term specified in the CSA Constitution was six years. This had assumed an election in 1860 (which is wrong in any case--secession was not until 1861). An election in 1861 would theoretically have placed *all* the elections in odd-numbered years. However, it is not clear whether that cycle was intended to be implemented from the beginning or only after the "War of Northern Aggression" was over. Assuming the latter to be the case, to have an election in 1880 would imply an election in 1868. (Anything later would imply a much, much longer Civil War than anyone expected.) In fact, 1868 would give Davis a full term plus a few months, and might be considered a reasonable time to start.
Gallagher also emphasized that to determine the true causes of the Civil War, one needs to read contemporary accounts, that is, what people said about the causes in 1861, not what they said in their memoirs twenty years later. When the Confederates wrote their memoirs, slavery in the United States was dead and was reviled by all our world allies. It was not, therefore, in the Confederates' best interests to attempt to paint their cause as an attempt to maintain slavery--even though that was what they all said in 1861, and what featured most prominently in the Articles of Secession ratified almost unanimously by the Confederate states.
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DRAGON HUNTER: ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS AND THE CENTRAL ASIATIC EXPEDITIONS by Charles Gallenkamp:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/29/2006]
Another book about exploration and discovery is DRAGON HUNTER: ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS AND THE CENTRAL ASIATIC EXPEDITIONS by Charles Gallenkamp (ISBN 0-14-200076-0). Andrews carried out several expeditions to Asia to find fossils and other paleontological artifacts, and this book describes those in detail, as well as his background and his career after the expeditions. Ironically, the expeditions came to an end as much due to one mistake on Andrews's part as to the unstable political situation in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. That mistake was in auctioning off one of the first dinosaur eggs his expedition had found. It was intended as a publicity stunt to raise money for future expeditions, but the governments and people in Asia interpreted it as meaning that 1) Andrews was undertaking a commercial rather than scientific venture, and 2) all the finds Andrews was removing were valuable and should remain in their country of origin. But most of the book is dedicated to Andrews's adventures in the field, which Gallenkamp admits that Andrews was not adverse to embroidering upon. This is a good introduction to Andrews, and may make you want to read some of Andrews's own books. Andrews himself wrote eleven books, none of which had unwieldy subtitles on the covers. (In his time, such subtitles were relegated to the title page only.) In any case, although most of Andrews's books are out of print, many of available for under $10 used.
To order Dragon Hunter from amazon.com, click here.
HOAXES by Curtis D. MacDougall:
FADS & FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE by Martin Gardner:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/18/2006]
And then of course, I have to mention HOAXES by Curtis D. MacDougall (ISBN 0-486-20465-0), a 1940 volume which covers the Cardiff Giant, John Wilkes Booth's mummy, and the baby picture of Adolf Hitler (among many others). And even Martin Gardner's classic FADS & FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE (ISBN 0-486-20394-8) covers some of the same territory, though it is more about the delusions than the outright scams. (In some cases, it is hard to tell for sure--was Bridey Murphy a scam or a genuine delusion?) And this could easily segue into several of Stephen Jay Gould's collections, such as THE MISMEASURE OF MAN. But I've probably suggested enough books to keep you busy for a while already.
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CELESTIAL MATTERS by Richard Garfinkle (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86348-9, 1996, 348pp, trade paperback):
Most alternate histories are based on some historical event happening differently. For example, it might ask, "What if the South had won at Gettysburg?" A few go back even further, with some change in prehistory, such as "What if the dinosaurs survived and developed intelligence?" But Garfinkle goes even further in Celestial Matters and changes the basic premises of the universe, by asking, "What if Aristotelian science and Ptolemaic cosmology were an accurate description of the universe?" So what we have is a universe where the stars and the planets really are fixed in crystal spheres; everything really is made up of earth, air, fire, and water; and the gods and goddesses really do exist and interact with mortals. Garfinkle also assumes that Alexander did not die young and went on to conquer Asia until he ran up against China, and the story takes place nine hundred years later, with Greece and China still fighting each other. (Well, if Greek medicine actually worked, then Alexander probably would have survived.)
I had two main problems with all this. One is that my knowledge of the details of Aristotelian science and Ptolemaic cosmology is fairly skimpy, since they aren't really taught in great depth these days. So whether the universe Garfinkle constructs is accurate or consistent is not clear to me, nor did I always understand the explanations given. My other problem is that Garfinkle has constructed a universe in which both Aristotelian/Ptolemaic and Chinese science and cosmology are "true," but they also appear (to me, anyway) to be somewhat contradictory. Harry Turtledove did something similar in The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, which assumed that all religions were true. Even though that premise is just as contradictory, I found it presented more believably than Garfinkle presents his competing cosmologies. (For that matter, one might ask how other cosmologies such as Mayan or Maorian fit into all this.)
In spite of these quibbles, I enjoyed this book. But I am a fan of alternate histories, and the original approach that Garfinkle takes sets it apart from the run-of-the-mill alternate histories that use fairly traditional variations. And in science fiction in general and alternate histories in particular, originality is getting harder and harder to find. (I just hope that Garfinkle's next book is not a sequel to this one, since the ending does seem to imply that there could be sequels.) Also, since I did minor in classics in college (and actually took three years of ancient Greek, of which I remember distressingly little), the classical setting appeals to me on its own. I guess the best question to ask is whether you are interested in the history of science. If so, this book will probably appeal to you.
To order Celestial Matters from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING MIND & BRAIN by Angus Gellatly and Oscar Zarate:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/02/2005]
In INTRODUCING MIND & BRAIN by Angus Gellatly and Oscar Zarate (ISBN 1-840-46084-9), Gellatly makes the same mistake that so many others do. He talks about experiments in electrotherapy or galvanism, and then says that this research "was given expression by Mary Shelley . . . in her novel FRANKENSTEIN in 1818." More accurately, it was given expression by Kenneth Strickfadden in his set design for the 1931 Universal film FRANKENSTEIN, a still of which serves as the illustration for this page. Shelley barely mentioned electricity, and never connected it with giving the monster life.
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ILARIO by Mary Gentle:
THE LOST PAINTING by Jonathan Harr:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/23/2007]
I recently listened to an unabridged audiobook of THE LOST PAINTING: THE QUEST FOR A CARAVAGGIO MASTERPIECE by Jonathan Harr (read by Campbell Scott) (ISBN-13 978-0-375-50801-1, ISBN-10 0-375-50801-5; book ISBN-13 978-1-415-92502-7, ISBN-10 1-415-92502-X). I also read ILARIO by Mary Gentle, published in two parts: ILARIO: THE LION'S EYE (ISBN-13 978-0-060-82183-8, ISBN-10 0-060-82183-3) and ILARIO: THE STONE GOLEM (ISBN-13 978-0-061-34498-5, ISBN-10 0-061-34498-2). Both THE LOST PAINTING and ILARIO deal with Italian Baroque painting, though the former is a non-fiction work about the search for a lost work by Caravaggio, and the latter is an alternate history in which the narrator-protagonist is a painter traveling to Rome to learn the new style of painting that uses something called "perspective". As Ilario says of his work before his apprenticeship, "The body and face painted as if a man faces them straight on. And the feet are painted as if seen looking down from above. Everyone understands that. How else is it to be done!" And Masaccio tells him, "Perspective! ... You see the world distorted. Every man does! Foreshortened, shrunk, extended, compressed. Every man sees the world from his own perspective. Two ends of a building measure the same, but the one that's far off, you see small. And I, I don't paint what you know must be there, I paint what you see!"
ILARIO: THE LION'S EYE is not served well by its blurb, though: "This action-packed, deeply intelligent novel [is] a focus for intrigue, intellectual and a fair amount of polymorphous hot sexual action." [--"Time Out London"] This is likely to make a lot of people avoid it, but in reality, the (semi-explicit) sex is minimal. And calling the creature in it a "golem" is very misleading. The term "golem" is Hebrew, only became well-known after the 16th century, and has a specific mystical meaning. The creature here is an automaton created in the Carthage of Gentle's alternate history (which takes place in the 15th century), and no one in that world would apply the term "golem" to it, anymore than they would call it a "Frankenstein monster".
I do recommend ILARIO, though more for its study of gender roles than its alternate history; I would not be surprised if it were a nominee for the Tiptree Award. (Gentle has combined the two aspects before, particularly in 1610: A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE.) Gentle does have the story unfold in various parts of the Mediterranean--Carthage, Rome, Venice, Alexandria-in-Exile, and so on--but much of it has less to do with the altered political and social structure than with the specific characters. (The primary alternate history *feel* for me came from a naval encounter in the second book rather than the general setting.) However, in any case I have to say that I can see no good reason to have this published as two books instead of one other than to extract more money from the buyer (the two volumes total less than 700 pages), and hope that at some point it is issued as a single volume.
To order Ilario: The Lion's Eye from amazon.com, click here.
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1610: A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE by Mary Gentle (Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-07251-2, 2003, L12.99):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2004]
I happened to get a copy of Mary Gentle's 1610: A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE, even though it hasn't been published in the United States yet. Reading it, I've come to two conclusions: 1) It will be on my Hugo lists this year, and 2) I definitely get the impression that British readers are more knowledgeable than readers here.
For example, the very first chapter begins with the date "27 January year of Our Lord 1608 Julian calender (6 February 1609 by the Gregorian that is to come). This is almost definitely going to confuse all but historical scholars, at least in this country, so here's the explanation.
There are two factors here, the aforementioned Julian versus Gregorian calendars mentioned, and another difference which I will call the New Years problem.
The first is easy. The Julian calendar (attributed to Julius Caesar) was getting out of step with the equinoxes. So Pope Gregory XIII came up with a new calendar in 1582 which corrected this. But because everything was already out of sync by ten days, its adoption required the dropping of ten days. Hence October 4, 1582, was followed by October 15, 1582. This took effect in all the countries that paid any attention to Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, which included France but not England. England (or by that point, Great Britain) didn't switch until 1752. (Russia didn't switch until after the Revolution in 1918.) So in 1608, when it was January 27 in England under the old Julian calendar, it was February 6 in France under the new Gregorian calendar.
But Gregory mandated another change which is not usually thought of as part of the Gregorian calendar (though I suppose that technically it is). Until 1582, the calendar year started at the vernal equinox, March 21. For some reason, Gregory also dictated a change in that, from March 21 to January 1. (Well, it does at least make sense that the year change should occur on a month change as well.) So the January 1 preceding the change was January 1, 1581, and the one following it was January 1, 1583. Again, this took effect in France, but not in England, where the January following October 1582 was still called January 1582.
So January 27, 1608, in England was February 6, 1609, in France.
And all this is on page 1.
[When he read this, Mark asked, "So was there a February 29, 1607, but no February 29, 1604, in the Julian calendar?" I'm not sure--does anyone know?]
Actually, the reader may be confused even before then by the "Translator's Foreword." Weyman is real in our history, but the particular book mentioned is not (so far as I can tell), nor are the various film references (though it's clear where they came from).
As you might guess from all this, 1610: A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE is impeccably researched (just as Gentle's previous BOOK OF ASH: A SECRET HISTORY was). The plot is full of conspiracies, political intrigue, disguises, and enough people using Giordano Bruno's teaching to calculate the future to populate the entire Second Foundation. (Think of this as ancient psychohistory.) And as she also did in THE BOOK OF ASH, Gentle examines gender roles without resorting to stereotypes. The ending is satisfactory without being pat, and the structure indicates that this is a stand-alone novel. (I only mention that because it is becoming increasingly rare these days.) To tell any more would involve giving away some of the twists and turns.
Let me sum up by repeating that it's going to be on my Hugo list this year. 'Nuff said.
To order 1610: A Sundial in a Grave from amazon.co.uk, click here.
MARX DEMYSTIFIES CALCULUS by Paulus Gerdes (translated by Beatrice Lumpkin) (Marxist Educational Press, Studies in Marxism (Vol. 16), ISBN 0-930656-40-7, 1983 (1985), 129pp, trade paperback):
I have no idea where I first heard of this book, but in my never-ending quest to report on the strange and unusual, I figured I would give this a try.
Gerdes begins by what Marx's mathematical writings comprise and how they were greeted at the time. He says of Marx's attempts to circulate his papers among his friends who had some knowledge of mathematics, "These German Social Democrats were not capable of a good understanding of the role of dialectics in mathematics and nature." [page 11]
Gerdes goes on to explain how calculus arose as an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Capitalism, noting that "[calculus] rapidly won new successes in astronomy and practical applications (however, still on a scale limited in accord with the interests of the absolutist, feudal state)^...." [page 19]
After a brief description of differentials and infinitesimals, Gerdes says, "But this differential calculus, approached in this way, is very 'mysterious' in the opinion of Marx, giving 'the correct^...^result by means of a positively false mathematical procedure." [page 31] It's nice to have that cleared up so conclusively.
But there's more. For example, you also learn that Father Guido Grandi proved the mathematical and scientific possibility that God created the Universe ab nihilo by looking at the infinite series "1-1+1-1+1-1+1-...." Considered as "(1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)-...." it yields 0; considered as "1-(1-1)-(1-1)-(1-1)-...." it yields 1. Thus (according to Grandi) 0 equals 1 and God could create the Universe (=1) from nothing (=0).
The basic gist of this book appears to be that calculus is best understood as a dialectic, that is, a negation of a negation. The first negation is the varying of the x-value of a function and it corresponding y-value; the second is the elimination of that variation after the function has been manipulated to calculate the derivative. The argument seems to be that other methods of calculating the derivative are too mysterious to be valid (even though they yield the same result). The conclusion I draw from all this is that there are several ways of considering the derivative of a function, and some are more intuitive to some people, others to others. Marx seems to have decided that what was intuitive to him was the "correct" way of looking at things, and the others incorrect.
Somehow this doesn't surprise me.
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