All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"An Everyday Confusion" by Franz Kafka:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/06/2009]
Regarding Kafka's story "An Everyday Confusion", Margaret Boegeman writes, "No one says 'How strange!' or 'How could this happen, that a journey which takes only ten minutes one day, takes ten hours the next, and but an instant to return?' The facts are given them; no one questions them." [in "From Amhoretz to Exegete: The Swerve from Kafka by Borges"] Clearly Boegeman has never dealt with American freeways.
To order The Complete Stories [of Kafka] from amazon.com, click here.
THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]
However, by coincidence I just finished reading THE TRIAL (ISBN 0-805-21040-7), and what can I say but that it's very ... Kafkaesque? What is the strangest thing about the events, I suppose, is that no one in the novel finds them strange. For example, hearings appear to be held not in some fancy government building, but in a back room in a tenement other occupied by various members of the lower classes. The one problem I see in recommending this book is that its originality will not be as evident as it was to its original readers, because Kafka has influenced so many authors since his time.
[And from "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/24/2004]
Our discussion group read Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL (ISBN 0-805- 21040-7) and everyone seemed to have a different opinion. One thought it surrealist, one thought it an attempt to describe a dream, one thought it a commentary on Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, and so on. My comment was that undoubtedly some high school student will get their chronology confused and write that it is a commentary on the Nazis. (For all I know, some high school student already has.) My feeling was that it was designed to be dreamlike, but incongruous aspects may have underlying meaning. For example, the fact that the court seems to meet behind people's laundry room and so on may be a way of saying that the courts and the legal system and the government are all- pervasive.
To order The Trial from amazon.com, click here.
THE PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES by James Kakalios:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/10/2006]
THE PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES by James Kakalios (ISBN 1-592-40146-5) is yet another book in the current flood of books trying to teach academic subjects using popular culture. In the introduction, Kakalios says, ". . . over the decades physics teachers have developed an arsenal of overstylized scenarios involving projectile motion, weights on pulleys, or oscillating masses on springs. These situations seem so artificial that students invariably lament, 'When am I ever going to use this stuff in my real life?' One trick I've hit upon in teaching physics involves using examples culled from superhero comic books that correctly illustrate various applications of physics principles. Interestingly enough, whenever I cite examples from superhero comic books in a lecture, my students *never* wonder when they will use this information in 'real life." Apparently they all have plans, post-graduation, that involve Spandex and protecting the City from all threats." Be that as it may, Kakalios addresses such questions as "Can we calculate what the gravity on Krypton is, and can we have a planet with that gravity that supports life?" and "Could Atom punch his way out of a vacuum clean bag?" There is a lot of math, and this is more like a physics textbook than a light read about superheroes, but definitely good for all us geeks.
To order The Physics of Superheroes from amazon.com, click here.
HOW TO HEPBURN: LESSONS ON LIVING FROM KATE THE GREAT by Karen Karbo:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/30/2007]
HOW TO HEPBURN: LESSONS ON LIVING FROM KATE THE GREAT by Karen Karbo (ISBN-13 978-1-59691-351-6, ISBN-10 1-59691-351-7) is half Hepburn biography, half self-help book, and not very good at either. If you are a Hepburn fan, you are liable to come away liking her much less. (Ditto for Spencer Tracy.) But there isn't much in the way of self-help either--given the negative portrayal of Hepburn's personality, a list of ways to emulate her would seem to be something to avoid rather than follow. And the editing is way below what I would expect from a publisher such as Bloomsbury. Karbo says that Mary Stuart was Elizabeth I's sister (she was her cousin), spells "Christendom" as "Christiandom", and says that Spencer Tracy's character in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK is "one-armed". (He actually has two arms, but one is paralyzed. (Karbo seems to know this, in fact, because a few sentences later she says, "[N]otice how he keeps his arms down?")
To order How to Hepburn from amazon.com, click here.
RESURRECTED HOLMES edited by Marvin Kaye (St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-14037-1, 1996, 337pp, hardback):
In the introduction to this anthology, it is explained that notes from several unwritten Sherlock Holmes adventures were discovered and that consequently, various famous authors were commissioned to write up the stories from these notes. Given that the authors were supposedly asked to imitate Watson's (Doyle's) style as closely as possible, one wonders why such a variety of famous authors were needed and, in any case, each author's style breaks through. That shouldn't surprise the reader--that's obviously the point.
The first story is "The Adventure of the Amateur Mendicant Society" by John Gregory Betancourt (supposedly H. G. Wells), and does have a very similar style to Doyle's. The story itself has promise, although the resolution leaves one moderately unsatisfied as being a bit contrived in regards to Holmes's position.
But "Victor Lynch the Forger" by Terry McGarry (Theodore Dreiser) is more what one expects: a story with Holmes written in a style different than Doyle's. And here is where the first flicker of doubt begins. While it is possible to do this style shift successfully, it is usually in humorous pieces (Sherlock Holmes as told by Dr. Seuss--that sort of thing). Done as a serious work, it has interest from a literary standpoint perhaps, but the story no longer has much of the appeal the originals did, which is their style. Recounting the plot of a Holmes story in bland prose would not have captivated generations of readers. Without Doyle's style, something is missing.
"The Case of the Notorious Canary Trainer" by Henry Slesar (W. Somerset Maugham), "The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech" by Morgan Llewelyn (Ernest Hemingway), and "Holmes and the Loss of the British Barque Sophy Anderson" by Peter Cannon (C. S. Forester) seem more matched with their purported authors because of subject matter than style, at least that I can detect, which I suppose is the stated plan.
With "Sherlock Holmes, Dragon-Slayer" (The Singular Case of the Grice Pattersons in the Island of Uffa) by Darrell Schweitzer (Lord Dunsany) we return to stories whose style is definitely that of their purported authors. These include "The Adventure of Ricoletti of the Club Foot" (and his abominable wife) by Roberta Rogow (P. G. Wodehouse), "The Giant Rat of Sumatra" by Paula Volsky (H. P. Lovecraft), and "Mrs. Vamberry Takes a Trip (Vamberry the Wine Merchant)" by Mike Resnick (J. Thorne Smith). The Volsky is one of the better stories, with the style working with the Holmesian atmosphere rather than against it. The Resnick, on the other hand, may be Smith's style, but this only shows that Smith should not have written Sherlock Holmes stories. (By the by, the biographical paragraph about Resnick in the back seems to go out of its way to list such obscure books that fans won't even recognize that this is the same man who has twelve Hugo nominations.)
"The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin" by Richard A. Lupoff (Jack Kerouac) is certainly in the style of Kerouac. However, it is not a style I like and because of this, this was my least favorite story in the book. "The Madness of Colonel Warburton" by Carole Bugg (Dashiell Hammett) is also definitely in the style of its purported author, even without the ending, but only serves to show that Holmes is not a hard-boiled detective--nor is Watson.
"The Manor House Case" by Edward D. Hoch (Ellery Queen) is much more in the Ellery Queen style than Sherlock Holmes, with the usual "obvious" clue. (Doyle didn't always "play fair" with the reader, often having Holmes make his deductions based on information not given to the reader until the very end when Holmes explained everything.)
"The Adventure of the Cripple Parade (The Singular Affair of the Aluminium Crutch)" by William L. DeAndrea (Mickey Spillane) and "Too Many Stains (The Adventure of the Second Stain)" by Marvin Kaye (Rex Stout) are two more hard-boiled stories, again reinforcing my earlier statement about how Holmes and this style do not mix.
Although there are a few good stories here, on the whole I cannot recommend this anthology.
To order Resurrected Holmes from amazon.com, click here.
CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS by H. R. F. Keating:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/26/2005]
In his introduction, H. R. F. Keating says that his CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS (ISBN 0-88184-441-1) would be better titled "One Hundred Very Good Crime and Mystery Books, Taking into Account that No Author Should be Represented by More Than Three Titles (So As To Be Fair to Others) and Allowing for a Little Personal Idiosyncracy in Naming One or Two Whom the Majority of Other Commentators Might Not Have Chosen Very Readily". (And as the publisher notes, modesty forbade Keating from including any of his own stories.) At any rate, Keating gives us a two-page essay on each work: why it is included, what its flaws are, which other works by the same author are considered on a par (or perhaps even better), and so on. He rarely gives spoilers, but when he does, he warns the reader first. Keating starts with Edgar Allan Poe in 1845 and ends with a 1986 P. D. James novel. Since this book was published in 1987, that makes it as up-to-date as it could be, but obviously provides no guidance for the last two decades. Still, for those wanting to sample the classic mysteries, this book is the perfect companion.
To order Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books from amazon.com, click here.
THE PERFECT MURDER by H. R. Keating:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/04/2005]
H. R. Keating wrote a series of Inspector Ghote mysteries, starting with THE PERFECT MURDER (ISBN 0-897-33078-1). These take place in India, although Keating is English and did not even visit India until after he had written several of the books. Therefore, it isn't surprising that some of the details seem a bit off, but in general the unusual setting gives an otherwise basic mystery some interest. In particular, Ashok K. Banker talks about the "tweaked" almost-Indian names, and I found the Indian English language not completely convincing. The duplication (e.g., "Gate hate. Locking knocking.") "is* accurate, even though at first it seems like a Yiddish invasion. (The classic work of Indian English is called "Hobson Jobson" for a reason. And thanks to Fred Lerner for telling me that the technical name for this was "reduplication".)
To order The Perfect Murder from amazon.com, click here.
THE BOOK OF THE UNKNOWN by Jonathon Keats:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/13/2009]
THE BOOK OF THE UNKNOWN: TALES OF THE THIRTY-SIX by Jonathon Keats (ISBN-13 978-0-8129-7897-1, ISBN-10 0-8129-7897-8) is a collection of twelve stories about purported "lamed wufniks" (as I described in my review of Leopoldo Lugones's "Metamusic" in the 02/06/09 issue, in Jewish mystical tradition the thirty-six righteous men whose purpose is to justify the world to God). It also has a fictitious author's foreword and editor's afterword, trying to present these as true stories discovered in an ancient genizah. Unlike with some novels, however, it is fairly obvious that the entire book is fiction.
Keats's purpose seems to be to show that saints may be the most unlikely people: a thief, a gambler, a whore, even a murderer. Yet when you finish each story, it makes perfect sense that such a person could be a saint. My one problem is that while most of the stories take place in villages that could be in our world, some stories seem to take place in a fairy-tale land. To me at least, they seem too distant from our world to be portraying the lamed wufniks that protect our world. Although the whole notion of the saints has an element of the fantastical, it seems like it should have more connection with our world if the purpose is to uphold our world.
That said, the stories stand well on their own as fables even without a specific connection to the lamed wufniks. Read them as stories of unlikely saints in whatever world and you'll see what I mean.
To order The Book of the Unknown from amazon.com, click here.
BLUE HEAVEN by Joe Keenan (Penguin, 1988, 0-14-010764-9, trade paperback):
Gilbert is broke. Desperate for money, he goes to a family wedding, hoping to hit up his stepfather for some cash. Having failed at this, he wanders off and accidentally finds the room where the gifts are. As he's looking at them, in wanders Moira, also lost, also broke. They look at the gifts. They look at each other. A plan is born!
Yes, Gilbert and Moira decide to marry--for the gifts. There are a few minor problems. One, they hate each other. Two, Moira can be trusted about as far as you could throw a seven-tiered wedding cake. Three, Gilbert is gay. But as they say, the course of true love did never run smooth, and believe me, for the gifts they have true love.
Set in the trendy world of Manhattan artists (one friend makes sculptures out of trash bags filled with trash), Blue Heaven is the funniest book I can remember reading in years. There is Vulpina, who shows up at one point wearing "immense brown jodhpurs, a sort of black lace mantilla and a skin-tight white silk tube top. The total effect suggested a teabag in mourning." There is Gilbert's stepfather, Freddy "the Pooch" Bombelli, so called because it is rumored that his enemies end up as input to his pet food factory. (That is, those that don't suddenly have a fit of remorse, set themselves on fire, and jump from the top of a ten-story building.) That's right, folks, Gilbert and Moira are trying to cheat the Mafia.
Of course, things don't go as smoothly as this explanation might indicate. (Think about it.) There's Moira's mother, the Duchess, who can be counted on to cause problems. There are all of Gilbert's past lovers and rejected lovers who can be counted on to cause big problems. And then there is the problem of which of Bombelli's nephews will inherit his "business."
In summary, this book is absolutely wonderful. I found myself laughing out loud--a lot. I kept thinking it would make a great movie, somewhat along the lines of After Hours, but more madcap. (The back cover compares it to P. G. Wodehouse and Preston Sturges.) Go read this book.
To order Blue Heaven from amazon.com, click here.
PUTTING ON THE RITZ by Joe Keenan (Penguin, 1992 (1991c), ISBN 0-14-014989-9, trade paperback):
Life in New York will never be the same. First there was Gilbert and Moira's wedding. Not that they actually loved each other, or could even stand the sight of each other, but they did have a lot of rich step-relatives who could be counted on to be generous with the presents and they had one trait in common--greed. But that story was all told in Blue Heaven (which you should run out immediately and read), so I'll stick to Putting on the Ritz here.
Philip Cavanaugh (Gilbert's best man) and Claire Simmons have just had a Broadway flop--through no fault of their own, I should add, though since Philip is the narrator his opinions should perhaps be viewed with some suspicion. But Gilbert, ever helpful, has found them a new job--writing and arranging the music for a rich social matron's singing debut. That it is al a cover for having Philip try to dig up some dirt on the matron's husband for the editor of a rival culture magazine to use in their feud is a minor detail, as is the fact that what the matron makes up in money she lacks in talent. Philip knows he shouldn't get involved--as he says, "I ... said [to Gilbert] that, while I had no desire to hurt his feelings or mar his delight over his new project, I felt nonetheless compelled to remind him that he was born under a malignant star, that everything he touched ended in sorrow and weeping, and that any person so bereft of reason to assist him in one of his ventures should first consult a good dentist, as prolonged and intense gnashing of teeth might be confidently expected." Then Philip meets Gilbert's sponsor for all this, and sanity flies out the window as love (or at least lust) comes through the door. Of course, this makes him Gilbert's rival for this man, so their teamwork in this somewhat dubious plot is made even shakier by each of them attempting to outdo the other and so gain the prize.
I had claimed that Blue Heaven was the funniest book I had read in years, and Putting on the Ritz is every bit as funny as its predecessor. I wholeheartedly recommend both of them.
To order Putting on the Ritz from amazon.com, click here.
THE SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK by Carolyn Keene:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/28/2004]
Carolyn Keene's THE SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK was a nostalgia read for the mystery book group, but one of the oddities about it is that people had at least two different versions to choose from. Originally written in 1930, it was re-written in 1959 to remove racial sterotypes (sounds a bit like Agatha Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS/AND THEN THERE WERE NONE!), as well as to raise Nancy's age to 18, change her roadster to a convertible, and other "modernizations." One of these modernizations, according to one person who read both editions, was the dumbing-down of the language. This may be why I didn't enjoy the new version as much, and I also missed Beth and George. (We weren't sure if they were written out, or whether they didn't appear until later volumes. And we also didn't think today's teenagers would find much to like in them--there isn't much for them to identify with, but there is no "period feel" left to enjoy either. (This is why the updating of Sherlock Holmes done for the later Universal films doesn't work very well.) And our opinion is supported somewhat by one person, who said her niece had read it and thought that Nancy was just "too good" to be believable.
(Ironically, given the removal of the racial stereotypes, Nancy Drew is now published under Pocket Books's Minstrel imprint.)
There are also new series of Nancy Drew: Nancy Drew on Campus, Nancy Drew Notebooks, Nancy Drew & Hardy Boys Super Mysteries. Frankly, my recommendation both for those looking for nostalgia and for those reading them for the first time would be to read the 1930 editions if you can find them, and skip the newer ones.
Details about many of the differences and change can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/opinion/06BENF.html (probably expired, but there seems to be a copy at http://www.bayviews.org/baynews/news0403.htm). There was also an essay on http://www.epinions.com, but it seems to be gone.
To order The Secret of the Old Clock from amazon.com, click here.
"The Best Christmas Ever" by James Patrick Kelly:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/17/2005]
"The Best Christmas Ever" by James Patrick Kelly (scifi.com 5/26/04) is about a man surrounded entirely by robots ("biops") who take on the forms of family, friends, pets, and whatever else is needed to keep him happy. But he isn't. This is another story for which I can't understand its nomination. It's not that I don't like Christmas stories. I do like "A Christmas Carol" (the Alistair Sim version), "It Happened One Night" and "Miracle on 34th Street", and also Thomas Hardy's poem "The Oxen". But on the whole, the mere invocation of the holiday is not going to boost a story in my estimation.
BURN by James Patrick Kelly:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/12/2006]
"Burn" by James Patrick Kelly (ISBN 1-892-39127-9) was yet another Hugo nominee that I gave up on. There was just something about the writing style that I found impenetrable.
To order Burn from amazon.com, click here.
THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR by James Patrick Kelly (Golden Gryphon, ISBN 0-9655901-9-4, 1997, 275pp):
This volume contains fourteen of Kelly's best stories, including two Hugo nominees and four Nebula nominees (a fifth, "Saint Theresa of the Aliens," is missing). The title story is the best known, and the most discussed, of all of them. Some see it as a response or follow-up to Tom Godwin's "Cold Equations." It can be seen that way, but the "equation" in Godwin's story is a function of the physical universe, while that of "Think Like a Dinosaur" is more artificially created. And in fact it's not a new idea, but has been part and parcel of teleportation discussions for a long time now. Kelly combines it well with an alien sub- plot, though, and makes it interesting from that perspective.
The other stories represent the best of Kelley's work, and make it available in a permanent form.
This is the first volume from a new publisher, Golden Gryphon, and is a very well-produced volume. The single-author short story collection is not as dead as some claim. It isn't even relegated to the small press, as some would have--just this month sees the publication of a single-author collection by Ace, for example. But these collections do have an extra hurdle (as do reprint anthologies, for that matter): readers may decide they already have some or most of the stories and pass them up. In the case of THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR, what will work against its success is the fact that all but one of the stories in it were first published in ASIMOV'S, and most readers who know of Kelly are probably subscribers to that magazine. On the other hand, libraries should definitely acquire this book. In fact, I hope someone is bringing the single-author collections being produced these days to the attention of libraries, since they provide the only way for most libraries to get some of the best work of today's leading authors.
To order Think Like a Dinosaur from amazon.com, click here.
FEELING VERY STRANGE: THE SLIPSTREAM ANTHOLOGY edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/03/2006]
FEELING VERY STRANGE: THE SLIPSTREAM ANTHOLOGY edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (ISBN 1-892391-35-X) appears to be for slipstream what MIRRORSHADES edited by Bruce Sterling was for cyberpunk or BLACK WATER edited by Alberto Manguel was for magical realism: the foundational anthology. And you know an anthology is good when you find yourself looking forward to reading even the pieces you have read before. In this case, these are such classics as Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God", Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes'", and Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter". The earliest story is from 1972, though most date between 1987 and the present. (The term "slipstream" was coined by Bruce Sterling in 1989.)
In the introduction, Kelly and Kessel attempt to define "slipstream", and in the process list some "precursors" of slipstream (my comments in parentheses):
They then say, "The ideal version of this anthology would include such precursors." Well, you can always create a virtual by seeking these out as well. (Judith Merril must have had a slipstream sensibility--she anthologized four of these in her various "best-of" anthologies.)
To order Feeling Very Strange from amazon.com, click here.
FRIDAY THE RABBI SLEPT LATE by Harry Kemelman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/26/2003]
The library mystery discussion group covered Harry Kemelman's FRIDAY THE RABBI SLEPT LATE, the first of his long series. I thought the "expository lumps" about Judaism where a bit un- subtle, but most of the people (particularly the non-Jews) thought them well done. At first I thought the portrayal of a conservative rabbi who cooks, drives, and turns on lights on Saturday was questionable, but thinking about it, I suspect one found this more then, with the move back to a more observant position being a relatively recent phenomenon. I found the book interesting for its portrayal of a different world: an upper-class community with maids where people don't even lock their cars. (It reminded me of the setting of FAR FROM HEAVEN, the recent film set in the 1950s with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid.) In any case, everyone agreed it was an easy-to-read and enjoyable book.
To order Friday the Rabbi Slept Late from amazon.com, click here.
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/09/2007]
Our discussion group chose ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac (ISBN-10 0-140-04259-8, ISBN-13 978-0-140-04259-7) for our January book. most of us found it close to unreadable, and certainly not enjoyable. But at least two of us were stuck by this passage in Part 2, Chapter 2: "When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey wit the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York." And this was written a half century before 9/11.
To order On the Road from amazon.com, click here.
WEIRD TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, ISBN 0-88677-605-8, July 1994, 318pp, paperback).
The idea of "theme" anthologies is certainly nothing new. But they are usually on more mundane or predictable themes--first contact, alternate Presidents, even cats and horses. And it used to be that anthologies were of older stories culled from magazines, stories that were written because the authors wanted to write them. Now they're commissioned--twenty-three authors are told, "I'm looking for stories on a Shakespearean theme." (Actually, it's more than twenty-three--I forget the multiplier someone once said was needed to get the right number of usable stories.) The result of this newer mode of operation is often a collection of stories that would not have sold in the open, undirected market. Not that the stories are necessarily bad, mind you, but they are getting points for being on-topic that get them accepted in anthologies but wouldn't help otherwise. Resnick seems to do the best job of keeping the story quality up in his anthologies (maybe that's why he is nominated for the Best Editor Hugo this year).
Now, I would have expected thirty-eight stories in this anthology, but I guess Kerr couldn't get anyone to agree to write a science fiction or fantasy story based on Coriolanus. Nor is this "the alternate Shakespeare," though both Kerr's introduction and the back cover blurb make that claim. The first section could have gone that way, with its stories with the Bard as a character, but none of them are alternate histories. These are among the best stories in the book with Diana L. Paxon's "Augmentation of Dust" especially worthy of note. (Nitpick to the editors: pick one version of the author's name and stick to it. Is it "Diana Paxon" or "Diana L. Paxon"?)
Section two deals with the tragedies: Henry IV, Part II from the Welsh point of view, Hamlet from Gertrude's point of view, King Lear from the Fool's point of view, King Lear in a computer, King Lear on an alien planet. After a while the pattern (either retell the story from another point of view, do Lear, or both) begins to wear.
The introduction to the next section implies that the comedies are being covered, but instead it's a selection of humorous stories about non-comedies: Hamlet from the point of view of the skull, another story about William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus done for an alien audience, a vampiric Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare in general from the point of view of Hollywood. Of these only the last--Mike Resnick's "The Summer of My Discontent"--tickled my funny bone.
Section four has unusual workings of Shakespeare's themes: The Tempest from Caliban's point of view, two re-workings of the Rosalind/Orlando theme, a genuine alternate Romeo and Juliet, and a look at A Midsummer Night's Dream. Section five is a look at the future (but several stories in other sections did that already): another Shakespeare performed for aliens and two very good pieces--Gregory Benford's "Not of an Age" and Adrienne Martine-Barnes's "The Elements So Mixed."
You may have noticed that the only stories I thought worthy of note were those with Shakespeare as a character (either on- or off-stage)--stories about how he got started as a writer, his universal appeal, etc. Whenever authors try to re-tell Shakespeare's plays ... well, let's just say they're no Shakespeares. Authors such as Barry Malzberg and Brian Aldiss don't turn in clunkers, of course, but even their talent suffers by comparison to Shakespeare. Some ideas sound better in the conception than they turn out to be in their execution and Weird Tales from Shakespeare may be one of them. (If you are a specialist on Shakespeare your mileage will almost certainly vary, though in which direction I cannot tell.)
To order Weird Tales from amazon.com, click here.
CORRUPTING DR. NICE by John Kessel (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86116-8, 1997, 317pp, hardback):
If this doesn't make my Hugo nomination ballot for 1997, there must be some really amazing books showing up later. Kessel manages to write a humorous, witty (no, they're not the same thing), thoughtful, time travel, alternate history, religious dinosaur story, which I think is the first. (Gore Vidal's Live from Golgotha. came close, but lacked the dinosaur.) Having said this much, I now have to try to review this book without telling you too much more, because part of the enjoyment is watching it all unfold. (Or perhaps a better analogy is watching it all come together, like those puzzles with pieces of all different shapes than fit together into a neat cube.)
How does he do this? Well, the underlying premise seems to be one of branching universes, at least in the sense that you can go from now to then, make all sorts of changes, and come back to this now rather than that now. So the entrepreneurs of Dr. Owen Vannice's "now" can go back to the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, build a Holiday Inn, bring several major religious figures back to his present, and still not change one iota of the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Salem witch trials.
Vannice (Dr. Nice) is returning from the Cretaceous with an apatosaurus when he finds himself in that Jerusalem, and soon becomes embroiled in a plot by zealots to purge their world of the "invaders." (I guess I forgot to say this was also about cultural imperialism.)
Kessel also fills his bizarre story with references to other science fiction stories, current journalistic tendencies, and a wide range of prehistoric, historic and quasi-historic figures. Yet within all this madcap whirl are insights and truths about us and our world. In this regard Kessel is part of a long literary tradition in speculative fiction, including Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, James Morrow, and Connie Willis.
This is a wonderful book, both entertaining and thought-provoking. So in the words of Kim Stanley Robinson on the back cover, "Go buy this book yesterday."
To order Corrupting Dr. Nice from amazon.com, click here.
THE QUOTE VERIFIER by Ralph Keyes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/11/2008]
I got THE QUOTE VERIFIER by Ralph Keyes (ISBN-13 978-0-312-34004- 9, ISBN-10 0-312-34004-4) as a holiday gift, and it is more than just the usual collection of quotations. This is more like the "Snopes" of quotations, tracing the origin of hundreds of famous quotations, and trying to determine whether they were said by (any of) the people credited with them. For example, Harry Truman did not originate either "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen (Buck Purcell did), or "The buck stops here" (no, not Buck Purcell, but an anonymous originator). And "It's like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall" is an update of the original "like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall," coined by none other than Theodore Roosevelt (describing negotiations with Colombia in 1903). Not surprisingly, Keyes concentrates on quotes that are usually mis-credited, rather than those that really belong to the person most often cited. Those that are correctly attributed are often revisions or alterations of what was actually said. For example, Ivan Boesky said, "Greed is all right.... Greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." This was condensed in the movie WALL STREET to "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." All in all, a fun book, and worth having if you are the sort of person who likes to nit-pick other people's .sig files.
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