All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
SCIENCE FICTION by Adam Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/06/2006]
SCIENCE FICTION by Adam Roberts (ISBN 0-415-19205-6) is in Routledge's "The New Critical Idiom" series. It seems to be attempting to be a serious academic study of science fiction, with a ten-page glossary, a six-page bibliography, sentences like "That is what these nova [*] symbolise: the linkage and coherence of intertextuality itself, the web of quotation and illusion in which all texts are located." ([*] "Nova" is Dark Suvin's coined word for "the new things that distinguish the SF tale from a conventional literature.") I would find this pose of seriousness more convincing were it not marred by poor editing (or proofreading): John Campbell is referred to as "Joseph Campbell" at least once (page 75), Isaac Asimov's "Hari Seldon" is spelled "Sheldon" every time after the first mention, and Olaf Stapledon's name is spelled "Stapleton", both in the text and in the index. (Thomas M. Disch also makes the latter error in THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF.) I would be more willing to slog through the academic language if I did not have the nagging feeling that maybe some of it is rendered incorrectly also.
To order Science Fiction from amazon.com, click here.
SWIFTLY by Adam Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/17/2009]
SWIFTLY by Adam Roberts (ISBN-13 978-0-575-08234-2, ISBN-10 0-575-08234-8) is an expansion of two stories which appeared earlier, one in a book titled "Swiftly: Stories". Alas, the expansion does not serve it well--the middle part seems unnecessarily padded and dragged out. In addition, Roberts draws not only on Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (the premise is that Gulliver's account was true), but also from several other authors for concepts and images.
As one example, consider the following passage: "On the Great North Road, a great worm of humanity pulsed slowly away to the horizon, people walking, trudging, hurrying or staggering, handcarts and horse-carts, men hauling packs stacked yards high with clinking pots and rolled cloth, women carrying children, animals on tight tethers." All that is missing is the phrase "the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind."
Roberts also makes several annoying errors. He writes, "Each patch of dirt was delineated from clear glass by a hyperbolic line running from bottom left to top right, as, Bates thought, x equals y squared." (page 2) First of all, x equals y squared is parabolic, not hyperbolic. Second, it is parabolic in the wrong direction (bulging up rather than down). And third, there is a bottom half of the parabola that Bates (or Roberts) completely ignores.
Again, Roberts labels a diary enter 11 Nov [1848] and then has someone say it was Thursday. No, it was Saturday. On page 37 a character uses the term "zero-sum"; this was not coined until a hundred years later. And on page 315, a character writes, "Whilst a new Nero arose and cried aloud 'If only all Rome had but one neck...'" Sorry, but that was Caligula.
I will note that of Roberts's non-fiction book SCIENCE FICTION, I said that it needed better proofreading: John Campbell was referred to as "Joseph Campbell" at least once (page 75), Isaac Asimov's "Hari Seldon" was spelled "Sheldon" every time after the first mention, and Olaf Stapledon's name was spelled "Stapleton", both in the text and in the index. (I note that MS Word's spell checking seems to think the former *is* a misspelling, while the latter is not flagged.) Roberts clearly needs to find better proofreaders.
To order Swiftly from amazon.com, click here.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: IMAGINARY HISTORY FROM TWELVE LEADING HISTORIANS edited by Andrew Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/30/2004]
Another British book that if we're lucky will come to the United States is WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: IMAGINARY HISTORY FROM TWELVE LEADING HISTORIANS edited by Andrew Roberts (ISBN 0-297-84877-1). (Of course, there may be a title change--there has already been a series of anthologies with the name "What Might Have Been" edited by Gregory Benford.) Roberts's book is on a somewhat higher level than most, as is clear from his introduction, in which he for example, says, "The Whig and Marxist theories of history should have long ago been replaced by a more believable one, in which What Ifs can play an important role by reminding us that no route is predestined. In this view of the world, Man is a fallen, Originally Sinful being, who strives to do better than previous generations by trying to learn from them, but is ever conscious of the abysses below, and is as familiar with a knowable past as he is suspicious of plans to get to a necessarily unmappable future utopia." (The Marxist theory is the inevitable "withering away of the state" into a workers' commune, and the Whig view is of the inevitability of liberal democracy and the "Brotherhood of Man".)
The stories, alas, cover some of the more common or obvious points of divergence:
Most are well thought-out, if dry, counterfactuals. I use that term rather than "alternate histories" because the latter need to have some plot other than a dry recounting of historical (or ahistorical) events. It's not enough to say Napoleon triumphs in Russia--one must have a Russian character reacting to this, or a French character in Russia, or *someone*. The most current of the counterfactuals (David Frum's "The Chads Fall Off in Florida"), however, while achieving some level of characterization and hence being an actual alternate history, is either just silly or a satire, neither of which is in keeping with the rest. (Sample: "[Gore] issued an executive order the day after [his] Inaugural requiring that all proposed military operations undergo environmental review.") Upon reading the biography of David Frum, I discover that he is a former speech writer and special assistant to President George W. Bush and a well-known conservative, which explains this. But while as a stand-alone or with other less academic works this story would almost definitely have seemed clever, here it suffers by appearing to be ill thought-out. It's like being the only one in jogging clothes at a formal dinner.
To order What Might Have Been from amazon.com, click here.
THE SEVEN HILLS by John Maddox Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/10/2006]
THE SEVEN HILLS by John Maddox Roberts (ISBN 0-441-01245-0) is the middle book of a trilogy in which Carthage has defeated Rome in the First Punic War, but Rome has withdrawn to north of the Alps, regrouped, and is now returning to re-take its lands, and Carthage as well. Even though it is a middle book, it reads pretty well by itself, although since I did read the first book (HANNIBAL'S CHILDREN last year I may not be an impartial judge. I do think, though, that there are some problems with Roberts's description of Judea, which he describes as having the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The problem is that the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., the Kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E., and neither was restored in our timeline. The First Punic War was not until 264-241 B.C.E. I suppose one could argue that without a strong Rome, the Maccabee Revolt in 168 B.C.E. might have led to the restorations, but if so, that is left unexplained. Still, it is a minor point, and Roberts has lots of detail on Roman and Carthaginian customs and military matters to keep the reader interested. (Note: There are those who claim that Roberts's descriptions of the Carthaginians are based on what was written in our timeline by the Romans, their enemies, and is not really accurate.)
(Shame on Ace Books for not indicating anywhere that this is indeed a middle book of a series. Yes, it can probably be read on its own, but it is not an entirely self-contained work.)
To order The Seven Hills from amazon.com, click here.
ANTARCTICA by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam, ISBN 0-553-10063-7, 1998, 508pp, hardback):
Robinson is certainly best known for his "Mars" series (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Antartica reads like White Mars. It has what seemed like even more expository lumps, nay, expository mountains, about geology et al. And the only hint that this attempt to get us all to live a more ecologically sustainable lifestyle might not be paradisical is a passing reference to three attempts at single-child families in China, a plan that sounds good in theory but has turned out to be quite otherwise in practice. (Robinson's character who refers to this seems to think it was a good thing; Robinson's opinion is of course unknown.)
If Robinson is not the leading "ecological science fiction" writer these days, I must be really out of touch with the field. But even though I agree with his goals (or what I think his goals are), I am starting to find his didacticism wearing. To be fair, he does not draw obvious villains, intent on killing all the whales or some such and hang the consequences. But the parade of scientists and just plain folks who get to stand up and "speechify" about their philosophies is not what I am looking for in a novel.
The most interesting part of Antarctica, in fact, was the recounting of the early exploration of the continent and the people involved in that. Here Robinson's long expository passages didn't bother me, maybe because the explorers had more personality than mountains and glaciers. At least with them I felt I was reading a story rather than a textbook.
If you liked the "Mars" trilogy, you will almost definitely like Antarctica. But if you preferred the sparser, earlier Robinson, and were hoping for a return to that style, this will be a disappointment.
[Though the copyright date listed in the book is 1998, the book was actually published in Britain in 1997.]
To order Antartica from amazon.com, click here.
BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra, 0-553-57335-7, 1996, 624pp, mass market paperback):
Well, Kim Stanley Robinson has finally finished his Mars trilogy, and while it maybe heresy to say this, I'm glad it's over. It is possible that if I had read the whole trilogy at one time, I might have enjoyed the third book more, but the fact is that finishing it was more a chore than a pleasure.
Maybe it's just my reaction to massive multi-volume series that take years to finish. Orson Scott Card took so long for his latest Alvin book to come out that I had completely lost interest. The current Turtledove World War series is another one that started out good, but two years later is bogging down, as I try to reconstruct enough of the earlier books to have the current one mean something. And even Robinson, whose work I generally love, cannot overcome this problem.
In the first book (Red Mars), Robinson sets the stage, introduces the characters, and gives us a clear picture of what is happening. Though obviously there was room for a sequel, the book did stand on its own. In Green Mars he continues the story, with even more emphasis on the technical aspects. But because it was a continuation, Green Mars did not stand on its own, having no real beginning and no real end in itself. (In spite of this, it won a Hugo. I was happy to see Robinson win a Hugo--I just wish it had been for one of his other works.)
Now in Blue Mars we have an end. (There is, of course, always room for a sequel set on "blue Mars," but it is not necessary and I doubt Robinson will write one.) However, we still have no beginning per se. We also have tons more technical areological and terraforming discussions and explications, and some characterization, mostly to wrap up the stories of the people we have been following throughout. (With all this technical detail, it's almost inevitable there will be slip-ups. For example, "Hindu" is not a language [page 406].)
I wanted to like this book. But I have to say it was too much of a good thing, too stretched out. I'm not even sure why I am saying this. People who read the first two will probably read this one for a sense of closure in any case, and people who didn't probably wouldn't read this anyway. I suppose if you want to read the entire trilogy through you will appreciate this more, but that's not likely to encompass a large number of readers.
To order Blue Mars from amazon.com, click here.
FIFTY DEGREES BELOW by Kim Stanley Robinson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/17/2006]
FIFTY DEGREES BELOW by Kim Stanley Robinson (ISBN 0-553-80312-3) is a sequel to FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN. The high-concept description for FORTY DAYS OF RAIN would be "Katrina hits Washington D.C."; for FIFTY DEGREES BELOW is would be "The Day After Tomorrow." Robinson's writing has always has an ecological bent. Unfortunately, it has become more and more a combination of info- dump and agenda, to the extent that I found it impossible to slog through this.
To order Fifty Degrees Below from amazon.com, click here.
FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN by Kim Stanley Robinson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2004]
I was really looking forward to Kim Stanley Robinson's FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN (ISBN 0-553-80311-5). The description I read said (or implied) that the island of Khembalung, which had become the nation that was the new house of the Tibetan government in exile, ended up under water due to global warming, and what was left of the nation was the embassy in Washington. Well, it is *something* like that, sort of. At ConKopelli, John Hertz said, "One of the weaknesses of science fiction is that it is a very tempting disguise for a sermon." And nowhere has this been more evident to me recently than in FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN. Charlie Quibler is a scientist concerned about global warming who cannot get the politicians to listen, and also the care-giving parent in his family. Another character, Frank Vanderwal, thinks of all human actions and interactions in terms of evolutionary characteristics that were beneficial to primitive man on the savannah, but in the course of the novel learns the superiority of the Buddhist approach to science. If I have missed any of Robinson's hot buttons, I would be surprised, because that would mean he had also. To top it off, the plot also comes up with some serendipitous scientific discoveries which make the ending more upbeat than it deserves to be. (But I do think that Robinson has actually found one hard fact that does give me some hope in the real world. I do not want to say more about the ending, because I do not want to give it away.) There is a good book in here, but as with many of his later books, Robinson has gotten too caught up in saving the world to write a novel that doesn't preach. (Note: As with William Ashbless last week, there is fiction presented as fact here--there is not really an island of Khembalung, or a League of Drowning Nations. Since these are given as pre-dating the present, I guess that makes this an alternate history.)
To order Forty Signs of Rain from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING MODERNISM by Chris Rodrigues and Chris Garratt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/07/2004]
And yet another example of synchronicity: One morning I read Jeffrey Ford's Hugo-nominated "The Empire of Ice Cream", which is about synesthesia. I then went home, opened Chris Rodrigues and Chris Garratt's INTRODUCING MODERNISM (ISBN 1-84046-229-9, Totem Books) to where I had left off and two pages later in a section on how the arts relate to each other read, "Charles Baudelaire (1821- 67), a proto-modernist poet, experimented with 'synaesthesia', which means translating one sense perception into another." Rodrigues also says that Baudelaire introduced the most important urban figure of Modernism, the "flaneur" or stroller. I wonder if this means that such radio shows as "The Whistler", "The Man in Black" and "The Shadow" are Modernist.
To order Introducing Modernism from amazon.com, click here.
YEARS OF MINUTES by Andy Rooney:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/27/2009]
YEARS OF MINUTES by Andy Rooney (ISBN-13 978-1-58648-264-0, ISBN-10 1-58648-264-5) is a selection of Rooney's "60 Minutes" talks from 1982 to 2003. I found myself agreeing with some and disagreeing with others, but every once in a while I would run across a little surprise in the form of a very dated comment.
[Note: Rooney omits what he considers are unnecessary apostrophes. I'm not going to include "[sic]" every time he does this; take this as a general "[sic]".)
For example, in 1985 he said, "Here's [a question in a report card] from the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Question number five: 'Is there something about your room youd like to see changed?' Well, yes, as a matter of fact there is. Your average room costs about $125. You could change that to half if you wanted to." The current (2009) room rate at the Century Plaza is $375.
1988: "We have cable television in our house because we get better reception with it. There are fifty-three channels, not counting the dirty ones. Now, when does anyone watch fifty-three channels? I paid $500 for a videotape recorder." Digital cable now gives you hundreds of channels, and videotape recorders cost about $80 and include a DVD player as well).
1990: "A ticket to a World Series game in the third deck is $40. A ticket in the first or second deck is $50. ... The large hot dog ... is $2.75. The small one ... is $2. A large beer is $4. A small beer is $2.75." Now tickets are $125, $150, and $225, a hot dog is $7.50, and a beer is $8.75.
1991: "My bet is that in a few years, half those Soviet states that left the union will come home." He referred to "fifteen states", which would be Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. The last I checked none of them want back in.
1998: "It looks as if we're going to bomb Iraq. Boy, I dont know about that either. Im not for starting a war but you have to figure the President knows more about what weapons Saddam Hussein's got than he's telling us. ... I still trust the President enough to believe that if we do it, we had to do it."
1999: "The Russians almost took the world out at Chernobyl in 1986. That little part of the world is practically dead." According to a recent report 48 endangered species are "thriving" there. There are 270 species of birds alone in the area.
To order Years of Minutes from amazon.com, click here.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Theodore Roosevelt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/13/2002]
Well, I just finished the autobiography of a labor-leaning, tree-hugging, equal-rights environmentalist--Theodore Roosevelt. All I can say is that if he rose from the dead and looked at the Republican Party today and they looked at him, both he and they would have heart attacks. Then again, he did split off and form the Bull Moose Party, so even back then he had issues with them. Theodore Roosevelt is considered to be possibly the finest writer of all the Presidents, and this autobiography was certainly both fascinating and readable--and what's more, I doubt any ghost writer was involved. His name has been in the news briefly recently when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize, as one of the other two United States Presidents who have won it. (I can also recommend his books about his life out west, and while I haven't read any of his others, I suspect they're equally good.)
To order The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt from amazon.com, click here.
FEAR GOD AND TAKE YOUR OWN PART by Theodore Roosevelt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/24/2004]
I found Theodore Roosevelt's FEAR GOD AND TAKE YOUR OWN PART (ISBN 0-898-75414-3) at a book sale and while much of what he writes is colored by the attitudes of the times, some seems remarkably pertinent today. For example, writing of President Wilson's policies in the title essay, Roosevelt says, "Mr. Wilson has more than once interfered--to use his own scholarly and elegant phraseology, 'butted in'--by making war in Mexico. He never did it, however, to secure justice for Americans or other foreigners. He never did it to secure the triumph of justice and peace for among the Mexicans themselves. He merely did it in the interest of some bandit chief, whom at the moment he liked, in order to harm some other bandit chief whom at the moment he disliked." That sounds like our foreign policy for many years after Wilson as well.
To order Fear God and Take Your Own Part from amazon.com, click here.
THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS by Theodore Roosevelt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/07/2006]
THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS by Theodore Roosevelt (ISBN 0-8154-1095-6) is Roosevelt's own account of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition to map what was then called the "River of Doubt" (Rio da Duvida), was renamed Rio Roosevelt, and then later renamed Rio Teodoro. His descriptions of the land, the animals, and the plants are first-rate, but he does somewhat gloss over some of the hardships of the expedition, in specific the illnesses. I suppose perhaps it was considered "unmanly" to complain of malaria, blood poisoning, and so on, but the result is a slightly incomplete picture of the expedition. On the flip side, Roosevelt is very clear about the insufficient provisions, the loss of several canoes, and so on.
Some of the writing is of interest in terms of later scientific discoveries. For example, Roosevelt wrote, "During a geologically recent period, a period extending into that which saw man spread over the world in substantially the physical and cultural stage of many existing savages, South America possessed a varied and striking fauna of enormous beasts—sabre-tooth tigers, huge lions, mastodons, horses of many kinds, camel-like pachyderms, giant ground-sloths, mylodons the size of the rhinoceros, and many, many other strange and wonderful creatures. From some cause, concerning the nature of which we cannot at present even hazard a guess, this vast and giant fauna vanished completely, the tremendous catastrophe (the duration of which is unknown) not being consummated until within a few thousand or a few score thousand years. When the white man reached South America he found the same weak and impoverished mammalian fauna that exists practically unchanged to-day." Now we think we can venture a guess as to the nature of the cause: South America had been an island continent for a long time, and the fauna that develeped were suitable for an isolated environment. When continental drift (unimagined in 1913) brought South America in contact with North America (which in turn had been connected to Eurasia), the much-better-adapted fauna of that continent pretty much wiped out a large proportion the native fauna of South America.
To order Through the Brazilian Wilderness from amazon.com, click here.
THE YEAR OF READING PROUST by Phyllis Rose:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/07/2003]
I had hoped that Phyllis Rose's THE YEAR OF READING PROUST would be more about reading Proust and less about what happened to the author during that year, but it wasn't. I was earlier disappointed in Alain De Botton's HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Proust may be a great author, but the books he seems to inspire are neither useful nor informative (though De Botton's is the better of the two in this regard).
To order The Year of Reading Proust from amazon.com, click here.
"Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" by Benjamin Rosenbaum:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" by Benjamin Rosenbaum (in the anthology ALL-STAR ZEPPELIN ADVENTURE STORIES) has a long, complicated title, and that's just a sign of what is to come. The Benjamin Rosenbaum of the title is a pseudonym for a "Plausible Fable", a.k.a. "PlausFab" (think "SciFi") writer in an alternate universe that is not a Democritan materialist one (as ours is), but one in which the world seems to have its own consciousness and purpose through the Theory of Five Causal Forms. (If I were to compare it to another work, it would be Richard Garfinkle's CELESTIAL MATTERS.) And Rosenbaum (our Rosenbaum, that is) adds another level of difference in the supremacy of the Karaite view of Judaism over the Rabbinical one. You either like this sort or stuff, or you don't, and I can't help feeling that if you don't, the addition of zeppelins won't help it. I liked it--a lot.
To order All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories from amazon.com, click here.
THE CULT OF INFORMATION by Theodore Roszak:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/09/2003]
Theodore Roszak is better known to me as a fiction writer, with his FLICKERS and the Tiptree-Award-winning MEMOIRS OF ELIZABETH FRANKENSTEIN. (He is also known to me as a writer whose name is hard to spell, since he uses "sz", while the composer Miklos Rozsa uses "zs".) Anyway, I ran across a copy of Roszak's 1986 book THE CULT OF INFORMATION, and skimmed through it. A lot of Roszak's fears--the possible misuse of information, the tendency of some to think everything can be solved by computers, and so on--have certainly been borne out. And all the amazing artificial intelligence accomplishments claimed at the time (fifteen years ago) which were touted as five, or at most ten years, away have not yet arrived.
But as with any older predictive book, there are a few statements that catch one up as just *wrong" (in retrospect, anyway). For example, talking about a plan Apple had to donate a computer to every school in California, Roszak wrote, "As the market for home computers sharply tapers off, . . . ." Well, if so, it was a temporary lull. Also, he talks about various schools that required the ownership of a computer for all students. (This was often a specific one--at Dartmouth, it was a Macintosh, at Clarkson, a Zenith.) Roszak finds this "a bold innovation," asking, "Has there ever been another instance of the universities making the ownership of a piece of equipment mandatory for the pursuit of learning?" Even if one doesn't include textbooks as pieces of equipment, I suspect that engineering schools usually required slide rules, and typewriters were usually de facto required.
To order The Cult of Information from amazon.com, click here.
THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA by Philip Roth:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/22/2004]
My main reading this week was Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA (ISBN 0-618-50928-3). Apparently that has been a lot of people's reading--this is probably the first alternate history to make the best-seller list since Sinclair Lewis's IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. (If it isn't, I'm sure someone will point it out.)
For those of you who don't follow the best-seller lists, the PLOT's plot is that in 1940 a dead-locked Republican convention nominates Charles Lindbergh as their Presidential candidate, he defeats Roosevelt, and his pro-Nazi sympathies have a devastating effect on the United States. Roth claims he wrote the book in 2000, which makes some of the parallels between Lindbergh's America and that of 2004 particularly startling. (On the other hand, in any time of crisis, there will be some group that the rest of the population will choose as the scapegoat to blame.)
The book is told in the first person by a "Philip Roth" who is seven at the time of Lindbergh's election. (Apparently Roth often uses some version of himself and his family in his novels.) This "Philip Roth" is Jewish, lives in New Jersey, and has a family diverse enough in character to cover all the types Roth (the author) wants to show--the honest, the dishonest, the violent, the peaceful, and so on. Some have said that what the narrator says seems too perceptive for a seven-year-old, but one can argue that it is actually being told several years later by an older boy (or man). My objection is that the ending seems a bit forced, and the reversion to so many similarities with our own timeline seems unlikely.
Yet Roth does capture the essence, by making the reader feel as thought he or she is in that world, that these rabble-rousing speeches have been made, that people have been co-opted in relocation plans, that there are roving gangs attacking people who don't fit their idea of "Americans", and that everything that seemed secure is no longer.
However, I do have a few bones to pick with Frank Rich's review in the "New York Times". Rich describes the book by saying, "The plot of 'The Plot' belongs to a low-rent genre, 'alternate history,' in which novelists of Mr. Roth's stature rarely dwell." Well, yes, if reviewers are going to call it a low-rent genre, it's no wonder that serious novelists shy away from it. Later, however, Roth says, "By sweeping us into an alternative universe, it lets us see the world we actually inhabit from another perspective." Precisely--that is why alternate histories are meaningful, or can be when done well. The fact that many are not done well does not make the good ones any less valuable.
And a couple of weeks ago, Charles S. Harris commented on Rich's review, noting "Mr. Rich doesn't even comment on the most glaring improbability in this supposedly scrupulous alternate history book: The 1-cent Yosemite National Park stamp pictured on the cover was issued in 1934, and therefore would no longer be available to receive the swastika overprint in 1940, the crucial election year in the novel." Well, it turns out the stamp pictured on the cover (with overprint) is one that the main character (a seven-year-old budding philatelist) sees in a dream when the events begin unfolding in 1940. Obviously bothered by all the talk of the Nazis and such, he dreams that when he opens his stamp album he discovers that his George Washington stamps now have Hitler instead, and the National Parks stamps have the swastika on them. No, it isn't logical, but it is the dream of a seven-year-old, and admittedly a striking image for the cover.
To order The Plot Against America from amazon.com, click here.
"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe (scifi.com 5/5/04) is another story I found, for some reason, unreadable. Maybe my age is starting to show or something, but a lot of "cutting-edge" fiction seems more like "the death of a thousand cuts" to me.
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX by J. K. Rowling:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/14/2006]
I finally got to HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX by J. K. Rowling (ISBN 0-439-35807-8). Each "Harry Potter" book covers one year, starting with Harry at ten years old (if I recall correctly). I'm not sure whether the initial idea was that readers would read the first one at age ten, the next at age eleven, and so on, and I don't remember the earlier books that well, but it does seem that the vocabulary in the fifth book is more advanced than the earlier ones, with words like "frisson" and "acerbity". (amazon.com lists the reading level for all the books at ages 9 through 12, but since that is just a lower threshold, that is not much of a clue.)
Also, I know they claim not to be re-editing the books for American audiences, but in chapter 12, when they are making the potion in Snapes's class, the American edition uses the term "counter-clockwise" rather than "widdershins" (or even "anti- clockwise").
After five books, I am beginning to wonder: if students start when they are ten years old, and we hear about their entire day and class schedule, when do they learn anything like mathematics, reading, or spelling (the orthographic kind, not the hermeneutic)? (I would ask about things like history or geography, but that would be considered "muggle stuff", and a lot of their courses *could* be considered science.) And why do all the wizards celebrate Christmas and Easter?
For reasons too complicated to go in to, I listened to the first two-thirds or so on CD, then finished the book by reading it. The two provided very different experiences--listening forces one to go at the performer's pace, which makes for a more intense experience than quickly skimming over parts. Or possibly it was the content itself, because a lot of this book is considerably "darker" than the earlier books, or even the final part of this book. Listening to descriptions of humiliation and child abuse provides a very different experience than reading about "spell-o- tape" and Quidditch.
To order Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix from amazon.com, click here.
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by Carlos Ruiz Zafón:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/22/2005]
If you liked Arturo Perez-Reverte's THE CLUB DUMAS, you will definitely want to read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's THE SHADOW OF THE WIND (ISBN 1-59420-010-6). This is another story about the mysteries surrounding a book, set in Barcelona before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War. When Daniel was a child, his father took his to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinthine repository for books that have been abandoned. "When a library closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here," Daniel's father tells him. The Cemetery itself sounds like a cross between Borges's Library of Babel and the Cairo Genizah. And everyone who knows about the Cemetery chooses one book to "adopt", so there's a possible reference to Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451 as well.
Daniel chooses THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by Julian Carax, but he soon discovers that someone else remembers this book, and all of Carax's other books--and seeking them out to destroy all of them. There are hidden family secrets, and vicious policemen (one of whom reminded me of Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert--yet another reference), and uncanny parallels between Carax's plot and Daniel's life, and even similarities to Franz Kafka. I haven't read the original, but as far as I can tell, translator Lucia Graves (daughter of poet Robert Graves) does a very good job of keeping a mysterious atmosphere throughout. Highly recommended.
(Ruiz Zafón now lives in Los Angeles, so maybe his future books will be published here faster. THE SHADOW OF THE WIND took a while, but being on the bestseller list in Spain for over a year probably helped.)
To order The Shadow of the Wind from amazon.com, click here.
GUYS AND DOLLS by Damon Runyon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/24/2006]
Damon Runyon is a much-neglected author. Oh, lots of people have heard of him, but I suspect most of them have not read him. He is probably best known in connection with the film GUYS AND DOLLS, based on his stories. At least that is a good representation of Runyon's style. THE LEMON-DROP KID with Bob Hope is a terrible adaptation of the story of the same name. First of all, the movie has none of Runyon's distinctive cadences. And second, it completely changes the tone of the ending, turning a tear-jerker into a comedy. For a sample of Runyon's style, I'll give you the same excerpt William Kennedy quotes in his introduction to GUYS AND DOLLS (ISBN 0-14-017659-4): "He is a big heavy guy with several chins and very funny feet, which is why he is called Feet. These feet are extra large feet, even for a big guy, and Dave the Dude says Feet wears violin cases for shoes. Of course this is not true, because Feet cannot get either of his feet in a violin case, unless it is a case for a very large violin, such as a cello." If I had to describe what characterizes Runyon's writing, it would be that his narrators 1) talk in the present tense, 2) use the present progressive a lot, and 3) never use contractions. (Mark pointed out the latter when we first started talking about Runyon.) So the narrator would not say, "So we went to the race track, and whom did we see there but Dave the Dude." He would say, "So we are going to the race track, and whom are we seeing there but Dave the Dude." For a while Runyon was mostly out of print, but now he is much more available, with GUYS AND DOLLS being perhaps the best place to start.
To order Guys and Dolls from amazon.com, click here.
"Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/11/2008]
"Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (ASIMOV'S Feb) is a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History as well as for the Hugo. The premise is that, through a slight miscalculation in the trip around the far side of the moon, Apollo 8 missed its window and was unable to return to Earth. Richard was a child at the time, and spends the rest of his life working for space exploration--and to recover the capsule and the bodies of Lovell, Borman, and Anders. (There has been much debate about whether using still-living figures in an alternate history this way is fair to them, but I notice that no one makes the same objections when it is a politician rather than an astronaut.) This is a combination of alternate history and classic space exploration science fiction--sort of the best of both worlds.