It’s a lot of light reading this month at The Admiral’s Book Post, with more books than usual, and not as many heavy duty "spinach books" (not so much fun, but good for you). I was coping with personal tragedies and slipping into mysteries and sci fi and other books that could be read in just a day or two, to ease my own pain. I discovered Terry Pratchett and Michael Dibdin, both of whom made me ooh and ah for different reasons. Enjoy.
Eight Shades of WIN: The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett :
"A subject of the Emperor appears to have taken it into his head to visit our city. It appears he wishes to look at it. Only a madman would possibly undergo all the privations of crossing the Turnwise Ocean in order to merely LOOK at anything. However.
"He landed this morning. He might have met a great hero, or the cunningest of thieves, or some wise and great sage. He met you. He has employed you as a guide. You will be a guide, Rincewind, to this looker, this Twoflower. You will see that he returns home with a good report of our little homeland. What do you say to that?"
"Er. Thank you, Lord," said Rincewind, miserably.
"There is another point, of course. It would be a tragedy should anything untoward happen to our little visitor. It would be dreadful if he were to die, for example. Dreadful for the whole of our land, because the Agatean Emperor looks after his own and could certainly extinguish us at a nod. A mere nod. And that would be dreadful for you, Rincewind, because in the weeks that remained before the Emperor’s huge mercenary fleet arrived, certain of my servants would occupy themselves about your person in the hope that the avenging captains, on their arrival, might find their anger tempered by the sight of your still living body. There are certain spells that can prevent the life departing from a body, be it never so abused, and...I see by your face that understanding dawns?"
"Yarrg."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Yess, Lord. I’ll, um, see to it. I mean, I’ll endeavor to see. I mean, well, I’ll try to look after him and see that he comes to no harm." And after that I’ll get a job juggling snowballs through Hell, he added bitterly in the privacy of his own skull.
"Capital...oh, and there is one other thing," the Patrician said, as the wizard groped for the door handles.
"Yes, Lord?" he replied, with a sinking heart.
"I’m sure you won’t dream of trying to escape from your obligations by fleeing the city. I judge you to be a born city person. But you may be sure that the lords of the other cities will be appraised of these conditions by nightfall."
"I assure you, the thought never even crossed my mind, Lord."
"Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander."
OMG, this book is one of the most DELIGHTFUL ROMPs I’ve ever read! I have friends who have recommended Terry Pratchett to me for quite a while now, but until now all I’d read (and loved) was Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman. This wonderful, wonderful book brings us a flat world on the back of a turtle, on which a failed wizard and an insurance clerk encounter parodies of Dungeons & Dragons stock characters, Pern dragons, Elder Gods, and a few references to fantasy worlds I have yet to encounter. Not only do the Gods play at dice, but the dice are loaded. Amazing tie-your-brain in knots paradoxes, and a bit to say about the magic v. science dichotomy.
I was saving the line "Probably the most interesting, multidimensional character in the book is the luggage" for a scathing critical pan....but it’s appropriate for The Color of Magic, in a GOOD, oh so amazing way. Just read it. Now.
Oh, and...best of all...on the "also by" page, I notice there’s about eleventy godzillion more Discworld books still awaiting me. This was just #1 in a series. I’m a happy camper today.
All your brains want to do is eat us: Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak :
"You know I detest your researches, Patrick. They can’t help humanity! All they could do is promote unhappiness. They take the world back to barbarism."
"I’m a specialist, and you are too," I replied, to help him argue himself out of these notions. "Civilization cannot exist without specialization."
"I’m not interested in civilization. We are so ignorant of our souls we take refuge in mechanics, physics, chemistry. We are losing our consciousness of the human dignity that distinguished man from animal. You are making the human being a highly specialized stone age man ruled by egotism. You are creating a mechanical, synthetic life and killing the spirit that has lifted humanity above the beast. You believe only your test tubes. You are killing faith! I’m glad only a few men like you exist! Your researches have made you more and more rational, until you refuse to recognize a single fact that cannot be proved in the laboratory. I’m frightened, Patrick! You’re creating a mechanical soul that will destroy the world."
HE is a mad scientist! IT is a brain in a jar! TOGETHER, they SOLVE CRIMES!
No, really.
Well, sort of.
Oh God. This is as good as The Color of Magic, in its own completely different way that combines, in all seriousness, the sci fi, horror and crime genres all in one unique plot. See, the scientist fails to rescue a stranger from a plane crash near his out in nowhere laboratory, but naturally, he saves the guy’s brain and tries to learn to talk to it. Except that the brain he rescued belongs to a guy with many, many dark secrets I’m not going to spoil for you here. And then they engage in a battle of wills...and then...THEN...it gets weird.
The opening pages have a description of an experiment done on a monkey, which is the most not-for-the-squeamish scene in the book. If that bothers you, it’s ok to skip it and keep going. The rest of the story is different and totally beyond worth it.
Life, the Universe, and Everything:Tono Bungay, by H G Wells :
I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham Infirmary. I have eaten illegal snacks, the unjustifiable gifts of footmen, in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk. And, to go to my other extreme, I was once (oh, glittering days!) an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I’ve seen these people at various angles. At the dinner table I’ve met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion—it is my brightest memory—I upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire (Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him!) in the warmth of our mutual admiration. And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man.
Definitely not what I was expecting from the writer known for The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Invisible Man, etc. Other than some speculative experiments with (at the time, undiscovered in real life) heavier than air flight and radioactivity, there is no science fiction in the book at all. Instead, Wells does for late Victorian society what Mark Twain did for the same period in America, only without the bitterly sarcastic humor.
To do so, Wells tells a rise-and-fall story from the point of view of a young man, born poor but with a scientific bent, who gets caught up in the fortunes of his uncle's medically worthless but commercially successful patent medicine, the "Tono Bungay" of the title, and watches the uncle's progress from industrious, honest, perpetually kicked, swindled and ground-down chemist to wealthy, corrupted, respected amoral quack. In the process, we get observations on every level of society the protagonists pass through, including country estate, academia, science, town commerce, national commerce, idle aristocracy, and a foray into high sea adventurism. Plus several philosophical digressions on the ethics of business, and especially on the profession of mass advertising, which in HG Wells' day was as new as the science of aeronautics.
Written in 1902 or so, I found it surprisingly moving and topical, given the houses of cards built and blown down on Wall Street lately. High recommendations.
The Invalid’s Tale: The Diary of Alice James:
Mrs. Simpson came out from the front room. She had a few rags on, hanging about her, but not sufficient to cover her nakedness. All the furniture in the house was two chairs, one without a back, and two iron beds, one of them in ruins, while there was a matress, black and glazed with filth. The children were in a filthy condition, hanging in rags and swarming with vermin. The house smelt dreadfully. There was no food in the house except a few potatoes. He afterwards went again to the house, but the door was fastened. He forced the door, and was led to believe that some person was in the house, but looked all over the house without finding anyone. On striking a match and looking up the chimney he found George there resting with his feet on one side and his back against the other side. There was no fire on. The boy said he often went there when anyone was coming into the house. The girls told him they slept in the bottom of a cupboard, and the mother on one of the shelves.
Yet the father of this miserable family was a carpenter in Armstrong’s, and his wages since the beginning of the year had averaged 25s.7d a week. Thanks to the "Children’s Charter," he and his wife (who is stepmother to all the children except the youngest) are now undergoing two months hard labour.
OK, I lied. This book, though short, is not light fiction, although it is light biography. Alice James was the sister of the famous James brothers, Frank and Jesse, and her diary spans the last three years of her life convalescing in England, before she died at the ripe old age of 43, with no marriage, no career, just some insights on her family and on current events of the day. Although nowhere near the immense literary quality of The Principles of Psychology or The Portrait of a Lady, the diary is much more readable and charming than either. I also found it a serendipitous companion piece wo Wells' Tono Bungay, as it has several observations on the same English society that Wells captured in fiction, although James focuses more on real life political figures of the day than on general social conditions.
Toward the end, the main topic of the diary is her impending death from cancer, and how she wishes death would hurry up and get it over with already. At about the time I decided she was like Emily Dickinson without the poetry, I turned the page and she began quoting Emily Dickinson. Earlier than that, I decided she and her ailments had a lot in common with Henri-Frederic Amiel, whose insufferable journal I read last year. Right about then, she mentioned how all of England was apparently reading Amiel, and she relished the freedom to ignore him. I love it when I mind meld with an author.
The Juror Who Knew Too Much: The 12th Juror, by B.M. Gill :
Robert Quinn was breaking the law by being there. A refusal to serve would have been accepted by the court. when the summons had been received a few weeks ago, he had no valid reason to opt out, but in the meantime circumstances had changed. During the last hour when he had discovered that he was to serve on the Edward Carne case he had wondered if he could feign sudden illness and get away with it. He decided he couldn’t. Here he would be pitting his wits against wits more keen.
His reluctance to take the oath wasn’t obvious. It sounded like a theatrical performance, delivered in a voice rich and commanding, and quite at variance with the way he looked. Whilst all the other jurors had dressed with some care for the occasion, Quinn’s patched jeans and open necked shirt were blatantly casual.
The judge spoke for the first time. "Solemn words, Mr. Quinn."
"Quite awesome, my lord."
"To be spoken with sincerity." The warning was implicit.
A nice courtroom drama, seen through the eyes of one of the twelve jurors in a capital murder trial. The story shifts from the trial evidence, which the reader gets at the same time as the jury, to the experiences of Quinn the juror during recesses. Quinn has a dilemma, because he has information outside the proceedings, as well as an emotional involvement in the case—and juries are not supposed to have either.
At times, the book sidetracks into philosophizing about what right do 12 ordinary strangers have to judge their fellow man. At best, it stays with the plot, and the main issues of: Is the accused guilty, innocent, or not proven, and will he fry or will he walk. The plot is a good one, and kept me guessing until the verdict and beyond.
Whammo Italiano: Ratking, by Michael Dibdin :
"The entire resources of the Questura of Perugia are at your disposal. Eager to obey, my men await only your commanding word to spring into action. Your reputation of course precedes you, and the prospect of serving under your leadership is an inspiration to us all. Who has not heard of your brilliant success in the Fortuzzi and Castellano affairs, to name but two?And who can doubt that you will achieve no less a resounding triumph here on Umbrian soil, earning the heartfelt thanks of all by succeeding where others, less fortunate or deserving, have failed? The city of Perugia has a long and historic relationship with Rome, of which your posting here is a concrete symbol. My men and I will, I am sure, wish to join with me in wishing you welcome."
There was a feeble flutter of applause from the group of senior officials assembled in the Questore's spacious top floor office, all discreetly modern furniture, rows of law books, and potted plants. Aurelio Zen stood in their midst like a Siamese cat dropped into a cage full of stray dogs: tense and defiant, his eyes refusing to meet those fixed on him with expressions of more or less successfully concealed mockery. They knew what he was going through, poor bastard! And they knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Salvatore Ioveno, their chief, a corpulent, vivacious fifty year old from Catania, had given a masterly performance. Fulsome and vapid, laden with insincere warmth and hidden barbs, his introductory speech had nevertheless left no legitimate grounds for complaint. He had spoken of Zen's "reputation", without actually mentioning that his abrupt departure from the Rome Questura in 1978 had been the subject of the wildest rumors throughout the force. The two cases he had mentioned dated from the midseventies, underlining Zen's lack of recent operational experience. He had referred to the transfer as a "posting", thus emphasizing that it had been imposed on him by the Ministry, and had called it a symbol of the historic relationship between Rome and Perugia, a relationship consisting of two thousand years of bitterly resented domination.
Lucky me, in one month I have discovered TWO Super Awesome authors with sets of tales that run into many volumes that promise to delight me for years (the other is Terry Pratchett and his Discworld). If Ratking is any indication, Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series is the best multi-layered addition to the hard boiled noir genre since Raymond Chandler, maybe even including Chandler. Where Chandler's Philip Marlowe was a private eye with nothing more nasty to deal with than Los Angeles, a big suntanned hangover with all the warmth and personality of a disposable paper cup, Dibdin gives us an Italy with corruption beyond anything California ever aspired to, a place where the local police often don't even bother to hide their bribes, their indifference to the public, and their willingness to put public justice aside in the interest of office politics and feuds with the central branch and the sinister "political office"; a place where the wealthiest citizensopenly flaunt the law, the working class is monkeywrenching everything with strikes and slowdowns on a near permanent basis, domestic fascist and communist terrorists are known and respected figures on a par with the Sydney Greenstreet character in Casablanca, and yet people sing and make merry whenever they can get a bottle of wine. And yes, among all the social and psychological grit there is a whodunnit involving the kidnapped father of a clan of rich, influential, backstabbing corporate monsters who get to decide for themselves whether and how to cooperate with the investigation. Do they want the victim returned alive or not? Is one of them in league with the kidnappers, or might the whole thing be organized from within the family? And even if Zen detects the cuplrit, how can he prevent the case from being slapped on the wrist? Why even bother?
I found myself thinking of how I, Claudius and Lindsey Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco mysteries are set in the same land, 2000 years in the past, and how little the psychology and morals of the ruling classes seem to have changed since then. If the Centauri lived on Earth, they would have been Italians. I'll definitely be coming back for more Michael Dibdin soon.
Spunky? Or Spunkiest? You decide: Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery :
"Anne, are you killed?" shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. "Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you are killed!"
To the immense relief of all the girls, and especially of Josie Pye, who, in spite of lack of imagination, had been seized with horrible visions of a future branded as the gir who was the cause of Anne Shirley's early and tragic death, Anne sat dizzily up and answered uncertainly:
"No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious."
Both The Redhead and her sister love this book, and they have great taste in books, and so I read it, target demographic or no. The cover boasts of the most beloved, beguiling and timeless heroine in all of fiction. I was skeptical. More beloved, beguiling and timeless than Pippi Longstocking and Mary Poppins? More than Jane Austen's ladies? Well...seems to me she isn't number one, but definitely has a solid claim to the top ten.
Anne Shirley is one of those irrepressible young girls who shows up in a neighborhood full of old fashioned curmudgeonly people who want children to do as they're told, and ends up bringing twinkles to all their eyes and joy into their previously grey lives, like Heidi or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, only more imaginative and prone to get into trouble. She talks as fast as she thinks, embarks on endless projects, and when the situation calls for waiting, why by golly she sits and waits expectantly with all her might! Sure, she's always mistaking linament for vanilla and baking the cakes with it, or wine for fruit juice and getting tipsy with the daughter of the conservative lady down the road, but she's always most sincerely sorry afterwards (The tears! The tears!), and nobody can hold a grudge against her for very long, no matter how hard they try. She's extremely modest and humble about her supposedly plain appearance, and ashamed of her red hair, but don't you dare call her "carrots" or she'll hate you forever...sort of. Easy to read, and easy to like.
Mary Sue Fights Teh Evil Heatherz: Jinx High, by Mercedes Lackey :
Buffie stared at the phone in gut-wrenching shock, unable to believe she was hearing a dial tone. "No--" she whispered, a panic that she knew was irrational starting to take over. "No, you can't..."
She scrabbled desperately in her purse, hoping for one more quarter. Nothing. With a sob, she upended the whole thing on the pavement, pawing through a tangled mess of makeup, jewelry, credit cards and odd bits of paper, praying for a quarter, a dime, anything...
Then she heard the sound; a kind of growl. And looked up.
And the scream died in her throat before she could utter it.
Utter, utter candy, somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight in quality, featuring the high school of a filthy-yuppified suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma confronted with...UNSPEAKABLE HORROR! Coming to the rescue is...YES, a hot babe who is...YES, ageless and effortlessly perfect despite the dark troubles in her past, and has...YES, formidable Wiccan superpowers AND a black belt, and...YES, she protects children! And when she's not fighting supernatural evil, her day job is...YES, a writer!!!! :-) :-) :-) Interspersed with the UNSPEAKABLE HORROR are scenes in which she teaches the students how to write fiction. Really.
And you know what? I had fun reading it. Especially the parts about Sex Magick. Shuttup.
Young Wittgenstein: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, by Mark Haddon :
He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.
The policeman said, "I am going to ask you once again..."
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.
The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.
I didn’t like him touching me like this.
And this is when I hit him.
This will not be a funny book.
I got this book because the Sherlock Holmes reference in the title caught my eye on a book list (you’ve seen the list, it’s that BBC one that has Narnia twice and lists Hamlet separately from the complete Shakespeare). I did not know what it was about.
I loved it.
The story is told in the first person by Christopher, an autistic teenager who can solve complicated math in his head, can’t understand facial expressions, is perpetually flummoxed by his Wittgensteinian literalism in language, and who freaks out at certain colors or at being touched. He uses prime number sequence to number the chapters. It is the single most accurate, humanistic portrayal of autism this side of Elizabeth Moon’s wonderful The Speed of Dark
As the book opens, Christopher is being raised by a single father and going to a special needs school, where he’s about to prequalify for his A-level math and his teacher gives him pictures of facial expressions to study and compare with those of people he is talking to, so he can figure out their emotions. One night he discovers the neighbor’s dog, murdered, and sets out to find the culprit and write his findings in the form of a mystery story. What he writes, however, digresses into illustrations and doodles, discussions of astronomy, computers, crowd behavior, dreams, his own past, and the unfortunate results as his investigation leads him to go where he shouldn’t, without ever understanding why he shouldn’t go there.
I’ve read a lot of good suspense this month. This book may well have been the most suspenseful, as well as maybe having the biggest claim to serious literary merit. It was definitely the book I grumped the most about having to put down to do other things instead of reading it at one long gulp. Very highest recommendations.
Wishing we'd listened to Al Gore: Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss :
The tree, vastly old, the longest lived organism ever to flourish on this little world, had a myriad trunks. Very long ago, two thousand million years past, trees had grown in many kinds, depending on soil, climate and other conditions. As tempreatures climbed, the trees proliferated and came into competition with each other. On this continent, the banyan, thriving in the heat and usung its complex system of self-rooting branches, gradually established ascendancy over the other species. Under pressure, it evolved and adapted. Each banyan spread out farther and farther, sometimes doubling back on itself for safety. Always, it grew higher and crept wider, protecting its parent stem as its rivals multiplied, dropping down trunk after trunk, throwing out branch after branch until at last it learnt the trick of growing into its neighbor banyan, forming a thicket against which no other tree could strive. Their complexity became unrivalled, their immortality established.
On the continent where the humans lived, only one banyan tree grew now. It had become first King of the forest, then the forest itself. It had conquered the deserts and the mountains and the swamps. It filled the continent with its interlaced scaffolding. Only before the wider rivers or at the margins of the sea, where the deadly seaweeds would assail it, did the tree not go.
In the far far future of Hothouse, global warming has almost stamped out humankind, and the few remaining people live like cave dwellers in the boles of the gigantic tree described above, hunting and gathering along the branches and trying to avoid the various sentient, carnivorous, mobile plantlife that rule the forest floor.
The story is a dijointed journey filled with little vignettes, similar to Huck Finn going down the Mississippi, filled with one description after another of some exotic, dangerous green thing gobbling somebody up. After a while, it seems like the same thing, over and over, without much in the way of character development or hope for a satisfactory resolution. In fact, the most clearly drawn character is an intelligent morel that latches on to the main character's brain and urges him to dominate the others and found an empire. Almost everybody else is met by said character and then dies or parts ways before the reader gets to care much about their fate. An interesting read, but not what I'd call ent-ertaining.
Where the Wild Things Are: New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer :
He was gone.
With shaky legs, ignoring the fact that my action was useless, I followed him into the forest. The evidence of his path had disappeared instantly. There were no footprints, the leaves were still again, but I walked forward without thinking. I could not do anything else. I had to keep moving. If I stopped looking for him, it was over.
Love, life, meaning...over.
OMG, Bella and Edward broke up! Oh Noez! What ever will Bella do? Will Edward come back? Our market research says Yes! After all, without a brooding, dangerous bad boy who can only barely control his wild, throbbing impulses, and who is constantly threatening to lose it and do her irreparable damage (because she smells so good she drives the boys crazy), what else does the world have to offer a teenage girl? Well, she can always take up motorcycling....and diving off cliffs into the ocean...and....Oh, Good God!
OK, Stephenie got me. I did not predict where Twi-Hard II was going until about five chapters before it actually happened, but...crazy. And not being the target demographic, I can’t really rip into it critically, other than making fun of it in a "so bad it's great" sort of way. In the first book, my primary image was Spike snorting derisively in the background; in this one, my primary image was of the monster-boys skulking around the schools, looking at the other kids mournfully, trying to resist temptation while the other kids sorta morphed in their eyes into roast chickens and hot dogs, like in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Also, Meyer is no longer claiming to be imitating Jane Austen, but has moved on to Shakespeare (which is an improvement. Thanks to West Side Story and all the other Romeo and Juliet updates, fanged Romeo doesn’t strike me as anywhere near as awful as fanged Darcy. Maybe Meyer takes requests and I can write and ask for fanged Heathcliff next!). Bella is now a "star-crossed lover" who does reckless, dangerous, stupid things because they remind her of her love for Edward! I thank God that no love of mine has ever, proudly or otherwise, linked dangerous and dumb behavior with a relationship with me.
The Redhead wanted me to get this one from the library and so I did, and just had to read it too. And I'll probably do the same with Twi-Hard III if only for the pleasure of watching Bella fall in love with a clan of zombies who go to 12-step meetings to overcome their craving for brains. At least there’s no way zombies could find Bella to be the most tempting morsel they ever had to resist.
At least we’re not at war with Eastasia: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley :
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
"We can electrify that whole strip of floor," bawled the director in explanation. "But that’s enough," he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
"Offer them the books and flowers again."
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily coloured images of pussy and cock a doodle doo and baa baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror; the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
"Observe," said the Director, triumphantly. "Observe."
Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks—already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
Wow. I last read this one about the ultimate planned society a long, long time ago, and at the time, it struck me as not too bad a place to live. I hadn’t seen as much of the world then, and I was comparing it to the much worse world of 1984, and I viewed the world from the standpoint of how nice it was that for every actor who had trouble fathoming the physics of lighting design, there was an eager lighting designer who loved that work and cringed from being on stage herself. And I was a lot more outcast and rebellious and unhappy than I am today. How wonderful to have a world where we were all happy in our designated place, working together like bees in a hive. It’s good to be the Alpha-plus.
That was also before various developments made it possible to bring elements of Brave New World into our own lives. Today, we have at least one major political party actually trying to create a base of preprogrammed civic Epsilons to vote blindly for their candidates. We are also actually urged, when something goes wrong, to get prescriptions for "soma" to make us feel better about things going wrong. These aspects of our society bother me a lot, and the other aspects of Huxley’s planned world...babies mass produced in bottles, some few selected for the world leadership Alpha track, all the others deliberately given fetal alcohol poisoning to keep them stunted and tractable for their factory jobs; the busy-work jobs deliberately set up to keep them occupied; people steered away from books and nature and towards constant travel and sporty hobbies requiring expensive equipment, just to keep the consumerist economy going; socially engineered gregariousness...bother me even more. The Gods of this dystopia are "Ford" and "Freud", although the methods of governing are more reminiscent of Skinner. Of course, the only other option for living on the planet, a third world reservation with no technology at all, isn’t much better. A very short book, but packed with food for thought.
London Noir: The Last Sherlock Holmes Case, by Michael Dibdin :
At the time, the popular impression of the murderer was of a great strapping brute swathed in black who skulked through deserted and fog-bound streets until he met up with the one unescorted and attractive female who was also abroad. The passing years have added their seal of authority to this notion, and today no one thinks to question it. As one who was there, I must protest that it is a complete travesty of the actual circumstances, and one that considerably devalues their real horror. What lent these crimes their almost supernatural aura was the fact that they were committed on perfectly clear nights, and in streets that were if anything busier and better lit at that hour than others in the city. The lighting was largely provided by the lodging houses. These huge, brick barns, containing hundreds of beds to rent by the night, each carried a lamp suspended above its front entrance as a beacon to guide the footsteps of its patrons, who, coming and going as they did at all hours, in turn accounted for the relative busyness of the streets compared with those of more respectable and better ordered districts. Throughout the night this tide of humanity, though it might slacken, continued to run. No sooner did the beer shops let out than the lodging houses took in, and at all times there was the constant trickle of those too poor to hire a bed, those in search of the bars that never closed, those too drunk to find their way, those too exhausted to care, those in fractious mood, and those bent on larceny or worse. And finally, as impossible to forget as they were to ignore, there were those women whose labors began when their honest sisters sought their rest, and whose trade was plied in the hours when conscience slumbers and shame hides its face.
This is maybe the twelfth attempt of a Sherlock Holmes fanfic to pit Holmes against the Jack the Ripper murders, and definitely the best one I’ve seen so far. The gimmick is that the "real" Holmes and Watson were friends of Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote up sensationalized accounts of their adventures, indulging in a lot of poetic license and considerable error, but THIS story is the only one actually penned by Watson himself, and sealed in a box to be discovered decades after his death.
Dibdin, my crime fiction lust du jour, is certainly gritty. His Holmes story is to Conan Doyle what The Dark Knight is to Adam West’s TV Batman. Much emphasis is placed on the detective’s drug use, his unorthodox methods, his contempt for the lesser intellects of Scotland Yard, and the squalid and dirty atmosphere of Whitechapel and London as a whole. Disfigured corpses are described in unsavory detail, and the psychological dark side of the usual Holmes cast is explored mercilessly but masterfully. Not for the squeamish, but well recommended to Holmes fans and fans of all gritty crime stories.
Full circle: The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett :
"There’s some big mushrooms under it. Can you eat them?"
Rincewind looked at them cautiously. They were, indeed, very big, and had red and white spotted caps. They were in fact a variety that the local shaman (who at this point was some miles away, making friends with a rock) would only eat after first attaching one leg to a large stone with a rope. There was nothing for it but to go out in the rain and look at them.
He knelt down in the leafmold and peered under the cap. After a while he said weakly, "No, no good to eat at all."
"Why?" called Twoflower. "Are the gills the wrong shade of yellow?"
"No, not really..."
"I expect the stems haven’t got the right kind of fluting, then."
"They look okay, actually."
"The cap then. I expect the cap is the wrong color," said Twoflower.
"Not sure about that."
"Well then, why can’t you eat them?"
Rincewind coughed. "It’s the little doors and windows," he said wretchedly. "It’s a dead giveaway."
Yup. Terry Pratchett really does remind me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the same way Leo Tolstoy doesn’t. Same kind of humor, only instead of space sci-fi satire we have fantasy sci-fi satire. Pratchett’s picture is on the back of the book, and I swear I saw him at NerdCon 2008.
In part 2 of the Discworld series, we rejoin Rincewind, Twoflower and their luggage, as they face Druidic sacrifice, the House of Death, rock trolls, magical shops that appear out of nowhere, neo-luddites, and the usual impending end of the world. We also meet Cohen the Barbarian, the delightful remains of Discworld’s greatest warrior, who, in the most dangerous profession of them all, has lived to be very, very old. As in, he slaughters armies and then calls for the girl to help straighten his back and rub him with liniment. I loved this volume as much as I loved the first.
For Lagniappe, here’s a Discworld cartoon: http://www.unshelved.com/...