Author: katenepveu

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Pratchett, Terry, with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: Science of Discworld, The

The Science of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen works quite well as a bedtime/filler book. Chad’s book log entry describes the basic setup very well, so I’ll just mention a couple of things that I particularly liked.

One was a discussion of an experiment that used a genetic algorithm approach on electronic circuits, to explore evolution. After four-thousand odd generations, the resulting circuit could tell two tones apart, but in an incredibly complicated and non-intuitive manner; for instance, five of the logic cells in the circuit didn’t appear to do anything (they weren’t connected electrically to any of the others)—but if you took them out, it wouldn’t work any more. I thought this was a really illuminating example of how evolution doesn’t necessarily rely on narrativium (the power of story, which in the Discworld is one of the driving forces of the universe) and, therefore, doesn’t have to produce anything we’d recognize as a designed solution.

The other is a silly bit, as the wizards contemplate an ice age on Roundworld:

“I think it looks more like a Hogswatchnight ornament,” said the Senior Wrangler later, as the wizards took a pre-dinner drink and stared into the omniscope at the glittering white world. “Quite pretty, really.”

“Bang go the blobs,” said Ponder Stibbons.

“Phut,” said the Dean cheerfully. “More sherry, Archchancellor?”

“Perhaps some instability in the sun . . . ” Ponder mused.

“Made by unskilled labour,” said Archchancellor Ridcully. “Bound to happen sooner or later. And then it’s nothing but frozen death, the tea-time of the gods and an eternity of cold.”

“Sniffleheim,” said the Dean, who’d got to the sherry ahead of everyone else.

(Good night, everybody . . . )

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Gash, Jonathan: Judas Pair, The

The law library at work has a “paperback exchange,” where you can take out pleasure reads for free, or donate books. (In practice, it includes hardcovers and a few audio books.) For some reason, the selection tends heavily toward mysteries, and today the new ones had several in a series about an antique dealer.

The Judas Pair, by Jonathan Gash, is the first of the Lovejoy series, and as I’d guessed, does indeed have cool how-things-work vibes about the antique business. However, the first-person narrator is a complete jerk, and while the ending is initially cool in an adrenaline-inducing way, it doesn’t really make sense on sober reflection. This one’s going back to the paperback exchange. (I might get the rest and just read the antique stuff. I have no actual interest in buying antiques or collecting things, it’s just the kind of thing I find soothing to read about.)

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Lickiss, Rebecca: Never After

I’m glad I borrowed Never After, by Rebecca Lickiss, from the library.

Instead of actually buying it.

This book annoyed me quite considerably. A full explanation requires spoilers, which I’ll be posting to sf.written; a link will be in the comments, as usual. Here’s the setup: a prince goes looking for a princess, because his parents have decreed he can only marry an actual princess—mostly because they don’t like his cousin, Vevila, and are afraid he might marry her otherwise. The prince finds a castle behind brambles, complete with sleeping inhabitants and not one, not two, but three—princes. One “s” only. He also finds a sleeping woman who he’s convinced is a princess and would marry if she weren’t, you know, so asleep. So he goes to get his cousin Vevila, on the theory that she’s much smarter than she is and could figure it out. He runs into Vevila on the road; she’s run away from court, rather than be married off to her suitors, etc. Along the way they also pick up some wizards.

Back at the castle, they discover that the caster of the spell is still around: she’s the prince’s fairy godmother, protecting him from evil (or, Eeeevil) by keeping him away from the world. (She also divided him when he was a child, to protect him from assassins.) The witch has no intention of actually letting anyone break the spell, because that would mean her beloved godchild would be back in the world again. So she subjects Vevila to a princess test (spin straw into gold) before she’ll even let Vevila try to kiss the princes. Also, along the way, she curses one of the wizards so that he can only talk in Shakespeare quotes (which the wizards all know, even though they state he’s from a different world. Which is never explained.). As the story goes on, alleged princesses and princess tests proliferate, Rumpelstiltskin shows up, there’s a pumpkin carriage and a ball, and eventually everyone is subjected to a Happy Ending.

First of all, this has been done before, and better, by at least two different authors: Patricia Wrede, in her Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and Terry Pratchett, in Witches Abroad. (I do hope the author hasn’t read Witches Abroad, or if she did, that she meant the “cat turned into servant for Cinderella’s ball, acts like a, well, tomcat in human form” episode as a tribute to Greebo . . . ) Three, counting John Barnes’s One for the Morning Glory, I suppose. So any charm that originality might lend is lost on me.

Second, there are too many characters, and too few of them have any depth. Third, they all have horrible names; even for a parody-fairy tale, this is going too far. Althelstan. Vevila. Mazigian. Urticacea. Berengaria. Jaquenetta. You get the idea.

Fourth, fifth, and nth, the ending. Oh, the ending.

Okay. We’ve got a story that’s structured around fairy tale elements, specifically princess tests. The story uses these elements to deconstruct the idea of “royalty,” and to point out that a person’s status as a princess is socially constructed. Great, fine, no problem. Now, having gone to all the trouble of undermining one of the key conventions of fairy tales, why would the story turn around and subject its characters to the most unthinking and conventional kind of Happy Ending there is? It’s absolutely baffling, extremely unsatisfying, and a complete compromise of the characters.

And then the story takes the idea that royalty is purely socially constructed, and tries to extend it to claim that personality traits are also purely socially constructed. Which I find offensive. If the question is whether someone is, say, generous and charitable, then it actually matters if that person gives stuff away.

It’s possible that this extension was meant to be limited to magic, but that’s not how it reads to me. And I reject the idea, particularly when presented as the moral insight of the story.

If you want fairy tale elements twisted around in light fantasy, read the other books I mentioned above. Avoid this one.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (07) The Valley of Fear

I picked up the next Sherlock Holmes novel on my list, The Valley of Fear, because it seemed like it would be a good soothing read in times of uncertainty. As far as that went, it worked okay, but it really wasn’t that good a book. It started out in a promising fashion, with talk of Moriarty (obviously, this is a prequel), but shortly devolves into a fairly predictable murder mystery. I don’t know if Doyle was being really obvious, or I’m getting used to how Holmes stories work, but I was with Holmes all the way on the deductions. And then, once the murder is solved, we head into a long backstory exposition, chock full of lurid secret societies and star-crossed lovers and ocean-spanning vengeance. Excuse me, but we’ve done this already, and it wasn’t all that good in A Study in Scarlet, either.

*sigh* I want more Moriarty, and I’m not going to get it, at least not in Doyle’s works.

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Lightman, Alan: Einstein’s Dreams

After going to the Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, I picked up Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman, for a re-read. This is a series of fictional vignettes about Einstein’s dreams about different kinds of time, which was moderately well-known when it was published. The last time I’d read it, I was confused about which of the vignettes was our reality; I thought there were two possibilities. This time I spotted the right one immediately; turns out that the other one I was thinking of had the right general idea, but on a wildly incorrect scale.

This is a very short book, with prose that approaches poetry at points. I enjoy it for its unusual extrapolations of the social effects of different forms of time; many of them are improbable (like ours), but they do display imagination, and there’s some nice images. Harmless way to pass half an hour.

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Elrod, P.N.: (03-04) Bloodcircle; Art in the Blood

I picked up Bloodcircle, the third book in P.N. Elrod’s Vampire Files, one night when I was waiting for the dregs of a horrible headache to pass so I could sleep. It’s short, it moves quickly, and Jack gets beat up routinely, so he feels worse than I did. In this book, Jack continues his search for the woman who made him a vampire, and we meet Jonathan Barrett, another vampire who has his own series. I have no interest in reading historical novels with Barrett, but I was interested enough in what happens to him in this time frame to pick up the next book the day after, Art in the Blood. However, Barrett doesn’t actually appear in this one; we seemed to have moved off of the beginning arc in the series (Jack is turned into a vampire and deals with it) into, possibly, one-shot mysteries. The plot of this one is basically unrelated to the prior books (though the emotional resonances from prior books remain), and a fairly standard, perfectly serviceable murder mystery it is. I have no great urge to read the next one, but I will someday.

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Pierce, Tamora: (208) Shatterglass

I bought Tamora Pierce’s Shatterglass, the last book in the Circle Opens quartet, while at Boskone, but didn’t complete a proper read for a while after that. This is as good as the first two, and considerably better than Cold Fire. This series is structured around two aspects of magework: discovering and teaching one’s first student, and the use of magic in forensics. In this book, Tris’s student is a grown man whose skill as a glassblower has been strangely warped after he was struck by lightning. He learns that he has both glass and lightning magic, with a strange precongitive aspect: sometimes his glass globes show crime scenes, including those of a serial killer preying on his community.

I’m really tired and not thinking of much else to say about this book. If you liked the prior books in the series, you’ll like this one, and really, that’s about it.

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Conover, Ted: Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, by Ted Conover, is one of my rare nonfiction reads. My job prompted me to get this out of the library: I have a lot of cases brought by prisoners, and while I’ve learned a lot about the working of prisons in the last few months, I thought it couldn’t hurt to get some more information. This was written by a journalist who spent a year undercover as a corrections officer, going through the academy and then working in Sing Sing.

This was a good book, though it didn’t tell me much more than I already knew. If I’d read it earlier, I would have found it more helpful: it does a nice job explaining how the popular conception of prison life is considerably different than the reality. (That popular conception, by the way, can make defending corrections officers rather tricky.) Well, okay, it told me that Sing Sing is a damn difficult prison to run, since it’s so old. I’m more familiar with the newer medium and maximum security facilities, which are much less chaotic.

I skipped a few chapters here and there, because this needed to go back to the library, but what I did read was well-written and interesting. One lunch during trial, I asked our defendants (six corrections officers) what they thought of it. Interestingly, not all of them had read it, but they’d all heard good things about it. This doesn’t surprise me, as my impression of it was that it was trying hard to be an honest and balanced look at the author’s experiences, both internal and external. It’s not a deep philosophical look at the problems of the corrections system, but it’s quite good at what it does. Recommended.

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Stout, Rex: (46) A Family Affair

We found A Family Affair, the final Nero Wolfe & Archie Goodwin book by Rex Stout, in a used bookstore a few weeks ago; in honor of the purchase, I re-read it. (Only two Wolfe books left to find and buy now—we’re getting there.)

The first time I read this, the most notable thing was the ending—those who’ve read it will doubtless know what I mean. This time, I really noticed how much the narration reflects the nature of the story. Normally, even when bad things are happening, Archie’s First Person Smartass Narration is ornamented with clever descriptions or turns of phrase that keep it fairly light. This time, the prose is really stripped-down and bleak: it seems to me that there’s more dialogue-only sections and much less description by Archie. The prose creates an additional level of tension that really propels the story—enough so that I read it all at once before bed, which had not been my intention.

The other thing I found interesting about this one is Archie & Lily. We get much more insight into their relationship here than in almost any of the others; for whatever reason, Archie spends a lot more time reflecting on it than in other books. Also, it’s much more palatable than what we saw in, for instance, Not Quite Dead Enough.

While most of the series stands alone, this would be a terrible place to start reading. (So would In the Best Families.) Go read some of the others first, such as Prisoner’s Base, one of my favorites and recently back in print. Save this one for the end, but do read it.

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Robb, J.D.: (16) Portrait in Death

I drop everything when a new J.D. Robb novel comes out, so I finished Portrait in Death next after Feet of Clay. This came out after Boskone, and I was vastly amused to see that a number of comments people had made at the J.D. Robb panel were addressed here. In particular, Roarke gets pretty thoroughly knocked off balance in this one, which was well overdue, in many people’s opinions (including mine).

My only real complaint about this one is that the brief sections from the killer’s point of view aren’t necessary; not only that, but I think they’re a touch misleading. I don’t know if it’s part of the genre that I’m not otherwise aware of, or something that Robb/Roberts just likes to do, but she seems to have the killer POV snippets in almost every book where there is a killer. I don’t see that it adds a whole lot, frankly.

Overall, this was an unusually solid entry in the series. Say what I will about some of Robb/Roberts’ craft details, she definitely has the storytelling instinct.

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