Wise Child by Monica Furlough

Wise Child and its sequels all have sweet cover art.

Wise Child and its sequels all have sweet cover art.

Happy Labor Day, everyone! To commemorate it, here’s another book review:

Wise Child by Monica Furlough takes place on a remote Scottish island in the early days of Christianity. Wise Child, a bright young girl of the village, is abandoned by her parents and taken in by the local witch, Juniper. Wise Child learns to navigate Juniper’s ongoing rivalry with the village priest among gorgeous description of a time and place that’s alien to our own.

The best part of reading this book is the setting. How often do you get to read a story that takes you to Scotland in the year 700 or so? Monica Furlough has clearly done her research, too. Her descriptions are vivid – and the villagers’ ongoing struggle with starvation is especially painful. Wise Child’s cousin gets excited at being offered a glass of milk. The historical forces of the era, the introduction of Christianity to the British Isles, are an undercurrent that run through the whole story. It’s like watching Titanic. You know that the iceberg is going to win.

The book doesn’t have much of a plot, but I didn’t mind. Wise Child goes through a series of episodes as the ward of the witch Juniper. Each one is intended to let us learn more about the world than to learn about Wise Child. Wise Child grows up a bit, and at the end there’s something like a climax.

Recommended if you want to go on a historical trip.

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing

Elmore Leonard, one of the greats of the mystery writing community, passed away recently. I didn’t know about him until the obituary showed up, but it turns out he wrote ten tips for writers that I think are damn fine pieces of advice:

 

1.  Never open a book with weather.

2.  Avoid prologues.

3.  Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

4.  Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.

5.  Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6.  Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

7.  Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8.  Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9.  Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

10.  Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

 

I disagree with some of his uses of never, but I agree with the spirit of the list: Stop trying so hard to be writerly and tell the story!

Source of his ten tips: Writers on Writing

Thai Basil

Hey, check out this Thai basil!

Thai basil is the same species as the European basil you’re likely to find in an Italian restaurant, but a different cultivar. Its flavor is milder and sweeter, like mint. I’ve been growing these plants in a pot on my apartment building’s porch. I wasn’t expecting them to make such pretty purple flowers.

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Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Discworld_PostalA great book, as is usual from Terry Pratchett, but I had some nagging issues with the plot.

Moist von Lipwing (yes, that’s his real name) is a con man who’s finally gotten caught. Lord Vetinari of Ankh-Morpork gives him a choice: execution, or a job as postmaster-general of a haunted post office. Lipwig takes the job.

From then on, the story has two major plots. The first is a Lovecraftian sort of thing. The post office is shut down, filled with piles of undelivered mail and pigeon guano. The only living beings inside are a creepy old man, his assistant, and a cat. Lipwig must get to the bottom of why all the previous postmasters-general died in this building, and what is the horrible thing that lurks under the floorboards and drives people mad.

And also, the letters are beginning to talk to him.

The other subplot features Reacher Gilt, who owns a vaguely steampunky monopoly on the semaphore lines. He’d like to see Lipwig put out of the way.

I love Moist. He’s a complex character and boy, he grows throughout this book. It’s a foregone conclusion that he hits the fast track from con man to reformed con man, but you totally believe it.

What bothered me about this story is that the Lovecraftian plot gets resolved about halfway through the book. Moist von Lipwig figures out what the abomination is and dispatches one of the major villains. After that, the book is all about the societal issues of technology and monopoly. It’s still good, but it’s a major shift in tone.

And the resolution of the other plot, the Reacher Gilt one, didn’t make much sense to me. But I read the last 1/3 of the book in one sitting, so maybe I missed something.

Recommended. Going Postal is a good standalone and it’s a good way to introduce yourself to the Discworld. And it does a better steampunk than most of the books that advertise themselves as such.

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

9780385267472_p0_v1_s260x420I picked up this book because I’d read Hyperion and I wanted to find out what happened to all of the characters. Sadly, I was disappointed.

The first book in the series had a Canterbury Tales conceit. Seven people from all walks of life set off on a pilgrimage to see a mysterious creature, the Shrike. In The Fall of Hyperion, the Canterbury Tales is abandoned and there’s nothing left but straight space opera. The unique voices of the main characters, as they told their own tales, are gone. The entire galactic empire is at stake in this book, but somehow I don’t care.

And it drags. The Fall of Hyperion takes about 500 pages to describe a week’s worth of events. There is an entire chapter devoted to Meina Gladstone wandering through the network of worlds and worrying about things. Entirely too much time is spent rehashing events from the previous book.

Did not finish.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion_595Ah, good old space opera.

I’d thought that I’d gotten thoroughly sick of space opera because so much of it is made out of recycled material. The issue of FTL travel irks me, too. But it turns out with Hyperion by Dan Simmons, that if you do space opera well enough, it’s still quite enjoyable.

Hyperion does use recycled material. But instead of trying to file the serial numbers off of the materials Simmons got his ideas from, he decided to go whole hog the other way and see just how many references to other stuff he can cram into one book.

This book’s Galactic Empire has a backwater planet called Hyperion, home to a mysterious killing machine called the Shrike. Legend has it that if a prime number of people make a pilgrimage to see the Shrike, it will grant one of them a wish and slaughter the rest. The book follows seven people on what may be the last pilgrimage ever as they board a spaceship headed for Hyperion. On the way, they decide to take turns sharing their reasons for going. Sound familiar? It’s The Canterbury Tales in space.

What I like about the book is that Simmons turned all the material drawn from other works into an artistic statement. Ever since Earth accidentally got swallowed up by a black hole (the Fall of Rome in space), human culture has failed to progress. They can’t do anything but recycle our own popular culture. Their society’s stuck in a Space Middle Ages.

It’s fun to pick out the references. The Ousters are Space Huns. Our pilgrimage party includes a Space Templar and a Space Jesuit. The Consul’s tale is Romeo and Juliet in space. Brawne Lamia’s tale manages to be simultaneously private detective noir in space and a story about Mary Magdalene with Robot Christ.

Not to be outdone with the religious references, Simmons also includes Fehdman Kassad, a Space Muslim. Maybe in 1989 when this book was published, Islam wasn’t as sensitive a topic as it is now, but Kassad still starts life as a street fighter, rises through the ranks of military academy, and then earns the title “The Butcher of Bressia.” Awkward.

On the other hand, I think Simmons did a great job with Sol Weintraub. He could very easily have come across like this. Instead, he’s a fully rounded character who’s being forced to relive the story of Abraham. Sol’s one of my favorite characters, second only to Brawne.

And about that pesky FTL travel: Simmons acknowledges that these characters travel at relativistic speeds and they actually have to face the consequences of the time dilation. Good work, sir.

If you’ve got a background in the classics and you like spec fic, you’d find this book fun.

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

9780553293401_custom-d20a26023ec4687ff257f81593313d8876755020-s6-c30Science fiction from 1954 is a hoot!

Recently I finished The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. In a nutshell it’s a buddy cop story. To be specific, it’s a buddy cop story where one cop is a technophobe and the other cop is a robot. They’re forced to put up with each other in order to catch a killer (and it’s a foregone conclusion that they wind up friends). This might sound like a cliché, but as far as I know, Isaac Asimov was the first writer to try it.

The real fun of this story is how unintentionally amusing the New York City of the future is. It’s the year 2500 or so and Earth’s population has risen to a ghastly eight billion people. All of Earth’s land area has been turned over to cellulose farms* and the world’s human beings squeeze into steel-enclosed cities that look like crosses between Tokyo and Calcutta. The state controls all aspects of peoples’ lives, from where they can live and what food rations they can get to how many children couples are allowed to have. Yet curiously, the state fails to follow through with any form of mandatory birth control (probably because the birth control pill didn’t hit the market until six years after this book was published).

This high-tech New York is filled with millions of nuclear families that look like they walked straight out of Leave it to Beaver. Women primarily work as wives and mothers because they’re too airheaded to do anything else. Where’s Susan Calvin when you need her?

There’s all sorts of little incongruities, too. Eyeglasses drop when you break them because they’re made out of actual glass. Newspapers still exist and they’re still made out of paper, too. The police department’s most advanced computer takes two hours to search its database and the characters marvel at its speed. And yet the robot cop’s brain is so sophisticated that he regularly passes the Turing test, except when you try to talk to him about emotions. Also he’s atomic powered. Not nuclear power, atomic power.

At least there’s one familiar-looking technology in this book. The “trimensic projection” that the characters go on about so much is clearly Skype.

I’m not trying to make fun of Isaac Asimov for this book. Asimov was brilliant. But this book just goes to show that one of the smartest men alive in 1954 can get the future so wrong. It makes me wonder what we’re going to get wrong about our projections of the future.

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* The cellulose gets hydrolyzed to sugar, which then gets fed to yeast. The yeast have been genetically engineered to produce all the organic molecules we need to eat. This is in fact a really cool idea.

A Trip to the Zoo

So the other day I came across this little gem: God Made Dad & Mom. In a nutshell, the message of this book is that Heather must have exactly one mommy and one daddy and that’s that. You can see what readers’ reactions were on Amazon.

I haven’t been able to get my hands on this book, and I’m not particularly interested in spending any money on getting it, so I’m going to have to use my imagination here. The book’s description says that the story goes like this:

In school, young Michael learns that God made men to be fathers and women to be mothers. After school, his father takes him to the zoo, where he learns that animal families consist of a male, a female, and their offspring.

For all you people on the internet who are not lucky enough to possess a copy of God Made Dad & Mom, here is my proposal for the zoo sequence:

A Trip to the Zoo

That afternoon, Michael goes to the zoo to learn about animal families. First he goes to the lion enclosure.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Lions live in groups called prides. A lion pride is made up of one or two males, five or six females, and their cubs. Each male will mate with all of the females.

Here’s the hyenas!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The female spotted hyena has a pseudopenis, which makes her look like a male. She will give birth through this pseudopenis.

Let’s move on to the bonobo exhibit.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

…

It looks like they’re kinda busy right now. We should come back later.

These are the whiptail lizards. They live in the deserts in North America.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

In some species, every whiptail lizard is a female. When they lay eggs, the baby lizards are exact copies of their mother.

Let’s move on to the aquatic exhibits.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Corals are animals, even though they don’t look like the animals you may be used to. Corals never mate. At a certain time of the year, corals release egg cells and sperm cells into the water. The eggs and sperm join to form a new coral, which drifts along in the water until it can find a new home.

If you look closely, you might be able to see clownfish hiding inside the sea anenomes.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Clownfish live in groups called schools. The leader of the school is a female clownfish. When that female dies, one of the males turns into a female and becomes the new leader.

You don’t even have to go to the zoo to find animals with interesting families. If you take some dirt from your backyard and look at it under a microscope, you’ll find a kind of worm called C. elegans.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Most C. elegans worms are hermaphrodites, which means that they are both male and female at the same time. They can self-fertilize, so one worm is both daddy and mommy to its eggs!