Majestrum by Matthew Hughes

It was very uncharacteristic of me to buy Majestrum at Minicon. Generally, if I try something by an author and don't care for it, I don't give them a second chance. In Hughes's case, it was Black Brillion I didn't like. Nevertheless, I was browsing at the Dreamhaven table in the dealers room and picked up a few things, and Majestrum was one of them.

Majestrum features Henghis Hapthorn, a discriminator (investigator) in a decadent future. He has become aware that the world will soon undergo a major shift, away from machines and logic, and toward magic and intuition. He knows this, and finds it preposterous. Nevertheless, magic is impinging on the world, and the story is an interesting combination of SF and fantasy.

In a prior adventure Hapthorn faced down a mage, and something went wrong with him as he was returning home. His personality split into two aspects: the logical side which he believes is the real him, and the intuitive side he occasionally consulted, and which will some day take over as the world changes. Likewise his integrator (personal data assistant) has been transformed from a machine into a small furry creature with a taste for expensive fruit. Hapthorn does not really trust the intuitive side of his personality or his transformed integrator, and he argues with them throughout the book. It gets a bit annoying, actually, as he refuses to believe his intuitive side when it is obviously correct.

The Archon, or king/tyrant/mastermind who rules the planet, seeks Hapthorn's help to discern a plot against him. This leads Hapthorn to chase around the galaxy while ignoring most of his alter ego's suggestions. It eventually turns out to be related to the matter with the mage in the previous book.

A solid and amusing adventure, though not riveting.

Interstellar Empire by John Brunner

Interstellar Empire is a fixup of a novella and two short stories that was published in 1976. In his introduction, Brunner explains that he wanted to write sword & spaceship stories. To do so, he had humanity find a huge cache of warehoused spaceships left behind by an earlier race. Thus they could have top-notch space travel without the technological development that would be required to invent it. The stories are also set in the waning days of a vast interstellar empire that is crumbling badly, so that some planets are still firmly under imperial control, some are struggling to stay that way, and many others have been lost or gone their own way.

The novella, The Altar on Asconel, concerns three brothers who join forces to try to liberate their home planet after it has been taken over by cultists from the far reaches of space. I didn't really care for it. The second story, The Man From the Big Dark, concerns the efforts of one man to warn a planet that they are about to be invaded by space pirates. This was my favorite of the three stories. And the third story, The Wanton of Argus, involves a struggle over who shall become regent for a young king after his father's death. It has a surprising twist at the end involving a time traveler who wants to make sure things turn out right.

Interstellar Empire is short by today's standards--probably 80,000 words or less. I read it in a day. I enjoyed it, though. I really enjoy space adventure stories, and not that many are being published right now. So I think I will seek out more older books for straightforward space adventure, and I look forward to it.

The Mac is Back

I've been offline for a few days, as my hard drive gave out last week. Fortunately this is a 6-month old computer and it was still under warranty. It was sent to Apple for service on Thursday, and I got it back on Monday. I'm a happy lady now, though of course it's a pain to get everything set back up the way I want it again.

Doc Savage:Fortress of Solitude

About a year ago I read a couple of Doc Savage novels, and now I've picked up a couple more. Doc Savage was a pulp hero of the 1930s and 40s. Known as the Man of Bronze, he was raised by scientists to fight crime. As well as being fabulously wealthy, he was tall, strong, handsome, and more expert in chemistry, surgery, and electronics than any other expert in any of those fields. He had five sidekicks who went on adventures with him but, despite all of them being accomplished men themselves, they seem rather stupid and immature in comparison to their buddy Doc.

The stories are short, and the quality of writing is low. When the writer, Lester Dent, didn't know how something worked, he made something up. Doc and his associates had secret hideaways and incredible gadgets before Batman or James Bond were created, and a Fortress of Solitude before Superman existed: they probably stole heavily from him. The stories were pumped out quickly, and the writing, as I mentioned, was not great literature. Sentences like this are not uncommon: "It was a sinister indication of John Sunlight's mental control that he did not show surprise when the Eskimo grunted." Nevertheless, if one can tolerate this, Doc Savage is good for a little light, pulpy, utterly unbelievable entertainment.

The bad guy in Fortress of Solitude is the above-mentioned John Sunshine. A man of hidden origins, he just exudes evil. In it, he escapes from a Siberian prison camp and heads off into the Arctic on a stolen icebreaker (and all of them are starving despite the fact that the ship was loaded with a year's supply of food when they stole it. What's up with that?). The ship is trapped in the ice, and John Sunshine stalks off into the icy wasteland, where he encounters friendly English-speaking eskimos and a mysterious blue dome. He eventually makes his way into the Dome, and finds death ray technology, which he decides to sell to a couple of squabbling Balkan nations so that he may use the money to take over the world.

A good deal of the storyline takes place in the Arctic, where some of them are running around in their underwear and feeling few effects of the cold. I suspect that the writer had very little personal experience with sub-zero temperatures. They also involve two giant women named Giantia and Titania, who aren't very bright; and their pretty but stupid sister Fifi, who keeps saysing "What about poor little me?" so that Doc's associates can act like idiots around her.

In the end, Doc reveals that the mysterious blue dome is his own Fortress of Solitude, where he retreats to perform experiments, and that the death ray technology the madman Sunshine is selling was Doc's own invention. He is then put in the position of needing to find a way to break into his own fortress, and Sunshine disappears across the ice sheet so that he can be used again in another volume. The characterization is terrible, the plot has holes you could drive a truck through, and the non-defeat of the villain annoying. Nevertheless, it was good dumb fun.

Just a suggestion. . .

...to any web designers or sales people working for web design firms.

When you are talking to a potential customer about what they need, it's perhaps not a good idea to suggest something way outside of what they're asking for. And when the customer rejects your suggestion for something they didn't want or need, don't say: "Is that too scary for you?"

Because you won't be getting that person as a customer, is all I'm saying.

The probelm with kooky idealists

Let me state, first of all, that I do not assume that all idealists are kooky. This post is about the irresponsible nuts out there.

I see in today's news that Margaret Seltzer, under the pen name Margaret Jones, has been revealed as the next James Frey. She wrote a memoir about being a mixed-race girl growing up on the streets of LA and selling drugs for the Bloods. It turns out that none of that is true. Indeed, it's entirely fabricated. She insists that it isn't really a lie, though--it's pieced together from the kinds of things she heard when working to reduce gang violence. It's just nothing that actually happened to her.

Unlike Frey, who who apparently wrote his fake addiction memoir because his fiction wasn't selling, Seltzer appears to feel that she was doing it for the forces of good:

"I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to," Seltzer said. "I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk.

"Maybe it's an ego thing - I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it." (quoted from the International Herald Tribune)

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she misrepresented herself and lied to us all, because her message was really important, and she needed to inform the rest of the world about gangs, and poverty, and stuff. Which is a total cop out, of course. Total dishonesty does not in any way lend weight to whatever moral cause you think you're supporting.

I don't actually believe her excuse, anyway, as she has apparently been writing stories like this, claiming they were her own experiences, for some time, and got an agent through someone who believed her misrepresentations of herself. Like Frey, she liked the attention she got by lying about herself. Her publisher has canceled her book tour and is recalling all the copies of the book. I suspect that in the future, publishers are going to be a lot more careful about vetting people's memoirs. And that might be a good thing--maybe the gross personal memoir is a genre that can die out.

Recursion by Tony Ballantyne

I picked this one up because Kristin read it and said it was pretty good.

Recursion is an SF novel that tells three alternating storylines set in the future--one in 2051, one in 2119, and one in 2210. I didn't immediately realize that they were set in different times because I never read chapter headings. I noted in my recent review of Thunderstruck that I tend not to like this kind of storytelling--multiple story lines that hopefully converge at the end--because inevitably some of the story lines are more interesting than others, and I resent the boring story lines interrupting the good ones. With Recursion, Ballantyne has done unusually well--I was interested in all three of his characters' stories.

The recurring theme that is discussed in all three is artificial intelligence, and how much we want to rely on it. We are shown both the great good and great harm that AIs can do, and then the question arises **spoilers** should we hand over control of our lives to an outside force that will do a better job than we could?

I thoroughly enjoyed Recursion, though it was not flawless--the first chapter took a while to hook me, and the storyline about Constantine Storey went way off the rails after page 300, even though it was overall my favorite of the three stories. I remain unconvinced that a copy of a person's personality running in a computer simulation, who is aware that they are a copy and their real self is alive and well, would be so desperate to not die. And because I didn't believe the characters' motivations, I found that part rather a trudge. Nevertheless, it was an absorbing and enjoyable read. Recommended.

Roses, Roses by Bill James

I've been trying this week to read a Graham Greene novel that I picked up at the library book sale last week, but haven't been making much progress. So that has been temporarily set aside, and I picked up another James novel.

The last one I read, Come Clean, was the fifth in the series featuring Colin Harpur and his boss, Desmond Iles. I looked in the library for others in the series, hoping to read them more or less in order, but they don't have the older volumes. Shelf space is tight, and they frequently cull older books to make room for newer ones. Roses, Roses is the tenth book in the series. Bother.

I don't really understand the relationship between Harpur and Iles. They are both very capable detectives, and very bright men, but they don't really work together. Both keep information from the other, and act independently. It makes for a more complex story, as Iles withholds information from Harpur, who does the same and lies to Iles, but it's not a very productive working relationship. There are more tensions between them now than there were in Come Clean: Harpur has had an affair with Mrs. Iles, and Iles seems a bit too interested in Harpur's teenage daughter. Both are really pretty nasty characters. It rather makes me yearn for something by Peter Turnbull, who isn't half the prose stylist that James is, but his professionals behave like professionals.

Anyway, in Roses, Roses, Mrs. Harpur is murdered, stabbed in a railway station car park. She was having an affair with another officer in London, and was planning to go home and tell Harpur she was leaving him. Harpur is a bit sad but not devastated, as the marriage had been falling apart for years. Their teenage daughters spend the rest of the book making sharp comments about their parents' infidelities. They weren't particularly believable to me--not enough grief, too many sharp questions and comments.

Harpur, of course, is not assigned to the case, but he decides that he owes it to his wife to look into it anyway. He manages this in between trysts with his 19-year old girlfriend, including one the night of his wife's funeral; and one with Mrs. Iles, in her own home, with his kids downstairs. Did I mention he's a pretty nasty character? Iles is also investigating, but he probably needn't have bothered because the whole matter is eventually sorted out by Mrs. Harpur's lover in London. Bad guy dead. The end.

I didn't find Roses, Roses a particularly satisfying story, and now I recall why I dropped an earlier Harpur & Iles novel because the detectives were nasty creeps. Nevertheless, I will probably track down others and read them. James can write. His style is quite sparse, but the characters have a depth and history that he only scratches the surface of. Full of nasty creeps, yes, but compellingly written.