Blood Brothers by Michael Weisskopf

This is a selection for my book group. I was the one who suggested it.

Michael Weisskopf is a reporter who was on assignment in Iraq to write an article for TIME magazine. A grenade was tossed into the vehicle he was riding in. Weisskopf picked up the grenade and tossed it away, which blew off his hand but saved the lives of the the people in the truck with him. Blood Brothers is his story of treatment at Walter Reed and learning to accept and live with his new circumstances. This certainly isn't a cheerful subject for a book, but I was interested, and I'd rather read this sort of memoir any day over something like Eat Pray Love.

Weisskopf relates his injury early in the book, and devotes most of the rest of the book to his recovery and that of three other men he met in Walter Reed. Weisskopf is a reporter, not military personnel, and he was older and more independent than most of the soldiers who go through the system. Nevertheless, they all faced similar frustrations, surgeries, pain, fears, and of course the long road to learning to live with fewer limbs than they'd had before. Blood Brothers is not an easy book, in some places. It's painful and emotional. But it's also quite good.

I appreciated Weisskopf's writing style. As a reporter, he writes well and gets to the point quickly. The book was as long as it needed to be, but no longer. One thing that sometimes frustrates me when reading nonfiction works is that they aren't very well written, and could usually use a lot of trimming (such as The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperowitz--horrendously badly organized and written). Conversely, sometimes I get the feeling that the writer had enough material for about two or three good magazine articles and tried to stretch it to book length (Stiff by Mary Roach was one such book). Weisskopf's writing was invisible, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

I am glad I read Blood Brothers, and would cautiously recommend it to anyone who also thinks it sounds interesting. It's not all rainbows and bunnies, but it's worth the effort.

Debatable Space by Philip Palmer

Debatable Space is a rather odd novel. The description from the back cover:

Flanagan (who is, for want of a better word, a pirate) has a plan. It seems relatively simple: kidnap Lena, the Cheo's daughter, demand a vast ransom for her safe return, sit back and wait. Only the Cheo, despotic ruler of the known universe, isn't playing ball. Flanagan and his crew have seen this before, of course, but since they've learned a few tricks from the bad old days, and since they know something about Lena that should make the plan foolproof, the Cheo's defiance is a major setback. It is a situation that calls for extreme measures. Luckily, Flanagan has considerable experience in this area...

So, it sounds like a take on The Ransom of Red Chief or perhaps Ruthless People. Which is fine. But it turned out not to be the novel I was expecting. Which is also fine. Nevertheless, I think I would have preferred the novel I was expecting over the one we received.

I don't want to spoil the story so I'm not going to relate the plot. I will say, however, that Flanagan actually isn't the main character of this novel, it's Lena. We spend most of the book in her head. In fact, we spend most of the book in exceedingly long flashbacks of her past. Lena is not a likable person. Lena is an annoying, self-absorbed twat. Lena has an undeservedly high opinion of herself, while at the same time having low esteem that needs constant propping-up.

The action scenes seem like an afterthought to tie together the Lena flashbacks. The rest of the crew are less substantial than cardboard cutouts. In fact, I couldn't remember who was who after I'd reached the halfway mark. Millions of people die, and it wasn't the least bit compelling. The writing was okay, or I wouldn't have managed to finish the book, but it seemed like the plot was just a thin veneer added later so that Palmer could play with ideas about how to solve the world's problems. Yawn. Not bad, just not very interesting, either.

Light by M. John Harrison

There is a theory that reading science fiction is a skill. SF writers tend to set their stories in the future, or on other worlds, and frequently they do not stop to describe and explain everything from the beginning. They drop hints and clues, and an experienced reader can pick them up and build an understanding of the setting and what's happening as the story proceeds. Apparently many non-experienced SF readers, unused to doing this, find it difficult to do.

There are also theories about why more people read fantasy than SF these days. It used to be the opposite--more people read SF than fantasy. However, these days fantasy is the stronger seller. One theory is that fantasy is more accessible to new readers. Much of it is set in quasi-medieval settings which are familiar to us all, and there is currently a strong trend toward urban fantasy, which is set in the present day. It's more familiar territory for new readers, and therefore easier and more accessible for them to pick up.

Light is not for beginners. I have no doubt that probably some people who aren't habitual SF readers picked it up and made it through, but really the work is very inaccessible. Harrison throws you into the middle of the story with no explanation at all, and you're just supposed to pick up the details out of the air and slowly build up understanding as you go. He did the same with Nova Swing, which I read in October. I liked Nova Swing, but even in the end I don't think I really understood it.

This was my second attempt at Light. I tried to read it when it was first released in the US, and gave up fairly quickly because it was yucky. This time I persevered, though it is still yucky. Light alternated between three story lines set in two different time lines. None of the three protagonists is mentally stable, and one of them is a serial killer. Ick.

Seria Mau Genlicher is a K-ship pilot. We learn, later in the work, that K-technology is alien tech that humans found out in space and adopted. So Seria's spacecraft is an alien. Seria herself has undergone a brutal transformation to become joined with her ship which involved losing most of her body. She is now a small creature floating in a tank, communicating with her ship through cables embedded in her spine. She is also emotionally frozen at a bad age, and has serious hangups about sex.

Ed Chianese is a former spaceship pilot who has fallen on hard times. Whenever he gets a little money he disappears into an immersion tank where he enjoys an alternate reality that's much more exciting than his actual life. But now Ed is on the run from the mob and can't really remember much of his past, so he contents himself with as much sex as he can get while he hides. Eventually he gets a very unpleasant job working for a very odd employer.

Michael Kearney is supposedly a physicist who is working with his partner, Brian Tate, on some cutting edge problem, but in reality he leaves Tate to do all the work while he wanders around being a serial killer. Kearney has an odd pair of dice that he throws and uses them to guide his actions. He is being pursued by a creature he calls the Shrander, and he kills women in the idea that it will appease the Shrander and stop it from pursuing him. He also has a very odd and unhealthy relationship with his anorexic ex-wife. And he, too, has odd hangups about sex.

So, we have three unlikable characters doing unlikeable things and constantly thinking about sex. The three story lines actually don't tie together in a very satisfying way, the ending was a bit pointless, and I was able to guess the surprise about Seria and Ed fairly early on. I also got stuck halfway through and had to force myself to pick it up and continue. Despite that, I sort of vaguely liked the book. It wasn't as good as Nova Swing was, though I understood more of this one than I did of that. Light just felt like it was a whole lot of work for not much payoff.

A Little Grumpy Today, Apparently

I haven't had much to say recently, because I haven't been home much recently (mostly at work--necessary, but not interesting enough to blog about). I haven't been reading, and I'm exhausted, and don't have much to say.

Over the weekend I went to a lecture at the library. It was a topic I was mildly interested in, but not particularly knowledgeable about. The speaker was fairly interesting, and her slide presentation with examples of what she was talking about was also interesting. In fact, I put away my knitting so that I could take notes.

The problem occurred in the question and answer session after the lecture. I've probably spent too much time in classrooms and business meetings, but I'm pretty task-oriented when it comes to learning. I'm there to soak up the information as efficiently as possible and then be on my way. The audience drove me nuts. Here and there people started chatting with their neighbors instead of listening to the general discussion, and then realize they'd missed something in the main conversation and say: "What was that? I wasn't listening. What did you just say?" so that the rest of the room had to hear everything twice. Gahhh. By the time I left the room I was not pleased with the lecture, I was annoyed by the clueless twits. Surely there must be a ring of hell reserved for people who waste everyone else's time.

The Play's the Thing

On Friday evening I went to see a play called, appropriately, The Play's the Thing. It was written by Ferenc Molnar and adapted by P.G. Wodehouse. Playwrights love to write plays about the theater and theatrical people, and this one is no exception. In it, a playwright named Sandor Turai arrives late one evening to an Italian castle where he will be a guest. He is accompanied by his collaborator, Mansky, and a young composer named Adam. Turai has arranged that their room is next to that of Ilona, their diva, who is engaged to Adam. They did not send a telegram to notify her of their arrival, so that they might surprise her. Unfortunately it is young Adam who gets a surprise, as he overhears his fiance speaking romantically to someone else. He is crushed, devastated, and ready to tear up his music, leave, and never write again.

Turai is worried about the future of the operetta that they are writing together, and also takes pity on the young, idealistic composer. He decides to pass off what they overheard Ilona saying as the dialogue in a play, and convince young Adam that what he overheard was a rehearsal. Turai sits up all night writing a play that incorporates the dialogue, and then blackmails both Ilona and the other man into going along with it.

Act I was all setup, and it took a long time to set up the situation. It was occasionally mildly funny, but it was a bit long. Act II, when they rehearse the play Turai has written in front of young Adam and Mansky, who eventually realize that they are hearing the same words that had been spoken the night before, is very, very funny.

Overall, I enjoyed the play. The actors playing Turai and the butler, Dwornitschek, were especially good. The set was beautiful, Act II was worth the wait, and the audience seemed to enjoy themselves.

The Third Lynx by Timothy Zahn

The Third Lynx is the sequel to Night Train to Rigel, a space adventure novel in which our protagonist, Compton, becomes aware of a plot to take over the universe by the Modhri, an intelligent cold-water coral that gets into people's minds and uses them without their knowledge. Much of the action takes place on the Quadrail, a system of high-speed interstellar travel resembling a train, which is run by an alien race called the Spiders. At the end of Night Train, Compton is hired by the Spiders, who want him to help save the universe from this threa.

In The Third Lynx, Compton and his partner, Bayta, are traveling first-class in a Quadrail when he is approached by a man who wants to hire him as a bodyguard. Compton refuses because he has other business, and within hours the man has been beaten to death. Because he was the first to reach the dead man's side, Compton becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of an annoying security man named Morse, who keeps trying to arrest Compton despite a lack of evidence or jurisdiction.

The dying man's last words have sparked Compton's curiosity, though, so he decides to tag along with Morse to try to find stolen alien artifacts and a man who may have stolen one of them. Meanwhile he realizes that the Modhri wants those artifacts rather badly, so they begin a cat and mouse game across space.

I emjoyed Night Train to Rigel, but found it took me a while to get into The Third Lynx. I just really didn't care about the characters or the situation until I was about halfway in. Even then, though I was interested, there were too many twists and changes of plan as Compton again and again came up with answers without any good evidence to point him in the right direction. It was an okay, quick space romp, but I wasn't wild about it.