Calico Kittycat

Maelstrom by Peter Watts

2010-08-05T21:10:59Z

Ok, first off this is a discussion of book two of a trilogy, Peter Watt's Starfish, Maelstrom, and Behemoth. Now I'm only about a third of the way into the book, so it's questionable how much of this counts as a spoiler, but it's kinda hard NOT to talk about it without providing spoilers for Starfish, especially the ending. So if you've not read it and want to (here's the review I wrote of it when I read it a couple years back), do not click on the lj cut.

OK, I'm only about a third into Maelstrom, I intend to read the rest of it, and probably Behemoth as well, and I'm beginning to wonder why. The situation is grim, even without the proximate threat of extinction by biological grey goo (simple mirror-image protein microbe with a taste for sulfur and the ability to get at it just about anywhere including inside other cells); society is fractured and frankly the fragments have me this close to uttering the Eight Deadly Words about an entire species*, though some of the characters are at least mildly sympathetic. Then again, I'm pretty sure if I really cared what happened to the characters I might well stop reading Right Now.

OK, now that I've probably driven all of you off, there ARE some interesting bits in here. The "Maelstrom" of the title is the name for what the Internet has evolved into, with lots of electronic wildlife descended from the viruses, spambots and whatnot and forming a continuously, and very rapidly evolving electronic ecology. We learn about this by following one of the inhabitants for awhile as it wanders about, mates by conjugation with a similar program, then gets eaten by something else, first managing to squirt out an archive of itself that carries itself elsewhere. OK, eventually this bit finds just the right environment, and finally fulfills its destiny - it's a spambot advertising a porn site. This message gets splashed across a monitor currently focused on a petri dish growing microbes. The monitor is being watched by an automated system** which can't read, and takes the splash of sudden typescript to mean that the microbe colonies are spreading at an incredible speed, and it launches the plague warning. For a minute it looks like we're about to witness the Fall of Civilization (what there is of it) due to a porn spam...

We watched a complex situation develop in a relatively small space in the first book, and the author has made what's going on out in the Rest of the World complex as well. And interesting. But somehow, not quite involving. Oh well...

*To add to the fun, the same could be said of the attitude of Lenie Clarke, who managed to make it ashore after surviving the nuke at the end of the first book and is now wandering the land shedding the aforementioned microbe in her wake. Semi-intentionally. Leastwise she's psychotic, for pretty good reasons, too.

**Which nearly blows my suspension of disbelief - why the monitor; wouldn't just connecting it to the pickup over the petri dish make more sense?

Hi all

2009-12-16T07:38:21Z

At least I should make one post this year... I'll see about more book reviews soon. Anybody reading this?

More from Tor

2008-09-23T08:35:54Z

I guess there is one advantage to getting sick; I do get more time to read. (Go to bed. When eyes open, read. When eyes closed, sleep. Repeat macro.) Read a bit of fanfic before giving up on it (note to writers - I don't care what you're crossing with Narnia, please try to at least keep Aslan in character.) Went on to better things.

Ok, this isn't one of the freebies, this is the sequel to one of the freebies, which I have now read courtesy the LASFS library. Warning - this WILL have spoilers for Through Wolf's Eyes. There is also a reference to Rosemary Edgehill's The Cup of Morning Shadows though not really all that spoilery.

Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart by Jane Lindskold is, as mentioned above, the second in the series begun with Through Wolf's Eyes. As might be expected, you can't glue two kingdoms together at the end of the first book without having all sorts of excitement with the second, especially with people around like the exiled former queen Gustin IV, now Queen Valora of the Isles, reputed sorceress Lady Melina, and various other rapacious sorts we didn't meet in the first book, along with a set of three magical artifacts of unknown purpose that nobody knows how to use (but the right people in New Kelvin just might be able to figure out) floating around, ... Ties to friends, human and otherwise, plus a commission by the council of Royal Beasts who would REALLY like to see those artifacts taken out of play, but would also like not to have their existence known any more widely than it must pitch Firekeeper right into the middle of intrigue, war, long difficult journeys, and so forth, and a painful decision at the end. Not that she's the only one to have the last. If anything, I think I like this one better than the first.

NOT from Tor but the sequel to something else I mentioned earlier, a week or so back I read the second book of Rosemary Edgehill's trilogy started by The Sword of Maiden's Tears (you remember - the elf prince gets mugged in New York), The Cup of Morning Shadows. I was, alas, underwhelmed. Somehow this worked better with the fantasy being in New York than with the New Yorkers in fantasyland. Oh well... it IS the second book of a trilogy.

Andddd... back to the Tor stash

2008-09-18T07:29:05Z

ConChord is over, and though I have to make up another Kazoo award for the category where there were two (and take the opportunity to decoupage the labels onto the bases of the awards whose winners weren't present and thus will have to have them mailed)... I still have time to do some reading.

So I just finished The Outstretched Shadow by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory.

This one is part one of "The Obsidian Trilogy", and properly labeled as such. Nice to have warning.

We've seen this plot before - young and insecure lad in city with a really bad case of cultural ossification discovers Forbidden Magic and gets himself tossed out of town, at which point his real adventures begin. In the process we find out why his home city is in such a wretched state, who the Bad Guys are, what they're up to, and how the rather interesting magic system works. He also is sent on a quest, which sets up the rest of the trilogy from the looks of it. Leastwise it touches off the war you've been expecting since you found out about the Bad Guys. Well, yeah, it's Lackey, Our Hero has a bit of a tendency to angst, but not quite to excess - and he actually has considerably more common sense than you might expect at first. And goodness knows he does have a reason to feel incompetent and insecure at first. In any case, I found it enjoyable enough to keep reading and will likely read the rest of this out of the library.

Rate this one readable.

Next I'm reading book two of Jane Lindskold's Wolf's Eyes series, courtesy of the LASFS library.

So much for that idea

2008-09-10T09:05:14Z

I give up - The Yiddish Policemen's Union is going back to the library half read tomorrow. Interesting, if ose, background, the old "determined detective bulls through to the TRUTH" plot... and I find myself putting the thing down every chapter to find something, anything more cheerful. Today I hit the last straw, as Our Hero did something so mindblowingly dumb that I found myself considering the Eight Deadly Words*. Someone with more tolerance for gritty street-level realism in an alternate universe may well enjoy it - in fact a number of someones must've or it'd hardly have won the Hugo... but I think I'm getting on with the rest of the stack.

*"I Don't Care What Happens To These People."

Reading right along

2008-08-29T05:57:12Z

OK, I started The Yiddish Policemen's Union and by the time I got halfway through things got so ose (after all, it IS noir) that I needed a break. So I'll review it after I finish it. In the interim I went on a reading jag in the AJ Hall does the Harry Potterverse (occasionally mixing in some other places) series of fanfics, aka the LOPverse which can be found here. There's a link to a recommended reading order; actually I'd recommend starting with the two novels which are, I believe, the first two actually written, and also strike me as the best of the lot. These are well, written, well plotted novels, the first (Lust over Pendel) being a comedy of manners crossed with an adventure, the second (Dissipation and Despair) a "cozy" style murder mystery in the tradition of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series. The rest are a mixed bag of short stories, and include items historical to the main novels, crossovers with Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and "The Perilous Point" which ties up most of the loose knots in the relationships established in the novels. A brief warning about one of them,"The Kindly Ones" which is one of those annoying short stories that make you feel like you just read the first two or three chapters and lost the book - while it's pretty obvious what happens next, there's really room for development. Still I can understand the author deciding to quit while ahead, and anybody familiar with Greek mythology can probably figure out why from the title.

And speaking of titles, don't let those of the novels throw you off - the author's being playful. Now these ARE technically slash, involving Draco Malfoy and Neville Longbottom of all people... but actually it works, and the author avoids both porn and overwhelming angstfests (I can think of a few well known authors who could learn a lot from her handling of this theme). Go enjoy!

Testing the Poll feature

2008-08-21T06:24:34Z

Theoretically there will be a poll in this post, about how anybody came to read it. If they do, anyway. :)

View Poll: Just out of Curiosity (I AM a cat after all)

Permanent membership

2008-08-21T03:09:36Z

Just bought a permanent Inksome membership, with a certain amount of trepidation considering what used to happen every time someone revived "Shangri L'affaires" and I locced it. Then again, last time I did NOT send a letter of comment and it still folded so maybe to quote another Kay, it's not MY fault. :)

Anyway, it's $120, and means with any luck I should be around here for awhile.

NOW - any friends of mine reading this who don't have Inksome accounts of any variety, want an invite? I've plenty.

More Tor etc.

2008-08-20T07:07:26Z

Candide (see previous post) finished up in what I can only call an appropriate fashion. If you haven't read it, I recommend looking it up.

Back to the Tor collection, with In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker. Sometime in the 2300s or so, a company which eventually calls itself Dr. Zeus make two important discoveries; how to travel in time, and how to make someone immortal or anyway very long lived indeed. Both processes have their flaws - the latter only works on small children and sometimes goes spectacularly wrong, while the former only allows you to travel backwards in time. You can return to where you came from, but you can't go forward. Furthermore, you can't change history. Or rather, change the history you know about; after all if it's history nobody knows about then whatever you did is obviously already what happened. So no stopping the fire in the Library at Alexandria... but you can spend years sneaking teams in when nobody's around and photograph all of the contents before it happens. No bringing back lost Old Masters directly, but an agent can hide one in a chest that you just happen to open later. And so on. Of course if you want breeding populations of extinct animals it's a bit trickier, since someone has to be around to take care of them... and so it was that they started recruiting lost children in the past... in some cases clear back to the Pleistocene (and not necessarily H. sapiens), made them immortal, and used them as agents to take samples of everything desired later, and care for it as they go along. The protagonist is such a recruit, rescued from the dungeons of the Inquisition, immortalized, trained and now on her first assignment, as part of a group posing as a family of Spaniards (in her case this is true - she's a genuine Spanish teenager) in England during the reign of Queen Mary. It's her job to collect samples of everything that'll be extinct later currently found growing in the garden in question, and also to acclimatize herself to normal humanity, something of which her early experiences have made her extremely wary. And every teenager's first duty, of course, to continue maturing. Now I'm not sufficiently familiar with the days of Queen Mary's England to tell how accurate this is, but the book has very much the feel of authenticity, the story is believable, and most important of all, the characters are too. I enjoyed this book, and will be looking up more works by this author.

At this point I stopped the Tor readathon in favor of "Legacy" the second book in Lois M. Bujold's The Sharing Knife series. This is a fantasy romance, set in an environment where two different populations are threatened by a leftover bit of nastiness from an ancient magic war, and who are going to have to stop sneering at each other before they're jointly overwhelmed. We met the first population, Fawn Bluefield's people who are agriculturalists in the first book, now that she's married Dag the Lakewalker, they go home to meet his semi-nomadic people, who use the minor magic powers they've inherited from the folks involved in that ancient magic war to battle the threat of the "malices". Their peoples' lack of understanding of each other not only causes severe problems with both Dag's and Fawn's relatives, but also is the root of a major disaster. I expect book three will involve the solution to this. Bujold's style, as always, is pleasant to read.. however I'm kind of disappointed with this series since I don't generally expect her to be quite so formulaic. I probably will read the third book - but it'll be out of the library, same as I did this one. Or maybe I'll go back and reread her far livelier A Civil Campaign, also a romance but not at all bland.

And on to another Tor, Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, which, bless them, is clearly labeled number one of four... and which at the same time does have sufficient of an ending that you don't HAVE to read the rest of the series. Alas, it starts out in such familiar style (the Evil Aristocracy keeps everybody else in subjection, Our Heroine learns she has Special Powers, quotes from someone's diary about their Destiny begin each chapter) I nearly dismissed the whole thing as Extruded Fantasy Product, but actually it picks up. The magic system is one I've never seen before, the quotes are actually significant and sufficiently important by the end of the book that you may want to go back and read them if you haven't, the people are mostly interesting, and while the pattern of the story is pretty much as expected, it's still fun watching them get there. I think I may read the next one.

Next up, this year's Hugo best novel winner, The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Who, interestingly enough won the Pulitzer literary prize in 2001. Must go look up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay after I finish this one. Then back to Tor again.

The Tor Trek continues...

2008-08-12T04:08:41Z

Comments on Through Wolf's Eyes, by Jane Lindskold, The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove, All Seated On The Ground by Connie Willis, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang, Tideline by Elizabeth Bear and even a few on Candide by Voltaire follow. No spoilers far as I can see, but I'll insert a cut anyway.

I have now finished Through Wolf's Eyes, by Jane Lindskold. A human child, survivor of a lost expedition is raised by sapient wolves until her mid teens when another group of humans arrive, and she accompanies them back. The result is quite entertaining in a Tarzanish fashion. I shall probably read the next one in this series as well.

The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove is number four in a YA series. Perhaps the first was better, but this one falls kinda flat. H. Beam Piper and Keith Laumer have both done a whole lot better with the crosstime travel theme. Oh well...

At this point, the Hugo winners were announced, so I went looking for them. Most of which turned up on the net, though I'm awaiting The Yiddish Policeman's Union from the library. My thoughts on the others:

All Seated On The Ground by Connie Willis: The Aliens finally arrive... and no matter who does what, do nothing more than stand there looking disapproving. Someone needs to find out why, and thereby hangs a delightful tale of Christmas, choirs, and the dangers of ignoring your subordinates. That was fun, and made up for slogging through the entirety of Disunited States. Read it - it's wonderful.

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang was also worthy of the award; a tale of mythic Baghdad, and the judicious use of time travel.

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear. After finishing this, I was pleased to learn that it was based on one of elisem' s wonderful art necklaces, entitled "Sinner in the Hands of a Mildly Startled Buddha". A lone surviving warbot scours the beach for beads and trinkets with which to make up memorial necklaces for the rest of the members of her platoon, human and otherwise. The story is quite as wonderful as the art piece that inspired it.

A train of thought begun by Through Wolf's Eyes and followed through Tarzan of the Apes ultimately reminded me that I had never actually read Voltaire's Candide, so that's what I'm reading now, courtesy Project Gutenberg. OK, most of the time "classic" is pedagoguese for "hideous slog to get through" but in this case, not so at all. Our Hero gets tossed out of his sheltered existance for kissing the heroine in the unexpected presense of her father, the Baron, and into a wild ride through the "real world" with no real idea of what's going on through the first part of the book. In passing, Voltaire manages to sideswipe just about every stereotypical convention of the romantic genre, giving us weird stories, strange lands, clashing armies, unexpected meetings full of purple prose dumped unceremoniously into the pit by disasters passed off in a line or two, and so on. Rather more than a shot of wry... I'm halfway through and mighty grateful to Proj. Gutenberg.

More from Tor

2008-08-02T22:15:29Z

I think this is general enough not to need a cut.

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder is one of those annoying books where there are all sorts of things to fascinate - an air balloon the size of the Earth containing breathable atmosphere, an artificial sun in the middle and smaller ones here and there, colonies drifting about with the air circulation currents or tethered to orbital bodies, pirates, empires, a general steampunk feel (and a certain amount of physics blandly ignored to be sure), war, love, revenge, murder, deadly plots and secrets, all that stuff... but though I cannot point the finger at any one thing, it just never quite gelled for me. A rather bland interest in seeing how it all came out did allow me to finish the book, and I'm glad that the author had the sense to actually provide a decent ending though with plenty of room for the next book in the pipeline, but while I wish the surviving characters no ill, I don't really care what happens to them next either. Sigh...

On to Through Wolf's Eyes by Jane Lindskold.

Current books in progress

2008-07-31T02:13:06Z

Currently paging my way through a batch of ebooks Tor was giving away recently, of which I downloaded the lot. Interspersed with other stuff, to be sure.

The trouble with writing anything resembling a review is telling anything about the book without committing spoilers, so if you're really concerned with knowing anything about Farthing (Jo Walton), Starfish (Peter Watt), and Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Cherie Priest), (and to a lesser degree The Sword of Maiden's Tears by Rosemary Edghill. There are also some other references that don't give anything away requiring a warning) just skip the cut.

And if you came in from my LJ (sorry about that), the cut covers the rest of this post after this sentence.

First off was Jo Walton's Farthing, an alternate worlder set where Great Britain made peace with the Nazis in the early '40s, mostly because Hitler wanted to concentrate on Russia. Eight years later, Germany is still embroiled in war with Russia, and across the channel, the British are conducting business as usual. At a country estate party for important politicos, one of the most important is murdered, and a police detective sent in to find out why. He's got to do it fast because he's not going to be able to keep the party together very long thanks to an important vote coming up. The net result? Agatha Christie meets George Orwell in a snakepit. Not badly written or conceived, but somehow, I don't think I"m going to read the sequel.

I reread A Toast To Tomorrow, by Manning Coles to take the taste out of my mind. (Highly recommended, and back in print courtesy Rue Morgue Press), then followed it up with The Fifth Man given as Manning Coles books are like potato chips - hard to stop at one. :) These are set during WWII, more or less OUR WWII this time, essentially the spy biz as it ought to be and so seldom really is, I believe*. Outrageous deeds of derring do... and a whole LOT of fun.

Then, back to the Tor loot.

Starfish, by Peter Watt is a study in pressure, physical and otherwise. It's set in the future, in a society that's still figuring out how to handle the replacement of humans by AIs and nanotech in most occupations. But most of what we see involves humans modified to handle the environmental extremes at the bottom of an oceanic trench who maintain the experimental machinery used to supply power to the mainland from the hotspot. These people are chosen mostly for their survival of extreme psychological pressure; victims of serial abuse and the like. Most of the book covers their adaptations to their surroundings and each other, also some unexplained factors which become important by the end of the book. Which is appropriately ambiguous; not so much what happens, but what you think of the meaning of it all. Good job all around; I shall look for other works by this author.

Next up, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, by Cherie Priest. A spooky fantasy; anyway the protagonist is acquainted with the ghosts of some family members. A young woman goes seeking her mysterious past and finds it, and a few other things too. Another good one.

I'm now in the middle of a book I checked out of the LASFS library, The Sword of Maiden's Tears by Rosemary Edghill. Elf gets stranded in New York, and is promptly mugged for his magic sword. This is more of a problem than it looks inasmuch as the sword in question has a curse on it that will do horrible things to the mugger who will do horrible things to everybody else if not found soon. And off we go. Thus far kinda derivative (though aware of it which takes a lot of the curse off), and full of references. Amusing thus far.

*OK, some of the weirder things the Danes pulled off during WWII do come to mind. If you can, track down a copy of The Savage Canary, by David Lampe. Which I should probably review sometime, but not now because if I go reread it I'll never finish THIS.

THIS is pretty...

2008-07-09T07:46:30Z

Whoops - been three weeks since I posted, hasn't it. I don't know how to add a generally available marker to Google Earth, nor am I sure this merits such anyway, but to see something real pretty, get onto Google Earth and go to:

66^o 11'22.21"N
150^o 24'06.16"E

All those meanders and oxbows and whatnot remind me of ruffles in a painting .

Ok, that's new...

2008-06-14T00:37:27Z

BLITEOTW

OK, so I suppose it shouldn't have been a complete surprise. After all, there was the LASFS election last night, which always draws a crowd including members who don't show up all that often otherwise. And of course when you think about it having him as a member makes a certain amount of sense in a club where Death Will Not Release You, after all... He even brought three friends with him. It's not often we see a first time visitor actually eager to be involved in club offices - the redhead actually offered to challenge the new president elect for the position until The Emperor explained the duties thereof. The skinny guy ate most of the munchies and threatened to start in on the table - this was impressive considering the number of bribes the candidates had placed there. And the other guy - the one with the greenish complexion kept bragging about the scope of his plans for tomorrow.. without ever quite telling us what they were.

So when I look out the window and discover the mailman staggering down the street muttering "braaaaiiinnnsss" I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised. Just another sunny day in Paradise with zombies. I've checked with Niall - Boeing's been running the zombie filter all day, so unless someone's managed to sneak in while infected they should be ok. Vicky says she's taken refuge in the King's Head, they'll admit anybody but certain things simply aren't DONE in the pub, so she should be all right too.

So I'm hiding up in the attic with the possums for a spell. Just hope they're not infected.....

Testing Out Semagic here

2008-06-11T05:11:32Z

Now to see if I read the instructions right - I've used Semagic to post to LJ for quite awhile, but have just tried to set it up for Inksome. Live Journal Archive works, I'm pleased to note.

And just to avoid having no content at all, here's a link to an article on the Time Travel Mart in Echo Park...

And finally I get started in here

2008-06-10T03:31:02Z

Dug out my backups from the Scribblit phase, and everything has either moldered away (commentary on the writer's strike) or is easily available elsewhere (Booty a short story published in the CaliFur program book the year the theme was pirates), so I'm not going to be posting any of that. Instead, a bit of commentary on something that's always bugged me a bit.

Just finished my occasional reread of the Chronicles of Narnia, then came across the neverending “What about Susan” discussion as incarnated on someone’s LJ. Now there’s a lot of discussion one can have over CS Lewis and his attitudes, or why he chose Susan to be odd man out (and not just at the end – she tended to be from the beginning), but in the context of the books themselves, this whole thing stems from a few of paragraphs in The Last Battle – so few that fair use allows me to quote them all:

“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”

“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”

“Oh Susan!” said Jill, “she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea of life is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

“Well, don’t talk about that now,”said Peter. “Look! Here are lovely fruit trees. Let us taste them.

Now we can easily see that her brother (and possibly other siblings) found her perhaps boring and no fun anymore, while Polly found her overly frivolous, but one thing is immediately clear, and that is that she has not been excluded from the Friends of Narnia because she won’t go adventuring, or because she’s too shallow or anything else along those lines. She’s not been excluded at all – she opted out of her own free will. Susan is no longer a Friend of Narnia because Susan herself has decided to not be one.

OK, this means there is a perfectly good reason she was not at the party – the same reason I don’t go to Elks meetings – I’m not a member. She did not know anything about the call for help, or the various actions spawned by same, and did not have any reason to be on that train, present at the Last Battle, or in Real Narnia either.

But you’ll note that the adult Pevenseys, not being Friends of Narnia also did not come in via Narnia OR Real Narnia – they came in through Real England, and still made it to Aslan’s Country. And there’s no reason to believe Aslan has called time on England; they’re here because they came to the station to meet the others and got caught in the wreck. (If I was going to pick a bone with CS Lewis, this might be the place for it – seems an awfully sloppy way to get a handful of people out of England for someone capable of summoning people out of one universe into another with such ease as he used to bring in Queen Helen in The Magician’s Nephew, or send the Telmarines back at the end of Prince Caspian… but I digress.) Susan, presumably is still alive since she’s not with her parents. Most likely due to having not happened to come to the station.

What happens next? We don’t know! All we know is that she didn’t come along with either part of the family before we reached the end of the book. The only people to speak of her at all were Peter, Polly and Jill and Eustace. Not a word from Aslan, the party whose opinion most counts. That’s Susan’s story, and the minute she separates from the story of the Friends of Narnia it’s no longer part of the Narnian story, which is the one we’re reading about. She may turn up five minutes after the end of the book; she may live a long life and have many experiences and then come in via Real England or wherever when she does die. She may HAVE separated herself from Aslan’s Country entirely. But we have no particular reason to assume so from what we see in the book.

Hello again!

2008-05-06T07:28:18Z

OK, it would appear I've got my journal up again - my thanks to all who helped. I'll put such posts from my old one as haven't completely moldered away up later - right now I should've been asleep an hour ago. Prrrrrrp!