Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper

All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.

READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN by Azar Nafisi:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/08/2008]

The biographical blurb on READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN by Azar Nafisi (ISBN-13 978-0-375-50490-7, ISBN-10 0-375-50490-7) says, "She [Nafisi] was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil...." I am sure most people's reaction is "How outrageous! What a restriction of freedom!" But if you read of a female visiting professor from country X, "She was expelled from the University of Iowa for refusing to wear a top," you would probably have a completely different reaction. (Too unlikely? How about a visiting professor ejected from a public beach for refusing to wear a top?)

That thought aside, I will also warn that the book will be more meaningful if you have read the works characters and authors Nafisi names her chapters for (Lolita, Gatsby, [Henry] James, and Austen). However, her descriptions of life in Iran before and after the Revolution will be meaningful even without knowledge of the works.

To order Reading Lolita in Tehran from amazon.com, click here.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND by Sylia Nasar:

In the case of Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A BEAUTIFUL MIND, I think the movie, although it takes many liberties with the events in Nash's life, actually may do a better job of conveying both Nash's genius and his illness in ways the book doesn't. The book requires more technical expertise on the part of the reader and is at times somewhat unclear, while the movie uses images to convey some of the ideas more strongly. However, what is most interesting in the book is following the various treatments tried over the years, because that tells the reader as much about the development of psychiatry as Nash's work does about the development of economics.

To order A Beautiful Mind from amazon.com, click here.

THE HIGHER SPACE by Jamil Nasir (Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-56887-6, 1996, 256pp, mass market paperback):

This book is an odd combination of mysticism and mathematics, with some horror touches thrown in. The story centers around a teenage girl who is trying to escape from her abusive foster father, and avoid her equally threatening birth mother, by studying Thaumatomathematics. Parts of this book seem to be descendants of Dennis Wheatley and Fritz Leiber, with covens and witchcraft. But just when you think you now what's happening, Nasir pulls the rug out from under you with a complete change of direction.

The very fact that this book doesn't fit into a definite category means that it will have difficulty finding its audience. In fact, I'm not sure I can even describe who that audience would be, and certainly not without revealing more of the plot than I want to. I did find that the child-abuse/custody case part proceeded a bit too conveniently for the plot to be completely convincing, which may seem an odd complaint about a book that has so many hard-to-believe concepts. On the other hand, one requirement that I have for a speculative fiction book is that unless something is intentionally and clearly a variation from our world, it should be true to reality as we know it. On the other hand, maybe this is how these cases go--I have no first-hand experience (thank goodness).

In any case, this is certainly an interesting book. While all the individual elements have been used before, this is an original and unique blending of them. It may not be to everyone's taste--unusual blends often are not--but if the thought intrigues you, give this a try.

To order The Higher Space from amazon.com, click here.

CITY OF TINY LIGHTS by Patrick Neate:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/24/2012]

CITY OF TINY LIGHTS by Patrick Neate (ISBN 978-1-59448-186-4) is described as "Chandleresque noir". And to prove it, here is a sample: "Problem is, the door of my shoebox flat opens right into the waiting room of my matchbox office and I wasn't going to sit in all day like some retired middle management with the complete works of Gilbert and Sullivan on leatherette boxed set. Problem is, I always leave the waiting room unlocked because mine's a shy kind of business and you got to cajole clients in like you would a forkful of Alphabetti Spaghetti into a reluctant Kid's mouth. Problem is, my bedroom stank like a pub ashtray at chucking-out time and the living room was just as bad so I needed to get out. It didn't occur to me that this stink was oozing out of my pores like butter through the holes in a cheese cracker."

Most of this is familiar to American readers, but add to it the Cockney rhyming slang that Neate throws in ("Would you Adam and Eve it?" for "Would you believe it?") and it becomes something that takes a little longer to parse. (Actually, not all the British slang is rhyming; for example, "a pony" is twenty-five pounds, and a "tom" is a prostitute.) And our first person narrator is Tommy Akhtar, a Ugandan-Indian-Muslim private eye, not quite the Philip Marlowe type. The mystery is also patterned after those in Chandler's novels, with twists and turns and interconnections.

Written for a British audience, this book had far more references to, and *long* discussions of, cricket for my taste. Neate also may have overdone the Chandleresque similes, and at times the lectures from Farzad to Tommy, and Tommy's own philosophizing, are a bit too much like hitting the reader over the head with Neate's message. On the other hand, the combination of a foreign (to American readers) setting with a genuine love of the English language is likely to appeal to those who pick up this book.

To order City of Tiny Lights from amazon.com, click here.

CIVIL WAR POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Paul Negri:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/30/2010]

CIVIL WAR POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Paul Negri (ISBN 978-0-486-29883-2) is a typical "Dover Thrift Edition": everything is in the public domain, and the paper and binding are fairly basic (though I think all Dover Books are on acid-free paper). It is not as good an anthology as WORLD WAR ONE BRITISH POETS (ISBN 978-0-486-29568-8), probably because the 19th century style often seems more trite and less sophisticated than the 20th century one. It certainly seems as though 19th century poets "cheated" more on rhyme and scansion, although the fact that by the 20th century many poets abandoned them altogether saved the latter from the necessity of cheating. (Walt Whitman abandoned them even earlier.) In "Boston Hymn", Ralph Waldo Emerson attempts to rhyme "seas" and "fleece". In "Barbara Frietchie", John Greenleaf Whittier has the verse:

	Fair as the garden of the Lord
	To the eyes of the famished rebel horde.

To order Civil War Poetry from amazon.com, click here.

SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME by Sara Nelson:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/21/2003]

This previous Saturday I did one of my "library marathon afternoons." Mark has a bi-monthly origami meeting at the Monmouth County Library, and since we don't have borrowing privileges at this library, I use the time as an opportunity to read all the books I want to read that it has that our own library doesn't have. (Well, maybe not all.)

I had hoped to get to Jane Jensen's DANTE'S EQUATION, but its length was rather daunting for the four-hour block I had, so I stuck to non-fiction instead. First was Sara Nelson's SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME, which was the diary of her attempt to read a book a week throughout 2002 and write about it. (I suppose what I'm doing here is similar, though I'm reading more and writing less.) Her attitudes and observations about reading in general seemed more interesting than what she had to say about specific books, probably because if one hasn't read the book, her comments don't resonate. But, for example, she talks about "junk reading," saying, "Woody Allen once said that the advantage of bisexuality is that it doubles your chances of finding a date on Saturday night. Having a bifurcated reading brain--one part that likes 'junk' and one that reveres 'literature'--is the same kind of satisfying. You don't have to be any one thing and you don't have to think any one way. And should you happen upon different kinds of people in different situations, your pool of conversation topics is twice as deep." She also admits to the relief of learning to be able to "give up" on a book if she's not enjoying it. I didn't give up on this, but I will admit to merely skimming the last quarter or so.

To order So Many Books, So Little Time from amazon.com, click here.

"The New York Review of Science Fiction":

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/24/2011]

In the April 2011 issue of "The New York Review of Science Fiction", Jari Käkelä writes (in "Robots, Foundations and Endless Growth: The Role of Frontier Expansionism in Asimov's FOUNDATION Future"): "The Turnerian component is an even more crucial factor in Asimov's later novels. His 1980s novels ROBOTS OF DAWN, ROBOTS AND EMPIRE, FOUNDATION'S EDGE, and FOUNDATION AND EARTH continue and connect the Robot and the Foundation series into one massive grand narrative. These novels turn Asimov's 20,000 years of future history into a series of cycles of stagnation and revitalization of civilization through constant reinventions of the frontier." Ironically, of course, what was happening at the meta-level was that Asimov was attempting to revitalize his series the same way, by constantly reinventing them, or at least the history behind them. Alas, the consensus seems to be that the result was more stagnation than revitalization. After reading Käkelä's article, one wonders whether the replacement of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire with the expansionist/Manifest Destiny themes of Frederick Jackson Turner may have had something to do with that.

I did catch one error Käkelä made. He talks about the "hymning of 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me'" in Bob Fosse's CABARET, implying it was a pre-existing German song. It wasn't--Ralph Burns and John Kander wrote it specifically for CABARET. It is perhaps the most familiar example of a composer (or a composing team) being able to write so perfectly in a period style that everyone believes the work is from that period.

In that same issue, Chris n. Brown [sic] writes (in "Some Monster Manuals for the Evasion of Capitalist Networks" about how Borges took an after-dinner walk, "setting out with proto-psychogeographical intent." One thing is for sure: Borges would never have written a phrase that looked like that. Nor would he have written, "Borges precociously reveals the ways in which the Situationist dérive prefigures Network culture's labyrinth of detours. And, just as a peculiar stance is required to evade the commercial slipstream of the city, Borgesian transcendence is hard to find while navigating the fruits of the operating system's self-expression." (Or that sentence, I might add.)

THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB by Kim Newman:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/17/2007]

THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB by Kim Newman (ISBN-13 978-1- 932265-17-0, ISBN-10 1-932265-17-1) are stories centering around Richard Jeperson, a detective specializing in the supernatural in 1970s Britain. (I wondered if Newman had been inspired by Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, but in an afterword Newman lists the authors who had influenced him and Quinn is not one of them.) "Tomorrow Town" is probably of the most interest to science fiction fans, since it takes place in a utopian community and involves science fiction writers, Hugo awards, and so on. (The writers and even some of the Hugo categories are fictional, making this an alternate history of sorts.) The best story, though, may be "Egyptian Avenue"; it is also the shortest. Some of the longer ones seem to drag a bit, something I never thought I would say about Newman's writing.

Oh, yes, and synchronicity seems to be omnipresent: I read the glossary for THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB, which explained (among other terms) "Heath Robinson" (the British equivalent of Rube Goldberg), and two days later I was watching an episode of the BBC's "Planet Earth" in which they used the term. And watching a documentary on American photography, we saw a high-speed photograph of a bullet going through an apple that we had just seen in a display in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron six days earlier.

To order The Man from the Diogenes Club from amazon.com, click here.

UNFORGIVEABLE STORIES by Kim Newman:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/26/2004]

I haven't read many of Kim Newman's novels, but I find his short fiction excellent, and UNFORGIVEABLE STORIES has several that are first-rate. But while most of my favorites are not stand-alone", it's not in the usual way of being part of an author's series. Rather, they build and develop on classics or common tropes. So, for example, in order to appreciate "Further Developments in the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," some familiarity with the original story is a prerequisite. (The movie versions are not enough, because they change the events around considerably, and none is at all accurate to the book. For example, in the book Hyde is introduced before Jekyll, and you don't actually find out what is going on until after Jekyll is dead.)

Another story I liked was "Completist Heaven." You have a much better chance of liking this story if you recognize that "Frankenstein Meets the She-Wolf of the SS" is 1) not a real movie, and 2) a conflation of two titles for movies that are real. A knowledge of all the character actors in the 1940s Universal horror films also helps. "Quetzelcon" requires a familiarity with both Aztec mythology and science fiction conventions. There are other stories which require little if any arcane knowledge; they're good too.

To order Unforgiveable Stories from amazon.com, click here.

THE AMENITIES OF BOOK-COLLECTING AND KINDRED AFFECTIONS by A. Edward Newton:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/18/2003]

I suppose I should say something about A. Edward Newton's THE AMENITIES OF BOOK-COLLECTING AND KINDRED AFFECTIONS. Newton was considered the leading authority on book collecting in the early part of the twentieth century and this was written in 1918, with the Modern Library edition in 1935. The chapters are about subjects such as "Book-Collecting Abroad", "Book-Collecting at Home", "Old Catalogues and New Prices", and "'Association' Books and First Editions". Newton does leave the realm of the collector to talk about authors as well, discussing (among others) James Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde. It's considered a classic of its genre, although its age makes a lot of it less accessible to the modern reader. (Collectors will still find it of interest.) Newton further wrote about book collecting in DERBY DAY AND OTHER ADVENTURES, GREATEST BOOK IN THE WORLD AND OTHER PAPERS, END PAPERS: LITERARY RECREATIONS, and THIS BOOK COLLECTING GAME. In keeping with last week's essay, I'll note that the latter contains Newton's list of "One Hundred Good Novels", which is at least a bit more restrained than "The One Hundred Best Novels".

To order The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred Affections from amazon.com, click here.

THE GREATEST BOOK IN THE WORLD by A. Edward Newton:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/03/2006]

Published in 1925, THE GREATEST BOOK IN THE WORLD by A. Edward Newton is so old that not only does it not have an ISBN, but the copy I got on inter-library loan has one of those old octagonal spine labels with the call number hand-lettered by fountain pen. To a book collector, this book would be scorned--worn, scuffed, dirty, and full of library stamps or stickers. However, I'm just interested in the contents. (Actually, the fact that the book is not in pristine condition is a bit of a plus--I'm not afraid to read it.) Newton is known as a writer of essays about books, but he writes about more than just books, although it is always something connected with words. While his chapter on the Old Vic did not make me want to rush out to re-read (or even re-watch) Shakespeare, his comments on Gilbert & Sullivan did make me want to hear their operas again. Newton was in his time a well-known author of works about books, and he is still recommended by book collectors when asked who to read about books. Unfortunately, he is pretty much out of print. Luckily one of the libraries in our system has many of his books.

Of particular interest to science fiction readers would be Newton's long chapter "Skinner Street News", wherein he recounts the story of William Godwin; Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin); her two daughters (half-sisters) Fanny Imlay and Mary; the second Mrs. Godwin; *her* daughter Mary Jane Clairmont (also known as Jane, but calling herself Claire); Percy Bysshe Shelley; Harriet Westbrook (Shelley); and Lord Byron. The fact that three major characters in this drama are named "Mary" is certainly confusing. But the important one from a literary standpoint is Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, who was eventually to become Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley, to write FRANKENSTEIN, and to become the Mother of Science Fiction. Newton mentions FRANKENSTEIN, and says that when the name was used to refer to the German army, this had "such sinister meaning that few of us stopped to remember that Frankenstein was the creator of the demon and not the name of the monster." (Note that this was before the Universal "Frankenstein" movies, so one cannot say that they were what popularized the term. However, he also says of Mary Shelley's literary work that it was "of no great literary value." This, of course, depends on one's definitions, but FRANKENSTEIN has certainly had both staying power and literary effect, and has become part of the culture in a way that her more literary husband's work has not.

And of interest to alternate history fans are Newton's musings on Prince Henry, the eldest son of King James I of England. He was a book-collector (hence in Newton's field of interest) and much beloved of the people. However, he died (probably of typhoid fever) in 1612, leaving his brother Charles as heir to the throne. This paved the way for Newton to write, "Let us close our eyes to the world around us for a moment and speculate as to what would have happened had Prince Henry lived to come to the throne instead of his brother, Charles First. Let us assume . . . that he had sense enough to keep his head upon his shoulders and his crown upon his head. There would certainly have been no Cromwell, no stupid and cowardly James the Second, no four German Georges, perhaps no George Washington. Is it too much to say that no death in modern history has so influenced and changed the course of the whole world?"

To order The Greatest Book in the World from amazon.com, click here.

A MAGNIFICENT FARCE by A. Edward Newton:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/24/2007]

I recently read yet another complaint about the decline of bookstores, brought on (according to the author) by competition of other types of stores selling books cheaper, the tendency of bookstores to concentrate on the latest best-sellers to the neglect of the classics, and the decline of reading, brought about in turn by "having to compete with the many forms of amusement unknown fifty years ago. Oh, and also the problem of clerks unfamiliar with the books. Sound familiar? It was written by A. Edward Newton, sometime before 1921.

I have written before about the experience of getting books through inter-library loan that have not been checked out in decades, and show clear signs of having been catalogued in the 1920s (e.g., hand-written call numbers on octagonal paper labels). The latest for me is A MAGNIFICENT FARCE, A. Edward Newton's second book. (His first was THE AMENITIES OF BOOK- COLLECTING AND KINDRED AFFECTIONS, which I earlier reviewed.) The Plainfield Library, that great repository of old books, had at some point since 1921 rebound this volume, and it has the author's name, title, and *call number* stamped in gold on the spine! (ISBN-13 978-1-432-68840-0, ISBN-10 1-432-68840-5, for the edition just published in June of this year)

One interesting piece of information I got from A MAGNIFICENT FARCE was that "in the first edition, only about half of the [Pepys's] Diary was published, and this was edited and expurgated by Lord Braybrooke to an extent which became apparent by degrees. ... Finally, and not until 1893, there appeared an edition, edited by H. B. Wheatley, which gave the Diary complete, with the exception of a few passages, amounting in all to about one page of text, which, he says, cannot possibly be printed."

Why is this interesting? Well, because in 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD, Hanff writes (on October 15, 1951), "WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS'S DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS? this is not a pepys' diary, this is some busybody editor's miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys' diary may he rot. I could just spit. where is jan 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?" [all sic] And Doel replies, "First of all, let me apologize for the Pepys. I was honestly under the impression what it was the complete Braybrooke edition...." Well, Doel was almost definitely right in this, because this episode with the poker is not in the (much abridged) Braybrooke edition, at least according to the version I have found on line (archived independently in two different places, so they is a bit of validation there). It is in the Wheatley edition.

(Checking this is a bit tricky, since Pepys's DIARY was written before January 1 became unequivocally the first day of the year. As noted in my review of Mary Gentle's 1610: A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE [in the 02/20/04 issue of the MT VOID], the first day of the year moved from March 1 to January 1 in the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which did not happen in England until 1752. So one has to look *after" the December 1668 entries to find the January 1668 ones.)

Newton also quotes a delightful poem by Ralph Bergengren:

My Pop is always buying books:
So that Mom says his study looks
Just like an old bookstore. the bookshelves are so full and tall,
They hide the paper on the wall,
And there are books just everywhere,
On table, window-seat, and chair,
And books right on the floor

And every little while he buys
More books, and brings them home and tries
To find a place where they will fit,
And has an awful time of it.

Once, when I asked him why he got
So many books, he said, "Why not?"
I've puzzled over that a lot.

To order A Magnificent Farce from amazon.com, click here.

THIS BOOK-COLLECTING GAME by A. Edward Newton:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/14/2005]

Well, the first book was with our library's new electronic inter-library loan systemA. Edward Newton's THIS BOOK-COLLECTING GAME. This was published by Little, Brown in 1928 (hence no ISBN), and the volume I got may well have not been checked out in decades. Its Dewey Decimal label is one of those octagonal, hand-inked ones of days gone by. I love it. A. Edward Newton is one of the great bibliophile writers (I reviewed his classic THE AMENITIES OF BOOK-COLLECTING AND KINDRED AFFECTIONS in the 04/18/03 issue of the MT VOID). and this is another of his gems. It begins, "Book-collecting. It's a great game. Anybody with ordinary intelligence can play it: there are, indeed, people who think that it takes no brains at all; their opinion may be ignored. No great amount of money is required, unless one becomes very ambitious. It can be played at home or abroad, alone or in company: it can even be played by correspondence. Everyone playing it can make his own rules--and change them during the progress of the game. It is not considered 'cricket' to do this in other games."

Newton goes on to talk about children's books, early books in America, what to collect, and so on. Along the way he makes various observations about the people as well as the books. Of early New Englanders, he says, "But if our ancestors were religious, they were also adventurous--they had not left England for that country's good, as has been wittily said of the early settlers of Australia, but to subdue a continent in which they might worship God in their own way, with a bible in one hand and an axe in another and a gun in another; and having suffered much for conscience' sake at home, they sought a free country, and immediately made it less free than the one they left behind them. This is quite inexplicable--but then, most things are."

I should note that with this charm and wit also comes a distressing "nativism", such as when he says, "Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were good substantial folk who brought to this country sound minds in strong bodies and a fine sense of decency and order. . . . [These] traditions gave intellectual color to a hinterland of enormous extent, until finally it was washed out by an influx of foreigners who know nothing of our literature or our language and care less. We have, I am afraid, closed our doors too late: the evil of a mixed population might, perhaps, have been dealt with by an enlightened aristocracy, but by a democracy--never." "Closing the doors" refers, no doubt, to the Immigration Act of 1924. As for his fears that the wave of "foreigners" did not care about English literature or language, I'll just note that I am descended from grandparents who were part of this wave, and look what I'm writing about. (None of this is surprising, of course. I have commented several times here about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century writings.)

And as evidence that there is no new thing under the sun, Newton describes all the faults of the modern trilogy--except he is talking about the nineteenth century "three-decker". The libraries of the time (particularly Mudie's Select Circulating Library, run by Charles Edward Mudie) dictated that novels would be three volumes and sell for 31 shillings 6 pence (very expensive for the time), and even required that while there was to be love, it should be in the upper classes and not the lower. This stranglehold on format was finally broken by George Moore, who in spite of pleas and threats by Mudie, published A MUMMER'S WIFE in one volume for 6 shillings. As Newton says, "people were glad to get a book which they could own and take their time over and place on their shelves." There was nothing comparable, I suspect, until the paperback book from Penguin (seventy years ago this year).

Newton points out that the ground had been somewhat prepared: publishers had been issuing cheap one-volume editions after the sale of the expensive three-volume sets had lagged. Newton also thinks this change greatly improved the novel: "When novels were published in parts, they were infernally padded. . . . The three-volume also was too long, too full of words masquerading as ideas; with the one-volume novel a man--or a woman--said what he had to say and quit. . . . Of course long novels still appear, but they are tours de force, as it were; or, if they are very long, they are broken up into sections or epochs, each complete in itself, as in Galsworthy's FORSYTE SAGA." We have, in fantasy anyway, cycled back to the "three-decker" with all its flaws, and with its format and price dictated not by libraries but by the bookstores.

To order This Book-Collecting Game from amazon.com, click here.

STARLIGHT 1 edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86215-6, 1996, 316pp, trade paperback):

Two Hugo nominees out of twelve stories--not a bad percentage for an original anthology. (And this anthology undoubtedly contributed to Nielsen Hayden's own Hugo nomination as Best Professional Editor.) And it's not a theme anthology. This is not "Science Fiction Stories Set in the Interior of Stars" or "Fantasy Stories About Light." It's just good science fiction and fantasy. Everyone seems to be comparing this to such series as Terry Carr's "Universe" or Damon Knight's "Orbit," but in my opinion it's too soon to tell. I will say that this is a very auspicious start.

The first story in Starlight 1 is "The Dead" by Michael Swanwick; the last is "The Cost to Be Wise" by Maureen McHugh. Traditional anthology wisdom is to start with your strongest story, and end with your second strongest. Nielsen Hayden is certainly in agreement with the readers here--these were the two stories nominated for the Hugo Award. But don't ignore the stories in the middle, or you'll miss some excellent works.

For example, "Mengele's Jew" by Carter Scholz is a unique combination of quantum mechanics and the Holocaust. "The Weighing of Ayre" by Gregory Feeley is a science fiction story of the seventeenth century. Jane Yolen has "Sister Emily's Lightship," the second "Emily-Dickinson-and-the-space-aliens" story of the year (and in my opinion, the better of the two). John M. Ford's "Erase/Record/Play" is written in the rather unusual form of a playscript, and reminds me in some ways of the plays of Vaclav Havel. It is subtitled "A Drama for Print," though it wouldn't surprise me to see this performed at some point. In fact, I wouldn't object if the folks at Boskone who do theatrical performances each year decided to do this one. (Consider that a hint.)

I won't list every story, but I will recommend that you go out and get this book and discover them for yourself. I'm looking forward to the second volume.

To order Starlight 1 from amazon.com, click here.

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Horace B. Samuel):

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/24/2012]

I bought THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Horace B. Samuel) (ISBN 978-0-486-42691-4) in a "Dover Thrift Edition" from amazon.com, because I was buying something for $23 and it was cheaper to buy this and get free shipping than to pay for shipping. The good news is that they have provided additional footnotes, probably those translating the Greek and Latin that had been left un-translated in 1913. After all, anyone reading Nietzsche then would be presumed to have an education that included Greek and Latin.

Nietzsche has a reputation for anti-Semitism, which is accurate in the sense that he blamed the Jews for the characteristics that he felt had diminished European culture from the high level of the Greeks and Romans. But almost all the characteristics are Christian rather than Jewish: meekness, poverty, turning the other cheek, forgiveness of one's enemies, etc. Nietzsche seems to see "the Church" as the continuation of the Jewish moral code, when in fact it was a major shift in direction. Another major difference that Nietzsche does not seem to recognize is that the emphasis on the afterlife is a Christian one--while Jews may speak of "the world to come" it is not a major part of their theology. There is no Jewish Dante writing up a detailed description of "the world to come".

Nietzsche does point up a major philosophical issue that the afterlife creates. No, not the idea that if one does good in this life in hopes of heaven in the next, one is not being altruistic, but rather is doing it for selfish reasons. Nietzsche's point is that all the things people say are evil in this work--riches, power, gloating over punishing one's enemies--are precisely those that one will be given in heaven.

To order The Genealogy of Morals from amazon.com, click here.

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]

Another book marketed as mainstream is Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE (ISBN=1-931-56164-8), but this *is* science fiction. (It's so mainstream-marketed, in fact, that the book is a selection of the "Today Show Book Club".) Henry has "Chrono- Displacement Disorder--he spontaneously time-travels, both backwards and forwards. He first meets Clare in 1997; she first meets him in 1968. (She does not time-travel.) So in 1991, she has many years of memories of him, and he doesn't know her at all. But because he has been time-traveling since 1968, he doesn't have a major problem accepting this. Niffenegger seems to take a lot of time working out all the variations. For example, Henry time- travels back to 1981 before he time-travels back to 1977, so this is why in 1981 Clare remembers him [again] while he doesn't know her. Or Henry time-travels back and meets an older version of himself, also time-traveling back. Niffenegger doesn't consider this a paradox, though interestingly she does limit the time- traveling to just Henry's body--no clothes or even (we discover later) tooth fillings. (She does gloss over the problems inherent in finding yourself somewhere with no clothes--there seems to be a convenient clothesline, locker, or even trash bin with clothing in it more frequently than one would find in real life.)

Of course, the reason I say all this is that I am reading this with the protocols of a hard science fiction novel rather than with those of a mainstream novel about the relationship between a couple, which is what it is. The problem is that I find it more interesting as a hard science fiction novel, even if it is going over somewhat familiar ground, than as a mainstream romance novel. (Robert A. Heinlein would have loved it--take "All You Zombies" and "By His Bootstraps", add some explicit sex, and bingo!)

If you are a fan of time travel novels, I recommend this just for all the convolutions. If you're not, I can't say it did much for me on any other level.

To order The Time Traveler's Wife from amazon.com, click here.

A POCKETFUL OF HISTORY: FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICA--ONE STATE QUARTER AT A TIME by Jim Noles:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/14/2008]

A POCKETFUL OF HISTORY: FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICA--ONE STATE QUARTER AT A TIME by Jim Noles (ISBN-13 978-0-306-81578-2, ISBN-10 0-306-81578-8) is, among other things, an example of subtitling gone wild. The book itself is a historical grab-bag, telling the history behind each state's design, starting with Caesar Rodney and ending with King Kamehameha. Sometimes Noles is hard-pressed to write his chapter; of South Carolina's design, he says, "South Carolina is another state that ... relied on an amalgamation of symbols for its quarter design--and created a difficult task for an author left to craft a chapter about a bird, a flower, and a palm tree." He is not always positive: "At the risk of irritating Michigan's nearly 10 million citizens, it is difficult to ignore the obvious: Michigan's state quarter ... is perhaps the most boring of the bunch." Depicting the outline of the state and the Great Lakes system, it is described by Noles as a "cupro-nickel- plated hydrogeography lesson."

Since a lot of the history or meanings on the quarters was familiar to me, I found some of the stories about how the choices were made more interesting. Iowa had to reject the suggestion of the Sullivan brothers when it was decided that a row of their heads was too close to the "busts or portraits of any person, living or dead." Full-figure images such as Cesar Rodney and George Washington were allowed, but I would think Mount Rushmore on the South Dakota quarter violates the "no-busts" rule. And there is still some dispute on whether the astronaut suit for Ohio violates the rule against portraying living persons, since arguably it is supposed to be either John Glenn or Neil Armstrong. The bison appears on three coins (though only as a skull on one of them). Lincoln and Washington each appear twice. Only one Native American appears, and only two actual woman (i.e., not Lady Liberty or the Spirit of the Commonwealth). Two states claim the Wright Brothers' achievement, and two the space program. And as Noles said, "[It] is difficult to find a more bitter piece of irony than New Hampshire's decision to depict the fabled Old Man of the Mountain" in its design--within three years of the quarters' issuance, the rock formation had collapsed into a pile of rubble.

As I said, how the choices were made and why is at times more interesting and revealing than the straight history behind what is being depicted. (And I can't help but feel that there will not be a similar book about the Presidential dollars--there is nothing notable about them. The portraits of the Presidents are not particularly notable, and the reverse does not have anything representing something distinctive to that particular President.)

To order A Pocketful of Quarters from amazon.com, click here.

AUTOMATED ALICE by Jeff Noon (Crown, ISBN 0-517-70490-0, 1996, 223pp, hardback):

Like Lewis Carroll, Jeff Noon fills his story with puns and word play. Unlike Lewis Carroll, he tries to work in computers and industrial development. This is not entirely successful, and at times the conceit of computers giving their answers by having termites spell them out gets to be a bit annoying.

Noon is writing from a very different perspective than Carroll, and there is no chance of mistaking Noon's prose for Carroll's. In a sense this works against the novel, just as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche not done in Doyle's style seems to be missing something. And Noon is not as deft or as free with his logical puzzles and riddles as Carroll--but then, Carroll was a logician by trade.

If you're willing to accept this as a modern homage instead of a copy, and if you enjoy word play, you might find this worth a look. Whether it's worth buying in hardcover is questionable though.

To order Automated Alice from amazon.com, click here.

HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON by Naomi Novik:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/12/2007]

HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON by Naomi Novik (ISBN 0-345-48128-3) has been described as "Hornblower with dragons", and that is reasonably accurate. The only difference is that Novik seems to be aiming at a slightly younger audience--there is more emphasis on the younger characters (though not making them the main characters). The main character starts out as a naval captain and becomes an aviator. However, the training and battle scenes (of which there are several) seem like a cross between nautical and aerial battles, so in some sense he is still a Hornblower stand-in. What there is not is any substantive change for our world's history. The American colonies apparently got tired of taxation without representation, threw tea in the harbor, and gained independence; Napoleon did pretty much what he did in our world, and so on. Somehow you expect more change to the world than that. This book and its sequels (THRONE OF JADE and BLACK POWDER WAR) are recommended if you are looking for "Hornblower with dragons", but not as an alternate history.

To order His Majesty's Dragon from amazon.com, click here.