All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE SINGULAR ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by Alan Stockwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/27/2004]
Alan Stockwell's THE SINGULAR ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES is yet another collection of Holmes pastisches, acceptable but nothing special, and missing that spark that the best ones have.
To order The Singular Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from amazon.com, click here.
"The Battle of York" by James Stoddard:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/10/2004]
The novelette "The Battle of York" by James Stoddard ("Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction", July 2004) is an idea that is not exactly new, but Stoddard handles it very well. The premise is that three thousand years in the future, someone has pieced together a history of George Washington based on imperfect records (much as we do with, say, ancient Egypt) or on legends (Parson Weems has a lot to answer for). So not surprisingly, a few of the "facts" are wrong. What is surprising is how true to the spirit of it all Stoddard's re-telling is. This is a story I read a couple of months ago, and it has really stuck with me, which is the sign of a good story. This is definitely going on my Hugo nominations ballot next year.
SILICON VALLEY SNAKE OIL: SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE INFORMATION AGE by Clifford Stoll:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/11/2012]
SILICON VALLEY SNAKE OIL: SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE INFORMATION AGE by Clifford Stoll (ISBN 978-0-385-41994-9) was written in 1995 and now seems a mere curious artifact. Consider the back blurbs. The top announces that this is "the first book to question the inflated claims--and hidden costs--of the Internet." I am immediately skeptical of claims by someone to be the first to question something, reveal something, or announce something. But then it continues, saying that Stoll reveals "that [the Internet] is not all it's cracked up to be. Yes, the Internet provides access to plenty of services, but useful information is virtually impossible to find and difficult to access. ... 'Few aspects of daily life require computers... They're irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing, speaking, and gossiping.'"
Within the last week, I have used the Internet (or the Web) to find a recipe for broccoli, get directions to a museum, and arrange a social get-together for dinner. I think that leaves only dancing and hiking (and gossiping, but we know the Internet promotes that).
I cannot even begin to list all the places *inside* the book where Stoll gets it wrong. Well, okay, I can begin. (I will summarize Stoll's claims rather than include lengthy quotes.)
- Stoll says that we are told the data highway will be the cheapest way to send information around the world. But the Internet is too slow, he says, taking up to a minute for a keystroke to read the target system. Faxing a page is faster than email, and sending a CD overnight is faster than sending it over the Internet. Things will not get any better because adding more users and flashy services like audio and video will overwhelm any technical improvements. CD-ROMs are slow, especially if lots of people try to access a single one simultaneously. [And when was the last time anyone accessed a database that way?]
- Far fewer people are connected than people say, and if the predicted growth rates continue, they would imply that everyone in the world would be on-line by 2003. [Regarding this, I am reminded of Mark Twain's extrapolations about the length of the Mississippi.]
- We are told that "entertainment will reach us quickly, without waiting for the mail." Stoll claims this will not happen. [Boy, are Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube going to be surprised when they hear this.]
- E-mail is undependable and anyway, a hand-written letter is cheaper and often faster. [Stoll was as wrong about the slowing down of the Post Office as he was about the speeding up of the Internet.]
This covers just three pages of chapter two.
A few more:
"No electronic shopping can compare with the variety, quality, and experiential richness of a visit to even the most mundane malls." In 1995, this meant a Waldenbooks versus the then-nascent amazon.com--and even then I think amazon.com would have won.
"Network authentication software can never give the same sense of trust as a face-to-face business transaction," so we will never have Internet commerce. The only time I had problems with someone stealing my credit card number was in a face-to-face transaction (at a restaurant). The amount of Internet commerce today clearly shows that people do have that same sense of trust.
He also was wrong about computer games, social networking, educational opportunities, e-books, and just about everything else. I actually gave up pretty early because it was painful to read.
I'm not the only one who finds it painful. Stoll himself says, "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong,"
Oh, and Stoll's prediction that e-commerce would never take off? He now sells glass Klein bottles on the Web.
To order Silicon Valley Snake Oil from amazon.com, click here.
"That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/15/2011]
I am sure that someone, somewhere has described "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone (in ANALOG 09/10) as "Mormon whales in space"--it's just too tempting to pass up. But to some extent it is too simplistic, because the underlying issues are a bit more universal than that description might lead one to believe. What is a god? Who determines, not what the correct belief set is, but what is the protocol to determine what interactions between belief groups is allowed? Basically, this is a story that questions "Star Trek"'s "Prime Directive": who determines whether one culture is allowed to affect (or interfere) with another? And under it all is the question of what evidence of "God's plan" is valid when what we get are piles of conflicting events. Stone does not ask us to take a particular stand on Mormonism (or any other religion); he presents a variety of views and then says, "You decide."
THEY ALSO RAN by Irving Stone:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2003]
Of interest to fans of alternate history (and of regular history, come to that) is THEY ALSO RAN by Irving Stone. Written in 1944, it tells the stories of all the candidates for President who didn't win. Well, almost all--it covers from 1824 through 1948, and does not include anyone who actually won a presidential election either before or after his loss, or any third-party candidates. The candidates are grouped by category (e.g., newspapermen) rather than considered chronologically. (This makes sense since a couple ran and lost in multiple non-consecutive elections.) Each candidate's chapter includes Stone's speculation on how good a President he would have made, and what he might have done (hence the alternate history connection). My edition is from 1966 and has a chapter on Dewey and an updated transitional section on Stevenson, Nixon, and Goldwater, though Nixon would get dropped as someone who did finally win if the book actually were updated. (It's out of print, but widely available used.)
To order They Also Ran from amazon.com, click here.
ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/29/2010]
I was also listening to Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia", in which someone discusses at great length the universe as being deterministic: given knowledge of the (past and) current state of the universe, one could theoretically predict its future. I was reminded of the line from SERIAL about "a woman who knows where she's going because she knows where she's been."
To order Arcadia from amazon.com, click here.
UNDER THE ANDES by Rex Stout:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/02/2004]
I read Rex Stout's lost race novel, UNDER THE ANDES, which is available on-line. It was not really a classic of its genre, but rather pretty much a potboiler of cliches.
To order Under the Andes from amazon.com, click here. It can also be found on-line here.
THOMAS AQUINAS IN 90 MINUTES by Paul Strathern:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/02/2007]
I have been doing a lot of long-distance driving lately, so I have been listening to books on CD. THOMAS AQUINAS IN 90 MINUTES (actually more like seventy on CD) by Paul Strathern, read by Robert Whitfield (ISBN 1-566-63194-7, audiobook ISBN 0-786-18527-9) is better than his GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ IN 90 MINUTES. For one thing, it is more linear. For another, it is done in the style of English humorist (or humourist) Mark Steel, peppered with comments such as, "In an age when the mail took over a fortnight to reach Rome, as it does once again today"; "Christ's crown of thorns, of which there were only three genuine originals at the time"; and (of Louis IX of France) "he was canonized and is now famous throughout Missouri and for his blues."
This book is not for everyone, nor is Aquinas's work. Strathern says at one point about Aquinas's writings, "Other topics which have insured Aquinas's masterpiece the slimmest chance of entering the best-seller lists include the following: what the world will be like after judgement; whether weakness, ignorance, malice, and lust are the result of sin; and whether the movement of the heavenly bodies will cease after judgement." He then says that you might find it difficult to believe these were popular topics. Just as I was thinking, "Well, *I* would love to read arguments about these," Strathern says that Aquinas was doing more than just writing "Christianity's answer to the Talmud." "Ah, ha!" I thought. "That explains why they sound like fun."
I will note that there were a couple of mispronunciations, and at one point the reader says "Augustine" when he obviously means "Aquinas". (I am assuming the error was in the reading and not in the text.)
To order Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes from amazon.com, click here.
CONJUNCTIONS: 39 (THE NEW FABULISTS) edited by Brad Morrow, guest-edited by Peter Straub (Bard College, 2002, 436pp, $15):
fabulist: a creator or writer of fables fable: a fictitious narrative or statement; as a: a legendary story of supernatural happenings b: a narration intended to enforce a useful truth c: falsehood, lie --Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
I suppose I will join the parade of reviewers who say that CONJUNCTIONS: 39 (THE NEW FABULISTS) is a good anthology, but that I'm somewhat confused by the title. In his introduction, Straub talks about "the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror . . . transforming themselves . . . into something all but unrecognizable, hence barely classifiable at all except as literature." Okay, but then where did this "fabulist" label come from, and what does it mean? And what about the "New Wave" part?
To start with the term "fabulists": they would be writers of fables. "Fables", as used in this volume, seems to include science fiction, fantasy, and horror, as well as stories that are none of these. Whatever it means, it does not limit itself here to the fantastic, or tales with morals. And "New Wave" implies some coherent approach, or technique, or attitude, or *something*--but the stories here are merely what a wide variety of authors are currently writing in a wide variety of styles. A more honest title might have been "The Many Faces of Fantastic Literature Today", but I suppose "The New Wave Fabulists" sounds more academic.
Okay, so who cares about the title anyway? What about the contents? Sixteen short stories, two excerpts from novels, and two essays cover a lot of territory. And I'll say up front that, as with most anthologies, I found some stories good, some middling, and some unreadable.
The first story is John Crowley's "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines". It is the best story in the anthology, and is not, so far as I can tell, fantasy at all. One could describe it as a "coming-of-age" story, but with Shakespeare and the theater and Francis Bacon thrown in as well. As in his novel THE TRANSLATOR, Crowley seems to have left the world of fantasy, or even magical realism, for that of the literary tale of literature. In THE TRANSLATOR one of the central characters is a (fictitious) Russian poet, and the novel centers around poetry. Here the story centers around Shakespeare's works--always a good starting point in my opinion. But even if the story isn't magical, the style is.
One that is fantasy is Andy Duncan's "Big Rock Candy Mountain", the story of what is basically hobo heaven. But once you get the idea (turkey dinners grow on trees, no one works, etc.), there's not much else to say. Jonathan Carroll's "Simon's House of Lipstick" is also fantasy, but a bit too predictable.
James Morrow's "The Wisdom of the Skin" is science fiction, set in the future (or a future) and although it has the satirical edge that Morrow is known for, it's also a bit more heavy-handed than some of his other works.
"The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door", by Jonathan Lethem, seems more surreal than most of the other stories--but that may just be because of the suicidal talking sheep.
Patrick O'Leary has perhaps the closest thing to a fable in "The Bearing of Light" a story about sin and forgiveness. It wouldn't succeed if it were much longer, but O'Leary knows when he has given us enough, and knows to stop then.
As an alternate history fan, I read John Kessel's "The Invisible Empire" with particular interest. Inspired by Karen Joy Fowler's "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" (It says so right at the beginning), it is remarkably unsubtle for Kessel, and also attempts an analogy that fails on close examination.
It was followed by a story from Karen Jay Fowler, "The Further Adventures of the Invisible Man", which is another story here that has no fantastical element at all (unless you count the fact that the main character plays video games and has been told that his father had been abducted by aliens (though clearly this is not intended seriously).
The essays at the end are written for academics. (Gary K. Wolfe's is somewhat more accessible than John Clute's.) Feel free to skip them.
I haven't mentioned all the stories. Frankly, some were just not to my liking after a few pages, and I skipped them. (It's not like I'm being paid to review this book in detail.) Others I read but had nothing to say about them.
Oh, and each story has a lead illustration by Gahan Wilson, who also did the cover.
Do I recommend this anthology? As a look at what a range of authors with some connection to the speculative fiction field are doing, it's certainly worth while, but one could argue that if all you want are good fantasy stories, you should buy THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling instead. (After the next issue, it will be Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant.) Contrariwise, it's probably worth noting that the Datlow and Windling may very well be available in your library, while CONJUNCTIONS is unlikely to be.
To order Conjunctions 39 from amazon.com, click here.
ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/05/2006]
ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross (ISBN 0-441-01284-1) is what is often called a fix-up novel: it is composed of nine parts which previously appeared as separate novelettes and novellas. What is more, four of them ("Lobsters", "Halo", "Nightfall", and "Elector") have previously been nominated for Hugos. I cannot fault the Hugo administrator for deciding that since the novel got enough nominations to place in the top five it should be allowed on the ballot, but my personal opinion is that this constitutes "double-dipping" and so my Hugo vote will reflect this rather than my opinion of the novel itself. I found the book itself more readable in book form than in the magazines, because the type face and spacing was more readable, and so I rated the section "Lobsters", for example, higher than I did when I read it for the 2002 balloting. But Stross's style is still very dense and slow-going, and the "novel" seems more a series of stories than a novel. (Then again, that was true of the original Asimov "Foundation" trilogy books.)
To order Accelerando from amazon.com, click here.
"The Concrete Jungle" by Charles Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"The Concrete Jungle" by Charles Stross (in his collection THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES) is a science fiction story with Lovecraftian overtones, as well as a paranoia piece about government surveillance. I found this to be just about the first Stross story I've tried that I found understandable. Am I getting smarter (or more persistent), or he is simplifying his work?
To order The Atrocity Archives from amazon.com, click here.
"Elector" by Charles Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
"Elector" by Charles Stross ("Asimov's" 09/04) could be described as "politics after the Singularity". This is a more typical Charles Stross, i.e, often almost incomprehensible. (It's apparently part of a series, but I have read none of the others.) What can I say about a story that contains sentences such as "Ust why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans--outrageously accurate simulations of lon-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the pre-singularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp--much less beaming them at refugee camps on Saturn--is beyond Sirhan's ken: but he wishes they'd stop." ("Vile Offspring" and "exaquops" are undefined, and yes, he really does use a colon there.) It felt like it was better than I was understanding (if you can follow that), so I've rated it accordingly.
To order Accelerando (of which this is part) from amazon.com, click here.
THE FAMILY TRADE by Charlie Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/11/2005]
Charlie Stross's THE FAMILY TRADE (ISBN 0-765-30929-7) is labeled "Book One of The Merchant Princes". A more accurate description would be that it is the first half of a book, and ends very much in media res. Miriam Beckstein discovers she is actually a cross-over from another world (orphaned as a baby), and not only from that world, but a princess there. The political structure of that world is a clan structure that is basically the same as the organized crime families here. And they are involved in similar illegal activities. I didn't find the alternate history aspect of the other world very well fleshed out, it's not clear when the cross-world traffic began, and the fact that it ends with everything up in the air is the final nail in its coffin.
As an additional complaint, publishers used to tell us that the higher price of books was because the books were longer. Then the bookstore chains said they wouldn't stock mid-range authors priced above $25. So most authors split their novels into two or three pieces and padded the pieces out, and the publishers priced them at a few dollars below that. But when Stross split his novel, he didn't add padding. This is good, but the price for this half-novel is $24.95--the maximum it could be. So Tor is asking people to pay $50 for a novel. No thanks. (I borrowed this from the library.)
To order The Family Trade from amazon.com, click here.
HALTING STATE by Charles Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/27/2008]
I had started HALTING STATE by Charles Stross (ISBN-13 978-0-441-01607-5, ISBN-10 0-441-01607-3) earlier this year and gave it up as too difficult (the introduction of too many characters in rapid succession, too much jargon, etc.). But I read a review that said that after a somewhat confusing beginning, the book settled into a more understandable form. So I tried again, and read about a third before I concluded than it wasn't true for me. Stross has written a book with three point- of-view characters, and written it in the second person. Yes, that's right--in every chapter, the point-of-view character is "you", but you are a different person each time. One result is that you lose many of the reminders of who the point-of-view character is that you would have in a normal third-person narrative. (Even a first-person version might be easier.) And on top of that, the characters write in a combination of Scottish dialect, police jargon, and computer jargon. It is even worse than BRASYL in terms of the dialects, because there is no glossary at the back. (I checked this time.) It may be good for Scottish computer types, but not for me.
To order Halting State from amazon.com, click here.
"The Merchant Princes" by Charles Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/25/2007]
"The Merchant Princes" by Charles Stross is (so far) a trilogy consisting of THE FAMILY TRADE (ISBN-10 0-765-34821-7, ISBN-13 978-0-765-34821-0), THE HIDDEN FAMILY (ISBN-10 0-765-35205-2, ISBN-13 978-0-765-35205-7), and THE CLAN CORPORATE (ISBN-10 0-765-30930-0, ISBN-13 978-0-765-30930-3). Each one comes in at between 50,000 and 60,000 words, making them fairly short "novels" by today's standards, and (no surprise here) they are not even stand-alone novels, but three installments of a continuing story. It is reasonably intriguing and entertaining, but given that they are priced at $24.95 each in hardcover, my recommendation has to be to get them from the library. (Even at $7.99 for a paperback, that's a lot for a single novel, albeit issued in three physical pieces.)
To order The Family Tree from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Hidden Family from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Clan Corporate from amazon.com, click here.
"Palimpsest" by Charlees Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/25/2010]
"Palimpsest" by Charles Stross (WIRELESS) seems to be heavily inspired by Isaac Asimov's THE END OF ETERNITY crossed with Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" stories, with a dash from John Kessel's CORRUPTING DR. NICE. It was fine up to a point, but I would have preferred something maybe at the novelette length. (In his afterword, Stross explains why he did not make it a short novel, and also implies he would have liked to add another hundred thousand words, which would have produced something longer than a short novel.)
SINGULARITY SKY by Charles Stross:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/07/2004]
Charles Stross's SINGULARITY SKY, on the other hand, was so hard to read, or uninvolving, or something, that I gave up after fifty pages of so. Somehow this year's Hugo nominees aren't doing it for me.
To order Singularity Sky from amazon.com, click here.
THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND by Jonathan Stroud:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/22/2005]
Jonathan Stroud's THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND (ISBN 0-786-81859-X) is the first of the young-adult "Bartimaeus Trilogy". In case, you're wondering, I'm reading this for the golem content (the second book, in fact, is called THE GOLEM'S EYE). Magic is real, and one of our main characters is a young magician in training. Sound familiar? Well, in Stroud's world, everyone knows magic is real. Governments employ magicians in large numbers. Prague, by virtue of its pre-eminence in magic, is a major world capital. And one of the first-person narrators of this book is Bartimaeus, a djinni. who delivers his asides as footnotes. (Example: As Bartimaeus is in the form of a mole, tunneling, he says, "No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble," and then footnotes this with, "Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you humans are so *dense*.") I like Bartimaeus as a character (he reminds me of C. S. Lewis's Screwtape), though I suspect some people with be less than thrilled with a demon as the sympathetic protagonist of a young- adult novel. This trilogy seems more in the tradition of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" than in that of J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter"--there is a darker side to magic (and life) that is more fully explored here.
To order The Amulet of Samarkand from amazon.com, click here.
"...And My Fear Is Great" by Theodore Sturgeon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/02/2004]
Second choice for me for Retro Hugo for Novella for me was "...And My Fear Is Great" by Theodore Sturgeon. The topic--individuals with special powers that become stronger when they join together--shows up in many of Sturgeon's works. For some reason it worked better for me here than elsewhere.
MORE THAN HUMAN by Theodore Sturgeon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/18/2004]
I know Theodore Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN (ISBN 0-375-70371-3) is a classic. I know people love it. I am not one of them. I have tried many times to read this book, and while I probably did finish it at least one of those times, this time I decided life was too short and my reading list too long.
To order More Than Human from amazon.com, click here.
SELECTED STORIES by Theodore Sturgeon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/06/2012]
Our science fiction discussion group met earlier than usual in January, due to scheduling conflicts for several of the members. The book selected was Theodore Sturgeon's SELECTED STORIES (ISBN 978-0-375-70375-1). To keep the page count below 300 (our unofficial cut-off), we skipped (or postponed) the three novellas ("The Golden Helix", "Killdozer!", and "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff"), leaving us ten short stories and novelettes. However, not having the book chosen, I read all the stories in other collections and probably in a different order than in SELECTED STORIES, so I will comment on them in publication order.
The earliest stories here, "It" (1940) and "Bianca's Hands" (1947), are more horror stories a la Robert Bloch than science fiction. Sturgeon is not thought of as a horror story writer, but this may just be a mistake in perception. (Admittedly, his later stories did tend more toward science fiction.) Of "Bianca's Hands", James Gunn says, "It was written in 1939 and rejected many times (often violently) before it won a $1,000 British magazine contest in 1947."
"Thunder and Roses" (1947) seems very cliched now, but when you recall it was published in 1947, it is clear that it was not a cliche when Sturgeon wrote it, and was certainly one of the first of its kind. Of it, David Drake writes, "If you were a kid who read SF [in the Fifties], the feeling of [nuclear] dread was even more acute. It wasn't formless for us, you see: there were hundreds of stories to describe nuclear war and its aftermath of lingering death, deformity, and savagery in vivid detail. "Thunder and Roses," which I read in THE ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION ANTHOLOGY when I was thirteen, is one of the earlier stories of the type."
"The Sex Opposite" (1952) is another one of those stories that may have been cutting-edge when it was written, but no longer has that virtue and just seems flat. It is possible to write a story that becomes in some sense outdated as events pass it by, but there has to be more to the story than the gimmick, the message, or whatever it is that made it once so notable. It is like re-reading DANGEROUS VISIONS: it may be that the stories were "dangerous" once upon a time, but now they are often just bland. (Or like the scene in TIME AFTER TIME where Wells is trying to seduce Amy by saying in meaningful tones that he wrote about "free love," and she responds in surprise, "Free love? I haven't heard that term since junior high.")
"A Way of Thinking" (1953) seems to be trying to show someone "thinking outside of the box," but his solution to the problem in the story did not seem particularly original. Indeed, if you do not accept the magical premise, the solution is the only solution possible.
"Mr. Costello, Hero" (1953) was made into an "X Minus 1" episode which aired July 3, 1956. Both its original publication and this adaptation were during the McCarthy Era, so the theme of being suspicious of everyone and especially those who wanted to be alone (for example, readers, writers, and other intellectuals) was an obvious work to shape a science fiction story around.
Of course, after I wrote this, I read John Grant's statement that, "At best one could describe the tale as an extremely inept satire of Soviet-style communism--one of those pseudo-satires that is ineffective through misrepresenting its target. At its worst it's just a rather flabby tale." Even after he has suggested this, I find it hard to see in the story. And Paul Williams takes my side on the topic, and completely disagrees with Grant on the quality: "'Mr. Costello, Hero' is one of the finer pieces of writing to come out of the whole McCarthy experience."
Two side notes on this story: Everyone on the "X Minus 1" episode pronounced "Costello" as "COS-teh-lo" rather than (cos-TEH-lo). I could almost understand this were it not that Abbott and Costello had been a popular comedy team for years. (Mark thinks maybe they wanted to make sure people *didn't* think of Abbott and Costello.) The other note is that the planet all this takes place on is Borinquen; Borinquen is another name for Puerto Rico. Normally, if you find a planet in a story named after a country, you assume there is some reason or significance to it, but apparently there is none here.
My observation of "The Skills of Xanadu" (1956) is that it looks as if Sturgeon were trying to write a story based on Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")--except that the Law was not proposed until 1973. John Grant feels it "takes a long time telling something very simple; Eric Frank Russell would have done the same in half the wordage and twice as effectively--and made you laugh at the same time." It is, of course, not clear that making the reader laugh should necessarily be a prime consideration when writing a story.
"Bright Segment" (1955) is yet another horror story (at least according to someone; Mark sys it is more Collieresque). I skipped this one, based on the samples I read.
"The Man Who Lost the Sea" (1959) was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. I am not sure why. I suppose the style is very literary, but the ending hardly justifies the rest of the story.
"Slow Sculpture" (1970) is the most recent of the stories and won a Hugo for Best Novelette. Again, the message seems a bit obvious. Maybe I am just not attuned to Sturgeon's style.
To order Selected Stories from amazon.com, click here.
THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING by James Lewis Sturm:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/03/2004]
I do not normally read graphic novels, but James Lewis Sturm's THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING (ISBN 1-896-59771-8) sounded as though it might have some Jewish fantasy connection. It doesn't. It is about a Jewish barn-storming baseball team in the 1920s, and the "golem" of the title is the name given to one of the players who wears a golem costume as a publicity gimmick. It probably is of interest to fans of baseball history or Jewish history, since it covers the difficulties faced by the Jewish players (and by other minorities as well). But don't read it expecting a real golem.
To order The Golem's Mighty Swing from amazon.com, click here.
The JEW STORE by Stella Suberman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/04/2003]
Stella Suberman's THE JEW STORE is a memoir of the author's family's life in a small town in Tennessee, where they moved so her father could open a dry goods store. (The title comes from the name given to the dry goods stores opened in these small towns by Jews. Apparently almost every small town large enough in the South of the 1920s had one of these stores.) While it is true that Hickam's memoirs have their hard times, they at least seem to have a lot of friendship and happy events, while Suberman's story is more downbeat. Her mother was never happy in Tennessee, the neighbors never really accepted them (and they never really accepted the neighbors), the Ku Klux Klan was always a threat, and the Depression almost wiped everyone out. I was reminded of RACHEL CALOF'S STORY, the memoir of a Jewish bride brought to a sod house in North Dakota in the 1870s. That too was filled with a lot of hard work, loneliness, and misery. In THE JEW STORE, the misery is almost all Suberman's mother's, but it serves to drag down the entire story. For Jews (or Southerners, I suppose) this book has some interest, but I doubt others would get much from it.
To order The Jew Store from amazon.com, click here.
THE GREAT BOOK OF MIND TEASERS & MIND PUZZLES by George J. Summers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/29/2011]
You would think that brain teasers and logic puzzles are things that do not become outdated, but one of the puzzles in THE GREAT BOOK OF MIND TEASERS & MIND PUZZLES by George J. Summers (ISBN 0-8069-6320-4) is a counter-example. On page 18 of this book (published in 1985) is the following puzzle:
Lee, Dale, and Terry are related to each other. Among the three are Lee's legal spouse, Dale's sibling, and Terry's sister-in-law. Lee's legal spouse and Dale's sibling are of the same sex. Who do you know is a married man?
They claim this has a unique solution, with Dale as Lee's spouse and a married man. They rule out Terry as Lee's spouse, because then Terry and Lee would be two men married to each other.
Like I said, you would think that brain teasers and logic puzzles are things that do not become outdated, but you would be wrong. (And before you quibble about various states, the book was published in New York, which does recognize, though not perform, same-sex marriages.)
To order The Great Book of Mind Teasers & Mind Puzzles from amazon.com, click here.
THE WISDOM OF CROWDS: WHY THE MANY ARE SMARTER THAN THE FEW AND HOW COLLECTIVE WISDOM SHAPES BUSINESS, ECONOMIES, SOCIETIES, AND NATIONS by James Surowiecki:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/27/2009]
THE WISDOM OF CROWDS: WHY THE MANY ARE SMARTER THAN THE FEW AND HOW COLLECTIVE WISDOM SHAPES BUSINESS, ECONOMIES, SOCIETIES, AND NATIONS by James Surowiecki (ISBN-13 978-0-385-50386-0, ISBN-10 0-385-50386-5) makes the claim that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." The important phrase here is "under the right circumstances," and the problem is determining those circumstances.
For example, he gives the example of the Challenger: while minutes of the explosion, the stock value of the four companies involved-- Morton Thiokol, Rockwell International, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed--started to drop. Yet by the end of the day, Rockwell International, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed had basically recovered, while Morton Thiokol was still falling. Surowiecki gives this as an example of how the collective wisdom "knew" Morton Thiokol was at fault (albeit with some acknowledgement that it might have been just luck or some other fluke). My first reaction on reading this list of companies, though, was that before the Challenger explosion I had heard of three of them, which probably meant they were big enough to survive even if they were at fault, while Morton Thiokol was not. (Surowiecki does allow that this might have been the reason for the stock market reaction.)
So is this an example of collective wisdom, or just a fluke? Who knows? When it works, it's too easy to attribute it to collective wisdom, while when it fails, it is for unknown reasons.
When talking about stock prices, Suriowiecki says, "If Pfizer's stock price today makes it worth $280 billion, then for the market to be right, Pfizer will have to generate $280 billion in free cash over the next two decades." (page 234) Is this some rule-of-thumb everyone knows but me, or is Surowiecki assuming too much on the part of his readership?
He also says, "In starting to think about bubbles and crashes, one thing comes to mind right away: you don't see bubbles in the real economy, which is to say the economy where you buy and sell television sets and apples and haircuts. In other words, the price of televisions don't suddenly double overnight, only to crash a few months later." (page 245) Does he include gasoline in this real economy?
And Surowiecki claims that the reason movie theaters charge the same amount for popular movies as well as for duds is tradition. He pooh-poohs the idea that variation in ticket prices might be too complicated to coordinate with distributors, observing that theaters already discount matinees. Yes, but they know about that when the contract is drawn up. What they don't know is how successful a film will be, so they would have to have the freedom to change ticket prices unilaterally. What he doesn't even address is the problem in differential pricing for simultaneous movies at multiplexes. As it is, teenagers buy tickets for PG-13 movies and then sneak into R-rated ones; differential pricing will mean people will be buying cheap tickets for the duds (turning them into hits in the process!) while actually sneaking in to see the hits (which, selling fewer tickets, will become duds!).
What all this has to do with the wisdom of crowds is pretty tenuous, of course. I suppose that Surowiecki is trying to demonstrate that when attempting to make decisions, people and groups are swayed by tradition and ignore their collective wisdom, but he spends an entire chapter on it.
Collective wisdom, by the way, would say that the title is *way* too long, and that the book should have an index.
(Those unfamiliar with it will not recognize that EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS, the classic book by Charles MacKay, is the inspiration for the title.
To order The Wisdom of Crowds from amazon.com, click here.
GUILTY PLEASURES OF THE HORROR FILM edited by Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/27/2006]
GUILTY PLEASURES OF THE HORROR FILM edited by Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla (ISBN 1-887664-03-1) is a collection of twelve essays on "guilty pleasures" such as UNKNOWN ISLAND, SH! THE OCTOPUS, and THE TINGLER. The least interesting are the essays that are almost entirely devoted to recounting the plot in detail; the more interesting are those which take a more subjective look. However, sometimes people's enthusiasm for a film can get the better of them, such as Robert A. Crick's defense of the Dino Di Laurentiis version of KING KONG (1976). Crick says it "seems remarkable" that we have had dozens of Frankenstein and Dracula movies, but no chain of Kong films. (He does mention SON OF KONG, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, and KING KONG LIVES.) The fact that Frankenstein and Dracula have been in public domain for decades, and Kong has not just might have something to do with that. (Actually, the 1981 "Donkey Kong" court case seems to say that Kong as a character is now in public domain, but before that he was at least thought not to be in public domain.)
But Crick also says, "Almost as if genius were something which died in Hollywood at the moment of Kong's death on the streets of New York, it has since been universally decreed that no remake of KONG, however lovingly executed, can ever be more than a joke." First of all, I doubt you would find very many people who would claim that the Di Laurentiis KING KONG was "lovingly executed." But even more importantly, Peter Jackson has clearly proved Crick's premise wrong. No, it is because the Di Laurentiis KING KONG was a bad "King Kong" movie, with neither the technical artistry nor the charm of the original, but only campy humor.
To order Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film from amazon.com, click here.
BONES OF THE EARTH by Michael Swanwick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/23/2003]
Michael Swanwick's BONES OF THE EARTH was an enjoyable enough read, but not really what I would call Hugo material. In fact, this year has been quite disappointing in its selection of Hugo nominees, with at least three striking me as not worthy of being labeled "one of the five best novels of the year."
To order Bones of the Earth from amazon.com, click here.
"From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" by Michael Swanwick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/19/2009]
"From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Feb 2008) was completely unintelligible to me.
THE PERIODIC TABLE by Michael Swanwick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/21/2006]
I cannot comment on the actual book of THE PERIODIC TABLE by Michael Swanwick (ISBN 1-9046-1900-2), because I read it as individual pieces on the scifiction site (A HREF=http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html> http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html). Actually, I downloaded it a bit at a time to my palmtop, because each of the pieces is just the right length to read while waiting in a line or during other short periods. It consists of 118 pieces each "inspired" by an element on the periodic table. Some are science fiction, some are fantasy, some are alternate history. Some are humorous, some are serious. Some are based on the name of the element, some are based on the characteristics of the element itself, and some are fairly generic (e.g., someone is mining for the element, but it could just as easily be another element). For example, "Iridium" is about the iridium layer at the end of the Cretaceous, while "Radium" is a reminiscence of Pierre Curie, and "Radon" is about monsters in the basement. While a few of them fall flat, on the whole Swanwick does an excellent job. (And I am sure he is happy it is over!)
(After writing this, I noticed that it was mentioned in SciTech Daily, http://scitechdaily.com/, so it may actually get an actual printing in the United States, rather than just the current British small-press edition.)
To order The Periodic Table from amazon.com, click here.
"A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/27/2008]
"A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick (ASIMOV'S Apr/May) is basically "CSI: Supernatural", and the solution turns on something supernatural that the reader cannot possibly be expected to know, so while the "CSI" element is kind of cute, the ending doesn't work for me. On the other hand, the setting is at least interesting, and frankly, its competition is not very strong.
WHEN ANGELS WEPT by Eric G. Swedin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/22/2011]
WHEN ANGELS WEPT: A WHAT-IF HISTORY OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS by Eric G. Swedin (ISBN 978-1-59797-517-9) is an alternate history somewhat in the style of Robert Sobel's FOR WANT OF A NAIL, an alternate history presented as a non-fiction book written in the alternate universe (in this case, one in which the Cuban missile crisis turned out differently). But where Sobel carried the technique through to footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, etc., Swedin "breaks character" with his introduction, prologue, "further sources" at the end of each chapter, and so on. Also, the style seems a bit wrong for non-fiction, though I have a hard time pinning down why. I suppose it seems too casual and simplistic for the topic.
One specific nit I have to pick is over Swedin's contention that Torrejon Air Force Base near Madrid would not be targeted. True, Spain was not in NATO at the time, but nevertheless this was a major United States military installation in Europe. I am particularly aware of this because we were an Air Force family and at the time of the Cuban missile crisis my father was stationed at Torrejon. The rest of the family was stateside, living a few hundred feet from Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois. (My school was only about fifty feet from the base perimeter fence. We all knew that for us, "duck and cover" was pretty useless.)
Swedin also says that the Middle East was not touched by "the Fire", but he does not indicate how the politics of the region played out when the two super-powers were no longer around to provide support or weapons (or curbs) to the two sides.
To order When Angels Wept: A What-If History of the Cuban Missile Crisis from amazon.com, click here.
"The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window" by Rachel Swirsky:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/08/2011]
"The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window", Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer 2010) is "fantasy with an agenda." The narrator is from a society in which women rule, and men are "worms", and more along that vein, and a lot of the story reinforces the validity of all this. It is true that eventually there is some question about whether this is good, but my feeling is that Swirsky ultimately says that it is, or rather that the alternative is bad. Combine that for my general disinterest in high fantasy, and you have a story that does very little for me.