Book Blogger Hop October 5th - October 11th: Exponential Thermostellar Bomb Number 20 Threatened to Detonate in the Dark Star's Bomb Bay

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The hop is currently traveling about the blogosphere and is being hosted by Soon Remembered Tales. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: Banned Books Week ends on the 6^th. How do you feel about books being challenged to be banned from libraries or schools? Have you read any banned books?

I can be best described as something of a First Amendment absolutist. On that ground alone, I oppose all forms of book banning, no matter the content of the book in question. Once you have government deciding some books are too sexual, or too virulent, or too something else to be made available, then you are well on your way to allowing government to decide that some books are too dangerous, too inflammatory, or simply too disfavored by those making the decision to ban them.

But as a science fiction and fantasy fan, there is a heightened awareness of the move to ban books, as so many books in the genre have been targeted by would-be book banners. From people seeking to ban the Harry Potter books due to alleged Satanic messages, to people wanting to remove Brave New World from the shelves, to people (ironically) wanting to burn copies of Fahrenheit 451, genre fiction is seemingly continually under siege by the forces of ignorance. Because that is what book banners are: The forces of ignorance. They want to deprive you of the right to find information and ideas on your own, and want to make those choices for you. They want you to be ignorant and in the dark. And that is why they must be fought every time they show up, no matter the merits of the book they want to ban.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: Alice Cooper's First Top Ten Hit Was "I'm Eighteen"

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Numbers on a Six-Sided Die Add Up to Twenty-One

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Follow Friday - Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture Were Both Released in 1979

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Book Liaison and Angela's Anxious Life.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What do you hope to accomplish with your blog? Is it to one day become an author yourself, just for fun, maybe get some online attention, or maybe something very different?

The main purpose of this blog is to catalog and chronicle the history of science fiction and fantasy as I see it, mostly through the lens of the books and stories that have been honored, but also through looking at film and television. I have always loved science fiction and its cousin fantasy, but always in a haphazard way, in fitful starts and stops as I grab what is in front of me, and usually fall back on comfortable old favorites. But writing this blog forces me to approach the genres systematically, and allows me to engage in some of my favorite pastimes: analyzing stories, placing them in context, researching biographical information, researching historical events, and so on. A friend told me that writing this blog is the perfect project for me, because it will never be finished - I am an unrepentant tinkerer - and it manages to satisfy both my inner OCD (or more properly, CDO, with the letters in correct alphabetical order) and ADD (squirrel!) at the same time.

And I think that also explains why I don't say that I'm writing this blog because I aspire to be a writer, even though I do. Because I never seem to be finished with projects that I start. I have dozens of fantasy role-playing campaign worlds in various stages of completion. I have a couple of unfinished stories half written, or a quarter written. I have piles of notes of things that I will "get back to later". I rarely do, but I keep them around anyway. But a blog is different. This site is always in flux, and I can always tinker with it. In fact, if I stopped working on it, people wouldn't have a reason to come back for very long, because uncared for blogs become dusty ignored corners of the attic of the internet.

Fortunately, I will never run out of source material for this blog. Even if I were able to double or triple my reading and reviewing speed, I would still have more books and other media on hand to go through and comment on that I could reasonably hope to accomplish in my lifetime. So I suppose the culmination of this long-winded answer is that the purpose of this blog is to give me something to work on, and to end up with a living, endlessly growing catalog of the best of genre fiction (and anything else that I happen to decide to throw in as well).

Go to previous Follow Friday: A Typical Tarot Deck Has Seventy-Eight Cards

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Phileas Fogg Went Around the World in Eighty Days

Follow Friday     Home

Biased Opinion - Typing With a Splint On Is Slow, Plus Thoughts About Public Television

First Things First My output here is probably going to be a little slower than normal for the next few days. Why? Well, because yesterday while sparring in Tae Kwon Do I dislocated my finger and I have to wear a splint to keep it immobilized for the next couple days. While this doesn't make it impossible to type, it does slow me down considerably. So the posts I am writing are going to take me considerably longer to write than I originally planned.

And Now About Public Television To give this post some content, I thought I would write a little bit about Public Television funding, and wonder about the place that Public Television holds in American life. In the debate last night Romney announced that among the programs he would cut in an effort to balance the federal budget he would cut funding for Public Broadcasting. As he said "I like PBS, I love Big Bird, and I like you [referring to moderator Jim Lehrer], but I'm not going to spend money on things to borrow money from China".

Right up front I'm going to say that this is a stupid statement for Romney to make. The subsidy for PBS amounts to 0.012% of the Federal budget. As in one-twelfth of one percent of the budget. That's a little more than a thousandth of Federal spending. This is a tiny drop in the bucket. Federal deficits usually run to about 30%-40% of Federal spending. Axing PBS will close the budget gap by just over a quarter of a percent. The fact that Romney identified PBS as one of the programs that he would target to cut demonstrates that he is completely non-serious about balancing the budget and thinks he can pull to wool over the electorate's eyes on this issue. Either that or Romney is so completely clueless about the Federal budget that he thinks that cutting PBS would make a difference, in which case he is entirely unqualified for the job of President. He is either too stupid to understand the budget, or he thinks you are too stupid to understand it. In short, no matter what angle you approach this statement of Romney's from, it marks him as a man unsuited to the job he is running for.

But the question that struck me at this juncture is this: What is public television for? In the past, public television filled a clear need. Public television provided quality children's programs. Public television was where you could see cooking shows and home improvement shows. Public television aired educational and science programs like Cosmos. It was where Americans were able to find British sitcoms. Public television was where you could find episodes of Doctor Who and Red Dwarf. And you really couldn't find any of those things anywhere else on the channel dial.

But that's not the case any more. While Sesame Street appears exclusively on public television, you can find good, educational children's programs on several different stations now. Food Network seems to have essentially killed off the PBS cooking shows, and the DIY Network and similar channels have killed off most of the home improvement shows. Science programs can be found (among other places) on the Science channel. BBC America airs British television. So what I am left to wonder is what niche does PBS fill any more? I loved PBS once. When I sat down to watch television, I would almost always check PBS to see what they were showing, and often I would stop my channel switching right there. But I almost never bother with PBS any more. Not because I am intentionally avoiding it, but because there are other, and in many cases, better options to find programming that I used to turn to PBS to find.

Biased Opinions    Random Thoughts     Home

Review - The Hugo Winners, Volume 1 edited by Isaac Asimov

Stories included:
The Darfsteller by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Allamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell
Exploration Team by Murray Leinster
The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson
The Big Front Yard by Clifford D. Simak
The Hell-bound Train by Robert Bloch
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Longest Voyage by Poul Anderson

Full review: A few years after it became apparent that the Hugo Awards were destined to be an ongoing affair, someone at Doubleday decided that it would be a good idea to print all the winning works of short fiction as a collection and have Isaac Asimov provide pithy commentary about each winning author. It turned out that it was a good idea, and the resulting collection is an example of some of the very best science fiction of the era.

The first story in the volume is the 1955 Hugo winning novelette The Darfsteller by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a tale of a man whose profession has been overtaken by technology. In this case, the profession is acting, and the profession has been replaced by mechanical performances tuned by an automated system to meet the mood of the audience. This is a brilliant story that has so many intersecting ideas layered through it. Ryan Thornier is a bitter-ender, an actor still hanging around the theater working as a janitor just to stay near the venue where his ilk used to ply their craft. He engineers a situation in which he is called upon to go on stage one last time, but everything goes awry, as it turns out that try as he might, he simply cannot fit into the new mechanized world that has grown up around him. Just like the character he plays in the play within the story, Thornier cannot adapt to fit within the confines of a world built not to a human measure, but with an eye towards other concerns. Running in conjunction with this theme is the idea that once someone becomes specialized, they will be soon replaced by someone who is even more specialized. And while the story says that the replacement will be human, the dislocation experienced by Thornier suggests that specialists will be replaced by machines. And if actors, members of a profession that involves being able to display the full range of human emotion and experience, can be replaced by a machine, the question that arises is who cannot be replaced by the fruits of the industrial revolution? And this dovetails with the third theme that runs through the story concerning the meaning and purpose of art. In the story the theater has been reduced to providing exactly what the audience wants, with the autodrama machines fine tuning the performance to tailor them to the audience's reactions. But if all art does is produce entertainment, is it still art? If art does not have the ability to challenge, disturb, or unsettle the viewer, is it still valuable? As is typical of a piece of short fiction, The Darfsteller doesn't answer these questions, but it raises them, and unlike the autodramas that it posits, it forces the reader to contemplate some rather troubling possibilities.

While The Darfsteller is a piece of deeply insightful fiction, the other 1955 Hugo winner, Allamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell, is decidedly not. This is not to say that Allamagoosa is a bad story, but it is a much lighter work, poking humorous fun at the rigidity of bureaucracies. The space navy ship Bustler is due to be visited by the inspector general, and in the frenzy of preparation that follows the crew simply cannot find, or even identify, one item on their manifest, the mysterious "offog". Hastily rigging up a pretend item manages to fool the inspector, but humorously leads to further troubles for the Bustler's crew. The story is fun and funny, but it seems a little too much like a bit of fluff to take seriously as a winning story.

In 1956, the Hugo for Best Novelette went to Exploration Team by Murray Leinster, at the time the "old man" of science fiction, having been publishing in the genre since World War I. The story takes place on the alien planet Loren Two where Huyghens is working as an advance scout for an illegal colonization operation. Planetary survey official Roane finds himself marooned on the alien planet and rescued by Huyghens and his team of genetically engineered bears. The meat of the story is the interaction between these two men, and their competing ideas about the place mechanization should hold in human exploration and development, with Huyghens holding that the standard method which relies upon ample robotic assistance is simply too inflexible to adapt to the challenges posed by an unknown world. And to prove him right, the "sphexes" of Loren Two has overwhelmed the nascent legal colony, while his team of bears has proven resilient enough to survive. Although the story does have the distressing 1950s attitude towards alien life of "kill it as quickly as possible so humans can build undisturbed", the story itself is raised above the typical fare of the day by the interplay between Huyghens and Roane. The other 1956 winner was The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, a brief tale about the crisis of faith experienced by a Jesuit astrophysicist on an exploratory expedition into a distant nebula. There isn't much story here, with the entire piece being told more or less in the form of a journal entry by the disillusioned priest who has been confronted by the devastating price paid to put a star in Earth's sky to foretell the birth of Jesus.

In 1958, the winner for short fiction was Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson, a mixture of science fiction and horror that sits just on the edge of possibility. This sort of cross-genre mixing was typical for Davidson, and he mixes them well here with a story in which safety pins, coat hangars, and bicycles take on a sinister air. The story manages to fit within the science fiction genre while being plausible enough that it could be happening right around the corner. It probably isn't, but after reading it you might want to check your drawers and closets anyway.

There are very few science fiction stories that make interstellar commerce plausible. Quite simply the energy requirements for travelling between the stars are so extreme that any civilization capable of doing so would be able to produce enough energy to make any goods they wanted to. But in The Big Front Yard Clifford D. Simak was able to come up with an idea that makes commerce plausible, mostly by discarding the idea of moving physical objects from place to place, and instead having the traders deal in ideas. Simak adds some spice to the mixture by having the aliens show up in the front yard of a Yankee trader who takes over the task of sharp nosed dealing for Earth. The story moves through a couple stages, from a mundane start, to a confusing middle as strange events swirl about the characters, to an ending in which everything comes together and the reader realizes that the aliens have probably more than met their match in negotiating a swap. This is also the only serious science fiction story I know of in which a pickup truck is used as a means of interstellar travel. This is an excellent story, and while it may not be the best story in this volume, it is my favorite.

Of the stories in the volume, The Hell-Bound Train by Robert Bloch is probably the second most famous. The story is a fairly simple morality tale in which a young man named Martin makes a deal with the conductor of the Hell bound train, agreeing to get on the train when his time comes in exchange for one gift. The young man chooses the ability to stop time for himself one time, thinking that he will choose the one moment in which he is fully happy to do so, and thus avert the necessity of ever having to pay off his end of the deal. The rest of the story details the life that the young man leads, ever searching for that elusive perfect moment of bliss until at the very end he finds himself out of time never having used his boon. In trying to trick the devil, he has outsmarted himself, as the devil knew he would. But the story has one more twist, as Martin realizes that while he was searching for happiness all his life, it had been right in front of him from the beginning.

The most famous story in the volume is Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, a story that was later expanded to novel length and has been adapted for the screen more than once. Keyes' story is told by means of the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a mentally handicapped man who is participating in an experiment designed to increase human intelligence. Gordon's entries are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors at the outset, becoming more and more polished as the treatment he received takes hold. Gordon is a completely likable character, good-natured and eager despite his limitations, and that makes the unfolding tragedy in the story poignant as it turns out that the increased intelligence is not permanent. The latter half of the story shows Charlie's slide back to his starting point, and the drama is further increased when Algernon, the experimental mouse that underwent the same procedure Charlie did, dies. In the end, Charlie's last journal entry is not a plaintive whine about his own fate, but rather a request that flowers be placed on Algernon's grave, which is also an unspoken request that he be remembered as well. When Keyes originally submitted the story for publication, the editors who looked at it requested that he change the ending to a happier one in which Charlie did not go back to his original condition, and in which Charlie did not die. Keyes wisely refused these changes, which would have left a decent story, but not the memorable and though-provoking masterpiece that we have instead.

The final story in the volume is The Longest Voyage by Poul Anderson, which starts out following the crew of the Golden Leaper under Captain Rovic as they travel across the oceans looking for new lands. While the reader may think that the story of the crew of a sailing ship might be set in our own 16th century, it quickly becomes apparent that the sailors are traveling seas lit by a different sun. The Leaper comes across new lands and a culture that seems remarkably similar to the Polynesian cultures of Earth's South Pacific. But the story takes a different turn when it is discovered that the natives are guarding a secret: a man from another world had landed decades before and taken up residence among them. It turns out that the inhabitants of this particular are the descendants of explorers from space who had become stranded on this world, and not having sufficient ability to keep an industrial culture going, had slipped back to a pre-industrial way of life. The outsider promises that if Rovic's crew will supply him with a few things he needs, he will reunify the planet with interstellar culture and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity. Rovic is faced with an interesting choice, and ends up choosing one that will be unsurprising to those familiar with Anderson's work. The story, like so many of Anderson's stories, is about freedom, self-determination, and human ingenuity.

As one would expect of a collection of award winning stories, the selections in this volume are all quite good. Although some are lighter than others, and less memorable, every one of these stories is enjoyable to read. Some provide the additional bonus of being thought-provoking, insightful, or disturbing. Not only that, Asimov's brief comments concerning each author, and in some cases the circumstances of their win, are fun to read as well. Overall, this is a great anthology, with nine good or great science fiction stories.

What are the Hugo Awards?

This volume contains the Best Novelette winners for the Hugo Award for the years 1955, 1956, and 1959, and the Best Short Story winners for the Hugo Award for the years 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1960, and 1961.

1954 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: Earthman, Come Home by James Blish (awarded in 2004)

1958 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

1958 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

1967 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Last Castle by Jack Vance

1954 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (awarded in 2004, reviewed in The Nine Billion Names of God)

1962 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette
List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

1955 Hugo Award Nominees
1956 Hugo Award Nominees
1958 Hugo Award Nominees
1959 Hugo Award Nominees
1960 Hugo Award Nominees
1961 Hugo Award Nominees

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Musical Monday - This Fantasy World (Dungeons & Dragons) by The Doubleclicks

The Doubleclicks are still on their East coast Ladies of Ragnarok tour with Molly Lewis and Dammit Liz. Due to prior commitments I was unable to go see them when they came to the Washington D.C. area, so I am consoling myself by featuring their songs every Musical Monday until their tour is done. If they come near you, you should go see them. Here is a performance of This Fantasy World (Dungeons & Dragons) from Nerds and Music in 2011. The two announcers who come on after them are Paul & Storm.

This song is their first "hit", and is a love story between a girl, a boy, and a fantasy role-playing game. The kind of role-playing game you play with polyhedral dice, character sheets, and multiple rulebooks each containing several hundred pages of rules. I love playing D&D, and well, pretty much any other role-playing game. Or war game. Or pretty much anything like that. I don't think I ever had a woman fall in love with me at the gaming table though. Heck, I don't think there were any girls playing in any games I participated in until I was well into adulthood.

And I think this song represents a shift in the science fiction and fantasy field that is excellent. When I was younger, genre fiction and gaming were primarily male activities. There were some girls who liked these sorts of things, but they were rare. I don't know exactly what the catalyst for the influx of female gamers, fantasy fans, and science fiction fans was, but moving these pursuits out of the male ghetto they had languished in is a definite improvement.

Previous Musical Monday: Apostrophe: A Grammatical Lament by The Doubleclicks

Subsequent Musical Monday: Modern Poetry (Nerdy Love Song) by The Doubleclicks

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Volume CXXIX, No. 11 (November 2009) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
To Climb a Flat Mountain, Part I of II by G. David Nordley
Amabit Sapiens by Craig DeLancey
Joan by John G. Hemry
Foreign Exchange by Jerry Oltion
Thanksgiving Day by Jay Werkheiser

Science fact articles included:
Rock! Bye-Bye, Baby by Edward M. Lerner

Full review: November 2009 seems to be a lackluster month for Analog with a collection of mostly mediocre stories and a couple of fairly dry science fact articles. Overall, there seems to be little to indicate that this issue will be particularly memorable.

The two best stories in the volume are also the shortest: Foreign Exchange by Jerry Oltion is a mildly humorous story about an unexpected alien contact and the rather foolish and faulty assumptions made by the crew of an expeditionary mission to Mars. The story is just silly enough to be fun, and just serious enough to avoid being a farce. Thanksgiving Day by Jay Werkheiser is on the opposite end of the scale, as a hard science fiction story about the colonization of an alien world and the struggles of the colonists to figure out why all of their attempts to grow crops result in poisonous produce.

Amabit Sapiens by Craig DeLancey marks the return to Analog of Marrion's kids, a collection of children genetically engineered to care more about the distant future. This time, the children's long view is put into use, as they are recruited into a plan to ward off environmental disaster and the looming energy shortage. There is nothing particularly good or bad about the story, although it does seem to state that humanity cannot solve its problems without a sort of magic Santa Claus to do it for us, which I find mildly offensive. Joan, by John G. Hemry, also deals with humanity's lack of foresight, in this case the lack of foresight exhibited by a woman who idolizes Joan of Arc. She serendipitously gets access to a time machine and sets about trying to save Joan from being burnt at the stake. Things don't turn out how she expects, as fate seems to have been preordained for Joan. The story falls apart upon the protagonist's return to the present, as the changes she wrought on the past seem to have had no noticeable effect on the present beyond changing a few pictures and records. Overall, the lack of evaluation of the consequences of the time-traveler's actions makes this story little more than a description of a holiday in the middle-ages.

The anchor story of the issue is the first part of the two-part To Climb a Flat Mountain by G. David Nordley. This part establishes the protagonist (and all the other characters in the story) as the survivors of an interstellar expeditionary force gone astray as a result of sabotage. They have crash-landed on a truly alien planet with flat square sides (hence, the "flat mountain"). The protagonist meets up with a handful of other survivors and they set about trying to establish a functioning society to ensure their survival. The survivors quickly diverge into two camps, with one being driven by sexist religious fundamentalism and the other (including the protagonist) taking a more egalitarian view. The trouble with this plot element is that the arguments made by the religious fundamentalist spokesperson are so obviously unconvincing that the adherence of others to his viewpoint seems ludicrous, and drags the story down. The hunt for the saboteur and the struggle to survive in this very alien environment make for much better stories, but the religious conflict is so weak as to make the entire story fairly mediocre.

Edward M. Lerner discusses the likelihood of asteroids or comets striking the Earth in Rock! Bye-Bye Baby, focusing on those that would be significant enough to cause a natural disaster of sizeable proportion. The article also discusses the steps humanity can take to prevent such a disaster from occurring. The article is filled with facts, but makes for fairly dry reading as the territory has been covered numerous times before. In The Alternate View Jeffrey D. Kooistra discusses what appear to be systematic methodological problems with the collection of data by the U.S. climate monitoring stations and the impact this may have on global warming calculations. This article is much more interesting, and raises some very significant questions.

In the end, this is simply a very mediocre issue of Analog. With two slightly above average stories (which also happen to be the shortest two), two average stories, and one weak story, the issue is simply devoid of any outstanding fictional material. Coupled with a dry primary science fact article, the issue simply seems to be a placeholder put out to fill the space between the September issue and the December one. The second half of To Climb a Flat Mountain could raise that story from being mediocre, but that seems to be damning with faint praise. Here's to hoping that the weak array of stories in this issue means that they are saving a bunch of good ones for December 2009.

Previous issue reviewed: October 2009
Subsequent issue reviewed: December 2009

Analog     Stanley Schmidt     Magazine Reviews     Home

30 Days of Genre - What Is the Cover of Your Current or Most Recent Genre Read?

Time Untamed by Ivan Howard (editor)

My efforts to work through the list of International Fantasy Award winners is currently on hold as I wait for my copy of Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers to arrive. On the Hugo front, I need to track down my wayward copy of James Blish's A Case of Conscience. To fill in the gap while I'm waiting to get my hands on those, I'm catching up on some collections of short fiction that I have on hand. I've read through several volumes of Hugo winning novelettes and short stories, and right now I'm working on Time Untamed, another collection of short fiction.

Time Untamed is a quirky collection. It has no listed editor, and it took a fair amount of research to determine that the editor was Ivan Howard. But there appears to be very little information available about Howard other than the fact that he seems to have edited a small number of short fiction anthologies in the 1950s. The anthology is also unusual in that it features a collection of notable authors - Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Clifford D. Simak, John Wyndham, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fritz Lieber - but I am unfamiliar with the stories included in the collection. Given that I have read a fair amount of work by all of these authors, this is a somewhat difficult achievement. This may mean I have on my hands a trove of hidden gems. On the other hand, this may mean that these stories are all to lousy to have enduring appeal. Either way, this should be interesting.

Go to Day 14: What Is Your Favorite Book Trailer for a Genre Novel?

Go to Day 16: What Genre Novel Has the Most Intriguing Plot?

30 Days of Genre     Home

Book Blogger Hop September 28th - October 3rd: "Nineteen" Is a Song About the Vietnam War by Paul Hardcastle

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: Hosting a giveaway? Tell us about it! Write a great discussion post this week? Promote it! This is the week to pick ONE POST from the past week to highlight for the Hop!

I'm picking my review of More Than Human as my post of the week (go read it). This particular post is part of my effort to read and review all of the books that won the International Fantasy Award, which is a subset of my larger effort to read and review all of the books that have won the major science fiction and fantasy awards. Because they are the most venerable awards, I am currently working my way through the International Fantasy and Hugo Award winners, reading them in order starting with the oldest winners first and working forward.

Once I get to them chronologically, I will start reading and reviewing the Nebula winners, the World Fantasy winners, the Locus winners, the Mythopoeic winners, and the Prometheus winners. While I'm at it, I'll probably get to the Campbell, Dick, Stoker, Gandalf, and Balrog award winners too. And after that? I guess I'll have to go back and read all of the nominees for all these awards as well.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: Alice Cooper's First Top Ten Hit Was "I'm Eighteen"

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Exponential Thermostellar Bomb Number 20 Threatened to Detonate in the Dark Star's Bomb Bay

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Follow Friday - A Typical Tarot Deck Has Seventy-Eight Cards

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - (un)Conventional Bookviews and J'adore Happy Endings.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What is the BIGGEST word you’ve seen used in a book lately – that made you stop and look it up? Might as well leave the definition & book too.

The word I am picking is sabretache, which I first encountered in Gene Wolf's Shadow of the Torturer, and is used throughout the remaining three books of the Book of the New Sun series. I don't know if it was the biggest word used in the book, but it was the one that I actually looked up. Wolfe uses a lot of unusual and archaic words, such as optimates, aquaestor, and fiacre, and most can be figured out from context. And sabretache is no exception. Based upon how the main character Severian uses it, one can pretty readily figure out that it is some sort of bag or pouch. And that is the case for most of Wolfe's writing - you can figure out what he's talking about, but not exactly.

But I wanted to know exactly what he was talking about, so I looked it up. A sabretache is a flat leather bag used by hussar cavalry starting at the beginning of the 18^th century, and spreading to use among many other types of cavalry by the beginning of the 19^th century. The British cavalry still used them in the Crimean War, and the Prussian Guard Hussars used them in the Franco-Prussian War. By the beginning of the 20^th century the sabretache had been discarded by most cavalry forces. So that is exactly what Severian was supposed to be carrying. But the odd thing is that except for some limited time serving in the Autarch's army as part of his destrier cavalry, Severian walks pretty much everywhere he goes. In any event, that's what sabretache means, even if it is used by someone who isn't technically the sort of individual who would traditionally use one.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Seventy-Seven Is the Smallest Positive Integer to Require Five Syllables in English

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture Were Both Released in 1979

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Review - More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

Short review: At the edges of society something new is growing, spread through many bodies, blindly searching to find one another and become whole.

Haiku
An outcast or boy
Three girls, and a strange baby
Need still one more thing

Full review: The 1954 winner for of the International Fantasy Award for Best Fiction Book and a 2004 nominee for a "Retro Hugo", More Than Human is made up of three linked stories detailing the rise of Homo Gestalt, a new form of life that is made up of several individual people who gather together to form a single entity. Because the book does not rely upon the technology of the 1950s to make its story effective, the fact that it is very decidedly set in that era does not detract from the book, even though it is now sixty years old. Like some other Sturgeon stories I have read, More Than Human could be taking place right now, or it might have already happened, and we, living our mundane lives, would never even know it. The story is, at its core, a coming of age story, but it is a coming of age story for a life form that is similar to a human, and yet not a human. And that is also very alone in the world.

Of the three stories that make up the novel, only the middle one Baby Is Three, was not specifically written for this book. The first, The Fabulous Idiot, and the third Morality, were written specifically for publication as part of More Than Human. Although it was fairly common in the early era of science fiction to construct a novel by stringing together preexisting shorter pieces, but in this case, this style of book design was intentional. And perhaps that is part of the point, because that makes the book's form parallel the new entity that the book is about, both constructed of smaller subparts that work together to create a complete whole.

And this is part of the poetry of the book: its structure seems to reflect the development of the entity at the core of the story. In The Fabulous Idiot, the story is told in something of a confused jumble, but that is because it is told from the perspective of Lone, for whom the world is a confusing and jumbled place. Lone's stumbles lead him to Evelyn, a young woman who shared Lone's apparent gift of telepathy, but who lives under the thumb of a domineering ultra-religious father. Their meeting ends in disaster, and Lone finds himself on the Prodds' farm, where he finally is able to stop wandering long enough to make a human connection. Meanwhile, a young girl named Janie and a pair of black twin girls named Bonnie and Beanie form a friendship, although given the mores of 1950s society, their friendship is considered scandalous by those around them. In these sequences, Sturgeon explores the casual racism surrounding him, and also details the difficulties that would be faced by children with the unnerving gifts of telekinesis and teleportation. Although all three of the girls have extraordinary gifts, they are viewed with suspicion and fear by the adults in their lives.

Eventually the three girls find Lone, who left the Prodds when the couple was expecting a baby and is now living alone in the woods near the now abandoned house that Evelyn lived in. The girls and Lone begin to work together, forming the first parts of the gestalt creature. Eventually Lone returns to the Prodd farm and finds his only friend despondent. It seems that the child was not what he ad expected, and the disappointment is made even more bitter due to the child's apparent disability. Prodd recognizes the child, described as a "mongoloid", as properly being part of the gestalt, and takes him back to Evelyn's house, but first using his mental abilities to convince Prodd that his wife didn't die but instead took the child and went to visit Pennsylvania. With the telepathic Lone, the telekinetic Janie, the teleporting Bonnie and Beanie, and finally, the computing Baby, the gestalt is now complete. Lone continues to visit Prodd, and decides to help him with his truck that continually gets stuck in the mud by asking Baby to devise a way to prevent that from happening. Displaying the awesome powers of the new entity, Baby devises an anti-gravity device, which Lone installs on Prodd's truck. The fact that Prodd has left to go find his wife in Pennsylvania makes this something of a futile gesture, but the power and the idiocy, of the new life form is demonstrated. The true revelation is that while at first glance one might think that Lone is the one referred to by the title The Fabulous Idiot, the reference is to the gestalt as a whole: capable of almost accidentally creating and building wondrous items of technology, but not capable of thinking of a use for them better than to install them on a rusting abandoned truck.

While The Fabulous Idiot starts as a confused jumble that works towards coherence, much like the gestalt entity, Baby Is Three is told with a clinical, and almost cynical detachment. This entire section is told as a flashback, with Gerry Thompson, the new head of the gestalt, consulting with a psychiatrist in an effort to recover his lost memory. Thompson replaced Lone when the older man died, becoming the new telepathic "head" of the gestalt. But even though Thompson is much more intelligent than Lone ever could be, he is also a child when he inherits the role, whereas Lone, although an idiot, was an adult. Consequently, they gestalt is forced to seek out Evelyn's sister Alicia and take refuge with her, leading to conflict as their close-knit group offends Alicia's conventional ideas about society. By giving the story a viewpoint character that would be the voice of society at large in the form of Alicia, Sturgeon is able to revisit the questions of racism and the treatment of the handicapped that he touched upon in the first part of the story. Each time Alicia tries to impose her ideas about how society should function upon the gestalt, Gerry and Janie fight back, keeping their little group together. The story features several 1950s era ideas about psychiatry, and in the end the mystery of Gerry's missing memory is solved by finding "recovered memories", a concept that is now regarded as dubious at best. On the other hand, Gerry lost his memory as a result of the use of his telepathic powers, so it is difficult to draw any conclusions about psychiatry in general from his treatment.

The final section of the story is told from yet another amnesiac viewpoint character, this time Air Force Lieutenant Hip Barrows, fresh out of the insane asylum and jail. He is nursed back to health by Janie and slowly recovers his memories that include Gerry's attempts to drive him insane and kill him. This portion of the story illustrates the dangers of the gestalt, as Gerry is unstable, and as a result of his tumultuous upbringing, probably a sociopath. Once he killed Alicia, and realized that he could do such things with impunity to those around him, erasing and altering memories to cover up his actions, his innate paranoia caused him to become a monster. And because he was a monster, the entire gestalt became a monster. But it is the kind of monster that is created when an unreasoning child is gifted with unlimited powers. Because the gestalt is formed of those on the fringes of society and is dreadfully and painfully alone, it never had an opportunity to develop a sense of empathy towards those around it. Lone is almost certainly mentally retarded, and is treated with the disdain that society of the time handed out to those with mental handicaps. Janie was the unwanted child of an alcoholic mother and abandoned by her father. Bonnie and Beannie are impoverished black children living in a society that institutionalized discrimination against them. Gerry is an orphan handed over to the state and raised by adults who were alternatively uncaring and abusive. Alicia's efforts to inculcate the parts of the gestalt with what she believed were proper mores fails, both because she tried to instill in them mores that would have destroyed the gestalt, and because she attempted to pass on human values, and although the gestalt is similar to a human, it is not a human. Janie's efforts in trying to aid Hip are a desperate attempt to avert the growing monster and force the gestalt to grow to maturity. In the end, Hip is healed, and even though it did not know it was sick, so is the gestalt. In the final pages of the book, the gestalt begins to hear from other similar entities, revealing that even though it thought it was alone, it was not.

More Than Human is a sterling example of what science fiction can be when it is at its best. Using the vehicle of the genre, Sturgeon was able to examine delicate issues such as racism and demonstrate just how foolish the notions held by society were. But the book also explores the issue of identity and loneliness. For much of the book, the gestalt believes itself to be the only one of its kind, and as a result it has to grope towards understanding itself. An unanswered question raised by the book is the question of the individual components of the gestalt. As Hip discovers, any part of the gestalt could be replaced, making it an effectively immortal entity. But what of the individual parts? They are both themselves, and part of a greater whole. What if, as is implied might happen, Hip and Janie form a sexual relationship and have a child? Would that child be part of the gestalt too? What if the child had no capabilities that would allow it to join the gestalt? Would it be raised by a collective, but be condemned to be forever outside looking in? More Than Human raises as many questions as it answers, which is a hallmark of truly great science fiction. But it also explores what it means to be human, and what it might mean to be something else, living among humans and blindly groping towards establishing one's own identity. This book is Sturgeon at his most poetic, most insightful, and most brilliant.

1953 International Fantasy Award Winner: City by Clifford D. Simak

1955 International Fantasy Award Winner: A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn

What are the International Fantasy Awards?

International Fantasy Award Best Fiction Book Winners

1954 International Fantasy Award Nominees

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Review - Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Short review: Some people believe in odd, weird, and downright crazy things like UFO abductions, creationism, psychic powers, and holocaust denial. Almost all of their ideas are wrong, and this book explains why.

Haiku
Belief in weird things
May be unexplainable
Shermer still tries to

Full review: Why People Believe Weird Things probably should have been titled Weird Stuff People Believe, and Why They Are Wrong. On the other hand, the subtitle of the book, Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, pretty much sums up what the book describes. Through the book Michael Shermer systematically debunks pseudoscience and superstition while making what seems to be a mostly unsuccessful attempt to explain why people are so persistently attached to beliefs such as holocaust denial and creationism that are simply demonstrably wrong as a matter of fact.

In his forward to the book, Stephen Jay Gould explains the need for skepticism, and the dangers of accepting pseudoscience as fact, drawing a connection between Michael Shermer's efforts and Carl Sagan's similar body of work. With that preliminary out of the way, Shermer begins the hard work of trying to unravel what it is about superstitious nonsense that draws fervent believers. Shermer opens by discussing his own credulous acceptance of various "weird things" that he indulged in to bolster his efforts at competitive cycling, detailing his various efforts to gain a competitive advantage. At one point, he and a group of cyclists sent several samples of a single person's blood for "cryptoxic blood testing", and in response received as many different diagnoses as they had sent samples. Finally, Shermer was working with a nutritionist who told him massive doses of megavitamins would help him win, and placed him on a regimen. The pills nauseated Shermer, so he began simply spitting them out when his nutritionist wasn't looking. At that point, Shermer realized that perhaps taking all claims at face value wasn't a particularly good idea.

Shermer uses the next section to sketch out what skepticism is, and how it relates to science. He then turns to defining pseudoscience and pseudohistory, explaining how each one respectively differs from real science and real history. A particularly notable example concerns attempts by an actual historian to point out the fallacies engaged in by a proponent of an Afrocentric pseudohistory that culminates in her dean telling her that "everyone has a different equally valid view of history", and that it didn't matter that what the Afrocentrist was claiming was physically impossible. Pseudoscience and pseudohistory start with their conclusions and seek out supporting evidence, real science and history start with the evidence and draw conclusions from that, no matter how uncomfortable or painful those conclusions may be.

Following on his description of what science is, and how it differs from pseudoscience, Shermer provides twenty-five fallacies describing how people fool themselves. Three are problems with scientific thinking, and which a careful scientist (and an honest skeptic) has to be on guard against. Eleven are common fallacies that are used by pseudoscientists and pseudohistorians to bolster their unreliable claims. Seven are common logical fallacies, and the remaining three are psychological problems with human cognition. In each case, Shermer explains what the fallacy is, how to identify it when it is used, how it affects human perception, and describes how to avoid falling victim to it, both in one's own thinking and when evaluating claims made by others. This chapter, more than any other, does the job of explaining "why people believe weird things". Or more accurately, how people fool themselves and others into believing weird things.

At this point the book shifts to specific examples of the weird things that people believe, and the reasons their beliefs are simply unfounded. One by one Shermer takes on E.S.P., near death experiences, cryonics, alien abduction stories (including a near surgical dismantling of the "alien autopsy" video), witch crazes both in the medieval period and the modern day, including an analysis of how accusation webs perpetuate and an examination of the "recovered memory" phenomenon, and the bizarre personality cult that has sprung up around Ayn Rand. Shermer then devotes a substantial portion of the book to debunking creationism and holocaust denial, in the process pointing out the parallels between the two systems of pseudo-belief. Along the way he dissects twenty-five common creationist arguments, most of which are still used by shills for creationism despite these arguments having been discredited years ago. As debunking holocaust deniers is Shermer's specialty, he spends an entire chapter of the book comprehensively demolishing their claims and demonstrating exactly how their claims of being unfairly persecuted as anti-Semites simply don't hold up to scrutiny. As detailed in the book, they are anti-Semites, and their claims that the holocaust was fabricated are simply unsupportable.

Although Why People Believe Weird Things is only somewhat successful at its stated objective of explaining why people continue to adhere to superstition and pseudoscience despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is a brilliant deconstruction of the various confused and illogical positions espoused by those people. Each of the pseudo-beliefs addressed in the book are thoroughly and completely debunked with ruthless efficiency. If one is not so much concerned with why people believe silly things, but is instead interested in why they are wrong to do so, this is a brilliant book. Even if one's primary interest is "why" this is still a worthwhile book, and well worth reading.

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Review - Second Skin, Too by Peter Darrach

Short review: A cartoon-like villain foments war between Earth and Mars. Meanwhile, Elaine gains Max's super-powers, which should surprise no one given the title of the book

Haiku
Earth wants minerals
Mars wants to keep everything
Max visits T'chell

Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Second Skin, Too is the sequel to Second Skin and the second book in the trilogy of the same name. Taking place shortly after the events of the first volume, the book follows Max Cody, recently enhanced with super powers, as he attempts to prevent an interplanetary conflict between Earth and Mars. Shorn of its need to provide quite as much explanatory exposition as the first book, this installment picks up the pace a bit, and that proves to be both good and bad. It is good in the sense that there is more plot and character development, but it is bad in the sense that when one sits back to think about these elements, they frequently don't make a whole lot of sense. The end result is a book that is moderately interesting, but ultimately isn't much more than a diverting way to spend a couple hours.

As with Second Skin, Second Skin, Too starts with an action sequence in which the reader follows an intruder as he infiltrates what is supposed to be a secure area. The main difference between Suicide Sam's assault on a Martian military vessel and Nigel Deftly's infiltration into a Martian prison to free Gilberto Mendoso and Artemesia Glittereski, imprisoned at the end of Second Skin, is the the level of lethal violence employed. Whereas Sam casually slaughtered the crew of the doomed navy cruiser, Nigel manages to accomplish his mission without killing anyone. This reluctance to kill seems unique to Nigel, as everyone else in the book seems to consider randomly beating and killing people on the way to one's objectives to be more of less par for the course. And it is this level of random violence that makes the book both so action-packed and monotonous.

The overarching plot of the book relates to the increasing political tension between Earth and the newly independent Mars. In a fit of grandiosity, the freshly minted Martian government laid claim to the entire solar system from the orbit of Mars outwards, an assertion of authority that Earth is understandably less than pleased about. On the other hand, Earth has no facility like MOSA or MOSA II that could process the bounty provided by the asteroid belt, and shows no interest in building one, which makes their assertion of competing authority seem somewhat hollow and meaningless. Even if Earth had a practical means of reaping the benefits of the asteroid belt, it is glaringly obvious that Mars could not possibly maintain any kind of control over the vast area of the asteroid belt - Mars doesn't actually occupy its entire orbit, and even if Mars and Earth were aligned, Mars would be further away than the Earth from the portion of the asteroid belt on the opposite side of the Sun, meaning that Earth would have an advantage in trying to get there at those times. Consequently, the entire idea of Mars "claiming" the asteroid belt, let alone the entirety of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, all of their moons, as well as the Kuiper Belt, is almost ludicrous on its face.

Nonetheless, in Second Skin, Too tensions over asteroid belt mining rights have brought both worlds to the brink of war, and to try to avert it, Mars decides to send a delegation to attempt a negotiated settlement. Because he is the hero of the book, Max Cody joins the expedition for more or less contrived reasons, as does his fiance Elaine. So everyone heads for Earth as part of the ambassadorial entourage, armed with the knowledge that someone from Earth had liberated Gilberto and Artemesia, and that the same unknown individual probably also kidnapped Denis Dermott, a scientist working on the top secret Martian teleportation based p-drive. After a brief trip, they arrive and are sent to Mauritius, a rather obscure island in the Indian Ocean, which seems like an odd choice for a diplomatic summit.

But before too long we learn why Mauritius was chosen: it is conveniently near a corporate installation owned by the industrialist and arms merchant Xanthus Rex, who serves as the not-so-subtle villain of the story. This lack of subtlety is somewhat disappointing, as Xanthus is such a scenery chewing over-the-top villain who is so boorishly clumsy that one has to wonder how he came to wield the influence that he displays in the book. Xanthus is presented and treated like a clever schemer, but he is more of a bull in a china shop than a sleek barracuda. He is desperate to instigate a war between Earth and Mars so as to get his hands on Martian resources, and to get the advanced Martian technology represented by the p-drive. But to get his way he engages in the most ham-fisted array of techniques one could imagine. At one point he decides that he has to figure out the secret of Max's unusual abilities, but rather than try to bribe Max, or do anything more sneaky first, he sends a band of thugs to try to beat Max up. When that doesn't work, he tries to kill Max by throwing him off a boat into shark-infested water. And when that doesn't work he kidnaps Elaine and shoots her, threatening to let her die unless Max divulges his secrets.

And that's the way Xanthus handles pretty much every situation. When trying to steal the secrets of the Martian p-drive, Xanthus doesn't try to bribe someone, or hack into the project's computers and steal the data, or any other sensible method. Instead, he kidnaps one of the scientists on the project and gives him hallucinogenic drugs to try to manipulate him into working for Xanthus. Xanthus kills the scientists working for him in an almost offhand manner, for no real apparent reason, and pointlessly alienates many of his underlings. Not only that, several of his gambits seem to be almost entirely pointless as well - had he managed to kill Max by tossing him into shark-infested waters, how would that have helped him to unravel the secret of whatever gave Max his powers? Leaving aside the fact that the "secret" is bonded to Max, a fact that Xanthus has no way of knowing, killing Max by casting his body into the ocean would mean that his body would be lost, and likely the technology he was using would have been as well. Like so many of Xanthus' other plots, this seems short-sighted and poorly thought out.

This sort of blunt force method of persuasion leaks out to the other characters in the book as well. Xu, a genetically modified space pilot who starts the book in the employ of Xanthus, is sent with Gilberto to try to make contact with Suicide Sam's gang, with the stated objective of inducing them to foment discord on MOSA. Xu's method of persuading Sam to support Xanthus' ambitions is to show up uninvited in his hideout and start a fight with his men, killing half of them before blasting her way out. Supposedly, this works, but Sam's men seem to have almost no impact on the impending hostilities. This sort of negotiation style is endemic throughout the book: when Martian Navy Lieutenant Sandra James goes undercover to work on the MOSA docks to look for trouble, she secures her job by punching the shift supervisor in the mouth when she meets him. Maybe I've just led a sheltered life, but in my experience socking your potential supervisor in the jaw is generally the way to screw up a job interview, not a way to get yourself hired.

Amidst all the punching people in the head to get them to join sides, tensions between Earth and Mars ratchet up, with the Earth holding a substantial edge in military equipment despite being starved for raw materials. Gilberto's net contribution to the effort to undermine Mars seems to be lying about as an invalid after a particularly difficult space flight back from Earth (having been kidnapped and taken there at Xanthus' behalf, only to be almost immediately drugged and returned to Mars, also at Xanthus' behest). Artemesia helps put together a fake propaganda video, an endeavor she has second-thoughts about, but that video is almost immediately shown to be a fraud, and the Earth government, which had thrown its support behind an invasion of Mars, immediately reverses course. Suicide Sam makes a couple of desultory appearances in the book, having almost no impact on the plot at all before he is summarily dispatched by Max. All in all, almost no plot elements from the first book other than Max's newly developed superpowers have any real effect on the plot of this book.

Max more or less accidentally bestows his superhuman powers upon Elaine while trying to save her life, and she becomes the "too" in the title. Max and Elaine discover a new collection of super powers, and both wind up in the "Tavern at the Edge of Time" and meet with its seemingly immortal proprietor T'chell. This element, foreshadowed since the beginning of the first book, is something of a disappointment as it turns out that Max's encounter with the alien was purely accidental, and the source of Max's powers was an almost trivial fix-up. Given that the first two books have been about human politics, introducing mysterious and inscrutable aliens into the mix seems like something of a left turn for the series, but then again most of the elements from the first book didn't have much impact on the second book, so one would probably expect the same to hold true for the transition from the second to the third.

In the end, Xanthus goes into full-on comic book villain mode, commandeering the Earth invasion fleet by impersonating its commanding admiral. Following a lifetime of abuse, Xu decides to switch sides and joins up with Mars for the climatic showdown. Nigel attempts to steal the p-drive technology amidst the fighting, but is foiled by a debilitated scientist wearing magic pants, and Max and Elaine use their super powers to save the day.

Overall, while Second Skin, Too manages to avoid many of the pitfalls that ensnared Second Skin, it has its own set of problems. The plot of this book is poorly connected to the plot of the first book, and many of the plot threads in this volume simply peter out. The plot points that do ripen to fruition are presented at an almost frenzied pace, and instead of the intrigue and skullduggery the book aspires to describe, the reader is given a collection of loosely connected lethal brawls. Many of the troubles in the book are directly traceable to the unbelievability of Xanthus as the villainous mastermind - his machinations are simply too clumsy to make him a credible criminal kingpin. And without a viable villain, the rest of the book more or less just falls apart, and is made almost surreal by the introduction of the T'chell. Second Skin, Too is a book that is perhaps too ambitious, and tries to incorporate too many elements, and as a result is too unfocused with too many moving parts to hold together.

Previous book in the series: Second Skin
Subsequent book in the series: Tavern on the Edge of Time
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Musical Monday - Apostrophe: A Grammatical Lament by The Doubleclicks

The Doubleclicks are on a East coast tour right now with Molly Lewis. Sadly, due to prior commitments, I will not be able to go see them when they come to play in Alexandria this Friday. This makes me sad, kind of like a lonely apostrophe. This song encapsulates a love of grammar with the inherent sadness of seeing it misused. I think that we need more songs about grammar and how terrible it is to be a much abused punctuation mark.

I don't think it is possible for me to adequately express how much I love the Doubleclicks and their music. In addition to being incredibly nice, witty, and interesting women, they write brilliant music with fantastic lyrics. I think that I love them mostly because their songs are not just about nerdy things, but are about nerdy things in an insightful, clever, and funny way. They don't just point to a nerdy thing and say "Hey, we're in the club, let's laugh at this funny nerdy thing." They take off-kilter topics, run them through their delightfully nerdy brains, and then make them even better than they were before.

Previous Musical Monday: Our Biggest Challenge by Symphony of Science

Subsequent Musical Monday: This Fantasy World (Dungeons & Dragons) by The Doubleclicks

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Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Volume CXXIX, No. 12 (December 2009) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
To Climb a Flat Mountain, Conclusion by G. David Nordley
Formidable Caress by Stephen Baxter
Wilderness Were Paradise Enow by H. G. Stratmann
The Jolly Old Boyfriend by Jerry Oltion
The Universe Beneath Our Feet by Carl Frederick
A Flash of Lightning by Robert Scherrer

Science fact articles included:

Plate Tectonics, Goldilocks, and the Late Heavy Bombardment: Why Earth Isn't Mars or Venus by Richard A. Lovett

Full review: Overall, this is not a very good issue. With really only two decent stories and a bunch of clunkers, this issue seems even more disappointing coming on the heels of the less than stellar November issue of Analog. One weak issue once in a while is merely annoying, two weak issues in a row is a disturbing trend that I hope is reversed soon.

As the most famous author with a story in this issue, Stephen Baxter gets the cover illustration for his Formidable Caress. Unfortunately, being written by a famous author doesn't prevent the story from being fairly uneven in quality. While the setting - a collection of civilizations on interlinked layers each moving at different relativistic speeds, and thus experiencing a different flow of time - is interesting and well-laid out, as are the interactions between the inhabitants of the various layers, the artificial intelligence character seems to be fairly dim, relying upon the human protagonist for information about the periodic "formidable caresses". In the end, the "formidable caress" element of the story seems not particularly interesting and figuring them out seems like it should have been a trivial exercise for the artificial intelligence. The central mystery of the story, focusing on the nature of humanity's "effigies", ends up mostly unresolved and what resolution there is comes out of left field and is completely unrelated to any of the story that preceded it, giving the story a somewhat unsatisfactory feel.

The issue also contains the second half of G. David Nordley's two part To Climb a Flat Mountain. As I said in concerning the first half, a decent conclusion could raise the story from mediocre to good. However, the second half of the story actually moves the rating the other direction, as a somewhat interesting setting and moderately interesting opening is wasted with a "super powerful aliens save the day" twist. The story chugs along in fairly predictable fashion until aliens start resurrecting dead people, reveal that the cube world is indeed an artificial construct, and tell everyone they can go home or not, depending on what they want to do. And then they tie everything up with a big bow and give humanity a figurative kiss. Needless to say, I found the resolution fairly disappointing.

Also featuring super powerful aliens is H.G. Stratmann's Wilderness Were Paradise Enow, featuring the return of Katarina and Martin originally introduced in The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya. Picking up right where the previous story left off, our intrepid explorers are now presented with an awesome choice by the aliens they encountered on Mars. To explain too much of the story would give everything away, so I'll just say that the shape of the future of humanity is at stake and the wrong choice could be fatal. The story is probably the best of the issue, even though in many issues it would be merely middle of the pack.

The Jolly Old Boyfriend by Jerry Oltion is this year's designated December Christmas story, and like most Christmas stories in Analog, the Christmas element seems fairly forced. Thankfully, this story about the return of an apparently dead boyfriend is fairly short, although it is highly predictable and not particularly interesting. Carl Frederick's The Universe Beneath Our Feet is told from an alien viewpoint and requires the reader to unravel exactly what is going on. It is a hard science fiction story, so it all makes sense and everything becomes clear in the end. There's not much to the story, and I would have liked more from the story, as it seemed to end just when things got interesting.

Richard A. Lovett contributes another excellent science fact article Plate Tectonics, Goldilocks, and the Late Heavy Bombardment: Why Earth Isn't Mars or Venus, which seems kind of apropos considering the nature of the fictional events in the background of Wilderness Were Paradise Enow. I have begun to wonder where Lovett finds the time to write as much as he does though: he seems to have a story or article (or both) in almost every recent issue of Analog, and all seem to be thoroughly researched and well-written. Seriously, the man must never sleep.

The combination of Wilderness Were Paradise Enow and Lovett's sceince fact article manage to rescue this issue from being a total loss. Baxter's contribution is also not a complete waste, although it clearly is not his best work. The rest of the issue is pretty much filler at best. Even the installment of Probability Zero is weakly executed. This was, in short, an underwhelming issue full of mediocrity.

Previous issue reviewed: November 2009
Subsequent issue reviewed: January/February 2010

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30 Days of Genre - What Is Your Favorite Book Trailer for a Genre Novel?

These are the sorts of questions that highlight just how idiosyncratic of a book blogger I am. Whereas it seems that most of my fellow book bloggers are plugged into the world of upcoming releases, exciting book trailers, and fan-made soundtracks for books, I find myself mucking about with cheap paperbacks published a decade or more before I was born, or collections of short stories that appeared in pulp magazines back when there was still a thriving pulp magazine industry.

So, the problem for me for this question is that most of the books I read and review don't actually have book trailers, that sort of thing being in the far future when they were published and marketed. And for the books I read that are recent enough to have book trailers, I just don't watch them. The truth is that I had never even heard of a book trailer until I started doing the 30 Days of Genre meme. So my range of choices is fairly limited, both by the nature of the books I read and my own personal lack of experience looking at book trailers.

So, I'll pick a book that I like that happens to be one of the few books that I have seen the book trailer that goes with it. The Dust of 100 Dogs (read review) by A.S. King is a brilliant book about Saffron, a poor girl in modern day Pennsylvania, and Emer, an Irish pirate in the 16^th century, and their oddly intertwined lives, as well as the curse that requires Emer to live out a hundred lives as a dog. I have no idea how the trailer for this book matches up to trailers for other books, but I loved this book, so I figure that's as good a reason as any to choose this as my favorite trailer. Because a trailer is supposed to promote a book, and anyone who picks up this book is going to enjoy reading it.

As long as I'm at it, I may as well point out that the other brilliant book by A.S. King that I have read is Please Ignore Vera Dietz (read review), and it also has a fun trailer to watch. I didn't select Vera Dietz here, but that is only because the book is not really a genre book, although it does have some genre-like elements. In any event, I'm going to put that book trailer here too, because I can. I hope that you enjoy both of the trailers.

Go to Day 13: What Genre Novel Have You Read More Than Five Times?

Go to Day 15: What Is the Cover of Your Current or Most Recent Genre Read?

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