Almost Paradise

Scott McCloud, comic book creator and theorist, was in the islands this week for the Hawaiʻi leg of the McCloud family’s year-long Making Comics 50 State Tour.

He spoke at the Academy of Arts Theatre to a distinctly bimodal crowd: on the one hand, comic book fans (young and geeky), who knew McCloud’s work and came to hear the man; and on the other, the Academy Theatre regulars (elderly and haole), who were probably clueless about comics but trusting in the Academy’s judgment that they’d hear an interesting lecture in any case.

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The Wizard Hunters, by Martha Wells

This one follows up on her earlier Death of the Necromancer and another I can’t recall, and is also the first of a new series, The Fall of Ile-Rien. Pseudo-Victorian fantasy, I guess? Fun. I’ll be looking for the next book.

Accelerando, by Charles Stross

I usually don’t comment on books until after I’m done but I am making an exception here.

So there I was, only a chapter or so into what was turning out to be a very fun near-future sf story, and I ran straight into the phrase “in President Santorum’s America”.

My eyes stopped dead and my stomach felt all funny. I couldn’t think for a couple of seconds.

“In President Santorum’s America”.

Brrrrrr!

Damn you, Charlie Stross. Those are the scariest four words that I have read in months.

Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Larry Niven and Hal Colebatch.

Back in the Dark Ages I was a teenage Larry Niven fan and I geeked out on all his whacky Known Space worlds like Wunderland, Jinx, We Made It, Plateau, and of course, the ultimate sf geek world concept, Ringworld. Niven admitted at one point that the reason he had never set any stories in the period of the Man-Kzin Wars was that he felt he was no good at writing military sf. So instead, he invited other writers to come in and play in his sandbox and write war stories for Known Space. It’s been a successful collaboration: ten books so far, and I doubt they’re done yet.

Plucky humans fighting giant alien cats. What can I say? It’s a guilty pleasure.

Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery Of The Brain — and How It Changed The World, by Carl Zimmer.

I really enjoyed Zimmer’s earlier book about parasitology, Parasite Rex, and the short articles at his web site The Loom are very cool. So I figured I’d like Soul Made Flesh, too. But alas, I neglected to take into account exactly what this book was about. It’s not a book about science, really; it’s a book about the history of science — specifically, the origins of modern neurology.

And like most history-of-science books, it necessarily spends a lot of time on… history. In this case, since Zimmer is focusing on a guy named Thomas Willis, of the Royal Society of London, we’re talking about 17th century English history. Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, etc. Never my favorite subject. Even when Neal Stephenson tarted it up in his Baroque Cycle novels, I really couldn’t get excited about that period. About halfway through Soul Made Flesh, I found myself skimming over all the politics and world events and slowing down only for the brief sections of actual science.

Overall it was a worthwhile read, but for his next book I hope Zimmer goes back to writing about present-day science.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow.

Ummm. Magical realism meets the Internet?

Cory Doctorow writes cool stuff. I got a huge kick out of his earlier novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. And he’s one of the folks behind Boing Boing, one of my favorite collections of odd things on the Web. But like with Counting Heads, which I read last month, when I put down Someone Comes to Town I felt unmoved. There was a lot of weird, off-the-wall supernatural stuff in there, and hip, cutting-edge Internet stuff as well, but I couldn’t sympathize with the protagonist and the plot didn’t really seem to go anywhere. It was fun enough, but it’s not one I’d keep or recommend.

Strange Itineraries, by Tim Powers

I like short story collections. In a short story, the writer gets straight to the point and paints his picture with the least number of brush strokes possible. No fat, all lean. Every word’s got to count. And they’re bite-size, too, which I appreciate these days. My absolute favorite short story collection is one by the late Fredric Brown, master of the short-short sf story. Anyway, before this I had only read Tim Powers’ novels, and I think I’ve read most all of them, from Last Call to Declare. This is his first short story collection.

Tim Powers doesn’t really write science fiction, or fantasy, at least not how the terms are currently used. Tim Powers writes modern ghost stories. They’re moody and spooky and surreal. I’m no book critic, so I won’t offer an in-depth analysis; I just like it.

A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong

I’m not a Christian. If anything, maybe I’m Buddhist, but only because that’s the religion my grandparents had. Most of the family funerals I attend are Japanese Buddhist, and that’s just about my only contact with any kind of religion. Well, and there were all those years of Wednesday chapel attendance at ʻIolani School; I guess they probably count for something too.

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The Book of the Short Sun, by Gene Wolfe.

Back in the 1980s I was blown away by Gene Wolfe’s 4-volume fantasy, The Book of the New Sun. He later wrote a 4-volume sequel, The Book of the Long Sun, and then another 3-volume sequel, The Book of the Short Sun. Volume by volume, over the years I’ve worked my way through Wolfe’s amazing stories and now I’ve finally finished Return to the Whorl, the last volume of The Book of the Short Sun.

In a horribly condensed and uninformative summary, BotNS is set on Earth in the far future; BotLS is set on a generation starship that was launched from the Earth of BotNS; and BotSS is set on a planet settled by colonists from the BotLS ship. But to describe them thusly is to ignore the real reason why these books are so critically acclaimed, which is that Gene Wolfe is an amazing writer. His prose is lush and dense and meandering. He’s been called one of the most literary of science fiction authors. And maybe that’s the problem.

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Counting Heads, by David Marusek.

I picked up this book on recommendation from, I forget, maybe Making Light. It took me a while to start it and get through it, and now that I’m done I’m ambivalent. I mean, it’s got clones, and ubiquitous nanotech, and interstellar colonization; all kinds of cool bells and whistles. But the story just didn’t grip me. I couldn’t figure out who the protagonist was supposed to be, and the resolution at the end didn’t seem like the story had actually gone anywhere. Oh well. It was fun enough, but I don’t think I’d read it again, or recommend it to anyone.