Arctangential

Aussie ingenuity:

http://thewest.com.au/20041215/news/general/tw-news-general-home-sto130036.html

I just finished Cold War in a Country Garden. I suppose this kind of thing is typical of 70’s pulp, and as such I wasn’t particularly impressed. The idea is that the British secret service has some up with a method of miniaturization and is going to use it as a means to end overpopulation (a real hot-button topic at the time). Their test to see if it’s a good idea? They drop our protagonist into a country garden, naked and without any tools. If he is able to survive long enough to get into the attached house and signal them with a tiny Morse code transmitter they’ve left for him, then the first phase is considered successful and they’ll go on with the experiment.

This is the most risible idea I’ve ever heard. Anyways, the plot continues with him calling in some more people to help, they build tiny little tools, eventually there’s some bugaboo where they go to Romania and tussle with some miniaturized iron curtain spies. The book is pretty harmless, and not a lot actually happens, but there are a few pretty amazingly stupid segments along the way that I feel the need to share. For example, at one point three intrepid miniature explorers are discussing how their miniaturization might have been effected (note that even though it’s clear in the book that hundreds of people have been miniaturized, nobody seems to have any idea how it happens) one man suggests that perhaps they were shrunk by having 299 of every 300 cells in their body removed. Another suggests that astronomers, having discovered black holes in outer space, had learned how to use incredibly strong gravity to shrink men.

I have 2 more books in this series to read yet — I’m not really looking forward to them.

My next book will be Larry Niven’s Neutron Star. I love Niven, and this should be good stuff.

I finished The Amber Spyglass last night. It wasn’t as captivating as the previous 2 books; I think Pullman really opened things up too much in the final installment and as a result there wasn’t any one character to follow and so things didn’t seem as major or important. The climax of the entire plot actually happened about 90 pages from the end of the book and I didn’t notice it. A few pages later I had to say, “wait, huh”, and turn back and read it again. The entire enterprise was so secondary to the actions of the main characters that it hardly registered. In fact, the main character spends the first 1/3 of the book asleep.

I certainly enjoyed the book; he kept coming up with interesting ideas, and there’s a lot left over to think about once all of the major issues in the plot are taken care of. The denouement is very touching, finally making whole the various characters who have given up so much to heal the world, and then at the same time taking away from them all the things that let them do what they had to do. I think if I hadn’t been so bored of the whole enterprise from earlier I would have been very moved by the ending.

Now I’m reading Cold War in a Country Garden by Lindsay Gutteridge. It’s… well… We’ll see.

I finished Pandora by Holly Hollander about an hour ago. It’s really awesome, particularly considering that it’s nothing like what I expected. From the cover art (img), publisher (Orb) and author (Gene Wolfe), I fully expected it to be some kind of genre fantasy novel; turns out it’s a mystery, set in Illinois in any unnamed year in the early to mid 70s. It’s written from the point of view of a 17 year old girl whose family is embroiled in a plot involving an exploding box at a country fair, love letters from a married man to a married woman, and a man killed after escaping from an insane asylum. It’s very postmodern; the narrator mentions time and again things which would never have happened in a mystery novel; lots of assumptions are turned on their ear and the ending is perfect in many ways — it’s entirely unexpected and 100% natural. Wolfe is a great author, and I really need to get more of his books.

Next I’ll be reading The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy. I am looking forward to it greatly.

I finished The Subtle Knife today at dinner. It was just as good as the promise of the first book would have had me believe. The story opened up a lot, and now is no longer about a precious girl in an interesting alternate universe, but now spans 3 different parallel worlds, has a wide cast of characters, discussions of wars against God, the misuse of technology, the power of youth, all mixed together with a good amount of action and adventure. I’m enjoying this more and more and I am looking forward to the final book in the trilogy.

At the same dinner, I started reading Pandora By Holly Hollander by Gene Wolfe. It’s quite good so far.

I finished Fireflood 2 nights ago night. Really good book, if somewhat difficult to read. It’s a collection of short stories, all on the subject of outcasts from society; either those who are for their own reasons, or those who have been actively cast out by society. It was pretty depressing, but there’s some very powerful work in there.

One story was about a woman captured by the government and forced to work identifying spectra with some kind of device. She lives in a kind of forced labor camp, fed through cannulae in her ankle while she sleeps in a coffin-sized cubicle, her only break being daily sessions with an exercise machine. We don’t get a lot of other information about her place or situation; she’s almost entirely blind, her eyes having been replaced by machines that allow her to detect the spectra as part of her work. Her only pleasure comes from rubbing her eyes in her cubicle at night, causing swirls of color. This however causes the devices in her eyes to malfunction and affect her accuracy in spectral identification. After determining what has happened, the people running the installation “fix” her eyes so that she gets a painful electric shock when she tries to touch them. The story ends with the unnamed woman lying in her cubicle, deprived of her only source of pleasure, unable to cry.

I’m reading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman now, the second book in the His Dark Materials now. I like it.

I finished The Golden Compass at lunch today. Wow. Really good stuff — very imaginative, with lots of interesting ideas that I haven’t seen in fantasy or science fiction before. I’m not sure who told me it was written for children, but it’s certainly not. The main character may be a prepubescent girl, but the writing, plot and situations are quite mature. I’m looking forward to reading the next book in this series; this one did a very good job at being the first book in a trilogy. It set up the world very clearly and gave us lots of chances to learn how things worked, it asked a lot of interesting questions, and only answered enough of them to keep the reader in the loop.

Now I’m reading Fireflood by Vonda N. McIntyre, which is a collection of her short stories.

I just finished Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë was a very good writer — her prose is beautiful and a joy to read. However, life in the mid 19th century was dreadfully boring, and this comes through fairly clearly in the book; not a whole hell of a lot happens. There’s a lot of whining and a lot of righteous suffering and a kind of Dickensian trick ending (although it’s not an entirely happy ending, which is nice). Some passages are really beautiful, like this one from the preface:

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the second. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the crown of thorns.”

Or this, from chapter 9:

“And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell; and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round and unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood — the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.”

Great stuff; I just wish some actual stuff would go on amid all that great writing.

I’m about to start Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which is part on of the His Dark Materials trilogy. I’ve heard it’s good, and that’s it’s written for kids, so I ought to get through it pretty quickly. It’ll be a nice change from Ms. Eyre’s fantastic adventures in housekeeping and being upset.