Arctangential

I finished The Guardians of Time the other day. It was great — just the kind of thing I expect from Poul Anderson. It’s about a group of people who police the time stream, stopping other time travelers from altering history. It’s very typical Anderson — there’s never a right answer, people are fallible, but the heroes just do what they think is best — and so do the antagonists. In fact, it can be fairly difficult to separate the two. In this book, there’s a group of people who are generally held to be the ultimate authority, but it’s fairly clear that nobody actually knows that they’re necessarily working toward a common good.

The time travel aspect of things is fairly fluffy, as these things go, and is used more as an excuse to have fun adventures, like saving the life of General Scipio right before the Hannibal’s attack on Rome, or stopping emissaries of Kublai Khan from discovering America too soon. This is book one of a 4-book series, but it’s not really a long story, they’re all just short stories about these Time Patrol guys. I am looking forward to the next book.

I am currently reading Newer York, an anthology edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

I finished Fratricide is a Gas this afternoon. It actually wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Despite his issues with plot and plausibility, Gutteridge is an entirely competent writer. This story avoided most of the really ludicrous stuff from the previous two books. The basic concept is still fairly unreasonable — Mathew Dilke, micro-spy, is sent to rather arbitrarily assist a normal-sized agent on a mission to Peru to look into a lab which may be creating chemical weapons. His mule is killed perfunctorily fairly early on, forcing Dilke back to his roots; that is, a naked man 1/4 of one inch tall, battling insects in a nightmare landscape, etc, etc. This goes on for most of the book, and then he eventually makes his way back to the lab, discovers the truth about the chemical weapons (it turns out that, quite literally, “Fratricide” is the name of a gas: a gas which causes people to go into a murderous rage, attacking everyone nearby) and uses the chemical on its creator and those who would negotiate for its purchase. Then he goes home.

Oh well, at least it went fast.

My next book is The Guardians of Time, by Poul Anderson. It looks cool.

I finished Poul Anderson’s Fire Time today at lunch. It took me a long time to read, even though it wasn’t very long, and it was fairly well-written. I think the main issue had to do with a particular way that it was written.

In any work of non-genre fiction, there are certain details that are not explained, as it’s expected the readers knows about them from his or her own experience. Nobody is going to explain how many fingers a person has, or what marriage is, or why a person acts how they do when a loved one dies. The authors makes some assumptions about the knowledge of his or her readership and omits details that would be redundant for them. This book was written with the same kind of thing in mind, except that the tacit assumption by the author is that the readership is of the same milieu as the characters in the story. Never mind that they’re 6-legged feline centaurs with symbiotic plant manes living on a planet in a binary star system.

Anyways. I don’t mind that kind of thing — it just means that the author is focusing on the plot and the characters and not on their culture of physiognomy. However in this case, there was just so much back-story and so much political intrigue and so much other business going on that I had no idea what was going on much of the time. By the time all of the interesting details about the aliens, and their history, and the history of human space exploration, and their war with some kind of giant walrus people, and everything else had been set up, I was totally non-engaged. Skimming back over the book, the plot is actually pretty interesting, but it took me a long long time to actually get through it all. Oh well.

I’m now partway into the third (and final (yay!)) of Lindsay Gutterdige’s wonderful novels about Mathew Dilke, Fratricide is a Gas. Great title, huh?

So I am done with Lego for the foreseeable future. After a few years of building, collecting, storing and reading about Lego, I just don’t have that much fun with it any more. There was a period for a few months where I really thought of it far more as an obligation than as a hobby, and since there’s honestly no reason at all for me to be doing it, that hardly makes sense at all. So I packed everything up, finished up the sets I had mostly completed, and stuck it all in the back of my closet. I’m still not sure what the permanent solution is — I might sell them, or I might just hold onto them as a gift for my children when I die or something.

Here’s the sum total of my Lego collection:

And here’s just some of the leftover crap that resulted from my grand consolidation:

(Both are click for bigger)

I finished Killer Pine at lunch today. It was not good, but mercifully short. The plot was pretty similar to the previous book; Mathew Dilke is removed from his post heading up the training of an army of “micro men” to investigate a problem in the pine forests of British Columbia. It seems that there’s an unknown blight afflicting lumber trees in Canada and the northern United States. Of course the best way to deal with this is to send Dilke, his girlfriend (the “negress” Hyacinthe, whom he rescued in the previous book), and a newly-miniaturized scientist by the unlikely name of Jonathan Butt, out into the middle of the BC forest and see what they can find. Amazingly, they find something. I’m going to give away the plot here, because I want to discourage as many people as possible from ever reading this book.

It turns out that mini-Russian spies have set up a base inside of a pine tree. Inside of the tree they’ve built a high-tech base and are raising colonies of flying termites. They use Pavlovian techniques to train the termites (coincidentally, the scientist training them is named Pavlov) and once they have enough, they spray all of the termites with a special virus that kills pine trees, and release them. They then, I suppose, fly to other pine trees and infect them with the virus, or something. The thought seems to be that this will undermine the “Monopoly Capitalist” economy and pave the way for communist world control. Maybe I’m just cynical, but to me it sounds like the most absurd plan in the history of plans.

At least there’s only one more book in this series. I am now reading Poul Anderson’s Fire Time, and enjoying it.

Finally, Killer Pine did have one wonderful small section… actually just one really good word, but it did make me laugh over lunch, so I will share it with you all: (click for bigger)

I finished Niven’s Neutron Star today at lunch. It’s such good work, a collection of his early short fiction, all of it based in the “known space” future history series for which he’s very well known. I’d never read this book before, but I’d probably read about 3/4 of the stories in it, because they’ve been so heavily anthologized. One of the stories, The Soft Weapon, was even made into an episode of the animated Star Trek series. Larry Niven’s writing, especially his early work, can be loosely categorized as “hard science fiction”. That is, SF where the emphasis is on the science more than the fiction. Such stories generally revolve around a particular scientific principle and explore the implications of that principle on the characters. For example, the titular story in the collection is about how important it is to take account of the tidal pseudo-forces surrounding an object as small and as dense as a neutron star. The only problem with these older works is that they’re so famous and have been so influential in the field that the tropes he introduced have become commonplace and in some cases, cliched. You have to read some of them with a sense of history.

I’m now about 80 pages into the sequel to Cold War in a Country Garden, Killer Pine. Bleh.