Arctangential

So, I’m here. I’m going to do a little combined book/travel update here and it’s gonna be real long and super dull, so nobody will read it and I will put it behind a cut.

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I’m shutting down my computer now, in preparation for moving to Seattle tomorrow. I won’t be checking email or anything like that so if anybody needs anything, then… well, tough.

Goodbye my internet friends.

I finished The Sword Smith last night. I think overall it was pretty good.

It’s of the school of what I sometimes called “realistic fantasy” — that is, it has fantasy elements, such as dragons, but it is presented in a more-or less realistic and down-to-earth manner. The story’s about a master smith named Limper, fleeing from a king whom he feels has been misusing his talents. He’s traveling with a young dragon named Nargri; in this world, dragons are generally human sized, omnivores, and peaceful, living in underground burrows, raising crops in mountaintop greenhouses and mining precious metals. Nargri is a baby dragon whose care Limper has accepted from her mother — he promised to show Nargri the upper world and keep her safe. Their adventures are somewhat episodic, ranging from familial arguments in a small farm, being trapped in a den of insane dragons, and being captured by a group of “trolls” (actually just a tribe of Neanderthals in an isolated forest). The action is generally interesting, the characterizations are well developed and generally interesting. I really liked the fantasy world without an overwrought melodramatic plot line, too. I’m going to keep my eyes open for more of Arnason’s work.

I’m now reading Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, the second of his Ender Wiggin books.

I finished Ender’s Game the other day. I’ve been too busy to write about it until now though. It was very good and I enjoyed it a lot.

The basic plot is pretty straightforward: the Earth has been attacked by alien invaders twice, and is now preparing for the third invasion. Part of this preparation is to train a commander who can coordinate the fleets effectively; a very difficult task. The government has been testing children as young as 3, looking for one who can rise to this challenge, and they find one — Ender Wiggin. The book mostly details his training, which isn’t about teaching him concepts of tactics or anything like that – he’s so smart that he doesn’t need to learn that at all. The training is all about isolating Ender, teaching him how to use people, breaking him down to build him back up. His natural genius allows him to pass all the trials and tests put before him, gain command of the fleet and eventually win defeat — although of course he isn’t entirely happy about this when it happens.

I only have 2 major complaints about the book — first, all of the children in the book talked just like adults. I understand that basically every child in the book is supposed to be incredibly intelligent and that they’re all in pretty extreme circumstances, but the dialogue coming from them is just absolutely out of place, especially in the instances where they’re being very emotional. Card just doesn’t seem to have a great deal of empathy when it comes to writing for children. Second, there’s this bizarre subplot involving Ender’s older brother and sister as professional political bloggers / trolls in a bid to gain control of the world. Card’s use of a global computer network in a book written in 1977 is impressively prescient, but this subplot is just entirely meaningless in relation to the rest of the book that I honestly have no idea why it was included at all. The last chapter of the book is also quite far-fetched and doesn’t really fit in with what had gone, although I understand now that it was written that way to segue into the sequel, Speaker for the Dead.

My next book is Eleanor Arnason’s The Sword Smith.

I finished The Humanoids last night. It was pretty good — kind of dated, as 50′s sci-fi tends to be these days, but with some very interesting ideas and very serviceable writing. The plot is pretty wide-ranging: it starts out on a planet far from Earth, in the far future, where a scientist, Dr. Clay Forester, is working on a weapon to help humanity defeat an alien menace with his assistant, Frank Ironside. His work is soon interrupted by a strange teleporting girl and a man who calls himself a philosopher. Soon, robots (the titular “Humanoids”) come to his planet and announce that they’re going to protect all humans from any kind of danger. Of course this means that they give people drugs to revert them to childhood so they won’t be sad, removing all tools of scientific research and other dangerous items such as alcohol, tobacco and sugar. Dr. Forester teams up with the philosopher and his group of paraphysical compatriots to battle these robots. At this point the book opens up a lot — they travel to ancient supernova remnants, extragalactic planets, even other galaxies.

One thing I really liked about the book was its dark tone. As the book progresses, Dr. Forester has more and more things taken from him — first his research, then his wife, then his allies one by one, and finally his own self. He has some epiphanies that allow him to harness more and more powerful energies, eventually letting him explode planets with his mind and travel billions of light years in an instant. The thing is that as soon as he really gets the hang of these powers, he discovers that not only have his enemies discovered them as well, they’ve done so before him and have reached a much higher level of proficiency with them. As soon as he determines a way to defeat them, they not only stymie his efforts but he is only barely able to escape each time. In the end, he is captured and put in a 50 year long readjustment process while the Humanoids build a giant central computer for control of all humans. The last line of the book is:

Within him, something like a scream was stifled. He turned with a smile of relief to go aboard with White.

I’m now reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I like it a lot.

In other news, I took an amusing picture and thought I’d share it:

I finished reading Monstrous Regiment at dinner tonight. Pratchett continues to be a pretty good writer, but he’s gone back to the well so many times with this series that I just think there’s nothing left for him to write about, and it makes the books really quite boring.

The story is about a group of soldiers in the army of a small country which is at war with another nearby small country. They start off small, being just a bunch of country bumpkins joining up to get away from the crappy town in which they’re living. They go on, of course, to become heroes and save their country. Not because they have superior military acumen or anything, but because they’re honest, forthright, courageous and they do the right thing and follow their hearts, etc, etc. It’s an ok premise, and he handles it fairly well, but the story is really bogged down by all the little Pratchettisms that he feels the need to cram into his book.

For example, in past Discworld books, he has discussed the concept of the “clacks towers” — linked semaphore towers that allow fast transmission of information between cities. They’ve become more embellished as the series has progressed and in fact one of the political issues in this book is that one of the warring nations has broken the clacks network. In the book, he introduces the idea that people have learned to transmit images over the clacks — and he goes into great detail about what mechanism they use to transmit the data using just human-powered blinking lights, etc. It’s kind of cute in the way that it parallels the development of the fax machine in our own world, but it slows down the story immensely and really isn’t very funny at all. I used to enjoy that kind of aside in his writing, but he’s just running out of interesting things to aside about.

I’ve really liked his recent non-Discworld novels and I wish he would start writing more of them so he can escape from this stupid world with which he’s painted himself into a corner.

My book now is Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids. I know nothing about it going in.