Arctangential

I finished Methuselah’s Children just now over lunch. What a great book — Heinlein at the top of his career, with some really startling and inventive science fiction.

The idea is that there are these “Howard Families” — groups of people who have been selectively bred for centuries to be longer-lived. The project started in the late 19th century, simply finding people with long-lived and healthy grandparents and “suggesting” that they marry other such people. By 2175, when the novel takes place, there are 100,000 people in these families, with an expected lifespan of about 200. They live in secret alongside normal society, faking their age not unlike the immortals in Higlander.

As the novels begin, their secret has been exposed to the populace which begins almost immediately to shed its civilization and demand to know their method for longevity. This is the brilliant part of the story; of course the Howards have this long lifespan, but they cannot share it with those around them, although those people will stop at nothing to get it. It’s a great quandary and Heinlein handles it very well, with a satisfying and clever ending.

The only problem I have with this book is that it introduces Lazarus Long, a common character is Heinlein’s later “crazy period” novels. In one later book (I forget the title), Long clones himself as a woman, gets her pregnant and then ends up having sex with himself/his children/his clones/etc. The whole thing is incredibly pointless and it makes me annoyed every time Lazarus Long shows up in any story, even a good one like Methuselah’s Children.

I’m now reading Louise Brooks, by Barry Paris.

I finished Treacherous Awakenings over lunch. Frankly, I don’t want to talk about it, because it was horrible.

I’m now reading Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children, which is quite good (unsurprisingly).

So I’m finally unpacked. It’s been almost exactly a month since the movers came. Being a big giant nerd, I for course took pictures of what I felt was a fairly impressive amount of boxes, and other crap, so I will share them.

In Flickr.

Some of this stuff I’m going to keep, some of it I’m going to try to sell on eBay or give away to the goodwill, and the rest will probably yet make it into the trash. Should be a fun few weeks. I’ll probably post a bunch of eBay links in here too, so keep your eyes open.

I finished Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary yesterday at lunch.

This is a pretty unique kind of book; it’s basically just a bunch of entries from Bob Balaban’s diary from the time that he was working on Close Encounters, talking about his days on set, and those surrounding it. I bought it because I’m a big fan of Balaban’s from the Christopher Guest movies, like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, and his humor and intelligence certainly show through here. He has a very dry wit and makes some very clever observations, especially in terms of his own feelings of inadequacy working with Truffaut.

Another fun thing about this book is that it gives on a look back into history, or at least 1977. For example, at one point Balaban is talking about the inside of Richard Dreyfuss’ dressing room:

He has about six different Pong games here, from “Battleship” to “Tank” to “Gunfighter.”

At another point, he mentions that a friend of Spielberg’s named George has come down tot he set and is chatting with some people. George tells Balaban about this movie he’s working on, Star Wars and Balaban says that it sounds like it will be pretty good. Very cool book — I’d like to find some others like it, but I don’t know if anything like this has been written before or since. I’m sure no more will ever be done — this is pretty much subsumed by the mass of special features you find on any DVD nowadays.

I’ve now started the final (yay) book in the Rifts (boo) trilogy by Adam Chilson, Treacherous Awakenings. I hope I can get through it without too many embolisms.

I finished Rifts: Deception’s Web by Adam Chilson today. The only good thing I can say about it is that it was marginally less excruciatingly terrible than the previous book in the series. In fact, that’s all I really want to say about it, and instead I am going to write a little bit about its setting, the Rifts universe.

I bought these books because I enjoyed, in my school days, playing the role-playing game they’re based on, Rifts. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a pretty immature RPG (as these things go), but it had an interesting and fairly unique back story, and lots of fun guide books to read and collect, and so I enjoyed it. I won’t apologize for that.

The story is that, at some point in the past (our future), there was a war, leading to a massive, unilateral nuclear assault. 90% of the world’s population was killed in just minutes. This just happened to happen at a time of great celestial alignment (or something), and so all of the spirits of the dead at that moment funneled into the ley lines (zones of mystical energy) that gird the planet. Usually these lines are just areas of slightly increased magical energy, and where they meet are only slightly more powerful. However, all of the magical energy of the spirits rushing into them causes them to flare hugely, pouring cast amounts of magical energy into the world. At the nexuses, the magical energy is sufficient to tear holes in reality, letting beings from other dimensions through and onto Earth. These are called rifts.

The RPG (and the books) take place about 200 years “post-rifts”, so things have settled down a bit since the tumultuous events. What they get from this setting is a really interesting melange of different genres — there’s futuristic weaponry, robots, vehicles and powered armor. There are mutants, psychics, aliens and being from other dimensions. There’s magic, wizards, witches, dragons, orcs and all the other things you’d expect in a fantasy setting. The great difference in setting also allowed for some varied genre concepts — there are giant cities run by totalitarian governments, small farmsteads living in a lush and magical realm and blasted desertscapes where people fight tooth and nail just for water to survive.

Anyways, this Chilson clown uses all of these settings, he just does so incredibly poorly. My book now is called Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary, by Bob Balaban. It’s great.

When I was a kid I read a book and I don’t recall any details but the people in it set up a post office on an otherwise more or less uncivilized island and they decided it would be a good idea to make it so the glue on the stamps tasted really good but the problem was that the people would just buy the stamps and lick off the glue and then return the stamps and for some reason the people running the post office felt that they were obligated to take the stamps back and so they lost a ton of money and eventually had to make the glue taste very bad which meant that nobody wrote any letters so they went out of business and I don’t recall anything else really about the book except that the whole situation seemed very stupid to me and I would have just told people that they couldn’t return licked stamps for a refund and it really upset me and clearly still does to this day.

I finished The Stars in Shroud earlier today. It was real real good.

It’s actually hard to tell if I enjoyed this book because of its inherent quality, or just because I’m on the rebound from that execrable Rifts book, but I think it was definitely above average. The story takes place in the future — humanity is united under a single leadership and lives in general harmony. There are human colonies all over, a vast interstellar community of (more or less) peace and tranquility. Arrive the Quarn, an enigmatic alien race. Before anybody really knows what’s going on, they’ve managed to infect the society itself with a kind of emotional virus, causing people to detach from the community and become more and more reclusive, the worst cases digging themselves into tiny holes, called “Slots” and refusing any outside contact. This insanity is passed from person to person by contact and, slowly but surely, is destroying the empire. The story follows a former Fleet Captain named Ling, one of the few who is immune to the disease, as he encounters the beginning of the outbreak and follows it through to its end.

Benford is actually an astrophysicist, but he doesn’t write the kind of pure hard SF that academics tend to put out — this book is very spiritual and poetic, with lots of good characterizations, something you almost never see from people like Forward or Clement. Of course, Benford’s scientific bent does shine through many times — there’s a beautiful sequence where Ling is travelling near a neutron star, and he fears the “crunch of electrons overcoming their own Fermi pressure”. Very cool stuff.

I’m now reading the second in Adam Chilson’s Rifts trilogy — Rifts: Deception’s Web. At least this one is shorter than the first one.

(If people don’t know what Fermi pressure is, let me know and I can email you a short explanation. It’s pretty neat. If enough people are curious I suppose I could do a post on it.)

I finished Rifts: Sonic Boom by Adam Chilson last night before I went to sleep. Wow.

In a break from tradition, I won’t discuss here the shitty writing, the cliched characterizations, the misplaced and decidedly unfunny attempts at humor, the stilted dialogue, the disjointed narrative and the complete lack of any coherent plot. Frankly, all that stuff is pretty much par for the course with this kind of thing, it’s just that they are all present in this example, and all in before unheard-of volumes. In any case, what I really want to talk about is the horrible quality of the actual production of the book itself.

To its credit, the book would probably pass through a spell checker without any errors. That’s about where I’m no longer able to say nice things, though. The book is rife with stupid typos — “it’s/its” mistakes, missing words, transposed words, and even missing lines. At one point, someone must have decided that the word “rift” should be capitalized (it being part of the book’s title) and did a global search and replace, causing all occurrences of that word in the book to begin with a big R, even when the word was not being used as part of the title. This action also caused words like “drift” to become “dRift”. Another fine gaffe had a machine being “altared” in order that it might perform an alternate function. Or should I say altarnate?

Oh yeah, the cover fell off the book too. Cheap binding glue.

I’m now reading Gregory Benford’s The Stars in Shroud, which is really quite good. Thankfully.

I finished The War Machine today at dinner. It actually wasn’t bad.

I remember why I bought it — I’m a huge fan of Roger Macbride Allen’s, and at one point I made it a point to get all of his books. The thing is that this is book 3 of some kind of interminable series of books, and the rest are just by David Drake, who is totally horrible. So, I decided to just get the one and read it, and say the hell to my rules for once.

Turns out to have been a good idea. The book very much stands on its own and is actually pretty interesting. I expect that the only reason Drake’s name is on the cover is because he thought up the initial setting, and then Allen took over from there. This is evident in the plot structure — the characters are roughly introduced in the main part of the galaxy and almost immediately traipse off to some outlying areas to deal with a planet nobody has ever mentions and an enemy nobody’s ever heard of before. Allen just wrote his own story and use the names of the good guys and bad guys from Drake’s series.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story, and the truth is revealed very intricately in different layers, so I can’t say too much. There’s some great detective stuff, some very interesting space battles and it’s generally pretty well written. The love interest stuff is pretty poorly handled, but that’s not why I read pulp SF anyways. It’s good and I would recommend it.

Now I’m reading a book called Rifts: Sonic Boom by Adam Chilson. It is, so far, indescribably terrible. Here’s the first line:

“Searing walls of incendiary destruction rolled away from the point of detonation.”

It hasn’t improved.

I finished Route 666 at lunch yesterday. It was ok.

It’s just a collection of short stories set in Games Workshop’s “Dark Future” universe, which is your typical post-holocaust wasteland setting, featuring roving motorcycle gangs, out-of-control biological and cybernetic engineers, and all the other tropes you’ll recognize from Mad Max and other related genre pieces. Of course, the cool thing about this universe is that there was no holocaust. People aren’t recovering from any kind of great war, it’s just the natural result of societal erosion and decay. GW books tend to be depressing in that way. I’ve written about that before.

None of the specific stories are really worth mentioning though.

Now I’m reading War Machine, by David Drake and Roger Macbride Allen. It’s part 3 of a series, and it’s really not very good at all. I have no idea why I’m reading it, really. Oh well.