Meg and I went to the Woodland Park Zoo on Saturday, as it was a nice day out and we like to see the fancy animals. I took some pictures, which I feel pressed to share at Flickr.
I finished The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag yesterday morning. This book was called 6*H the first time I read it, since it’s a collection of 6 Heinlein short stories, but I don’t know why they changed the title. Anyways, it was real good, as you’d expect from Heinlein.
These stories aren’t very typical of his writing — they’re more metaphysical, more thoughtful, less scientific and more… I guess you’d say literary. That isn’t to say I didn’t like them — quite the contrary. It’s just that this collection is very much Heinlein’s Different Seasons: a collection of stories that don’t fit into the general theme of the rest of his work, but that he wrote anyways.
The first, titular story starts off remarkably enough, in a mode probably more familiar at the time of its writing than now — that of a wisecracking husband/wife private detective team. In this case, they’re hired by an amnesiac man to tail him and find out what he does during the days. The story quickly begins veering into less-comfortable territory, and eventually ends with a particularly Lovecraftian despair. I like this story more every time I read it.
The second story, The Man Who Traveled in Elephants, is a simple and wistful story about an afterlife like none that I’ve seen describe before or since. It’s very sweet.
The third, “All You Zombies” is a typically clever Heinlein time-travel logic puzzle, which I don’t want to go into depth about in case I spoil it. It’s the kind of thing I discussed here.
As for the fourth story, They, I’m going to have to assume that it was less cliched and less obvious when it was written.
The fifth story, Our Fair City, is a cute little tale about how an ace reporter topples a corrupt city’s government with the help of a sentient whirlwind named Kitty.
The last story is on of my favorites of his and shows up in lots of compilations — at some level, And He Built a Crooked House is to geometry as “All You Zombies” is to time travel. It’s only 15 pages long, but it does a wonderful job of exploring all the ramifications of building a house shaped like an unfolded tesseract which then accidentally collapses into the 4th dimension. It’s brilliant and funny, and a lot of fun to really think through.
I’m now reading Jon Williams’ second “Privateers and Gentlemen” novel, The Yankee.
I finished The Privateer last night.
I think it’s based on a role playing game — at least, there’s a logo on the cover that says “Privateers and Gentlemen”, and that logo also appears on some role-playing materials that I found on eBay while I was searching for these books. However, I’m not sure which came first, and it doesn’t really matter because I bought and read the book because of the author: Walter Jon Williams, writing as Jon Williams, a well-known and very well-respected science fiction author. I’m not sure if he’s writing pseudonymously because he didn’t want people to associate these books with his SF work, or what, but the books are as good as I’d expect, and it’s refreshing to hear his distinct voice in this very atypical genre.
Anyways, the story is about one Malachi Markham, a privateer for the US in the Caribbean in and about 1776 through 1778. the book can be seen in a few ways — some people might see it as a well-written and accurate description of revolutionary-era naval combat, which is it, but it can also be seen as a character drama. Markham goes through a full arc in the story — beginning as a new captain on a privateer ship, gaining wealth and notoriety after a number of battles won by luck and skill, falling in love, having his heart broken, becoming harder and harder, and finally dieing ignominiously while stupefied by the effects of his laudanum addiction. The battles serve both as punctuation and as commentary on the progress of his story and are not gratuitous at all.
Which brings me to one thing I really enjoyed a lot about the book — it managed to avoid all of the traps that so many period novels fall into. The characters aren’t against slavery in a modern way — they were morally opposed to it in a way that many people of the time were, but they accepted it as a fact of life. The author also makes good comment on the quality of medicine at the time; the doctor is constantly bleeding people who have been shot and prescribing all kinds of horrible tinctures for people to drink, constructed based on ideas about “miasmic vapours” and such nonsense. At first I assumed that this was the typical “make fun of past beliefs” kind of thing, and partially it is, but the tragedy is that the doctor’s single legitimately efficacious remedy – laudanum – is what ends up killing Malachi in the end.
I’m now reading The Unpleasant Profession of Johnathan Hoag, a collection of short fiction by Robert A. Heinlein. Very good stuff.
I finished Gulliver’s Travels on Friday night. I haven’t posted about it until now because I was in Vancouver with Meg all weekend, and only just recently got home.
Vancouver was fun — had some good food, saw some neat parts of the city, got to see some old friends and their 4 kids and just generally had a good time.
As far as the book goes, I enjoyed it. I think I missed some amount of the much-discussed political commentary, although some was pretty clear (and also fairly relevant still today, which is actually not particularly surprising).
I think I understand why movie and animated versions of the story generally omit the last 2 sections of the book — while equally interesting, well-written, etc, the second two sections have much more involved situations than the first two, and it would be pretty counter-productive to try to express those on the big screen. As everybody (I hope) already knows, the first 2 places Gulliver visits are are a land where everything is very small, and then a land where everything is very big. After that, he visits a land where people are effete intellectuals, eat food cut into geometrical shapes, and develop vast and useless machines. Later he visits a man who can conjure ghosts and spends a night talking to various famous historical figures. This kind of thing would be possible to put on a screen, but it would be orders of magnitude more difficult than just using some forced perspective and clever editing to show tons of really small people.
Anyways, it’s a good book. Go read it.
My book now is called The Privateer, book 1 in the 5-book Privateers & Gentlemen series by Jon Williams. So far I like it.