Arctangential

I finished Contacting Aliens earlier today. It was real good — I enjoyed it a lot.

This book is just a companion piece to Brin’s Uplift series, so for people who haven’t read those books and who aren’t fans, it might not be as interesting. In fact, I’m not really going to discuss it much here — it’s essentially just a bunch of drawing of the various alien races described in the books, along with short descriptions of those races, their origins and behaviors. Certain more important races have longer sections on their societies, strategic importance to humanity and other things like that. Instead, I’ll talk a little bit about the universe of the Uplift books.

The Uplift books are, in order, Sundiver, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore and Heaven’s Reach. They describe a galactic society that is billions of years old and it kept alive by a complex array of rules and institutions all centered around the idea of uplift — that is, the bringing of new species to sentience, through breeding, genetic manipulation and education. Uplift is the central drive for all progress in this intergalactic society — any new species works as hard as it can to prove itself, so that it might be granted licenses to take care of certain planets, and to uplift any new species found. They then work hard to make their client species as good as they can, so that they will in turn be granted uplift license and continue the clan. It’s a very clever self-perpetuating system that works to create as much intelligent life as possible in the universe.

Now of course, the humans are special — they’re discovered by this intergalactic alliance about 200 years in our future, and are met with universal shock and disbelief. Humans don’t have Patrons, they’re “Wolflings”: a species which has raised itself up out of pre-sapience and not destroyed itself in the process. This kind of thing simply doesn’t happen, and most of the members of the councils want the humans to be “adopted” by another patron species, to be properly integrated into society. However, there’s a problem — it turns out that the humans have, on their own, begun the process of uplift on dolphins and chimpanzees. That is, in addition to not having patrons of their own, they in fact are patrons themselves. Because of this, and so other luck involving powerful sympathetic alien species, the humans are granted membership in their own, new clan, and join the ranks of some very prestigious alien species, more or less out of nowhere.

This is a great premise for a series of books, and I think Brin is a great author. I’d recommend the series to anybody who is a fan of science fiction. The best thing is that everything I’ve described here is just backstory to the actual novels — they’re about even more outlandish things: the discovery of ancient (many billions of years old) alien bodies, sparking widespread war between alien clans and even natural cataclysms of intergalactic proportion. It’s kickass stuff.

Anyways, now I’m reading the final “Privateers & Gentlemen” book, Cat Island by Jon Williams.

I finished The Macedonian 2 nights ago. It was pretty good overall.

This book broke a lot of new ground for the series — it’s the first one to follow a character we’ve already met: in this case, Favian Markham, protagonist of the previous book, The Raider. Secondly, the story spent more than half of its length on ground, not in a boat. The others have very much been focused on sailing and being on the sea, with occasional brief interludes on land, but that’s it. This book begins with Favian’s trial for the events ending the previous book, then follows him in some political dealings with secessionists and his mistress, his onetime fiancee and some British spies, etc. It was pretty interesting, but not very typical of the series. It’s clear that Williams has a very good grasp of the politics of the time, and it was quite educational for me, someone with little to no knowledge of America during this period.

Anyways, after some political posturing, Favian ends up in a rebuilt ship that he’d helped capture at the beginning of the previous novel; the titular Macedonian. He takes it under somewhat questionable circumstances, but plans a great commercial raid in the Indian Ocean, hoping that if he’s able to inflict massive economic damage on the relatively unprotected shipping lines there, he’ll be forgiven for more or less stealing a ship. He just barely escapes the British blockade and then luckily is able to sneak up on a British ship at night, taking it unawares and capturing not just the ship but something much more valuable — the code books, log books, and military communications carried by it. Learning a frightening fact from the new intelligence, he gives up his previous mission and races back to the US to inform the Government of an imminent and potentially crippling attack. And then…

Well, at that point the book ends — this is the other way in which it largely differs from the previous books, ending in a cliffhanger. The others have all ended fairly neatly, not with pat ending necessarily, but tidily. I think Williams had, at this point, begun to run out of ideas and was kind of grasping for things to write books about. There’s only one more book in the series, and I haven’t read it yet, but I suspect that it won’t be as good as this one, and further that it’s a good thing that it’s the last book.

I’m now reading David Brin’s Contacting Aliens. It’s really good — in fact I’m almost done with it.

The Greek word for tuberculosis is phthisis. Damn.

I finished Out of the House of Life yesterday afternoon — it took me a while because, frankly, the book is pretty dull.

The book is about Madelaine de Montalia, a French antiquarian who also happens to be a vampire, but this fact is not actually all that important in the book. The book is billed as “historical horror”, but it’s really just a simple drama, all about the lives, loves and betrayals of a group of European antiquarians excavating in Egypt in the 1820s. The narrative is pretty complicated — there are lots of characters to keep track of, most of which have long and complicated British or French names, the rest having shorter but more confusing Egyptian names. Personal relations are difficult to track, what with not being sure of who is who, and also with part of the story being told in periodic epistolary passages which are used to inject information and viewpoints from outside of Egypt, whence the story never strays. Each section also begins with a letter from the Count Saint-Germain (a recurring character for the author), who also happens to be a vampire, recounting stories of his time in Egypt, thousands of years ago. These stories are actually a lot more interesting than the main story, but they’re annoying short and distressingly unrelated to the main plot line.

The basic idea here is that the head of the expedition is a Frenchman (whom I thought of simply as “B”) is kind of an asshole — he takes credit for all of his underlings’ discoveries, sells ancient artifacts for political advantage, etc. As the story moves forward, he gets inexplicably more and more disgusting, starting off by making advances towards Madelaine, then threats. It’s intimated that he tries to kill her, first with a scorpion and later with a cobra. By the end of the book he’s a complete ogre, raping and impregnating the daughter of a local magistrate, luring Madelaine and her friend into a trap where they’re shot at — her friend dies saving her, and still she almost dies. While she’s holed up in a cave, this B guy shows up again to kill her, for reasons unclear; luckily she’s a vampire, so she can stab him(?). The end.

It really seems like the author just wanted to write this story about infighting at an Egyptian dig, but felt that she needed to throw in her popular character and some other vampire crap to be more popular. She didn’t fool me though — I bought this book to fill in the “Y” section of my collection.

Now I’m reading The Macedonian, by Jon Williams, the 4th in his “Privateers and Gentlemen” series. It’s not bad.