Arctangential

I finished Dinosaur Warriors last night. It was ok.

This book was basically the same as the others in the series — our group of heros gets in trouble, then escape, then get in trouble again, while moving through alternate histories and parts of the world. Their first jaunt takes them to a land of rocky crags inhabited by sentient pteranodons called “saorods”, from whom they escape by turning the sacred corpses of their elders into hang-gliders. This gets them to an Aztec city, in an alternate history where Cortez’ party was killed by an unknown disease before they were able to subjugate the natives.

There’s not a lot else to say about this book so I’ll just talk about one little bit of laziness oft employed by the author — translation. As the party travels around from time to time and place to place, they run into lots of people (as well as intelligent dinosaurs) who don’t speak English. In the first book, much business was made of language barriers — one character, Jenny, learns the language of the dinosaur people over probably half of the book. It isn’t easy — the language is tripartite, with an auditory component, a gestural one and an olfactory one. At first Jenny has a lot of trouble communicating with them, being aware of only the auditory aspect of the language — later she discovers the gestural one as well and is able to imitate it enough to make herself understood, although complaint is often made that she misses the proper smells to go with what she’s saying.

As the books went on however, they visited many other peoples; the Japanese and Native American from the 3rd book, and the saorods and Aztecs from this one — instead of having to deal with the translation issues, the author will just state that, for example, Jenny took some Japanese classes in high school and as such is able to communicate with the Japanese warriors — the party also includes a super-intelligent albino ape called Mundo, who is able to speak fluently with anyone they encounter by reading their minds. I understand that he needs some way to get around communication issues when the story is moving between so many different cultures, but it’s handled in such a perfunctory way in these later books that it feels very much like a cop-out.

Anyways, I’m now reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Better in the Dark, yet another story about the effete vampire “St. Germaine”.

Also, we’re moving on Monday, so I will probably be offline from Sunday night until Tuesday afternoon or so, assuming that the cable company doesn’t screw up my Internet connection too terribly.

I finished The Puppet Masters yesterday. What a great book.

This book comes really from the pinnacle of Heinlein’s career — it was after he’d stopped writing the juveniles, but before he’d gone entirely off the deep end, so it’s an intelligent, logical adventure story that’s told simply and without gratuitous sex-with-clones and other such silliness.

The basic idea here is that there are these slug-like aliens which can “ride” a human and completely control their body, with no possibility of resistance. These aliens come to Earth en masse and start covertly taking people over, starting with a saucer crash near Des Moines. (Iowa). The story centers around a man who works as a kind of super secret agent working for a shadow agency known only as The Section, he is among the team who firsts discovers the invasion and ends up being integral to the efforts which finally (mostly) save the Earth from in the invaders. He’s the archetypal Heinlein hero — quick to action, quick-thinking, strong, wise, brave, I’m sure he could compose a sonnet or set a bone, too.

What’s so good about this book is that even though the main character is so smart and generally apt, he isn’t perfect. He is captured once (and almost a second time) by the invading aliens, he allows his wife (and fellow agent) to be captured and almost kills her in rescuing her. He generally does the best he can with what he knows at a given time, but he’s not omniscient or all-powerful, and he does make mistakes. Heinlein also doesn’t pave the way for the heroes — no solution is easy, and they have to think through all the implications of a plan of action. For example, when they find a method for killing the aliens, the next chapter isn’t all of them sitting around toasting to their victory — instead they have to figure out a vector for delivering the poison to the aliens, how to get it to them all before they get suspicious, and how to care for the humans after the aliens have all died. Heinlein just sets up the situation and lets it play itself out, not taking shortcuts or changing things to make life simpler for his heroes.

Anyways, it’s a great read. The movie version isn’t terrible either.

Now I’m reading the 4th dinosaur book, Stephen Leigh’s Dinosaur Warriors.

I finished Dinosaur Samurai at lunch today. It was surprisingly good.

First off, as absurd as the title is, it does make sense in a way. See, the basic idea here is that this time machine has exploded and created all of these rifts in time — this is how the humans ended up in the dinosaur world. Earlier novels had mentioned that samurai had come into the dinosaur as well, so this novel takes very little time in getting our heroes, now united, to all visit the samurai world. Of course, once they’re there, the books has almost nothing to do with dinosaurs, but I think they had to keep with the naming scheme. I personally think they should have called it Dinosaurs and Samurai, but that’s just because of my musical taste.

So, the world they enter into isn’t actually feudal japan — it’s some weird alternate history America where the Japanese are making steps toward colonizing the continent, like 15th century America with the Europeans. Our heroes meet up with the Japanese colonizers and with their Native neighbors, get in trouble, escape, and then go back to the dinosaur time, managing to deactivate the portal between the two in the process.

This isn’t literature, but it was a fun book, and I think the addition of Miller as a coauthor really helped here. Miller is known for doing a lot of shared-universe stuff, which means he is good at looking at other peoples stories and picking out interesting details upon which to elaborate. Without his input, I think this series would have just spiraled into a bunch of boring bullshit. Not that I don’t think it will eventually — there are 4 more books to go and there really isn’t much more to be said about this situation. Maybe they’ll surprise me.

Now I’m reading Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Master; I’ve read it before and it’s a super-great book.

I finished The Liar and the Hippopotamus yesterday afternoon. Actually, I finished The Liar a few days ago, and I just finished The Hippopotamus yesterday afternoon, but since they’re both in the same edition I’m treating them as one book.

Anyways, they were both pretty good books. Very British. The Liar reminded me somewhat of the YA Roald Dahl books I read as a kid, except with a lot more homosexuality. It had a kind of tacked-on thriller-type ending, but overall I enjoyed it. The Hippopotamus was about an old poet sent to investigate some strange goings on at the country house of a friend of his, although the main themes of the book are art & poetry.

One note — this book is a British edition (as Fry isn’t an amazingly popular author in the US and I was having trouble finding local printings), and it’s terrible. The printing is so sloppy that I had trouble telling the difference between “h” and “d” multiple times, and it was quite eye straining. The covers are also pretty low-quality, something that gets more of a problem for a book this long, as you tend to hold it more and longer than a shorter book.

I’m now reading the 3rd dinosaur book, Dinosaur Samurai by Stephen Leigh and a new coauthor – John J. Miller. It’s not bad.

Meg and I went to Portland a few weeks ago. I’ve been incredibly lazy about posting about it, but now I am doing so, so there you go.

We arrived Saturday night and basically went straight to bed once we got into the hotel, although not until discovering that there is nowhere open to eat in Portland after 10pm.

Sunday morning we got up and went to the zoo. I took pictures at the zoo. They are in a Flickr set.

Some amusing zoo anecdotes — in the petting zoo area there was a goat who I guess was having a bad day — he kept going around to all the other goats, rearing up on his hind legs, and then bapping them with his head. He did it over and over again and eventually the other goats got tired of it and started turning around when he got near to them. Eventually he gave up on the head-banging game and jumped up onto a barrel and started bleating. It was cute.

A little bit before that, we were over by the elephants, where two older female elephants were hanging around together. One of them was sniffing around on the ground for food and came across a pile of elephant poop. Everybody was yelling at her not to sniff the poop (because poop smells bad), but she didn’t listen, and not only did she sniff the poop, she jammed her trunk right into it. She immediately stepped back and tried to shake the poop off of her trunk, but to no avail. Then, she turned and wiped the poop on the other elephant’s leg, then she walked away. The other elephant didn’t seem to notice, but everybody else thought it was pretty funny.

Anyways, after the zoo we went to Powell’s and I spent quite a bit too much money on books. I actually wasn’t super-impressed with Powell’s — it’s ok, it’s certainly big, but it doesn’t really have any kind of transcendentally spectacular selection, and the prices weren’t anything to write home about. I think the kind of bookstore I like are big rambling shops like The Strand or the late, great Avenue Victor Hugo, full of wonderfully musty old book smell and books double- and triple-stacked on shelves with barely enough room to stand between them. Powell’s was just like a big Border’s with some used books in it.

The next day we looked around the Pearl District, a kind of bohemian neighborhood in northern downtown, with lots of ultra-modern furniture galleries, some cool cooking shops and other stuff like that. Afterward we walked around the Pioneer Square area in the middle of downtown, almost saw a movie, and then decided we were tired from too much walking.

The next morning we drove home and chilled out. It was a good vacation.