Arctangential

I finished Blind Waves the night before last — it was very good.

The author, Steven Gould, has written some other novels that I enjoyed a lot: Jumper, about a boy who learns to teleport, and Wildside, about a boy and girl who find a time machine. As you might guess, both of those books were juveniles, and I’m fine with that, but I was pleasantly surprised when I found that Blind Waves was decidedly not a juvenile adventure. The story takes place some years in the future, when the ocean levels have risen by 100 feet, putting 90% of the populated centers of the world under water. This has caused an immigration crisis in the US, with refugees streaming in from all quarters and less and less land to house them. The government has passed a law greatly increasing the powers of the INS, which of course has led to abuses by the same group.

The story is about a woman, Patricia, who is a property owner and councilwoman of New Galveston, a floating city reclaimed from the now greatly enlarged Gulf of Mexico, and her relationship with a CID investigator named Thomas. She, while on a routine dive, discovers a ship, filled with bodies and shot at by weapons mainly used by INS patrol ships. Thomas arrives to investigate the issue and they’re quickly drawn into a mess of intrigue and and mystery. Of course, in the course of figuring out who sunk the ship and who has been trying to cover it up, they discover an even more sinister plot, etc etc etc. The story was much more mature than I was expect, but still very fun to read, and the author wove a lot of Shakespeare (mostly from Twelfth Night, as might be guessed from the title) into the language and texture of the piece. I liked it a lot.

I’m now reading the second of 3 Octavia Clemens books by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Crusader’s Torch. I hope it turns out ok.

I finished A Flame in Byzantium last night. It wasn’t so bad.

Like Yarbro’s other books, this is a competently written and very accurate piece of historical fiction, with a vampire thrown in inexplicably as the main character. In this case, it’s set in the Byzantine Empire, and follows Octavia Clemens as she’s forced to leave Rome and travel to Constantinople due to enemy attacks on the city. What follows is a whole bunch of double-dealing, subtle poisoning, dishonesty and betrayal. As before, the author plays up the misogyny of the Byzantine culture by having Clemens react to it as a strong woman from another culture — she isn’t allowed to own property, enter into agreements or even read official documents without the help of her (male) sponsor. She gets in trouble when that sponsor, a highly-ranked General, is targeted by elements within the administration to be dishonored and ruined.

The kinds of things they do are pretty unbelievable: slowly poisoning his wife, causing him months of grief and exhaustion as he tries to care for her in her failing condition; finding innocuous books in the General’s library and then adding them to the list of banned books (such as a book on the care of injured horses, added only because it’s written in Latin and therefore blasphemous); and “expunging” his most trusted lieutenants, banishing them and their families from the Empire and making it illegal to even mention their names. Octavia is dragged into the issues but is able, through her centuries-old wisdom, to defend herself from the attacks (at least for a while). In the end, most of protagonists end up alive but in bad shape, while most of the antagonists get their comeuppance off-screen (as it were).

Like I said, the book was OK but it really was kind of dull and I spent the whole time reading it being annoyed at the fact that the main character was a friggin’ vampire for reasons purely of plot convenience. Anyways, now I’m reading Steven Gould’s Blind Waves, a cool science fiction book about the future where ocean levels have risen 100 feet.

I finished Expanded Universe a few days ago. It was good; I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now.

This was actually a very exciting book. I’d thought at first that it was just a collection of Heinlein’s short fiction, which would be a good read, but I’ve read almost all of his output before, so it wouldn’t be anything new. However, it turns out that this is a collection of otherwise uncollected writings, some short fiction and a lot of essays and articles, with nearly all of it being stuff I’d never read anywhere else. New Heinlein is not something I find often, and I was thrilled when I realized what I’d found. The book isn’t only a collection of great Heinlein material; it’s also very well collected, with the works presented in chronological order, with fore- and afterwords by the author accompanying most pieces. It’s a really great way to look at Heinlein’s career as a whole, from his humble beginnings (he wrote his first short story to enter in a contest for $50, but ended up selling it to a magazine for $70), to the crazy ranting insanity of his dotage. I enjoyed the book immensely and would recommend it to any Heinlein fan.

Now I’m reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s A Flame in Byzantium. I have not enjoyed her books much in the past, and this is yet another whiny vampire book, but this one is turning out to not be that bad, so maybe there’s hope.