Arctangential

I finished Tunnel in the Sky last night. It’s a really, really good book. One of Heinlein’s funnest juvenile novels, an one I enjoy reading every time I pick it up.

The story begins in a typically Heinleinian society — people have to pass a basic survival course (probably among other things, but that isn’t really fleshed out) in order to accepted into any of the “major jobs”, like teaching, being a lawyer, or leading a colonization effort. The final exam in the course is having to survive alone on a hostile planet. The students are given no information about the environment they’re going to, and have only 24 hours to prepare as best as they can. The students are then sent through a kind of teleportation door, and left to survive for between 4 and 10 days. Those who don’t die and are able to come to the exit in time, pass the course. This is pretty harsh, but it’s very typical of Heinlein’s philosophy on how people should be educated.

What happens in the book, is that something goes wrong. The exit never appears, and the students are left to fend for themselves on a wild alien planet for, I think it turns out to be 17 months or so. So what began as one kind of social commentary quickly turns to another; instead of discussing how best to manage education and responsibility in a high-tech society, it becomes a discussion of how to run a small, non-technical society in the absence of even the very basics, like paper or even shelter. The kids eventually band together, and do a pretty good job of survival, with some hitches along the way. I think Heinlein’s understanding of how human beings behave isn’t entirely in sync with reality, but it still ends up being a pretty enjoyable read.

I’m now reading the third and final Atta Octavia Clemens book, A Candle for d’Artagnan, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It’s the last book of Yarbro’s that I have, and I’ll be glad to be done with them, really.

I finished Crusader’s Torch last night. It was ok, I guess.

Like Yarbro’s other books, this is a very accurate and rather dry piece of historical fiction, with the main character being a vampire for no reason. I won’t harp too much on the fact that her vampirism once again doesn’t actually affect the plot at all, except to help us modern readers identify with her more. As usual, the story is about this vampire wanting to get out of a certain place and being unable to. Unlike the previous book in this series, instead of being stuck in one city for the entire book, it’s more of a road story; she wants to get from Tyre, an unpleasant place to be during the crusades, to Rome, her home. She has to deal with the usual religious bureaucrats, misogyny and in this case the issues relating to the crusades, on her travel to Rome. Also as usual, we’re introduced to a disease which is a mystery to those in the book but it recognizable by modern readers as porphyria, which afflicts Octavia’s traveling partner, getting them both branded as lepers. She eventually gets to Rome.

One thing I’ve enjoyed about these books is that they don’t fall into the trap which I’ve seen in a lot of historical fiction: that of having the main characters invent anachronistic devices. I don’t know how many times the lazy author of historical fiction has had their characters escape from a sticky situation by having them suddenly come up with the idea for the compass, or Greek fire, or gunpowder. Harry Harrison’s “Hammer and Cross” books were particularly bad in this respect, but I’ve seen it in a lot of other places as well. Yarbro does use Octavia’s great age (I think 500 years) as a way to have her know a lot about medicine or horses or things like that, but she never has her inventing the linked list in order to escape from a jail.

I’m now reading Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky. This is a good book.

I didn’t sleep again last night. It happens to me less these days, and it tends to take more and more extenuating circumstances to occur, but it does still happen. At least I’m still able to more or less function as normal after a nuit blanche, but I’m not sure if that’s a testament to my lack of need for sleep, or my generally low level of energy and competence in normal circumstances.

Anyways, here’s what happened: Yesterday afternoon I went to a kind of little party on a boat. It was one of those small yacht kind of deals, I think about 40″ long, with a motor and a toilet and a fridge, so kind of like a small and cramped floating living room. It was fun tooling around on the sound, and the company was good, but I got a little bit seasick and so wasn’t able to enjoy any of the food on the trip. As a result of this, on the way home (around 10pm), I stopped at a Jack in the Box and got a burger meal thing. Through some miscommunication, I ended up with a very large cup of diet coke with my order, and through stupidity, I drank it all, around 10:30pm.

I didn’t even start feeling tired until about 4:30am. When I did finally lay down, my bed began to gently rock as soon as I closed my eyes, and I started feeling a little bit queasy again. This might have been attributed to lingering seasickness, or it might have had more to do with the 99 cent “Monster Taco” that I added to my Jack in the Box order. In any case, I gave up around 5am and got back up. I left my house around 7:45 to head to work.

I saw a lot of things this morning that I don’t usually see during my regular commute, around 9 or 10am. I stopped into the local Denny’s for some country-fried steak (a manly and super-American breakfast), only to be seated at a table next to a group of 15 Buddhist monks, ranging in age from about 60 to 10 or so. They seemed very excited to be eating at Denny’s, taking lots of group pictures and discussing the menu quite animatedly in, I guess, Buddhish. I didn’t notice what all they ordered, as I didn’t want to stare (at least not any more than I already was).

I saw aggressive asshole drives on the roads, in much larger concentration than usual. After I left the Denny’s, I rounded the corner on a road I don’t take very often, only to find the lane I was in was closed for construction about 5 feet in front of me. There was a gap to my left, so I turned on my blinker and started to move over, but a fire engine yellow Nissan Xterra felt the need to zoom up and close the gap before I was able to get all the way in. I almost hit the traffic cones delimiting the construction zone. This is the kind of thing I expected driving in Boston (there, I wouldn’t have used my blinker), but it’s usually pretty rare in the Seattle area. I think I’ll be avoiding the rush hour commute from now on.