Book Reviews

Unless you're completing a Heinlein collection or are studying him this is not a book to buy. It does have some interesting history about RH but you can get that elsewhere or borrow this from a library.

The book reads like a poorer written version of his later work (it was his first novel) with an economics lesson thrown in (I skipped most of that). I had thought that Heinlein turned into a dirty old man in the 60's but this proves he started that way. Either he couldn't get that published until the late 60's or I was limited to my high school's library which wouldn't carry that sort of stuff.

Next is Nymphos of Rocky Flats, I'm half way through and so far so good.

This is Crichton's latest. It is on the subject of genetic engineering and set in the current time. It is basically a series of chapters about different characters who may or may not end up in the climax. A lot of characters. Very few whom you can care about. Mostly it is a fictional setting for Crichton's views about the state of genetic research today. He may be right but that hasn't translated into a good story.

If you like books with a lot of characters (I can't keep them straight) then this might be worth a loan from a library.

I'm starting Heinlein's _For Us, the Living_ which was written in 1939.

And I have _Nymphos of Rocky Flats_ by Acevedo. He is a Colorado author and Rocky Flats is an old military base in/near Denver.

This a collection of three short novels by Edmond Hamilton. It's pure adventure scifi, little merit in creativity, but man is it engaging reading. It's clear why this stuff sells. The physical writing is horrible, absolutely horrible, bad grammar, lots of excess words. Often I put the page down for a second I'm so annoyed. However, the characters are riveting, and you never know how the space mercenaries are going to get out of their current mess. If you want a plot structure for pulp scifi adventure stories, this book is perfect. It knows where to start and where to end.

I believe it's currently out of print though. I got this book from my brother, so it might be hard to find.

Is anyone interested in discussing the stories in the latest major magazines? I've got the March issues of F&SF and Asimov's, The April Analog, and the Winter 2006 Apex.

So far in F&SF I've read Magic with Thirteen-year Old Boys and The Devil Bats Will Be a Little Late This Year. Both are good fantasy reads. Devil Bats is an amusing read, not hilarious but fun. Magic is one of those stories that doesn't completely tell you what has happened but lets you infer the conclusion.

Any more comments on these or other stories?

Dave K

Anyone read this? Classic dark humor and hyperbole set in a war-time setting. Until recently, this kind of dark humor and satire could only be found in war-settings, as this was really the only plausible setting to unleash the truly gruesome of humanity. The books and movies of American Pscho and Fight Club are two examples of breaking out of this "war setting" constraint to examine Humanity's bestial underbelly.

It's a style of writing based on oppostites--set-up a central image of a character or idea or an event and then have the main character, Yossarian, believe the exact opposite of everything that was previously stated. It works beautifully.

Joseph Heller, the author, was never known for anything else, and some accused him of stealing the idea. Nonetheless, Catch-22 is worth the read.

This is a story of an intersteller colony ship that has problems in route to their destination and has to stop at a star for refueling. It is a great idea, somewhat along the E-ship idea that this group played with a while back. But, I don't buy the major premise that leads to all the conflict. All I could think of while reading the book was - why are they doing that? At least it needed a lot more setup to for me to believe that they would behave as they do. To me it seemed that the book spent a lot of time leading up to the climax and then solved it in one chapter, as if a time deadline or word limit was reached. If you're a Niven fan get this from a library but don't spend your money, especially on the hardback. Actually I think the prequel would be more interesting - why did they leave earth and what was the problem they had.

SPOILERS The colonists create and terraform a moon as a site to create antimatter fuel. To be able to do that they have children with the plan of abandoning them after the fuel is created. That is what I can't believe - that they will leave theri children to certain death.

This is my first book from Sedaris and I think I'll try another. It was entertaining throughout with many parts that made me laugh out loud. He is kind of a modern, politically incorrect, cigarette-loving, drug-addled, openly gay, extra-pathetic Woody Allen with some of the clever and biting observations of George Carlin or Chris Rock. There was one or two low points where his stories dragged, and especially the one on the metro where the ending was a major letdown. His phrasing and comic timing are excellent.

I got the audiobook which had some of his live bits mixed in. These were the best ones. He narrated the book himself and as a narrator his voice was thin and high-pitched but it fit here... especially since these was his own true (hah, probably not without some small exaggerations) life story.

This book has an amateurish feel like the first in this series (Luck in the Shadows). The first half is rather dull, with little happening, except for the syrupy love story growing between the two male leads (yes male, and considering the pages and pages spent carefully setting it up, the author must be making a statement here). There are brief bursts of action but the protagonists quickly resolve them. The book at this point feels more like a showcase for the characters and setting.

Once the main threat comes in and the real adventure gets going (about the halfway point) the book clips along well. I found the second half of the book hard to put down. The ending is somewhat predictable but satisfying nonetheless, however the denouement goes on far too long with the resolution of the syrupy love story.

The prose is good overall, but the author uses many fantasy cliches. Not much original in the dialogue either. The characters on the "good" side are excellent and well drawn, but the characters on the "bad" side are simply evil with no redeeming qualities. This is not an issue in fantasy but some authors (e.g. George RR Martin) have been making their villains more three dimensional, which makes the conflicts more interesting. The setting itself is terrific, with a rich background and history, and there are less infodumping problems than in the previous book.

I kept thinking this book was rushed through editing. Spice up the beginning and shorten up the ending, cut some of the cliches out of the prose and dialogue, and this book would have been much better.

The book was okay, but if Flewelling comes up with a third in this series, I probably won't bother with it.

Okay.
I'm a caver. I like caves. I like crawling in caves. I like mud, water, and the lack of light.

Here are a couple of books that revolve around caving, yet more importantly, around the fringes of biological research. The definition of life, my friends, in the last decade, has begun to shift drastically, right here, on Earth. Who needs other planets? Sure, science fiction writers have been creating life in methane, underwater, in the vaccuum of space, for decades, however, If you want to know where the future of biology lies today, it's within these books.

These two books talk about life in weird places, glacial ice sheets, ocean vents, hydrothermal pools, and my favorite, caves. The coined term is "extremophile life". Life can exist without oxygen, without light, with heat, without heat, in PH's in the negatives, hibernate for decades, centuries, millenia. So far, the only thing in common with all the living discoveries over the last few decades is: <drum roll> water. Perhaps one day thart rule will be broken too.

I was lucky enough to see up close and personal one of these environments in a cave in Mexico. A sulphur cave. With H2S gas bubbling out of springs. With CO2 and CO spiking and dropping O2 levels below 9% When H2SO4 drips from some of the formations (look-up snottites, pictures here: [url]http://www.i-pi.com/~diana/slime/villaluz/[/url] or here [url]http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/cave_slime.html[/url]), it burns through clothing in seconds. The sweat from your skin can react with the H2S gas and form the acid on your skin. To enter the cave, a gas mask is needed at a certain point, and at a second point, oxygen tanks and Tyvek suits. Within this cave, life doesn't just survive, it flourishes. Bacteria, insects, bats, fish. There's an entire ecosystem built independently of the outside world, independent of the sun. Reasearch done in this cave is being used in devising equipment to test for life on other planets, namely Mars.

The only thing that really restricts our definition of life, in my mind, is our imagination, and that is where scientists and science fiction writers can come together. There is no future but the present.

So here's another big name author I thought I'd peruse at the prodding of a fellow Sfwwer. Picked this one straight off the rack. "Destiny's Road", other than being a horrible title, raised my opinion of Niven. I was never blown away by his "famous" "Ringworld". In fact, I was pretty disappointed. However, this book showed definite strains of stong writing, strong plot development, a sastisfying conclusion, and lastly, in-depth, scientific world building (that's one thing I've never doubt Niven on; its the others). Worth the read? Yes. Makes me want to read more Niven works? Yes, whereas Ringworld did not.

Essentially the book is about a new planet colony which has lost contact with its founding fathers and most of the technology that propelled them to the planet "Destiny". There's a mysterious road on the planet that was created by one of the landers, Cavorite, which seared the road into the ground, and our hero, Jemmy, can't stop thinking about this road. So the road is the basis for unraveling the mystery of where Cavorite went, why the Caravans on the road are so secretive, and why everyone needs "speckles".

Not a fantastic science fiction book, but a good one.