The Gabble / Neal Asher

The Gabble
by Neal Asher

science fiction, short stories

published 2008 (previously published stories)
read in May 2013

rated 7/10: well worth reading

Who could not like the gabbleduck ?!

Asher's universe is really quite amazing. Complex. Coherent (as far as I cared to look). Very, very violent. But positive.

Positive ? I mean, it's mostly the bad guys who suffer the violence. And there's usually a happy -- or at least satisfying -- ending.

It's also nice to have a universe where humanity rules... Well, humanity and AIs... though I have to admit... humanity is no longer constrained by the original model. Made in *whose* image ?!

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The Phoenix Guards / Steven Brust

The Phoenix Guards
by Steven Brust

copyright 1991
read in May 2013

rated 9/10: really, really good

28mar24: I have finally read The Three Musketeers.

Brust copies, as he says, that style. He also steals characters and plot. Reading Dumas, I could better understand the main characters because I almost knew them -- from Phoenix Guards.

Brust refers to the style of Dickens and Dumas and prefers Dumas. Brust himself... adds fun and humour. And makes his characters far more likeable.

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Brust tells the reader that this book -- and its sequel -- are written as an homage to Dumas' Three Musketeers. With that in mind I rushed off and began to read the musketeers sequel, Twenty Years After.

What a mistake.

Brust has characters who are loyal, intelligent (or, at least, skilled) and very, very likeable. D'Artagnan is a cunning schemer. He uses trickery to get his "friends" to join him. But enough of Dumas !

Phoenix Guards is a lot of fun !

It is also long-winded, rambling, totally over-the-top... Exactly as Brust intended.

So yes, it can be a little difficult to read. Until you get into the flow of the style. Yet the effort is most worthwhile.

There are complex plots and clever plans and deadly duels. Action and adventure, wrongs righted and justice summarily dispensed. This is the world of Vlad Taltos in a less serious era.

Take a deep breath, clear your mind -- and enjoy the read :-)

early 2023: read it again, enjoyed it again, want to re-read the sequel

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Philip K Dick

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
by Philip K Dick

science fiction

copyright 1964
read in May 2013

rated 7 out of 10: well worth reading

Warning: possible spoiler ahead ! Only a "possible" spoiler ? Yes... I don't know if I really know what happened...

First, I checked my understanding of "stigmata". Check. Then related that to the book. Check. So here is what happens:

The man who has god-like powers in the hallucinatory worlds is not God. He has been taken over -- or possibly replaced by -- the god-like being who lives in deep space, the being that may, in the past, have been mistaken for God. The existence or otherwise of a real God is not a part of this story.

The hallucinatory worlds exist only for the hallucinator. Each person dreams of their own world. Every other person in their world is imaginary. Except for the man who has been taken over by the God-like being from outer space.

Except -- another exception -- when the hallucinator imagines that they have moved into the future. The hallucination of the future is real. (It is a real... possible... future.) The people in the hallucination of the future are real. Although they -- the real people in the imagined futures -- may be taken over by the man who has been taken over by the God-like being from outer space.

Are you with me so far ?!

Enough !

This is an enjoyable book... if a bit challenging to understand ! Easy to read, difficult to follow. Satisfying, though my own satisfaction may be based entirely on misconceptions of what it all means...

Better yet, the style of the book has not dated... The predictions may be way off but that does not affect my reading enjoyment... Which I particularly notice because I have recently read some Heinlein.

Heinlein is horribly dated. His scientific predictions may be better but his characters -- and their attitudes -- are, well, possibly believable and maybe acceptable to narrow-minded readers of fifty years ago.

I find Dick's characters to be much more believable. Okay, not realistic ! But believable. And very hard to dislike...

Sure, the Stigmata characters are self-centered. Some are willing to abandon others to protect themselves. They are open to bribery and corruption. But they are all children, and how could you dislike children !?

No, not really children. They are all child-like in their approach to life. There is no underlying cruelty, no innate evil. They just look after themselves. And are sorry when that causes problems for other people.

The characters mean well. They are just realistic when it comes to matters of self-interest. Realistic and self-centered ! Oh, and very analytical.

When it comes to character motivations, Dick fails the test of show versus tell. The characters are constantly "telling" us their motivations -- through self-analysis -- rather than "showing" through their actions.

Which just goes to show that an author can break the rules and still write a good story.

Stigmata is a good story. Still readable, still enjoyable -- still confusing -- many years after it was written.

I have a book containing four more Dick novels. I hope the rest are just as enjoyable.

I just hope that I am better able to understand what happens... :-)

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Blue Remembered Earth / Alastair Reynolds

Blue Remembered Earth
by Alastair Reynolds

science fiction

copyright 2012
read in May 2013

rated 6 out of 10: read to pass the time

I've read that science fiction answers the question, "What if?" This book raises the question, "So what?"

Can you remember the first Star Trek movie? It probably had the clever name, Start Trek The Movie... It had a good 50 minute plot -- stretched out to an hour and a half of movie. Stretched using lots of SF special effects. Blue is like that, except without the good plot.

Several people chase clues across the solar system. They spend a lot of time admiring amazing scientific developments -- or possibilities, for today's reader. What a pity that so few of these developments have any bearing on the story.

Then we discover that some old lady -- believed to be dead -- had discovered the secret to travel beyond the solar system. How did she make this amazing discovery? Pure deus ex machina... Some passing aliens decided to spend some time leaving explanatory graffiti.

Not that we are given any hint of this amazing discovery. At least, not until the final pages, where the author decides that it's about time to stop writing. Eternal life? Cold fusion power? (Well, almost.) Cure for the common cold? New and improved snake oil? I know, let's make it space travel!

Then there are the holes in the plot. The elephants in the room, for example. Seriously.

Two midget elephants on the moon. Bred to size, we are told, by phyletic evolution. (I hope those words are right. I can't be bothered checking again.) Phyletic evolution is the natural process of animals -- such as elephants -- breeding smaller in an environment with limited resources. Smaller animals are better at surviving the regular food shortages, so natural selection results in a herd of smaller elephants.

So how do you do that in just one generation? We're looking at elephants the size of large dogs... More than a minor shrinkage.

And if it happened over the more reasonable several hundred generations -- where were these elephants while they were being bred for small size?!

Then there's the shell and pea trick with the buried treasure. We're expected to believe that a man can dig up a box, open it, swap the contents, close it -- then bury it again... All while being watched by three good guys, a bad guy, three intelligent drones and by whatever automated surveillance system it was that initially detected this prestidigitating digger.

Then there's that crazy old lady, believed dead. She trips over the secret of space travel. Decides to hold it for a while. Goes off on her own deep space voyage -- as far as I can tell. And suddenly -- for no reason that we are given -- decides that now is the time to release her discovery. Puts everything into a one-shot treasure trail. Makes the trail so difficult to follow that only one intended finder makes it to the end...

And if he had failed -- too bad. The trail is destroyed. No-one will every be able to follow it again. If the hero had blinked -- the discovery would have been lost for all time.

Blue Remembered Earth has entertaining science. The characters are slightly interesting. The plot is weak as water.

Easy enough to read. Hardly worth the effort.

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Tonto Basin / Zane Grey

Tonto Basin (aka To the Last Man)

by Zane Grey

western

copyright 1921

read in April 2013

rated 8 / 10: really quite good

I've seen Western movies. I was a fan of John Wayne. I thought that I knew what to expect from a Zane Grey novel.

But...

Everyone wears a big black hat. Everyone is tall blond and tough. The good guys are not all that good. The bad guys are, well, bad. But not one-sided bad. The only certainty that remains is that the hero and the heroine get together at the end.

Then there is the forest of Arizona -- the beautiful country in which men kill each other. Grey describes the country with beauty and emotion. In a foreword he writes, "My inspiration to write has always come from nature." Yet his characters clear land and shoot wildlife with not a hint of compunction.

Grey sees nature in all its grandeur and beauty. He portrays nature as something to be used and abused in order to support humans. There is no hint that this is contradictory. A sign of the times in which he wrote, perhaps... A reflection of the belief that nature's abundance is and always will be, unlimited.

The hero and heroine are a bit too good... Every other character is a mixture of good and bad, of loyalty and violence. I was surprised by the shades of grey in "a Western".

This is an enjoyable book -- and a bit of an eye-opener to the real world of Arizona in the 1880s to 1890s. If you don't want to read the book, read the Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasant_Valley_War. Which leads to authorial sources...

Grey writes, in his foreword, that he spend many months, over several years, getting the basic facts from native Arizonians. Wikipedia cites a book written at the time. I wonder how much else was available from the bookshop rather than from original sources? And how much of the foreword is poetic licence?!

All that is quibbling. Tonto Basin is a good book: enjoyable, tough, believable and with a satisfying (somewhat contrived) happy ending. All set in a beautiful part of the world... as it then existed.

The rest is just a curious line of thought...

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I read Tonto Basin in a book published in 2004. It included a recent foreword which included the lines, "Tonto Basin now at last is published as Zane Grey wanted his story to appear."

So what has been changed?

I went to Gutenberg Press (www.gutenberg.net) and downloaded an older copy of the novel. What are the differences?

Well, the author's foreword has been replaced by a researcher's foreword. Which is a pity because the author's notes are fascinating.

The name has been changed, from To the Last Man, to Tonto Basin. Not sure why.

The new foreword says that the original publication had a key sexual relationship removed, that reference to an illegitimate birth was censored. Okay, I'm an innocent... I didn't see the illegitimate birth in the new novel, either...

Then I looked for word-by-word changes.

First, the older characters say a lot of "y'u" and "y'ur" and "y'u're". In the newer book they say "you" and "your" and "you're". Has an authentic Arizonian accent been censored in the *modern* book?

Then, in the older book, there are three or four times when a character says, "----, ---- ---- !" In the uncensored version, these characters say, "God damn!" or similar. Okay, that's more modern acceptance of blasphemy; older censorship of the same.

Right at the end, the older book ends with the hero hugging the heroine; all is right with the world. The newer book carries on for perhaps two hundred more words... There's an actual marriage proposal; some words about how happy the couple are now that they understand how good they each are; a hint of the woman's subservient position in a marriage; and a brief reference to God. Not much God really, after the spirituality of various rides through the forest.

Apart from the obviously implied marriage proposal, the cut did not make much change to the story.

So the changes are not that great. Perhaps there were earlier versions -- original publications -- which were more heavily cut. There is a reference to the difficulty of getting a book published, with the large number of deaths that are an essential part of this story.

Which leaves just one more change that I have identified:

"Isbel's house had been constructed with the idea of repelling an attack from a band of Apaches." So, okay, the house was built to withstand Indian attacks. Which means that it is solid enough to withstand the rustlers who are about to attack.

Really? Nowhere else in the book is there a mention of Apache attacks! The only Indian is the "half-breed" hero (who actually has a quarter or less Indian blood -- but not Apache blood). So why was the house built to repel Apache attacks?

That quote is from the more recent publication. In the older version -- with my own emphasis added -- the sentence is, "Isbel's house had *not* been constructed with the idea of repelling an attack from a band of Apaches." Which makes more sense. Especially since the bad guys hang out in their own building which is noticeably more solid, with stone walls.

But the sentence which does include "not"... seems to me to imply that the rustlers are being referred to as "Apaches". The house is not built to withstand an attack by the gang of rustlers... referred to by Grey as "Apaches"... Just as we would refer to a gang of "thugs" -- which is a word which comes from the original Thuggees... professional assassins now used as a byword for people who are tough and violent.

Has the more *recent* book been censored?!? Has a "modern" editor said, We can't call these rustlers Apaches... That would offend our Native American brothers!

Have we moved from one form of censorship to another?

Or am I reading too much into one small word that was lost in a proof-reading oversight...

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Dr Nick Lethbridge
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(+61) 0419197772
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"The time to relax is -- when you don't have time for it." --Sidney J. Harris