Belated Book Reviews
Hey,
I’m really behind on my book reviews.
Luckily (or not), I don’t have a ton of books to review. Directing a show tends to gobble up all your free time somehow.
So picking up from...August(!) here’s what I managed to get read:
First up How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Mr. Pollan has covered a wide range of interesting topics and here he turns his attention to psychedelics (mainly mushrooms and LSD). He goes into a fascinating history of the drugs and how they were showing promising results treating a number of conditions. Then Timothy Leary and the 60’s came along and the research all got shut down and the drugs outlawed. In the past few years a lot of this long-lost research has been unearthed and re-examined.
Mr. Pollan also charts his own encounters with these drugs. He describes a brief encounter in the 70’s and during the course of researching this book, he has a few more. His experiences are hardly the wall-melting horror show it’s made out to be, but it’s not necessarily a profound, life-changing experience either.
I think what I appreciate most about this book is that the author eventually arrives at a pretty nuanced position -- he thinks that there is a lot of value in these drugs and their therapeutic effects should be more fully explored and exploited, but he also thinks that these substances probably shouldn’t be handed out willy-nilly. Given that a lot of psychedelic experiences are heavily influenced by where and when and how you take them, it seems prudent.
I liked this book quite a bit and if the topic interests you, I think you should check it out.
Next up, we have Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames. This is the sequel to his previous book Kings of the Wyld which I really enjoyed. The follow-up might be just a tad better.
The central conceit of these books is that in this fantasy world, adventuring parties are really more like rock stars today (it’s a band of adventurers after all). Since most people can’t watch them plunder dungeons, they tend to fight as gladiators in large stadiums against various monsters that have been captured and dragged in to fight. Some adventuring parties only play the stadium circuit but a few still go out into the wild. In either case, someone needs to let people know about all the cool things they’ve done and the terrible monsters they’ve killed and that means that every good adventuring party needs (or puts up with) a bard.
Tam Hashford is the daughter of a pair of adventurers and she’d like to join up as a bard and go on quests and adventures and so on. When her all-time favorite band Fable, led by the notorious Bloody Rose, stops by and mentions they need a bard, she jumps at the chance.
As you might imagine, she gets the gig, joins the band and quickly discovers that life as an adventurer isn’t quite up to what she imagined.
I really liked this book. The plot draws you along, the characters are interesting and there’s a lot of fun dialog. The book is a sequel, but doesn’t really require having read the previous book (and the info-dump to catch up new readers is well handled). I’d still strongly suggest reading the previous book, Kings of the Wyld, simply because it was also a good book, but either way you’ll probably be happy you picked this one up.
After that we have Moderan by David R. Bunch, but first, a bit of background.
As a teenager, I purchased a large pile of old sci-fi magazines for cheap at a flea market. None of these were super old (60’s and 70’s) but I plowed through a bunch of short sci-fi fiction. One of these was Amazing Science Fiction Stories in June of 1965. Here’s the cover:
The story associated with that cover “The Walking, Talking, I-Don’t-Care-Man” is easily the one story I remember the most from that entire pile of magazines . The story described the future world of Moderan where everyone has been partially or nearly fully-replaced with cybernetic parts (the more you get, the more important you are). High level “masters” are put in charge of Strongholds and they periodically have devastating wars because...that’s apparently what you do when you’re nearly immortal. In this particular story, the I-Don’t-Care-Man has replaced all of his “flesh strips” with metal and the narrator (master of Stronghold 10) isn’t quite sure if he should be jealous or dismissive of I-Don’t-Care-Man. It was a short story and ended a bit in a bit of a question mark, but it was a compelling read, even if I sorta missed the point at the time.
That story was one of dozens set in the same setting that Mr. Bunch wrote for science fiction magazines from the 50’s to the late 80’s. An article on the web talking about this collection of his Moderan stories and their description of Moderan made me realize that the “I-Don’t-Care-Man” was part of it, so I grabbed the collection and waded through it.
There’s a very distinct style to the prose in Moderan stories. Although not written entirely in all caps, it has that feel and flavor -- bombastic, chest-thumping lines that never allow for any conception that life as a Moderan isn’t quite as perfect as it’s made out to be. In his time, the stories focused on war and conflict that paves over everything. The forward suggests that it might be read as an allegory about ecological disaster and humanity’s difficulty in changing its ways to avoid that. I think there’s a case that it can also be read as an allegory about how technology can isolate us from one another. In Moderan, you children are grown in a tube and riased by robots and televisions. Your spouse will suffer you to visit maybe once a year if their up for it. The wars are more like real-life videogames than anything else.
I think the only real downside is that the basic theme gets repeated over and over through the various stories. Each shines a light on a different facet of the problem, but after 10-15 stories it does get a little same-y. Perhaps best not to read them all in one go.
This book carries a lot of nostalgia for me so I don’t know if I’d recommend this book, though I would suggest reading a few stories from it -- the work comes highly regarded by other sci-fi writers of his era so it’s worthwhile. I enjoyed it anyway.
Something I can more objectively recommend is Priest of Bones by Peter McLean.
Thomas Piety and his brother used to be in charge of one of the largest criminal gangs in Ellinburg. Then they were drafted by the war. Now they’re coming home hoping to pick up where they left off and bringing a number of their fellow soldiers along to fill out their depleted ranks.
While they were gone, Ellinburg went downhill pretty fast. In part because of the war and in part because another kingdom is attempting to make inroads and they’re starting here. Thomas finds out about that when he’s recruited by Ailisa, a secret agent for the Queen who hopes to use Thomas and his gang against the interlopers.
So it’s a fantasy crime novel in the vein of The Lies of Locke Lamora, although this time it’s not con-men and more mafia kinds of crime. What I particularly like about this book is that Thomas is relatively proactive. He suffers reverses and surprises, but he’s not constantly reacting to the last thing that happened, he’s always got some long-term plan going. On the flip side, he’s not some criminal mastermind, always 500 steps ahead of everyone else where every apparent setback was all planned and accounted for in advance. It strikes a nice balance.
The crew is pretty large, but most of them get some amount of spotlight time and they’re all pretty distinct from one another. The dialog is pretty good and the plot moves swiftly along. All in all it was a fun read and one I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for some fantasy skullduggery.
Finally, we round out the year with The Razor by J. Barton Mitchell. Imagine a world whose rotation is equivalent to its yearly revolution around its star. Like our moon, this world always faces its sun. One side is blasted desrt wasteland the other a frigid ice ball and in the middle there’s a thin sliver of land that’s temperate. That thin sliver is the titular Razor and the planet is a prison world where prisoners are sent out into the hot zone to mine the rare element there that largely powers the rest of human space.
The premise is...a bit shaky, the book will point out that a planet like Razor is incredibly unusual (never mind the vast deposits of Unobtainium) but it doesn’t harp on it too much and just says “don’t worry about it, let’s have a sci-fi prison book” and goes from there. Luckily, the book is good enough to breeze over stuff it isn’t worried about and you get a pretty good read.
We jump between a few characters, but Flynn is our primary focus. Flynn used to work for the company that runs the Razor, but then he got framed for murder and as the book starts, he’s going through his first day. He has a few encounters and run-ins and then a mysterious alarm goes off and all the guards start to evacuate. Soon it’s clear that the planet has been hastily abandoned and the delicate balance of life on the planet is about to break down. Flynn and his companions have only a short time to try and figure out what’s going on and how to fix it.
Like I say, the book is breezy and quick and is a pretty fun read. Because Flynn is an engineer and he’s worked on various pieces of gear found on Razor it makes him a key player and it’s fun to watch him think his way out of various problems. The book doesn’t make the mistake of replacing ingenuity with techno-babble. Most problems are explained in such a way that even when using sci-fi tools or tech to solve a problem, it’s clear that the tools are tools and not a magical solution in and of themselves.
As it’s a prison world, you get your share of stock prisoner characters. The one downfall in this entire book is that there are at least two tech-enhanced super-predator people on the planet. They’re not mindless killing machines, but they do sit at the other end of that spectrum where they’re so clever and/or badass, they pretty much anticipate everything that’s happening. They aren’t quite omniscient (they both realize that Flynn has specialist knowledge they don’t have), but they’re way better than pretty much everyone else around them. I feel like the trope of the super-psychopath who trades in emotional empathy for the ability to instantly and unfailingly assess every situation is kinda weak.
Despite that, the book was a pretty good read. There’s clearly a sequel in the works, though the story ends at a decent stopping point. I might be tempted to get the next volume.
Anyway, I guess I’m finally caught up. Here’s hoping I’m a bit more timely and prolific in my 2019 reading.
Later
Tom