Showing posts with label adult fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adult fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The Trials of Nikki Hill by Christopher Darden and Dick Lochte


Title: The Trials of Nikki Hill
Author: Christopher Darden (and Dick Lochte)
Publisher: Hachette
Rating: WARTY!

Dick Lochte? Seriously? That sounds like a medical condition. I get that you don't get to chose the name you're given when you're born, but you do get to choose the name that goes on your novels. He didn't like Richard Lochte? Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he thinks it's funny, but the problem with chanting "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" is that there have to be torpedoes in the first place....

So why do I get to make fun of a writer's name? Well, I get to do that because of the writing in this novel. At one point, at the start of chapter 30 on page 149, we learn that a character looks like Rock Hudson "in his healthier days". Now there are two ways of using that description. One was to go the AIDS reference route, the other was to simply say "looked like a younger Rock Hudson" - or even omit the reference altogether. It wasn't necessary to make an arguably derogatory reference, yet the writer chose purposefully to go that route. That's my justification.

Clearly this guy, who has published several crime thrillers of his own, was hired to "punch up" Darden's writing since he's less of a novelist than he is the prosecuting counsel in the disastrous OJ Simpson murder trial. I read his In Contempt about that trial. I reviewed (unfavorably) Guilt by Degrees by his co-counsel, Marcia Clarke (whose Without a Doubt - about that same trial, I also read), so I figured it's only fair if I give him the same chance.

I have to say I wasn't favorably impressed by the first two pages (numbered 5 & 6, not 1 & 2 for some reason. I guess that numbering scheme is because there was a prologue, which I skipped as I usually do. If the writer thinks it's not worth putting in chapter one or later, I don't think it's worth reading.

So what didn't impress me? The rampant racism shown by the main character on the first two pages. She uses the term 'white-bread' on the first page and describes a murder victim as "whiter than rice" on the next page. There was absolutely no need to go there for either of these comments. She didn't know at that point that this was a murder victim, but this doesn't excuse unrestrained racism on two consecutive pages.

The black and white references are rampant in this novel, even when it's clearly quite unnecessary to reference what race the character is. I started to wonder if there was some abolitionist throw-back going on here, since when the character was identified as black or "Afro-American" or whatever, it always seemed to be a character who was employed in a subservient role - a security guard for example - someone who serves someone else. It made no difference what color the person was, so why specifically reference it?

Yes I get that there are real racists in society and that therefore it's fine to represent them in your novels if your plot or even verisimilitude requires it, but that's an entirely different thing than having your main character routinely espouse racist phrases. If a white writer had written these same kinds of derogatory phrases about a black person, they would have been called on it and rightly so. So why isn't anyone calling Darden on it? Or Lochte, whichever of the two of them came up with this?

There was also genderism here, and this was by the author, not the characters. The authors reference all female characters by their first name, all male characters by their last - like an abusive private school. Why? I have no idea, but genderism, like racism, cuts both ways. Just like it's not only whites who can be racist, it's also not only men who can be genderist, and it's not always in obvious ways that genderism rears its ugly head as we see here.

The way to fix a problem - like racism, and like male chauvinism - which has been characterized by the pendulum of justice swinging way-the-hell too far in one direction - isn't to force it to swing an equal amount in the opposite direction, it's to nail it dead in the middle and never let it move again.

I suspect this is more a Lochte novel with input from Darden than it is a Darden novel with guidance from Lochte, but that's just a guess. Since I've never read a Lochte novel I have no comparison to make - it's just a feeling I get from the way this is worded - and wordy it is. You could skip the first four chapters and not miss anything, and this same text-stuffing was rife throughout this novel (at least as far as I could stand to read it.

I wanted to read this because of the police investigation, to follow how the crime was solved, not because I wanted a detailed report of the main character's social life. I took to skipping chapters where the 'action' had nothing to do with the case - and that was a lot of chapters. This begs the question, of course, as to how to rate the writing where you deem only certain examples of it readable, and find yourself constantly irritated by the endless digressions. Is it worthy because of the crime story, or is it warty because of the mindless and pointlessly trivial babble?

Chapter one is pretty much all about how the main character, Nikki Hill (Nikki Heat rip-off, much?) getting out of bed, and the life history of her dog (I kid you not). Barf. Chapter two I had to go back and look at because I'd forgotten it by the time I reached chapter eight already. It's Hill's bad history over a case where evidence was mishandled. Objection: irrelevant, your honor. Chapters three and four are a pointless look at the limp interrogation of the guy who is the prime suspect - so we know for a fact that he didn't do it. It contributes nothing to the novel. Five and six are a look at the crime scene, so you may as well start there. You'll miss nothing.

This is your typical celebrity murder with lowlife suspect who's innocent story. TV personality Maddie Gray is found murdered and dumped in a dumpster. Jamal Deschamps is found close by with her ring in his pocket - yet later we're expected to believe she wore no jewelry! Naturally he's arrested despite the fact that other than his theft and failure to report a dead body, there's no evidence he committed any such thing as murder.

This marks the first failure of the enjoyable part of this novel - the murder investigation. We, the readers, know that Jamal is innocent, but the detectives are supposedly convinced that he's the perp, yet despite the fact that they're running out of time for holding him without charging him, they never once charge him with theft (of that ring) or of interfering with a crime scene, or failure to report the murder. They could have easily nailed him on something and held him longer, but they never even consider it. Bad writing. They also end up opening themselves up to a lawsuit for wrongful arrest because of this. These people are morons.

Given that a prosecutor was at least involved in writing this, I expected that procedures would be spot on, but there are failures all along, and this is what tipped the balance for me. For example, at one point we learn that the murder victim's computer is still in her house - the police never seized it, which means an assistant to the victim can get on it and do whatever he wants. Bad writing.

In another instance, they get a report of a car seen in the vicinity of the murder at about the time of the murder, and the first thing they think of in trying to track it down is to contact car dealerships in the area? What they don't have a department of motor vehicles in LA?! Bad writing.

There's also a curious piece of writing when discussing Jewelry. Gold is referred to by karat with a 'K' whereas diamonds are referred to using carat with a 'C'. The fact is that while the term has a different meaning when used for gold than it does when used for gems, the spelling isn't fixed in stone, precious or otherwise. To suggest that the 'K' form can only be used for gold and the 'C' form for gem stones is nonsensical.

But the bottom line is the characters. While I found the crime story engaging to a certain extent (when it wasn't being interrupted with commercials for Nikki's private life), I found I had no interest whatsoever in any of the characters, least of all the main one. I found her to be a prosecutor who was completely without appeal, and I really didn't care whodunit. In the end, that was my objection, and coincidentally the only motive I needed to kill-off this novel.


Thursday, June 19, 2014

Alpha by Greg Rucka


Title: Alpha
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!

Alpha is written by Greg Rucka who has an article on strong female characters, but you won't find any strong female characters here. All the females are appendages to the men, because this is a macho military man kind of a novel. After I read this, I decided that I probably had to visit the improbable characters populating his comic books to find out what he thinks a strong female character should be, and I wasn't impressed there, either.

This novel reads like a rip-off of a movie I saw some time ago about the take-over of a theme park by thieves or terrorists, but I cannot for the life of me recall its name. I guess it wasn't that great, huh?! I've searched on Amazon, on Netflix, and on the Internet, including IMDB, but I've failed to dig up the name of the movie I saw, and IMDB doesn't identify Rucka as the writer of such a movie or as a movie based on anything he wrote.

In this take, a terrorist threat aimed at the fictional Wilsonville theme park a thinly disguised Disney knock off, comes to the attention of government agencies, so Jad Bell, a master sergeant in some special forces outfit or other, is recruited as deputy safety director. Another of his team is working as a security employee. There is a third person, a CIA operative, also working there, but the park's management has no idea that it's a target, nor that there are undercover operatives implanted at the park.

When the terror does strike, it's in the form of a couple of dozen guys who set up a dirty bomb. It turns out they were hired by a US government politician who wanted to literally scare-up funds for defense, but the terrorists take that and run with it, and then demand that this same guy pay them over again what he already paid, otherwise they really will detonate this bomb. It's up to Bell and his team to rescue the hostages, take out the terrorists and defuse the bomb. In short, your standard macho bullshit.

The complication is that Bell's wife is in the park with his deaf daughter, taking a tour which magically happened to be on this self-same day, of course. The daughter, Anthea, does seem to be a strong woman, but she's marginalized, Bell's ex wife (it's always the ex in these stories, isn't it?) is a complete moron. In the first part of the novel, Bell pretty much outright begs her not to visit the park, but he can't tell her exactly why, and so this dip-shit chooses to completely ignore the advice of her terrorist-expert husband. Later in the story, she bitches him out about getting her into this and putting her daughter at risk! What a frickin' numb-skull!

Generally this novel is well-written and I certainly had no trouble maintaining interest in it, but once in a while there was a "Wait, what?" moment. At one point, Rucka writes, "...judders to a sudden, sharp stop." I'm not sure that makes sense. Judders is a word, although it's not one I like. The problem as I see it is that "judders" implies at least a small amount of time for said juddering to happen, which seems to be at odds with the "sudden, sharp stop" portion of the sentence. Maybe it's just me, but I would never have written that. It just sounds too weird to me.

I have no idea, even having read this novel, what the 'Alpha' title is all about, unless it describes the guy on the cover holding his gun like it's a loaded automatic metal dick....

So overall this was not quite a disaster, but neither was it anything memorable, new, inventive, or original and, as I said, it's strongly reminiscent, if not a rip-off, of that movie. So in short, I can't rate this as a worthy read. Others have done far more with less.


Saturday, May 10, 2014

Seal Team Six: Hunt the Jackal by Don Mann with Ralph Pezzullo


Title: Seal Team Six: Hunt the Jackal
Author: Don Mann
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Don Mann is a retired chief warrant officer with the US Navy, who has actually been a SEAL. This is what attracted me to this novel because I felt it would be authentic, which is what I like in a military novel. I'm sorry that it didn't feel at all authentic once I began reading it. The Hunt for Red October aside, I'm not a Tom Clancy fan (where every novel reads like a training manual), but neither am I a fan of novels in that genre which offer no military details. I like the Goldilocks novel: the kind where there's enough to make it feel real without it being a dry recitation of weapons and tactics, but this novel just didn't do it for me. Donn Mann has a series of "Hunt the [Despised Animal]" novels. I'm guessing from this one that they're very formulaic, and therefore uninteresting to me.

I'm not sure why this novel had to begin by stating a woman's age: "Forty-two-year-old Lisa Clark", but it's one of those novels which starts with the first few words in larger font, so we're actually yelling it out, and those words which are announced so loudly happen to be: FORTY-TWO YEAR OLD! Like pay attention: this woman is old and therefore useless! Note that we get no ages given for any of the men! This seems like a journalistic thing to me, where ages, no matter how irrelevant they are to the story, are always reported. There was no reason at all for her age to be rolled out because it played no part whatsoever in the story. Indeed, neither did she, really. The parts featuring Lisa as the hostage held no interest whatsoever and were boring as hell.

Mann has been helped in writing this by Ralph Pezzullo, so I have no way of knowing which of them contributed what to the writing or who to blame for the poor take on women. And poor take it is. There is another woman appearing in these first few pages, and none of the descriptions suggests that we should be remotely interested in women as anything other than sex toys for men. Who cares if she has a mind or what that mind is like? Yeah, I get that these are supposed to be 'rough and tough' novels aimed at a certain male demographic, but that's still no excuse for demeaning or objectifying women. I immediately felt that I was not going to like this novel because of that. Nevertheless, I pressed on, and while that attitude wasn't as prominent in subsequent pages as it had been at the start, the novel became a tedious and uninviting read for other reasons.

Note that there is a huge difference between having a character in a novel demean women, and having the actual tone of the novel itself being demeaning. I don't like it any more when a character objectifies a woman, but there are people like that and it's plainly stupid to rail against a writer who depicts real life. Such a case is an excusable use of this approach, but actually writing the objectification into the tone and narrative of the novel is a different matter entirely, and there is no excuse for that. It's particularly noticeable here because we can contrast it with a quote that's given later (supposedly up on the wall in the Seal Team Six training room), from Mia Hamm, which appears in her book Go For the Goal. This token nod to the value of a female perspective is an insult given the derogatory milieu in which we find it.

Back to the story in progress! In the "galley" copy I read, page numbering starts with the cover as page one, so the novel starts on page eight, which is a bit weird, and yes, I know this is a 'galley proof', but in this electronic era, there really is no excuse for sub-standard or non-standard proofs. Anyway, we start on page eight with Lisa being kidnapped from her bathtub by some new (and evidently quite youthful) terrorist group who identify themselves as La Santísima Muerte (that's 'The Blessed Death' in English). Next we move, still in the same chapter, to the Middle East, where Seal Team Six is trying to recover a predator drone which has unexpectedly gone down, but even though they're in northern Syria, the mission starts going south really quickly.

I have to ask what happened to the other five Seal teams?! How come no one ever talks or writes about them?! Funnily enough, these authors do mention Seal Teams One and Two, but only in passing.

This action on Northern Syria was when the novel started feeling realistic to me. We have brave and dedicated men putting their lives on the line and this part felt gripping and very readable (if a little overly dramatic), because we know that men and women of the armed services do this on a daily basis, and whether or not you agree with their mission takes nothing from their skill, dedication, sacrifice, and guts.

There's a serious error in the text where they talk about M47 grenades. I think they mean M67. The XM47 is a riot control grenade. The M67 is what's military issue. I'm not sure about an M67 grenade explosion lifting a pick-up truck into the air however! I suppose it's possible if it detonated a full fuel tank, but grenades are fragmentation devices no different from a pipe bomb or an IED. One of them is likely to perforate a truck and anyone in it (with sufficient proximity), but it's more likely for the shrapnel to rip through it or put serious dents in it than it is to lift it off the ground. This isn't Hollywood, where every explosion is larded up with gasoline to create that spectacular orange and red plume (and resultant pollution)! Note that M47 is also the designation of the Patton tank produced by the USA in the early fifties. Now that M47 would lift a truck!

Here's another error: on page 42, I read that "stars died and broke up into asteroids". What? Someone needs a serious education in cosmology. Stars do die, but they shrink to dwarf stars, or neutron stars or black holes (dependent upon their initial size). In this process, some of them explode as supernovas, spewing gas, dust, and elemental particles (not asteroids) into space to feed other stars. Yes, those particles might eventually end-up in asteroids, or in planets, but 'breaking up into asteroids' is nowhere near an accurate way to describe this process. Some of those elements created in a supernova are actually inside you right now. We're quite literally made of 'stardust'. How cool is that?

You would think a novel like this would be able to hold my interest, but in the end it simply wasn't very good. Seal Team Six is reduced, in this novel, to rescuing hostages in Mexico from a drug lord masquerading as a an acolyte of the Aztec religion, and it's just not that exciting, not even when they get into a pitched battle with the Mexican federales. In fact, that part just seemed like far too big of a stretch, and for me it lacked credibility. Something like this would have ended up triggering a massive international incident. I found myself skipping more and more pages, which of course meant that some of what I did read made no sense.

Far from getting the engrossing military yarn I'd hoped for, I got an uninteresting mess which I honestly cannot recommend.


Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The Sensualist by Barbara Hodgson





Title: The Sensualist
Author: Barbara Hodgson
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Rating: WARTY!

This novel started out right up there with Frances Hardinge's efforts for being downright weird, so it drew me in right away, but in the end it became tedious, repetitive, dull, and boring. Barbara Hodgson is an artist who has written several novels and this is the first of hers that I've read. And probably the last, which is sad, because the format of this novel is quite charming. It contains multiple illustrations and fold-outs representing the materials of which the main character comes into possession as she rides a train into Vienna, Austria and meets with people in an effort to try and discover what has happened to her deadbeat husband who has been missing for three months. He has often gone off for weeks at a time, ignoring her letters and failing to contact her, but the editor from the newspaper he's working for on a story about art theft or art forgery (it’s unclear which it is at first) calls her to see if she knows where her husband is, because the story is overdue and he hasn’t heard from him. Thus her forlorn quest begins.

She takes off into Europe and encounters three strange women and a strange train conductor during the journey before she even leaves the train - and that's just for starters! One of the women leaves her a box which contains an antique book in which hollowed-out pages hold a magnifying glass and six vials of herbal medicines. The materials are ancient. Everyone she meets seems to know something about her or her quest, and everyone seems to want to trade her something of theirs for something she has - seemingly insignificant, ordinary and occasionally disgusting objects, such as a molar tooth which an elevator operator trades her for one of the pearls decorating the box lid.

Helen runs into one offbeat character after another and takes it all in stride, very much like one would do in a dream. She seems to become quite easily distracted from her purported main purpose of tracking down her husband (about whom I'd long given up caring anyway), and side-tracks into pursuing a discovery adventure of Flemish printer Andreas Vesalius and the woodblocks he created for a publication he produced on anatomy. These blocks were thought to have disappeared during the bombing of a Berlin in World War Two, but maybe they were not all destroyed, in which case any existing ones may have survived. Is this why the director of a museum has been murdered? Did Helen murder him?

There are some weird references too, such as the one to Felice Fontana (1730-1805). Hodgson describes this character - represented as a wax figure in an obscure European museum - as a woman, but that name and those dates apply to a man who was a physician. Whether Hodgson knows this and is playing, or is simply ignorant, or is merely trying to ratchet up the absurdity factor I have no idea. I just found that interesting. There may be other such references that I missed. But the problem for me was that her quest for her husband was uninteresting and when she effectively abandoned that, I was given nothing else even remotely interesting to engage me.

Of all her encounters, Helen's first is the one which most unsettles her, because she seems to be the very same person as the one she first meets on the train. She doesn’t realize this at first because the other the person is aged and significantly overweight, but when Helen finally gets a look at a picture of the other woman when she was younger, she notes a striking resemblance to herself. In addition to this, Helen seems to be traveling in an earlier time - much earlier than 1998 when this novel was published. She goes by train, not airplane, and she has no cell phone or email. The impression I increasingly had in reading this novel was that the real Helen was not the younger version, but the older one, and was possibly lying in a bed somewhere dying of old age, or in a coma, and recalling her younger life. So: trope-ish and boring.

It was all well and good and rather fun and intriguing to begin with, but as the novel creeps towards some 300 pages of nothing but this stuff, the novelty value wears off, and as Helen becomes more and more obsessed with Vesalius's wood blocks, it starts to become completely uninteresting. Normally I would have ditched a novel like this, but I kept trying to stay with it. When I realized I had only some seventy pages remaining, and since I had enjoyed the beginning so much, I decided to try and finish it even if I no longer liked it.

I got within 35 pages of the ending, but I couldn't stand the mindless diversions into Vesalius's wooden blocks and the increasingly repetitive nature of the story-telling. I felt more and more like this was going quite literally nowhere and I reached a point where I decided that there was no payoff, no matter how brilliant nor how miraculous it may be, that could make up for the effort I was being forced to put in! Hodgson, if this was some kind of a big joke on your readers - which I could easily believe - you got me, but you didn't get me all the way to the end. WARTY! Life is way too short to waste on that kind of writing where "literary" is used as a really poor euphemism for 'self-indulgently soporific', not when there's other much more engaging and exciting material waiting to be read.


Wednesday, February 19, 2014

The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata




Title: The Bohr Maker
Author: Linda Nagata
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: TBD

This is volume one in the loosely-connected Nanotech Succession quadrilogy. I've read Deception Well and Vast, but not Tech Heaven, so I'm pleased to be able to review the first of this group for the blog. Even though this is not a new novel (indeed, it was the first Nagata ever published!), it is new to me, and hopefully I'll enjoy this as I have the other two. It begins in Asia (and the choice of typeface imbues the novel a rather Japanese aura) where a few members of a local 'tribe', trying to eke out an existence in an abandoned mill by a river, discover a dead body in the water. Jensen Van Ness has apparently been murdered and robbed, but his body still bears clothes which might be traded in the city for food. As two of the tribe, the petite, retiring Phousita and domineering and cruel Arif haul the body to shore, something sharp slides out of his chest and stabs Phousita, the diminutive woman who looks like a child, infecting her with the Bohr Maker, an illegal and self-directing genetic enhancer.

I confess I found that while it was an acceptable read, and engrossing in parts, I did not find myself enjoying this novel as much as I had the other two, and I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the Bohr of the title was the fictional Leander Bohr, not Neils Bohr, who was neither an engineer nor a biologist, which is probably fueling my lack of complete enthusiasm! Neils Bohr was a giant in the wild early days of particle physics. I read a charming, sad, and amusing account of this in Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segrè, which contained the picture I reproduce below, which I find really extraordinary. The sheer magnitude of brainpower concentrated in this one instant in time in this photograph is as humbling as it is inspiring. The ones most interesting to me are identified by the red numbers in the list below.

  1. Paul Ehrenfest
  2. Erwin Schrödinger
  3. Wolfgang Pauli
  4. Werner Heisenberg
  5. Paul Dirac
  6. Arthur Compton
  7. Louis de Broglie
  8. Max Born
  9. Neils Bohr
  10. Max Planck
  11. Marie Curie
  12. H.A. Lorentz
  13. A. Einstein

Meanwhile, somewhere slightly off-planet, the Chief of Police, Kristin, cruelly abuses a dead man, whose brain patterns have been preserved by a cutting-edge scientist before laws were enacted which severely circumscribed such experimentation. The dead man, Nikko Jiang-Tibayan, is now dying again - the license for his existence is about to expire. This is an era which has declared that thou shalt not mess with the human genome, and he represents the last such experiment - a human consciousness in a ceramic body. Kristin, living in luxury at the top of one of many Earth-space elevators uses his body for her own perverse and abusive sexual pleasure (yes, this made no sense to me either!).

Nikko puts up with this in the desperate hope that she will relent and help him to continue his existence. She cruelly taunts him over his impending doom, refusing to grant him a reprieve even as she pleasures herself with his ersatz body and causes him pain by biting his kisheer - an augmentation to the body which permits him to survive in a vacuum by recycling CO² in his blood. She has affixed above her bed a collage made from the confiscated body parts of the human experiments she has personally terminated and mentions that she would like to see his skull up there eventually.

Nikko unfortunately involved his brother, Sandor Jiang-Tibayan in his theft of the Bohr maker and now Kristin is hunting Sandor, too, and she doesn't care if his involvement came about in Sandor's ignorance or not. But Phousita's transformation, under the refurbishing power of the Bohr maker is startling. She becomes a Messiah to her people and so well-known that both she and Arif must go on the run to escape Kristin - a run which takes them into the cold of space and the the bizarre artificial world at the top of the elevator - the one created by Fox Jiang-Tibayan, Nikko and Sandor's dad.

That's all I'm going to reveal about this novel. I am rating this worthy although I have to say I was not as impressed as I had been with the other two. But Nagata can write inventively; she had surrogates before Surrogates had surrogates, and she has some really interesting sci-fi scenarios on display.


Sunday, February 9, 2014

Undead And Unemployed by MaryJanice Davidson




Title: Undead And Unemployed
Author: MaryJanice Davidson
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

Why the second novel (or any novel) in a series would need a twelve-page prologue is as much as mystery as it is missed with glee by me; been there, skipped that, moving on to chapter one! I started out Liking volume one of this series. It wasn't spectacular but it was an ok read and it was a fast read. This one I started out pretty much the same way, but it went downhill faster than the first one did, to the point where it went beyond my ability to stay with it!

This series has run to some ten novels, so it can hardly be described as a failure. I liked the first one in the series well enough to want to see the follow-up, but in reading this follow-up now, I can’t say I have an interest in pursuing this series any further. I just didn’t like this sequel well enough - or at all after the first half of it. I started out thinking the story was OK, but after reading to about half-way through, it seemed to me it wasn't really going anywhere or showing me anything new or interesting.

It’s a really fast read, but I don’t feel involved with any of the characters and I don’t feel engaged in the stories which are being told. They're ok, and that's the problem, they're only ok, nothing special. They do beat the pants off the god-awful Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire series! I love the TV show, but the novels sucked worse than the vampires did. These novels are significantly better than that, but they're just not really my idea of a truly enthralling read, and the simplistic PoV in this novel finally started getting to me.

In this volume, Betsy Taylor, vampire queen, moves into a new home - which is a mansion - meets a little girl named Marie who, it's patently obvious, is a ghost, and Betsy is beseeched by her vampire acquaintances to take on the Blade Warriors, a church youth organization which is murdering vampires at the behest of some anonymous benefactor - or rather, malefactor. Betsy at first refuses to step up to her vampire queen responsibilities; that is until they attack her personally, and also attack a vampire friend she likes. In the end, there is no war: she makes friends with the vampire killers, overpowering their antagonism with tea and biscuits. This was amusing, but not really that funny and not really very entertaining - like I said, it was ok, but nothing special.

It was at that point, and in the next few pages that I found I couldn't engage with the material. It didn’t draw me in or make me want to find out what would happen next. The problem with this story, I think, in a nutshell is that Betsy is never in any danger, never has any real problem, and there is never any real conflict, no problems to solve, nothing to worry about. It’s more like a child's story ("Betsy the Happy Vampire") than a story for the age group Betsy is actually in, but the graphic depictions of adult life, and vampire life, of course mean it isn't a child's story at all, and that unholy combination simply doesn’t work. It’s very childlike in its simplicity and fruity goodness, and it inevitably becomes sickly, like eating too much of a rich desert. If you put a cream filling in a cake and eat a slice, its wonderful, but if you remove the cake and try eating only the cream filling, after the first taste, it’s nasty. That's how this novel is - all cream filling and no cake! I have no choice but to rate this one warty!


Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Windwalker by Natasha Mostert





Title: Windwalker
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is the second of Mostert's novels that I've read. I just got through the first, and really liked it, but this one, at least superficially, appeared to me to be almost a carbon copy of the first, with some cosmetic surgery to make it seem fresh and original. I hoped sincerely that it was not like that, and Mostert didn't let me down, but for a while, during the opening chapters, the déjà vu factor was looking like it would reach uncomfortable heights! What was I supposed to think about a novel which begins with the same premise: a damaged girl in a new locale who quickly becomes the target of an anonymous "watcher" (one who has on a previous occasion sat in the dark observing his subject sleeping)? I don’t know from whence Mostert originally pulled up this idea, but it definitely seems to have left a weighty impression on her while leaving me wondering if this novel was more of the same. Rest assured, as I now do, that it wasn't. Phew!

Mostert's title is again in competition as it was with The Midnight Side, but this one has way more competitors. This is an advantage of self-publishing in that you choose your title and you choose your cover. Yes, you don't have the support of an established publisher; you're on your own, but it is all yours, and I'd personally much rather have it that way than to cede creative control to those who have too much power and who do more harm than good in the long run by systematically ignoring talented authors. The only way to break the power of the mega-trending publishers is for all of us writers to stick together and self publish. Put the legacy publishers in the position of having to beg to get authors; then maybe all writers, instead of just a privileged few, will get an even break. And yes, it does bother me that self-publishing giant Amazon is becoming ever more powerful, but that will even out over time as competitors take them on in a battle of business models.

Anyway, Mostert went with Windwalker despite The Windwalker by Tracy Blough, and Windwalkers by R Burns, and Windwalker's Mate by Margaret L Carter, and Windwalker: Starlight & Shadows by Elaine Cunningham, and Where the Windwalk Begins by Todd Dillard, and The Windwalkers by Diane Fanning, and The Shaman Windwalker by Willie "Windwalker" Gibson, and Juno and The Windwalker by Julie Hodgson, or Windwalker by Dinah McCall, and Windwalkers Moon by Randee Redwillow, and Windwalker: The Prophecy Series by Sharon Sala, and Windwalker by Kris Williams, and The Windwalker by Blaine Yorgason! Brave girl is our Natasha!

On the topic of names, the intriguingly-named Justine Callaway, combining both elements of the Marquis de Sade in her first, and a hint of callousness combined with cowardice ('callous-run-away' - or perhaps more charitably, 'called away'?) in her last name is grieving and paradoxically unfeeling. Rather than work through her grief, she chooses the patented Jack Torrance method: flee to a remote location, foolishly hoping that everything will fix itself. She doesn’t, of course, take-up tenure in the horrifically disturbed Overlook Hotel, cut off by a chill Colorado winter as Jack did. Justine moves herself to an isolated country home in her homeland of Britain. Rather than pursue her interest (which unlike Jack, is photography, not writing), she initially spends day after day doing precisely nothing but sit around staring into space. Will we, I found myself wondering, see her churn out image after image of exactly the same subject in parallel with Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? All black and no white makes Justine a crazy girl, maybe?! Amusingly, she does do something disturbingly similar, but not for the same reason.

So our protagonist has lied to the building's owners to get this job. They wanted a married couple after the last caretaker - a young single male who held raves there and charged for admission - so Justine told them she was married and they believed her. The building is huge, old, creaky and dusty, whereas the grounds are huge, fresh and tended. She spends her first week there doing literally nothing. It took a call from her mother to precipitate an idle stroll through the large and empty house, which in turn roused her from her lassitude, but it didn't propel her into doing anything within the purview of care-taking. Instead, she retrieved her Leica camera - the one she uses for photographically exploring new subjects - and she began visiting the empty rooms, taking pictures of whatever grabbed her attention.

Justine (a name I happen to really like, btw) is old school, preferring b&w film photography to digital, and I immediately suspected that this was for the same reason I employed it in Saurus: because Mostert and I both need to have disconcerting things appear as the images are developed before the photographer's eyes. How robbed we've been - even as we make astounding and welcome progress - by the advent digital imagery! The thought did occur to me, given where the author is going with this, that digital images might actually have been a better choice. Assuming for a minute that it's possible for a mind to influence a photograph (it's not! More on this anon) it seems to me it would be a better bet were it to be placed on the mental manipulation of digital images (which, let's face it, exist only in the form of ones and zeroes encoded onto a magnetic or some other medium), than it would to do the same with fixed, printed images.

Mostert mentions (in the context of reading from a textbook on the subject - a very clever ruse to distance oneself from assertions!) the topic of "thoughtography" by which mental images are supposedly directly transferred to photographic film. It seems that the images Justine is discovering in her prints are her own projections. As I mentioned in my previous review, I don't buy any of this nonsense, but it's a great subject to play around with in fiction. When I was younger and more impressionable than I am now, I read a lot of books on topics like this, but the more I read, the more I came to an understanding of how amazingly easy it is to fool humans with woo and whack.

Ted Serios was purportedly a "thoughtographer" and he's mentioned in Windwalker. I read a book written by the scientist (Jule Eisenbud) who studied him, but Eisenbud, whilst ostensibly trying to be skeptical, was rather given to gullibility and conducted his "experiments" on Serios with really, really poor controls. The problem is that scientists are by far the worst people for studying this kind of charlatanry. The best people are magicians and one of the most famous, The Amazing Randi had a long-standing offer to pay one million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any of these powers under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed it. That tells you all you need to know right there!

James Randi and others exposed Serios as a fraud, Randi demonstrating how easy it was to replicate Serios's "thoughtography" scam, but let's pretend that in this novel, some other magical method is at work so we can enjoy the fiction! So, moving along: it's in the process of taking these pictures that Justine discovers an old wardrobe which is locked. She finds the key and opens it to discover that it’s full of clothes: old, musty and forgotten men's clothing. She wonders why no one removed them, but the explanation is at hand. She starts wearing the jacket, draped over her shoulders and despite its age (an overly large size for her) and its odd smell, it comforts her.

The only other people employed by the house's owners are the gardeners: an older man and his adolescent son. Justine meets them as they arrive for their once-a-week yard work. From them she learns of the tragedy which struck the family whose picture hangs in the house. Apparently family bad boy Adam stabbed his brother Richard to death and then disappeared without a trace. Their father had died of cancer and the mother killed herself after her favorite child's death. The remaining child, now a middle-aged woman named Harriet, hasn’t been near the place in nine years even though she had been the owner it. The house is currently owned by a development corporation who want to turn it into a spa and health retreat to complement the lifestyles of the rich and spoiled. Hence the need for a resident care-taker to keep an eye on the property until building permits, etc., have been put into place, which is taking time because the building is of historic value.

Adam, the purported murderer, seemed to me to be such an obvious candidate for innocence, and also the one with whom Justine will hook-up as this novel progresses. Whether I was right in either eventuality remains for you to discover! Another suspicion I had was that it was Harriet who murdered her brother Richard because, even though he looked angelic in the painting (in counterpoint to the evil which Adam seemed to project), he was molesting his sister. Unfortunately for my charming theory, the very next chapter seemed to confirm the popular story. I can still see a way how a witness could think Adam stabbed his brother, and yet have Adam be innocent as charged, but you'll have to read the novel to find out how far wrong or right I was!

Chapter eight was evil, with Mostert subtly ratcheting up the sphincter factor (and no doubt chortling gleefully to herself as she did so), but the hairs on my skin didn’t become sharply erect until I reached page 77 and went beyond; that's when it started to become truly creepy (even though we knew that something like this was coming: it's a Mostert, after all!). This is when Justine starts taking pictures of the house, but when she develops them, there's an image within several of them which looks remarkably like a wolf. And when she reprints the same pictures, the "wolf" has moved! Yeah like that, with hair standing up, and goosebumps! As if that's not enough, I find that I've become suspicious of all the mirrors in the house. Who's behind them, watching? Or am I too paranoid? I mean why has pretty much all the furniture gone but the mirrors all remain? And whatever became of Adam? Fortunately for me, Justine begins investigating. I love it when that happens!

I mentioned earlier that this novel has some parallels with the previous one I reviewed, but I was thrilled to discover that this one took a decidedly different tack. It turns out that Adam and Justine have matching tattoos even though they've never met. Yes, not tattoo, but tattoos: each of them has two, and the designs, a snake and a wolf, are the same. I like this very much. Justine says she went to the tattoo parlour looking to get a "Union Jack". The name of the British flag is actually 'union flag'; it's only properly referred to as a "jack" when it's flown from a ship. This is a writing problem, isn't it? Do you use the correct form, even though most people - including most Brits - do not, or do you use the form most likely to be spoken by your character, and then have to put up with wise-ass reviewers like me correcting you on it?! What a dilemma! Since the 'jack' version is coming into common use regardless of the flag's location, I guess I need to stop being a wise-ass, huh?

Now let me mention, briefly, the signature Mostert stalker, and then I'm done giving out spoilers in this review! The stalker is a he, and he's definitely creepy, but there is at least four or five possible candidates, two of which are strong, the other two or three weaker. But is the "obvious" one a red-herring or a double red-herring?! Only time will tell!

In conclusion, I recommend this as a worthy read; another winner from Natasha Mostert. Now I'm really looking forward to starting Season of the Witch which was my goal all along! I'd begun to think, as I was entering the down-gradient to the end, that I wouldn't like this novel (Windwalker) as well as I liked The Midnight Side, but as it happened, I liked it better and this was despite some issues I had with the latter half of the novel. The Watcher turns out to be a rather different pot of Pisces from the one in the earlier novel (and from what I'd been expecting), which was most welcome (and I even nailed who it was! Yeay! What a novelty that was: for me to get one right!), and I loved the ending which again wasn't what I expected at all, but which was perfect for the tone set in the rest of the story. That kind of relationship really resonates with me, fictional as it may be!

Where I had some problems was in two areas, and it's hard for me to detail my concerns without posting spoilers that I've chosen not to do! I'll try to give voice these without giving anything more away about this story. The first of my concerns was with regard to the two main characters: Adam, and Justine. I was disappointed in the course that was initially charted for them. I felt that they deserved better than what they got (and I'm not talking about the ending, which was great, but about an earlier event). It seemed like they ought to have had more, that these two deserved something greater, and they were under-served. I'm not saying that I could have done better, but I did feel a bit let-down after all the anticipation. I'm sorry that's vague. Maybe a year or two from now I'll revisit this review and add a bit more at a point where I won't feel like I'm robbing the author of some of her glory if I'm more specific!

In more general terms, the other issue was that the closing sequences were drawn-out for too long for me. I realize that Mostert had spun many threads all of which needed to be tied off neatly, but it just seemed to go on longer than it ought. Again, I risk spoilers because there are elements of this novel which I've left unmentioned, but at one point there was a distinct (and to me inexplicable) lethargy in Adam and Justine's actions. It seemed to me that the obvious course - the one which each eventually took - should not have been delayed at all, let alone for as long as it was. I didn’t get that at all, and I saw no rationale for it, which was one of the reasons I felt that this portrayal was less than stellar.

But these are relatively minor considerations when set against what Mostert does deliver: another fun tale that’s by turns creepy, angering (for the right reasons!), warming, intriguing, and engrossing. Definitely a winner!


Monday, January 13, 2014

The Midnight Side by Natasha Mostert





Title: The Midnight Side
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) any other remuneration for this review.

Not to be confused with Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight or with Terri Marie's The Wrong Side of Midnight, or with Mia Zachary's Another Side of Midnight, or M D Nygaard's The Other Side of Midnight, or Patrick DiCiccio's The Jagged Side of Midnight...do you see where I'm going with this? Pick a more distinctive title please? My new title is going to be The Clichéd Side of Midnight, or An Order of 11:59pm, with Midnight on the Side or maybe, yeah: The Half-Assed Side of Midnight....

I'm brand new to Natasha Mostert and I've brashly taken on three of her novels so I sincerely hope she doesn’t let me down! This one is Mostert's debut novel, first published in 1999, but republished with some serious editing last year. Let me offer a full disclosure up front, that I do not believe in any supernatural crap and the reason for this is reason itself! I've seen no valid or even useful evidence for the existence of any of it: gods, devils, demons, magic (black, white, or grey), witchcraft (as opposed to Wicca, which does exist, but is nothing more than a harmless belief, unlike major religions), ESP, clairvoyance, astrology, telekinesis, ghosts, etc., etc., etc. Neither do I believe in UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster (although I did write a novel about it!) and so on. I do, however, love a really good story about any of these topics on the rare occasion I can find one. I'm hoping this is a rare occasion!

First impressions were good. Mostert is a descriptive writer with an eye for a turn of phrase, although she's a bit too fond of 'vertiginous' and I'm not convinced she's using it correctly, but I’ll give her the benefit on that score! Having said that, she doesn’t dally too much, moving the story along with a playful tease here, some disturbing suspense there, just to keep your imagination tickled. There are some bits here and there which become bogged down in memory/flashback, and a bit too much detail for the minor characters, but not enough to tick me off. I do confess to disappointment in her female protagonist. I prefer a good strong female character, and Isabelle is a bit of a wuss, but I am trying to overlook that and some of her sorry behaviors (more anon) as I read this. Or should I say behaviours, since this is set in Britain?

With regard to the setting, kudos! It begins in South Africa, which is where Isabelle is resident, but she's called to Britain by the death of her best friend Alette. A death I immediately suspected as being rather more than accidental, suspicious old me. This actually distracted me because it reminded me of a short story I wrote, but let’s not dwell on that. What I want to mention is how thoroughly Americanized the writing world is - at least the one in which I've been immersed for evidently too long. When this novel mentioned flying from South Africa to the UK, I was lost for a minute. I had assumed this was set in the US, so this itinerary thoroughly confused me! How god-awfully sad is that?! I was thrilled to be proven wrong.

Anyway, enough rambling. So Isabelle is awakened early one morning by a phone-call from Alette, on a really bad line, asking fro Isabelle's help, and implying serious problems. When she receives another call later that morning from Alette's lawyer, informing her of Alette's death in a car accident, Isabelle is shocked, but nowhere near as shocked as she is to discover that this death occurred two days prior to Alette's phone call!

Isabelle learns that not only is she Alette's sole beneficiary, she's also tasked by Alette with something which the lawyer says he needs to discuss with her in person. This is the first of my annoyances with Isabelle's personality - rather than rail against this, or at least object, she meekly complies, traveling to London. She learns that Alette left her three letters, each one to be dispensed to Isabelle on a weekly basis. The first of reveals how awful her originally ideal marriage to Justin was. It began perfectly, but, Alette reveals, it rapidly descended into Justin becoming a control freak in the most extreme ways possible short of physically imprisoning Alette. Even after she divorced him, he continued to stalk her, begging her to return to him, almost literally showering her with flowers and cards. The night she died, she had gone to have it out with him and get him off her back once and for all, and she was in the accident on her way home.

Justin isn't the only guy involved with Alette. Michael lives in a flat (apartment) across the street from Alette's house, and he has a habit of entering the house uninvited, of which Isabelle is unaware to begin with. The first time she meets Justin on this trip is also when he lets himself into the house, but she never tackles him on the matter, and never considers changing the locks! I must admit it crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't Justin who stalked Alette after the divorce, but Michael, pretending to be Justin? Or is there something else entirely going on?

Alette's request in the first envelope is that Isabelle help her get revenge upon Justin by bringing down his pharmaceutical company, and she details her plan for doing this with which, again annoyingly, Isabelle complies, since it involves "only" making three phone calls to stock-brokers, questioning the company's viability regarding manufacturing supplies, and mailing two letters (which Isabelle doesn't read). Isabelle, at this point, is a puppet whose strings are caught upon whomever happens to be closest. This isn’t a surprise given the flashbacks we get, disruptive to the story as they are. She accepts an invitation to dinner with Justin despite all she has read about him from Alette. The question is (for me anyway at this point): is she smart to do so - will this begin a friendship to show that Justin isn't quite as bad as he's painted, and it's Michael who's the bad guy, or is she sliding blindly down the same slippery road upon which Alette slid, and only Michael can save her? Interesting, huh? Except that it looks like Isabelle is going to need saving by one or other of these two guys, which doesn’t work well for me! Maybe I'm wrong!

The more I read of this, the more convinced I became that things might be backwards: that Alette is the villain, and Justin the wronged party, and that the lawyer, Lionel Darling is also a villain (especially given the reveal about his troubled childhood), and Michael, the too-friendly neighbor, merely a red-herring. I suspect both Michale and Lionel because Mostert has them both out of town - obviously in the hoe that when she writes more of her anonymous stalker's activities I will think it cannot be either of those guys. Hah! In short, Mostert was doing a wonderful job of screwing with my mind! It has also occurred to me that Alette is still alive, and/or that Darling was orchestrating the whole thing using Alette as a ruse, using Isabelle to pose as The Wisdom and undermine Justin's corporation with her phone-calls for Darling's own purposes. One after another, new theories arose to explain the new information that Mostert leaked with cruelly metronomic ruthlessness, and even more cruel thrift.

I don't get the point of a weak character being the main protagonist in a novel unless they learn how to become strong over the course of the story. I can see how you could work it with a weak character depending upon the story you're telling, but in this one, it’s not working well for someone like me, who adores strong female characters. Well over half-way through, Isabelle shows no sign of taking charge of her life, constantly allowing herself to be led by the nose by various men, including Justin and Michael. Of course, she has a history of this. Alette did this to her throughout their childhood together, and even now is doing it from the grave. Isabelle also allowed a married man to do this to her back in South Africa. With Justin, even after she swore to herself that she wouldn't see him again, she lets him drag her out of the house (metaphorically speaking!) to go on a picnic on a day which is really too cold, and then take her on a tour of some of London's tourist spots.

I'm not going to reveal any more of this. I finished it (it's an easy read) and though the ending was a bit flat, I consider this to be a worthy novel. That's fortunate for me, since I have two more Mosterts to get through! Let me just conclude by saying that one of my guesses was, amazingly, spot on, but you're gonna have to read it find out which one (like you care!). That's the joy of making a sesquicentillion guesses - at least one of them is likely to be close! I don't know what this was like before she got in there and polished it up for re-release, but whatever she did was worth her efforts. I recommend this one.


Saturday, December 28, 2013

Light by M John Harrison





Title: Light
Author: M John Harrison
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: WARTY!

I've often looked at Iain Banks's novels on bookshelves and always put them back. Now I'm glad I did because he wholeheartedly recommended this novel in a newspaper review, so it tells me all I need to know about him! M John Harrison has a host of novels out there. Whether it's a heavenly host, I can't say since this is the first of his that I've ever read, but it isn't looking good.

I don't normally remark upon covers, since the author has little or nothing to do with the cover unless the novel is self-published. This blog is about writers, writing, and stories, not publishers, editors, and cover-artists, but I have to say that the cover design here fails in that it looks dirty - like even a brand new copy of this novel is soiled with dirty spots! Not pleasant, but perhaps that's the intended effect? It certainly portended my experience with this novel.

Harrison wastes no time in making it clear that he's one of those annoying authors who, because they went to the effort of creating a back-story for every minor character in their novel, has to share it with you in its entirety. And he's also one of those authors who is so proud of said characters that he has to parade them all out before you in the first few chapters, plot, story, and pace be hanged. The odd thing is that it turns out that none of his three main characters are in any way connected!

He's also apparently frightened by female bodies because he can’t talk about their "private parts". Hence he hides them all under the generic title of "sex". A man's hand doesn’t touch her vulva or her labia, or even her Mons Veneris, it touches her sex! Having said that, the story proved just about readable for at least the first one hundred pages, although I had to skip page after page of boring exposition - not of the plot, but of irrelevant or minor, or uninteresting characters. It’s not hard to see how this novel swelled to over four hundred pages. In the end I was reading only every third chapter because only one of his three main characters was interesting to me.

One of these three is a guy who is some sort of a weird serial killer in contemporary London, who also works in quantum computing. Another is a woman who lives many centuries in his future, who has become so tired of her body that she's dispensed with it and become part of her spaceship. Her problem is that the spaceship seems to have a mind all of its own - in addition to hers! She's trying to find out what the deal is. This was the character who interested me. There was not enough of her and what there was didn't make a lot of sense. There is a third character of whom I'm not even sure. It’s either the owner of a tank farm, or it's the guy who got liberated accidentally from the tank farm. Technically there's a fourth character - a shadowy figure known as The Shrander, who seems to haunt the serial killer, and which the killer's ex-wife (the one who has a "sex" in place of a vulva) also claims to have seen, so one quarter the way through, things were disturbingly vague, with not much happening or looking like it would happen, and with Harrison spewing cyberpunk terminology like he's in a William Gibson impersonator contest.

In the end, I read a bit more than a third of this, and it wasn't the first third. It was a third interspersed with the other two utterly boring, and in the end irrelevant to the novel, thirds. The interesting third featured the K-ship girl Seria Mau Genlicher, who has a name very evocative of the names used by Greg Bear for the advanced humans in his Eon series of novels. I liked this part of this novel, about finding and exploiting advanced alien technology from a vanished race. While there's nothing new or original to it, it was well done and had a really professional sci-fi feel to it. The other two thirds were about the most tediously boring people imaginable, and contributed, for me, absolutely nothing to this story.

That one third I would have rated worthy because it was engaging, particularly the capricious and moody Seria. The other two thirds are pure, adulterated trash. If Harrison has novels out there which he has written in the same idiom as the one good third here, then they might be worth reading, but if his writing is more like the 66% trash content here, then they're warty without question. That's the reason I'm rating this warty: it's purely on a percentage basis, and the novel had no ending!


Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Fifty Sheds of Grey by CT Grey





Title: Fifty Sheds of Grey
Author: CT Grey
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: worthy

Fifty Sheds of Grey is quite plainly and simply hilarious. It's a small format hardback designed for all those who wish to shed their inhibitions and out their hibitions, and it comes replete with pictures (grey scale, of course) of assorted garden sheds, gardens, garden tools and gardenias (at least he thinks that's what they were, he confesses with a shrub of his shoulders). But it's the sly text interspersed with the pictures which is more than enough to make you exclaim "Garden Bennet!", and then for your exclaim to come around and get your ticker going ninety to the dozen so you can claim it on your tocks return.

It's a parody of course (which contrary to popular opinion is not a cross between a parrot and a chickadee), but the irony (no, that's not a condition of the patella and it certainly has nothing to do with Pat or Ella, so they claim, but offend in knee is a friend in deed) is that it's doubtlessly better than the original.

I haven't read the original, but I did read Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey which was also hilarious, so it at least qualifies me to have a laugh at their expense account.

I think the best way to recommend this book is to pass on a few quotes (unless the poor things have passed on already), so as Mrs Forficula said to her philandering husband, earwig go:

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked. "When I'm done, you won't be able to sit down for weeks."

She nodded.

"Okay," I said, putting the three-piece suite on eBay.
She told me it turned her on to have her movements restricted when she made love. I looked around - I was going to have to get a smaller shed.
As we stood there naked in Ikea, we came to an important decision. Next time, only one of us would wear a blindfold.
"I'm a very naughty girl," she said, biting her lip. "I need to be punished." So I invited my mother to stay for the weekend.

In short, I highly recommend this for a laugh or to be or not to bean. It makes a great bathroom book, or even a book to keep in the shed.


Sunday, October 20, 2013

On Basilisk Station by David Weber





Title: On Basilisk Station
Author: David Weber
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: worthy!

You can read this novel online for free at Baen books.

This novel is the first in a long series, and if you've noticed that I already rated it worthy, it’s because I already read this novel. I'm going through it again via audio disk so I can start documenting this series, and from a personal perspective, I'm curious to compare how the audio version matches up to my own recollection of reading the print version. I like this character, but it’s been a while since I read this novel, so listening to it will be interesting and fun.

This audio is by Allyson Johnson. Johnson's reading is passable, but not brilliant. Her cadence is odd at times and her voice for Honor Harrington is completely wrong, but other than that she does a decent job (although her pronunciations are a bit adrift to me at times). She turned 'malaise' into mah-lezz rather than ma-lays, which I found odd. I think that was an American thing; a British reader, for example, probably would have made it sound more French, as its origin dictates. I have to wonder why, given that this is quite obviously rooted in the British Navy of the 19th century, why they didn’t get a British reader for the series. Johnson also says Man...tickoran, hurrying through that last bit. I have no idea how Weber pronounces it (another problem with letting a third party get between you and your reader! Why don’t authors read their own novels for the audio versions?). I have to wonder why, given that this is 'Manticore' and not 'Manticor', it’s 'Manticoran' and not 'Manticorean' and why it's Man...tickoran and not Manti-coran, but the name of the people has often been inconsistent with the name of the country from which it hails even in reality, so it's hardly a surprise when you think about it.

I have to ask, ninety-nine tracks on each disk? NINETY NINE? Each one is a minute or less long. What the heck inspired that bizarre arrangement? I found the dramatic music at the start and end of each disk rather laughable, but it was short. I did appreciate the announcement at the end of the disk that it’s the end of the disk. As pedantic as that sounds, there is method to my madness! On my car player, the disk simply recycles back to the first track and starts over, so if I'm not watching - which I'm not when I'm driving of course - it sometimes takes a few seconds to realize what's happened.

As I mentioned in other reviews on this blog, a reader has to choose, sometimes, whether to overlook the writer's peccadilloes and short-comings for the sake of enjoying what is otherwise a good novel, or to simply reject the thing as a waste of time and not read it at all. From the writer's perspective, the trick is to tell your tale without pissing-off your reader, of course. But readers are very flexible. They will forgive a lot of bad material if the underlying story is engrossing enough. It doesn’t mean they're idyllically happy with it by any means, but it does mean they will put up with it. This is where critics come in, and why writers need to pay attention to valid criticism. This is especially true of a series. If you write book one and find it sells, but there's criticism, it’s foolish to ignore those comments when writing book two, but you have to tread the fine line between the complaints which book one generated on the one side, and both retaining what was good from book one and telling the story you want to tell in book two on the other side. And of course, if you've already got book two in the bag by the time book one catches on, it can be a bit hard to go back and address criticisms there!

However, if you persist in failing to do this, then you end up with readers like me who put up with what they consider to be the crap in the early books for the sake of enjoying what they consider to be the benefits, only to ditch the series after a while as they see that nothing is changing, or worse, the gold-to-dross ratio is declining. In the end, that's why I ditched it because the only thing which changed in this series was the increased level of tedium and frustration on my part with the stories. I have to tell you that while the first half-dozen books were really engrossing and rewarding, for me the series went to hell in a hand-basket somewhere around volume six or seven (I forget which) and became one of the dullest and most uninteresting series ever at that point. I will touch on the reasons for that in this review. Note that while I am reviewing book one in the Honor Harrington series (or the Star Kingdom series, whatever!), the criticisms come from a wider perspective of having read several of this series.

I started out really liking Commander Honor Harrington, "captain" of the HMS Fearless, almost adoring her as much as David Weber himself quite evidently does although, unlike Weber, I baulked at complete prostration, worship, and shrine building! At the start of the novel there is a prologue which I may well actually have read when I first picked up the paperback, but which I skipped this time as I routinely do with prologues - considering them to be a waste of time. If it's worth telling, it’s worth putting in the first chapter. The hell with prologues! The one here is bit tedious, and serves only to explain why Basilisk Station is the target chosen by the bad guys. In short, it’s a pointless exercise which could have been worked into the text.

The situation in this fiction that there are some really big kingdoms, or empires, or republics in space, one of which is the belligerent Haven, which seems to be a cross between post-revolutionary France, and cold-war Russia. The good guys are supposed to be the Manticoreans, based around a planet called Manticore, and which has a monarchy. All the combatants are human, coming, originally, from Earth ("old Earth" as it’s stupidly called, like there is some other, newer Earth somewhere around!). Haven, because it isn’t a Weber-approved political or economic system, is short of cash and therefore needs to take over Basilisk Station, which is a warp hub - there is a wormhole there which permits quick passage to distant stars, but it's controlled by Manticore which derives an healthy income from it. See? I did it in one paragraph!

I have to inject here that this business of space empires has always seemed to me to be appallingly juvenile and short-sighted, not to say uninventive and brain-dead. It blindly disregards how massive space is and how pointless it would be to imagine that anyone could "conquer" it or administer any kind of oppressive or coercive system over such huge distances. it relies on the patent fiction that it's economically viable to spend billions to "conquer" another system in order to extort millions from that system.

Weber modeled this series very closely (far too closely IMO) on the early nineteenth century seaman Horatio Hornblower - which is why his main character has the double-H initials. I have never read that series, but the impression I have is that the stories parallel the Hornblower series in many regards, particularly insofar as it reflects the commander's travel through the ranks. Harrington has worked hard to get her command, but she faces some people in a strong position to derail her. The first of these is the chief on her own command, who detests her for no good reason. The second is more a case of circumstance than of a person: her new ship has been pretty much stripped of weapons in favor of a new-fangled pet project of a clueless woman who somehow has risen to the rank of admiral, with the emphasis on rank.

The "grav lance" is a powerful weapon, but it's useful only at short range, so Harrington can strike with it successfully only once before her opponents in the exercise realize what both her power and her limitation is, and take her out before she can get close a second time. So when she fails to make a roaring success of Admiral Hemphill's toy, Harrington is going to be very effectively banished to a piss-ant backwater "command". The name of that command? Basilisk Station. The problem with Weber's space fights is the same problem which all space battles have, which is that although we call them ships, and dreadnoughts, and cruisers, like they're ships at sea, it's the mind-set behind this which is actually all at sea. These are not ships of the line, they're space craft and they operate not on the two-dimensional surface of the ocean, but in 3-D and black and white.

That's why Weber's stories so annoyed me in the long-run, because he obsesses so dedicatedly over his space-faring vessels and the pitched battles between them that he risks blowing a vessel in the space between his ears. He would have us believe that space battles will be no different in any way, shape, or form from sea battles (and sea battles of Horatio Hornblower's era, to boot!), and he depicts each and every one exactly as though it were at sea, all participants steadfastly conducting themselves as if they were ocean bound and constrained. Even within the context of his own framework, this makes no sense.

For example, he talks about a "line of battle" or "wall of battle" (just as if this were a sea battle), completely ignoring the fact that no enemy with any brains is going to line-up all their ships on a two-dimensional plain neatly facing their opponents when they have all of three-D space in which to operate, and when they can make micro jumps as well as come in on literally any vector. Weber bemoans the massive dreadnought's weakness: having an energy weapon fired "up the dreadnought's skirt" (i.e. between the energy barricades set up by the spacecraft's impeller drive, which offers a massive shield on two sides, but not fore or aft). Yet he later goes on to talk about the space fortresses guarding the Basilisk worm-hole and states clearly that they have all-around coverage (and they are capable of moving). So, too, could the battleships have 360 degree coverage if they didn't rigidly get in line, but had other ships out of line, perpendicularly positioned so as to guard those skirts!

But none of this is actually relevant because the whole thing is nonsense. Here in 2013 we're already awash with robots and drones, and I'm not talking about that pissant little Honda Asimo, or those robot puppies, I'm talking about industrial robots and space-exploring robots. No civilization worth its salt is going to waste billions upon billions in building and crewing massive battle ships (the real-world navies had already abandoned that plan back in the twentieth century!). The future, and the future of warfare, is going to be be entirely in the hands of robots and AIs, so all of Weber's antiquated bullshit about having the right man for the job and how inhumanly dedicated and skillful Harrington's crew is - is obsolete. The reality is that humans aren't going to be allowed anywhere near astro-navigation and fire-control systems when we have AIs and robots to run them. Now there would be a story.

Yet despite the prevalence of robots here and now, Weber takes the same dishonest tack which Star Trek took, and blindly pretends that robots and AIs were never invented. I have a few salty words to say about that, but I'll drop anchor right there and grant Weber his fiction, and let him get on with his story! As I said, I really do like the first few novels, so I was willing to let him get away with emitting these irritants like so much pollution for the greater reward of seeing Harrington in action.

So when Harrington gets to Basilisk, she has another shock awaiting her in the problem of a specific person with whom she had a really, really bad experience (if you want to tart-up near-rape and make it sound like nothing more upsetting and debilitating than a stomach-ache) when she was in "naval" college. Captain Lord Pavel Young is a dilettante, a bully, a slacker, and an abuser of women. He got away with assaulting Harrington because of her weakness and her fear, and the fact that she had been attacked in a very male-oriented service where there were male senior officers and everyone was expected to be super-tough and to hide their weaknesses and feelings of being badly treated. It's hardly surprising that when we cultivate a system like this, real-life abuses of women and real rapes are not rare. But why Weber thinks the military will be just as male-oriented and oppressive of women several hundred years from now as it is right now is a mystery; however, this is his fiction, so let him tell it how he wants.

Young takes off to get his ship refitted as soon as Harrington arrives, but this isn't the blessing you would think, since she is now solely in charge of this crucial station, yet she has nothing worthy of the name with which to defend it! Harrington buckles down and starts doing her duty despite these setbacks, and she really makes a difference. In process of properly enforcing the rules and laws, she discovers that Haven has infiltrated a nearby planet and plans on using illegal drugs and weapons to foment a crazed rebellion amongst the rather primitive alien inhabitants of Medusa against planetary rule. Haven hopes to be able to slip in as a 'stabilizing' party, thereby taking over the planet; they can then use this as a forward base of operations for an invasion of Manticorean space.

The Havenites have a stealth ship lurking locally, but this is discovered by Harrington, and after a drawn-out knock-down fight, Harrington gains the upper hand and thereby thwarts (yes, thwarts, no other word will suffice!) the Haven plan for taking over in the area. Harrington now becomes a real captain and takes over a brand new cruiser, all ready for her next impossible mission in The Honor of the Queen. Yes a good many of these novels play on Harrington's name.

Since I already knew what I was going to rate this novel going into it, I was less hesitant to read others' takes on this novel, and I found some interesting and amusing criticisms, Including humorous remarks about how important Harrington's white captain's beret was! That didn’t bother me. There were also comments about Nimitz, her tree-cat. This is not a pet, it’s a companion, and while I normal vomit profusely over cute animals in stories, in this case, I was quite intrigued and fascinated by Nimitz, so I had very little problem with him. I can see, without a back story to support him, how his relationship with Harrington might seem bizarre, but that didn’t bother me and was one of the very few parts I found worthy of reading in one of the later books: perhaps the very last book I ever read in this series, where I believe I skipped everything but that part of the novel! Nimitz (which I think is a great name for him) really comes into his own in book two where there is a stunning passage about a fist-fight Harrington gets into, not by choice, and against several opponents who are assassins. That was one of the best action sequences I've ever read in any novel.

An issue which didn’t seem to be raised in other criticisms is Harrington's planet of origin: Sphinx. In the Manticore system, there are three Earth-like planets (Manticore, Sphinx, and Griffin), which is why it was settled so readily, and also why the Manticoreans did not get into expansionism: they already had everything they needed in this one system. Sphinx is described by Weber has having noticeably greater gravity than Earth, and a shorter year, but he says nothing (that I recall) about whether the higher gravitational pull is because of increased size, or simply increased density. He does say this is why Sphinxians are generally taller and stronger than other inhabitants of the system, but we never (or almost never) meet any other Sphinxians for comparison with Harrington! (And why Sphinxians instead of Sphinxans?!)

I have to wonder at Weber's interpretation of how the greater gravity would influence growth. I can see that it would, without having to require an evolutionary change (evolution, very simply put, is a change in allele frequency in the genome of a population). Since humans have a large variability, it wouldn’t require a mutation, merely a favoring of certain already-existing body types, but it’s this that's the problem for me. Weber assumes that the favored body-type would be tall and strong, but I'd have to argue that maybe it would be short and stocky, and strong instead. Weber offers no good reason to buy into his chosen type. It does grant Harrington a certain statuesque authority, however, so this didn’t seem to me to be worth bothering with given what he was doing with this character.

The other thing which is odd about Harrington is her age, and this business of Weber trying fruitlessly to reconcile years between planets with differing orbital periods I found truly irritating. Everyone in the Manticore (and the Haven for that matter) systems is ultimately from Earth deep down in their roots, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Earth in this entire series, and it hardly garners a mention, yet Weber would have us believe that everything needs to be translated to "T-years" (Earth years), so while Harrington is actually forty, she's really only 25 in Earth years which explains why she's such a newbie in terms of her schooling and graduation at that age. Weber needs to dispense with 'T-years' and just talk about 'years', only mentioning the actual length of the year if it's vitally important. Mostly it’s not at all important, but it is really annoying when he keeps on doing it!

I have to agree with other critics that Harrington is too much of a Mary Sue (in the traditional sense). She reminds me very much of Janeway, the captain of the Star Trek Voyager spacecraft - always immensely moral, unarguably correct and proper. How did Rex Harrison put it (of men) in My Fair lady? "Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; eternally noble, historically fair."! It’s like Harrington is trying to live up to that absurd appellation I couldn't stand Janeway, but for some reason I found Harrington much more acceptable, if nauseating on occasion. Her extreme perfection is quite annoying. A few character flaws or imperfections (other than stroking her nose, which seems to be the extent of Weber's idea of a character flaw) would be nice. Her internal monologues are also annoying at times - all info-dump and quite pedantic.

Weber also has his peccadilloes. His exclusive employment of Scotsmen in key support and fatherly positions is highly amusing. If Harrington is going to have a fatherly figure take her under his wing, he inevitably has a Scots -sounding name - such as Hamish Alexander. If she's going to have a right-hand man, he inevitably has a Scots-sounding name, such as Alistair McKeon. Weber has a lot of ethnic-sounding last names (not that, a thousand years into the future, and light years out into space, those names really mean anything), but the names seem to be invariably Japanese or Hispanic. I don’t recall reading many if any names which sounded like they had, for example, an African origin, or a Middle-Eastern origin. Weber inevitably becomes boring whenever he's talking of the Havenite Republic, or about the evil plans thereof. He invariably becomes long-winded and often dull whenever he gets into military technical talk, or into political, economic, or aristocratic deliberations. It's harder to skip the boring parts on an audio disk because you can't see where you're going!

I also found that this business, a trope in all space operas, of trade between star systems to be unutterably absurd in the extreme. I can see that certain high-end items - such as archaeological artifacts and "native" crafts might find rich buyers on other systems (that's kind of the premise behind The Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt), but to suggest that people are going to spend billions on building space-craft and on financing interstellar travel to bring in common or garden raw materials, or manufactured products from star systems which are scores of light years away is pure bullshit. It’s not even remotely economical.

I'm not sure where Weber gets his physics, and I honestly do not require any details about how some fictional concept works, especially not in sci-fi. I can hardly imagine anything more pointless than a lecture about something which doesn’t exist! It’s like sitting in church and listening to some ignorant clueless so-called holy man pontificate about his god when he actually knows no more about any god than you do. I really don’t care about how much research you've done, nor do I need to be drilled on this by having extended sections of the novel devoted to expounding your back-story. I sure as hell don’t need an info-dump on the topic, but if you're going to put some sort of an "explanation" into your fiction, then please accept these two pieces of advice:

  1. Don’t put it in the form of a three-thousand word essay in the middle of a chase scene.
  2. Do make sure it doesn’t defy long-established principles of physics!

Weber starts in about 'grav waves', by which he means gravitational waves (not gravity waves, which is something else entirely), but he erroneously believes it's possible for these to move at "...two and a half or three thousand times the speed of light". BullSHIT. Once he's made a blunder like that (so large that it probably has its own gravity!), then everything he says subsequently on the topic isn’t worth wasting your time in reading. Having said that, let me note the possibility of an out here: Einstein's (or rather, this universe's) speed limit applies to physical objects in space-time, not to the fabric of space-time itself. Since gravity waves are 'ripples' in that fabric, perhaps there is a way for them to (at least apparently) 'beat' the speed limit. Whether they're actually beating it in any meaningful sense is another issue, and these are questions for the physicists! To the best of my knowledge, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light (or near as 'damn-it' is to swearing) and not any faster; certainly not three orders of magnitude faster. There is evidence that gravitational waves exist, but none have been detected to my knowledge, at least as of this writing.

This revelation of Weber's, that Einstein was completely wrong about the speed of light being the universal limit, comes in the middle of Harrington's trying to run down a disguised Havenite warship, which is a decently exciting chase (had it not been interrupted by info-dump!), but all of it is nonsense. The reason for the ship's trying to escape, so we’re given to understand, is the fact that it must reach the Havenite incoming fleet to warn them that their invasion plan needs to be shelved. In that case, why send a ship at significantly sub-light speed to deliver the message, when a simple radio signal would carry that same information very nearly at light speed itself? Hence the chase is all revel without a cause.

Being a warship rather than the merchant vessel it's disguised as, the Havenite ship can fire missiles at Harrington in her inevitably out-classed vessel, but this poses some really interesting problems. I'm not going to get into them because it would take a real physicist to figure all this out, but allow me just to confine myself to saying that if you're going to write about missile exchanges between vessels traveling at significant percentages of the speed of light, I rather suspect you cannot treat everything in exactly the same way you would if this exchange had taken place at every-day speeds. Yes, they're still bound by the universal laws of physics, but would we see, at those velocities, the same things we would at the speeds with which we’re familiar in everyday life? Would we be able to react to what we see in any useful way? Maybe. I don’t know. Nor do I know of anyone who's written about this in sci-fi and addressed these issues, either. I’d love to read it, if anyone has!

On this same subject, I have to note an appalling lack of computerization. This always amused me in Star Trek, where robots and AIs are non-existent despite their already being in extensive use in real life even in our day and age! This makes no sense. It makes even less sense with Weber's pally old-boy network of characters like "skipper", and "guns" doing manual calculations for intercept vectors and missile defense. Weber is too bogged down in Horatio Hornblower and paying very little attention to the fact that he's moved this whole thing from the ocean to the low-gravity vacuum of space while essentially changing nothing of his approach towards any of it. For example, he seems to forget (as indeed do most space operas, Star Wars and Star Trek included) that when you set something in motion in space, it tends to keep on going regardless of whether it runs out of fuel. The whole concept of "out of range" is meaningless in space. Yes, it’s relevant if a missile loses its own power, and is therefore not maneuverable; its target can then conceivably move out of the missile's path, but if the target remains immobile in relation to the incoming missile, there is no such thing as range!

Amusingly, it’s still the "Navy" to Weber, which technically has nothing whatsoever to do with space ships! He still talks about "Naval Intelligence" which shows little intelligence, and tosses in cute catch-words like "buships" (boo-ships) for Bureau of Ships and bupers (boo-pers) for Bureau of Persons. None of that works for me, which makes it strange that I even liked the first few novels in this series! That still amazes me, but doesn’t surprise me that I ran out of steam as he allowed more of the kind of nonsense I've detailed here to pervade the novels, consequently shutting out the stuff which actually did keep me interested.

So to bring this amazingly long review to a close, yes, I enjoyed this story just as much in audio as I did originally when I first read it, and I'm now tempted to move onto volume two to read again or listen to it! So yes, I had a lot of issues and I can see how others could have a lot of issues with this, but despite those, Weber did provide me with enough to keep me coming back - until he didn't, then I ditched the series and never looked back. I recommend this volume, though.