More Heaven Than Hell

Last night we got to see Heaven and Hell, i.e the Dio version of Black Sabbath, at the Warfield in SF.

I pretty much lucked into finding out about this show. Guitar Center had a sale over the weekend and I had one guitar cable I've been whining about for years. So I decided to take advantage of the sale to replace it. On the way out, I always look at the flyers near the door and the one for Heaven and Hell caught my eye. Given that I haven't played my electric in over a year before this weekend, and I hadn't been to a Guitar Center in longer than that, it was very fortuitous.

The show was the next day, so I rushed home, expecting it to be sold out. Luckily for me, Heaven and Hell doesn't sell as well as Black Sabbath. This meant that not only were they playing a smaller venue, but that they still had good seats available.

The show itself was amazing, from the opening strains of E5150/Mob Rules to the ending of Neon Knights. For me the high points were Falling of the Edge of the World and Die Young, near the end of the set, but even the songs off their new album, The Devil You Know, and the slightly older songs from the under appreciated Dehumanizer were really good. They also had the obligatory solo sections for drum and guitar and some jamming and a sing along on Heaven and Hell.

It was the Mob Rules era lineup - Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice - and none of them have lost any of their chops. This is particularly amazing since Dio is 67, just 2 years younger than my mum. He was looking a little old running around, but he still has the pipes. Geezer was also looking, well, like a geezer but Tony Iommi is amazing - he doesn't look like he has changed in 20+ years.

Overall, I'm still amazed and thrilled that I got to see this band in a smaller venue. I don't do arena shows any more, so this might be the only chance I get to see them, and this is probably the closest I will every get to any of Black Sabbath. I will have to keep my eye on the Warfield to see who else comes through there.

The opening act was Coheed and Cambria. I'd heard their name somewhere before, but never heard any of their music. They did a good set, without a lot of stage banter. I assume this was because they were trying to fit as much as possible in their shorter set. Live rock shows aren't the best place to judge new music, due to the usually terrible sound mix and loudness, but they seemed to have some possibly interesting songs. The high point of their show for me was a nice cover of Iron Maiden's The Trooper. The only down side of their set was their lighting - they had a set of floor spotlights that were nicely set to point directly at the balcony, making it impossible to actually look at the band for a good portion of their set.

I just finished Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow.

Pleading Guilty isn't a legal thriller like you might expect from Turow. It's actually a modern noirish mystery with a partner in a law firm substituting for the typical private investigator protagonist.

The protagonist is an ex-drunk, former cop who is been underperforming at his firm and is on his way down, if not out. He's asked to look for a missing partner who might have also stolen a lot of money.

This is a departure for Turow, and feels very different from his other novels. It still has the complex and flawed characters he is known for. It starts out slow but picks up momentum in the second half. Once you twig that it is noir, everything -- twists, turns and betrayals -- falls into place and the end is about what you would expect.

Yesterday I finished All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear.

All the Windwracked Stars is set at the end of the world, in a fantasy world derived from Norse myth. The beginning is set at the end of the world in it's equivalent of Valhalla, the rest of the book is set much later in Midgard, when that world is ending as well.

The main character is an ex-Valkyrie who ran away when her comrades were slain and has lived alone ever since. She gets drawn back into things when an old enemy pops up, and she tries to save the world one last time. In addition to these struggles, the novel also features some intense and somewhat violent sexual scenes, somethat that seems de rigueur in many modern fantasy novels written by women.

An interesting, and very dense novel. The use of a mythology that hews closer, in some ways, to it's origins is well done.

Yesterday, I finished WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer.

Wake is the first of a planned trilogy, obviously dealing with the rise of an emergent AI on the world wide web. The book follows four separate plots. The first is of an awakening AI. The second is of a blind girl who gets an experimental implant to try and give her sight. The third is of the Chinese government trying to contain an outbreak of virulent flu, and repressing internet connections to contain publicity. The fourth is of a hybrid chimp/bonobo that not only can talk using sign language but starts to show actual artistic ability.

By the end of the book, the first and second plots have intertwined, as the nascent WWW AI starts to communicate with the blind girl through her implant. The third plot does not cross with the others, except for the isolating of China's web causing the AI to bifurcate and then re-unite early on in the book, possibly spurring it's development. The fourth plot does not cross with the others in this novel, presumably it will in the rest of the series.

Overall, it's not one of my favourites of Sawyer's works so far. There is a lot of obvious exposition in this novel, with characters delivering huge speeches on neuropsychology, Zipf plots, etc. Sawyer does a good job of making the exposition compelling and timely, in terms of the plot, but it eventually drags everything down. I didn't like his last book, Rollback, very much either but I'm still interested enough to continue reading his books in general.

After getting back from our trip, I finished Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow.

This is the sequel to Towing Jehovah, which I wrote about here. The corpse of God has been recovered from his Arctic resting place and put on display in an amusement park, and visited by the sick like Lourdes.

The protagonist is a very sick man, with very bad luck, who decides to sue God in the World Court at the Hague. From this point on, the book basically becomes a detailed examination of the "Problem of Evil" as the protagonist wrestles with his opponent in the lawsuit. All of the theodicies (defenses of God against the "Problem of Evil") are examined. As such, it is quite interesting, but the rest of the story and the characters feel a little tacked on, like in most one issue books.

Not one of my favourites by Morrow.

I just finished The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon.

In some ways this is a gimmick novel - the gimmick being that the protagonist is autistic and the book is told in first person from his perspective. But it's a very well done gimmick, so readers won't mind. Moon does a very good job of creating a compelling character and plot, even though she is telling it through the viewpoint of someone who things very differently from most people.

I don't think anyone really knows if her descriptions about what it is like to think like an autistic person are true, but it feels true, and that is all that matters in a novel. Once we get used to the protagonist, we can follow him, and care about him, as he goes through various trials and adventures.

The plot deals with how outsiders deal with autistic people, and how autistic people themselves feel when an opportunity to cure them of autism comes up.

If I had one quibble with this excellent book, it is that the protagonist, Lou, is set up as a little too perfect - nice guy, genius, excellent fencer, capable of fighting off attackers, leader of his group of autistic people, etc. He does grow through the course of the novel, but a more rounder protagonist would have been nice.

Last night we went and saw the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Another good job on the movie adaptation's for Harry Potter. Other than the first two films, of which the less said, the better, the movies have all been quite good. I still think the third one, which fixed the problems with the earlier ones and set the template for the rest of the series, is the best.

This movie had two advantages over the previous one (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). First, the book is shorter. That allows for fitting in all the important elements without feeling too rushed. As it is the movie does have a very quick pace, and will probably be difficult to follow for non-fans, and the titular character gets much shorter shrift than in the book. Second, the book is better. Phoenix is the weakest of the seven books, with too much angst from Harry and other story problems. Half-Blood Prince is a stronger story and gets to start tying up and paying off some of the story arcs that have been building from the previous five books.

Last night we saw The Seldom Scene at Yoshi's SF, with opening act The Tuttles.

The Seldom Scene are a more progressive bluegrass band then I typically listen to, and the version we saw last night only has one original member, but they put on a great show. It was particularly good to get to see Dudley Connell on guitar.

The Tuttles also did a great job as the opening act. The band is made up of Bay Area bluegrass teacher extraordinaire Jack Tuttle, his daughter Molly, sons Michael and Sullivan, and guest A.J. Lee. Molly and A.J. sound great singing together and all the Tuttle kids picked up a storm.

Although the bands were great, like my previous visit to Yoshi's SF, it left me cold as a venue. It looks nice, but the sound in the room comes across as sterile. Combine that with the obvious fact that the sound people are more used to dealing with jazz than bluegrass and didn't have a great sound mix, and it takes some away from even the best performers.

Last night I finished The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick, his follow up to the The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I wrote about here.

The new book is set in the same post-Industrial Revolution fantasy world as the old one, but are otherwise unrelated. The new book is also a better book - both better written and more enjoyable. The action and events are a lot easier to follow in this book, which makes it easier to appreciate the story and the characters instead of puzzling about what just happened. And although the story involves war, death, etc., it is a lot lighter in tone than the previous book.

Like the previous book, this one involves a lone child that gets involved with a damaged cybernetic dragon war machines. In this case, it is one that has crashed and takes over his village. This eventually leads him on the road to Babel, a variant of the fabled biblical city that did not fall and has instead continued to grow. On the way there he gets involved with various shady characters, gets in scrapes and barely survives. As expected in a fairy tale, eventually he comes out on top, whether he wants to or not.

Recommended much more than the previous books by Swanwick.

Last night, I finished Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan.

Market Forces seems as if it was written as bid for a movie - picture Death Race 2000 meets Wall Street. The world seems to be divided into three parts - the UK/US, which are ruled by an economic elite that settles their differences in formal duels involving their cars while the poor live in squalid "zoned areas"; socialist Europe, not described much except in Utopian terms; the rest of the world, where the evil financiers manipulate and exploit continual small wars. The action scenes, either duels on the road, fights in the "zoned areas" or brutal acts of revenge are described in loving detail, even though it is nearly impossible to picture the car scenes in any kind of real world.

The protagonist is almost a caricature of something Mickey Spillane would create - he starts out hard, and gets harder as the novel goes along, ending with (SPOILER ALERT) killing his super-hard mentor in a car duel.

At the same time, the author seems to intend the book as some kind of condemnation of capitalism, taking it to what he obviously considers is a reasonable extrapolation of where the current system might lead. It would be flattering to call his extrapolation childish, and in any other book it might be clear that this is parody or deliberate exaggeration, but this book does not seem to have any kind of humour attached to it, and he gives a bibliography at the end of "books consulted", including Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Joseph Stiglitz, that makes it clear that he isn't kidding.

But at the same time, I do have to admit that the book does work as an extreme hard-boiled thriller. The over-the-top action and ever-wrought relationships do pull the reader along.

Yesterday, I finished The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross, the third book in his Merchant Princes series.

First, a quick re-cap: in this series, there are people who can switch themselves between alternate worlds. There are a few known worlds: our world; a world where things have not progressed beyond the medieval era; a world where technology has progressed, but in a different manner, and gov't is more totalitarian than ours. The group of "world walkers" featured are part of one family in the medieval world and they exploit their talents like mafia, in order to smuggle drugs and other high value goods. The story involves one journalist who stumbles into these people, finds out she is one of them, and gets involved in all three worlds.

At the end of the second book, the protagonist had discovered the third world and started a base there, but was still having difficulties with her mafia like family from the second world. This book is mainly a long continuation of those difficulties. It is mainly occupied with tiresome political discussions of how she can survive within her family.

I started off by not liking the first book very much, then liking the second one more. With this third book, I'm back in the "not liking it" camp again. The story is bogged down with not very interesting political discussions, and the protagonist is mostly reduced to a bystander, as things happen around, and to, her.

Yesterday I finished The Last Colony by John Scalzi, the third book in Old Man's War universe.

This book uses two of the main characters of the previous two books in the series - John Perry from Old Man's War and Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades. They've settled down and are helping run a colony when they are asked to volunteer to help start another new colony. That colony turns out to be involved in some schemes of the human government against a new alliance of alien races.

There's nothing surprising here - just some well written, old-fashioned military/political science fiction.

I wrote about the previous two books here and here.

Yesterday I finished The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick.

Similar to The Stations of the Tide, Iron Dragon's Daughter throws the reader into the deep end of the pool, introducing a complex and multi-faceted world with little explanation or background. In this case, it's a clever combination of fantasy and technology. The background seems to be built around what might happen in a world where magic exists, and the industrial revolution also happens. The result is a fairly grim world where elves rule, dwarves and others serve and the disadvantage exist at the sufferance of those in power.

The protagonist starts out a virtual slave in a factory, longing for some other kind of life, which is eventually supplied by a damaged dragon - in this world a sentient war machine. The relationship between them is more built on mutual explotation than anything else, and is typical of the relationships in this book. The book is fairly grim, with characters scheming against each other, abusing and exploiting those around them whenever possible.

Very interesting, but also frustrating. The lack of exposition on the world make everything that happens feel somewhat arbitrary, and undermine the arc of the character's development and the story.

I just finished Odyssey by Jack McDevitt.

Odyssey is set in one of McDevitt's common worlds, where humanity seems to be almost alone in the universe, with no other advanced civilizations around and most of the threats come from the natural world or mysterious things, like the "Omega Clouds", but it is very different from most of his other novels. There is a lot more use of the politics of this world, which seem oddly similar to our own, with the future equivalent of NASA facing being shut down or under-funded. Meanwhile, some ships have started to see strange objects along their routes and no one is sure what they are.

By the end of the novel, there is more revealed, but McDevitt doesn't insist on wrapping everything up neatly in his novels and this is no exception.

The first half of the novel, which focuses more on the political struggles, is below average for McDevitt, but the second half comes on strong and gets a lot better, continuing McDevitt's streak as one of the more interesting modern SF writers.

On Sunday, I finished The Soul of the Fire by Terry Goodkind, the fifth in his Sword of Truth series.

The Soul of the Fire is better than the last book in the series. Maybe it's not surprising at this point, but the most interesting characters were the new ones he introduces just for this book. The main series characters are off screen for good portions of this book.

The plot involves some evil spirits accidentally loosed at the end of the last book. As a side effect, these spirits drain magic from this world, so the characters have to get by without their immense magical powers for a while.

The book also does very little to advance the larger level plot of the struggle against the Imperial Order that has been hanging around since part way through book two.

I just finished Ivory by Mike Resnick.

I don't know if there is a term for this type of story, but I have seen other examples, like the movie The Red Violin. Basically, it tells a larger story about the last of the Maasai tracking down the tusks of a legendary large elephant through smaller stories of the people who owned them, or stole them, or tried to acquire them. In this case, the stories range from Mount Kilimanjaro in the 19th century to 7 milleniums in the future, and from Earth across the galaxy.

The main character is the researcher who helps the Maasai. The author tries to make that part of the story interesting by holding back why the Maasai wants the ivory, as well as adding some minor growth in the protagonist, but it's really just an excuse for the mini-stories. The researcher is portrayed as a great puzzle solver, but his work seems entirely to consist of asking his super-computer "Have you found and new data on the tusks yet?".

But that minor quibble aside, it's quite an enjoyable book.

I just finished Dragons From the Sea by Judson Roberts, the second book in his Strongbow series of YA historical novels with horrible covers (see my review of the first book here).

The second book continues directly after the first, with the protagonist on the run and seeking revenge after his family is killed. In this book, he joins up with a ship's crew that is heading off to war against the Franks. The YA cliches do continue, but this book is darker than a lot of YA. The protagonist fights in a few realistically depicted battles, as well as killing a few people when forced, from his point of view.

Everything I said in previous review still holds - good story, great historical focus, some YA cliches and a protagonist with a somewhat a-historical modern outlook. The weakest part of the book is the ending, which comes fairly abruptly and leaves the entire story and characters development hanging. It feels like it is actually one book that had to be broken up for market reasons. The best part is the intense, well written, battle scenes.

On the weekend, we saw UP, the new Disney/Pixar animated film.

UP continues Pixar's string of winners. It's not as good as Ratatouille, The Incredibles or even WALL-E but definitely better than Cars.

While I will continue to look forward to Pixar's movies, I think they need to be careful about one thing - over use of nostalgia. UP almost drips with nostalgia, as did the much worse Cars, and it has also been strong element in a number of their other films, including Toy Story and The Incredibles. In UP, I hope it has reached its zenith and Pixar can move on to forward looking, rather than backward looking, stories.

I spent all of last week at the California Bluegrass Association's yearly music camp and Father's Day Festival up in Grass Valley.

Volunteering at the camp was fun, as usual. I was an assistant to Kathy Barwick's level 3 guitar class, focusing on cross-picking and playing up the neck. Kathy is a very good teacher and the class was very informative. I've decided that I need to move away from focusing on technique to going back to focusing on ear training, so it will be a while before I can make use it, but once I come back to it, I think her approach will be very useful for me to get away from just playing in the first five frets.

The rest of the camp seemed to go very well - no major problems that I know of, and I think everyone had a great time.

The festival was also great. In fact, I think it was the best one for me personally. There were a lot of good, hard driving bluegrass acts on the main stage (Danny Paisley and Southern Grass, Junior Sisk and Rambler's Choice, The Bluegrass Brothers), as well as some great sets by California bands, including 49 Special, Blue and Lonesome and Mountain Laurel. One of the highlights for me were the two sets by the Tuttles, a family band put together by Bay Area bluegrass teacher Jack Tuttle.

I also did a fair amount of picking this year, mostly with people I already knew, but I was a lot happier this year with my playing.

I wrote about this last year here.

I finished The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling over the weekend.

The Caryatids is set in an environmental dystopia where global warming has damaged the Earth badly enough to de-stabilize most of the world's nation states. The titular characters are a group of highly dysfunctional clones that become central to global events. The four surviving ones (of a set of seven) all hate each other, and their "mother", and refuse to interact, meet or even talk about each other.

The story was interesting, even though most of the characters are fairly unpleasant, and emotionally over-wrought to the point of annoyance. Sterling's thoughts on the environmental dangers of global warming seem over-blown, given current projections, and his political and economic ideas seem crank-ish, and that's probably being generous.