Yesterday I finished Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham.

This book is basically the story of the second Punic war, where Hannibal picked a fight with Rome, crossed the Alps, terrorized the countryside for a decade and a half and then had to run home to defend Carthage when Rome got smart.  He only lost one battle, but it was the final one.

The book does a good job of creating believable characters out of Hannibal's family and entourage, the Romans who are trying to beat him and a few miscellaneous common people thrown in for colour.  It doesn't do as good a job of making the characters feel like historical people, rather than modern people in a historical drama.

I finished two books over the weekend. 

The first is Vampire$ by John Steakley.  I'm a big fan of his other book, Armor.  Vampires$ isn't as good as Armor, but is enjoyable.  It was written before the latest deluge of vampire related material and in contrast to most of it, it doesn't humanize the vampires.  They are judged from a very Catholic point of view and are shown as inhuman monsters.  Lots of action sequences, lots of existentialism as the hunter team knows most of them will die sooner rather than later.

The second is The White Rose by Glen Cook, the third book in the Black Company series, and concluding book in the first series.  Since I like this series a lot, I don't know why it took me so long to track down the final book of the first series.  The book itself is quite good, wrapping up all the earlier plot threads and introducing some interesting twists and turns along the way.  Definitely some of the best of military fiction.

The last book I finished is The Nine Wrong Answers by John Dickson Carr.


Carr is a master of a form that no longer really exists, the pure puzzle mystery.  These books are usually set amongst the upper class, and involve locked rooms or other factors that make a crime seem impossible.  The game is for the author to present the facts that led to the crime being possible, but to not have the reader guess the solution before it is revealed. 

Modern mysteries have moved on to a more character or situation based approach, where the reader enjoys the ride but is not expecting a "fair game" at the same time.

This book is fairly typical of the type, involving switched identities, mad uncles, poison and a duel to the death.  It even goes so far as to add asides from the author at various points to explain that certain solutions are not correct, the "nine wrong answers" of the title.

A few days ago I finished Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton.

Villjamur is a city on a freezing world.  It's never clear if this is actually a far future version of our world, where the sun is slowly dying, or a pure fantasy world.  In any case, the city is facing an upcoming ice age and is trying to prepare.  At the same time, parts of the political structure are trying to generate a coup, while others are trying to find a way of escape.  By the end, a lot of action has taken place but not many questions are answered, something probably left to the sequels.

It's a well written new world, with decent characterizations and an interesting plot.  Hopefully it won't develop into an overblown, endless series, but keep focus and resolve the story in a few books.

I just finished Saturn's Children by Charles Stross.

 Saturn's Children is a convoluted book, with sections in dreams combined with sections in memory combined with sections where it's not clear who the protagonist is or what is going on.  This is as a result of the setup - a universe where humanity is extinct, and the artificial intelligences they created still roam the solar system.  These robots can exchange memories through "soul chips", leading to the above conclusion.

Stross does add one major new, interesting twist.  Some of the robots are trying to re-create a human being, but because all of the robots have been programmed with the equivalent of Asimov's Laws, making them slaves to any human, they fear humans and fight to prevent this resurrection. 

The only other novel part of the book is Stross's didactic attempts to convey exactly how difficult/terrible he things even intra-solar system travel would be.

Overall, it's an OK read but not one of his most enjoyable books.

I just finished Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds.

Not set in the same world as his Revelation Space series, Pushing Ice is a strong stand alone novel.  His other novels that I have read have been extreme space opera, set in a far future with humanity already on the verge of becoming, or already having become, strange transhumans.  This novel starts in the near future, and only moves into more familiar space opera territory with the second half.

Highly recommended, and it made me interested in checking out more of his stand alone novels.

Earlier in the week, I finished All the Devils Are Here by Bethany Mclean and Joe Nocera.

This book is one of many current ones on the financial crisis that started sometime around 2007 and is still not completely finished.  It does a good job of laying out the roots and major players of the financial system that led to the crisis, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to Ameriquest and AIG.  They give lots of details on the rise of subprime mortgages, derivatives (particularly credit default swaps) and the financiers who used/abused them.

Very interesting reading, but it doesn't lend itself well to final conclusions.  The whole situation is too complex to be wrapped up with a simple summation, but this book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what happened.
 

A few days ago, I finished Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter.

Manifold: Time is as odd as it's title.   It starts off like a modern version of Destination Moon, but then quickly goes off the rails with messages from the future, philosophical predictions of the end of humanity and Midwich Cuckoo like children being abused across the globe.

It started to lose me with the predictions of humanities doom based on the Carter Catastrophe.  The Carter Catastrophe is a real idea, but the way it is presented in the novel is transparently wrong, and that bothered me for the rest of the novel.  The rest of the ludicrous plot didn't help.

Not recommended.

I just finished The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.

Set in a near future Istanbul, were nano-tech is a cottage industry, The Dervish House follows a number of plots centered around one home.  These include the launch of a new tech product, the search for a man turned into honey and the fallout of a tram bombing.  They all tie neatly together in the end.

A dense, slow read, but worth the effort.  Expected to be on a lot of end of the year best of lists.

Some time last week I finished Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.

I've been a huge fan of Banks non-science fiction writing for a long time, but the last time I tried to read one of his Culture novels, I lost interest quickly.  This time, I decided to start at the first one and see if it was any better.

And it was.  Consider Phlebas is actually a pretty straight forward, and old fashioned, space opera, right down to characters using "laser rifles".  It follows a soldier from a human offshoot species that can modify it's shape under some circumstances, as he works to track down a lost AI in order to help undermine the Culture, a vast anarcho-socialist empire.

It's an enjoyable read, if not anything spectacular, and I'll probably try some of the other Culture novels as I find time.

Over the weekend, I finished Pirate Latitudes, the posthumous novel by Michael Crichton.

Pirate Latitudes, and another novel, were found as completed manuscripts on Crichton's computer after his death.   I don't think it is known why it wasn't published - if it was held back for a reason or just hadn't reached publishing.

It's a good novel, more similar to his earlier works like The Great Train Robbery, than his later techno thrillers.  The first few chapters are a little annoying as they constantly and blatantly throw in facts about the time when the novel is set to correct assumed misconceptions in the readers.  After that, it settles down into a nice nautical tale of English versus Spanish in the New World.

A few days ago I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

At the start, I was a little disappointed with this novel, but through no fault of the author.  I had heard about this great new historical novel about Cromwell, and assumed it was Oliver Cromwell, England's so-called Lord Protector.  Turns out, I was mistaken.  This book is about Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII.

I had hoped for a book about Oliver Cromwell because he is part of a period of English history that hasn't been as well covered in fiction.  In contrast, Thomas Cromwell is part of the whole Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, divorce, etc. story told in many different forms over the years.

Once I got past that, it is a well written book, although very dry and slow.

I just finished The Hammer and the Cross by Harry Harrison.

I guess it's an alternate history, rather than a straight historical novel, since the premise is based around the Vikings resisting the spread of Christianity through Europe.  The main character, Shef, is English but falls in with Vikings and helps them against the English, and the church's forces that work with them.  The medieval Christian church is portrayed, probably fairly accurately, very harshly - mostly money grubbing, cruel and aloof.

It's an interesting book, though the inventiveness of the main character seems a little ahistorical at times.

A few days ago, I finished The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, winner of the 2010 Hugo for best novel.

The Windup Girl is a dystopia set in Thailand, after a collapse due to the end of the petroleum age and then a second collapse caused by plagues of mutated genetically engineered crops.  The narrative is split between four characters, a North American businessman in Thailand to undermine the government and get access to the Thai market for his companie's crops, a Malaysian refugee trying to survive in a country hostile to foreigners, a soldier of the enforcement arm of the Thai government's environmental ministry, and the titular windup girl - a genetically modified human abandoned by Japanese businessmen.

It's hard to find anyone to sympathize with.  The windup girl herself is an innocent, abused horribly throughout the novel and constrained by her breeding and training, but is so helpless through most of the novel that it is hard to identify with her.  The businessman is amoral and thoughtless.  The refugee is scheming and dishonest.  The soldier is a bully and a proto-fascist.

I suspect the author wants us to sympathize with the latter character, and his lieutenant who takes over the narrative part way through, due to his efforts to protect the local environment and loyalty to the Thai government, but this is hard to go along with given the obvious comparisons between his "white shirts" and the historic "black shirts" or "brown shirts".

Even with the lack of a sympathetic protagonist, the book is still well written and compelling. 

I just finished The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

This is the basis for the movie of the same name.  There's no way I'll be able to avoid SPOILERS in this post, so reader beware...

I saw the movie version of this story years ago, and enjoyed it as one of the most intelligent movies of the time.  The book is equally good, though different in many ways.  Both are built around a feud between two magicians, Borden and Angier, ultimately ending in tragedy, but the differences are striking, and are mostly improvements in the film version.

The novel is book-ended by modern scenes involving the magician's grandchildren that don't feel necessary to the story, and the film wisely gets rid of them.  In the novel, the fact that Borden is actually a twin is strongly hinted at from early on, and is even investigated by Angier before being dismissed.  The movie avoids any hints of twins, and depends on the impression created by only showing one Borden, to keep the audience from suspecting it as well.  This strengthens the contrasts between the two magicians and the irony of Angier making the Tesla device work.  In the book, the device leaves behind a copy that is not fully alive (referred to by Angier as the "prestige materials", which explains the title, something the movie never really does), while the movie Angier is actually actively killing the duplicates left behind, a much more intense, almost melodramatic, emotional choice.  The movie also makes the feud between the two stronger, tying it to their actions while working together and making their acts of sabotage more concrete, while the novel keeps the two very seperate, and their feud is almost abstract.

Overall, the novel is still a very good read and recommended.

Every year I come up with some overly ambitious ideas for Halloween costumes, and end up not having enough time to actually do anything about it or, like last year, can only do a half assed job.

This year, I came up with the idea, and found time to work on it, early enough to test it out and refine it before Halloween.  The idea was Odin, the Norse god.

Some parts of the costume were easy - I bought a wizard's rob and wig/beard - since Odin was the original inspiration for the look of Tolkien's Gandalf - and a pirate's eye patch.  The beard that came with the Merlin beard/wig set was way too much, but I came up with a last minute substitution.  I've got a pretty good Van Dyke beard going, and it's a little overgrown right now.  I combined that with the hair whitening makeup I'd bought for my eyebrows, and it worked pretty well.


For a prop,  I wanted to carry Gungnir, Odin's spear, but none of the commercially available spears were appealing.  I ended up making it myself, out of cardboard tubes, paper mache and acrylic paint, with some glow in the dark runes added for affect.


One part of the costume never came to fruition, and I might try to add it in the future.  I'd like to have Hugin and Munin (Odin's two ravens) props on my shoulders, but I couldn't find anything the right size to carry around.

I think it turned out pretty well.  No one at the party I went to had any idea who I was, but I didn't expect any different.  If I'd run into any experts on the Norse pantheon, I think they would have figured it out.

Odin

I just finished Djibouti by Elmore Leonard.

Going further afield than Leonard normally does, Djibouti is set in the Horn of Africa area, and involves filmmakers, vigilantes and terrorists with his usual tough guy bravado throughout.

It also has him doing something else unusual, playing with the narrative structure.  Part of the novel is told in pseudo-flashback form, as the filmmakers review some of their footage and Leonard weaves in the events that were going on around the time the footage was taken.  This gimmick doesn't work very well, just creating confusion about where/when the narrative is, and Leonard abandons it after a few chapters.

Leonard's usual distinctive dialogue also doesn't work as well here.  Usually Leonard's dialogue, like that of David Mamet, feels real even though it isn't realistic at all.  In the beginning of this book, it doesn't feel real at all.

By the end, Leonard is more in his comfort zone, as various tough guys confront each other, and the novel is much stronger and more interesting, but the trip to get there isn't very interesting.

I just finished The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman.

This is the fourth book in the Sally Lockhart series, even though Sally only appears in a few cameos.

It features the return of a character from The Ruby in the Smoke, Adelaide, who was presumed dead.  She's reunited with Jim, and then becomes the princess, then queen of a small European country caught between Germany and Austria.

It's a worthy sequel, full of the same great characters and conflict as the other books.

Yesterday I finished The Knights of the Cornerstone by James Blaylock.

Blaylock is one of my favourite authors, based on his books like The Last Coin and The Paper Grail.  He dropped out of site for many years, not publishing any novels for ten years before this one.

It's a good book, probably not as good as the two above, but more enjoyable than his last few.  He has a nice way of mixing the real world with odd human behaviour, and the mysterious spiritual world, different from any other author I've read.  His protagonists are not easily distinguished from each other, but they still work in context.

I just finished Tapping the Dream Tree by Charles de Lint.

Normally I don't like short story collections, but I was craving some de Lint that I hadn't read, and this was the only one in my local library.

I've always liked de Lint's writing, and his take on the urban fantasy field. I think of Charles de Lint as an early practitioner of urban fantasy, but one very different from what has come to dominate that field.  Most of the current urban fantasy is more derived from the works of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels and involves a lot more sex, violence and action than de Lint's stories.  His are more contemplative, personal, spiritual and filled with a sense of wonder.

This set of stories is pretty typical - a mix of minor and major interactions between the characters and the fantastical, featuring some of his standard Newford characters.  Not as good as a full length novel, but still very enjoyable.