The Year in Review

Despite my best efforts I failed to make it to the 50 mark this year but I am pleased with my performance nonetheless. I know why I didn't make it, I got too ambitious. The pseudo-intellectual side of me raged out and decided that I should be interested in all sorts of high brow books with interesting titles and fascinating subjects. If I had stuck to my meat and potatoes - science fiction with a little bit of mystery thrown in - I would have been closer to the mark.

I want to recognize some of my fellow 50-bookers for their efforts: Olman's 50 for some of the great authors he brought to light this year (Attlee and Canning); Meezly for her terrific, well written and thoughtful reviews; and Mount Benson for continuing to giv'er. I would also like to thank Opinion be Damned and Redwing for taking the time to read my blog: increasing your regular readership by 67% (from three to five) is great, just ask any newspaper man.

Happy new year and here's to 2009.

43. Amar Bhide, The Venturesome Economy

This is the baddest of the bad business books. You know you are in trouble when an author (or his editor) decides that it is a good idea to have shaded boxed insets in the middle of the narrative or decides to divide the book into "Book 1" and "Book 2" like its some religious manuscript. This book is supposed to enlighten you about the nature of innovation, how it can be fostered and sustained in a business and how a business man can do things to use it as a competitive advantage. I am not enlightened

42. Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli is a fascinating guy because he was a long time prime minister in 19th century England but he was not an aristocrat, he was a novelist, he was under the burden of a great deal of debt and, most interestingly, he was Jewish. He was definitely the first Jewish prime minister of England and, as far as I can recall, England has not had a Jewish PM since. Disraeli was a conservative whose political career was marked by an epic political battle with Gladstone, his counterweight on the Liberal side of the house.

This was a short, interesting and well put together biography of Disraeli. Those of you who are interested in 19th century British history will find it interesting.

41. John Wyndahm, The Chrysalids*

I grabbed this off the shelf because of Meezly's terrific review. I don't have much else to add other than to say that it was great to re-read the book after so many years.

40. Ray Bradbury, R is for Rocket

This is a great collection of short stories which, I think, were put together for a young adult audience though some seem quite sophisticated. Some of the stories are just brilliant. The Fog Horn is about a lighthouse whose repetitive horn and light attract an ancient sea creature from the depths of the ocean. The sea creature gets himself to the lighthouse and begins slowly and carefully introducing himself to the lighthouse and its operators who, then, foolishly turn off the horn leaving the sea creature distraught and helpless. The Rocket is about a family who can barely make ends meet in a world where only rich people get to ride in rockets to and from Mars. The father runs a scrap heap and is one day offered the opportunity to purchase a full scale model rocket. He blows the family's entire savings and proceeds to refit the rocket with car engines and other bits and pieces. He then invites his kids over, buckles them in, turns on the car engines and manages to convince them that they are on a real rocket ship leaving them forever happy. Frost and Fire is a story about a group of rockets that crashed in a planet resembling Mercury. The heavy radiation on the planet speeds up the survivors metabolism to the point that it reduces their lifespans down to just eight days which means that life has to be lived in fast forward. The survivors live in hill side caves that protect them from the extreme daytime heat and nightime cold leaving them with only dusk and dawn to go outside to gather food, get into fights, wage war and make love. All of the rockets that crashed on the planet have been destroyed but one which crash landed at the crest of a hill and has been able to survive the elements. But it is just far enough away that no one has been able to make it to the ship before they die until Sim. Sim ingeniously finds a way to get to the ship and to save many of the people from the planet.

Ray Bradbury is an interesting writer who was always a little skeptical of the advancement of technology and the dawn of space travel. This collection of stories really highlights his skepticism.

35 to 39. Various Books I've Read in the Past Month

I have been delinquent in making timely posts over the past month or so: too much travel. The period began with the completion of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, a terrific piece of allegorical science fiction that is highly critical of colonial mores; I then moved on to Larry Niven's Ring World - which I must have read in high school but forgotten. I found this book to be a little too heavy on the tech/gadgets but otherwise an entertaining science fiction story; I then moved on to Philip Attlee's Canadian Bomber Contract which is well reviewed on Olman's Fifty; I then moved on to Alan Furst's The World at Night, a spy story in occupation France. Furst's books are so light and airy that you barely feel like you've read a book and despite his efforts he is not able to add the true grit and darkness that good spy stories deserve. He is now off my list of supported authors; finally, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Gladwell is a man of big ideas and doesn't provide much in support of his big ideas. In this, his third book, he hypothesizes that people don't achieve success through just their hard work and dedication they are, more often than not, supported by particular circumstances that end up giving them an advantage over the next guy. His arguments and examples make sense but one cannot prove such a big hypothesis by anecdotes and scant references alone. Someone needs to tell him that he has ADD and if he really wants to present a compelling hypothesis then he should do the hard academic work required to back it up.

Passwords

In the past few weeks I have had a couple of people ask me or make comments about my blog. I would rather not give these people a window into my life, as a result I will soon switch this blog to a password protected site. If you'd like to continue to have access to the blog then leave a comment saying as much and include your email address. This will really help improve my readership!

34. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin

Tolkien wrote the manuscript for this book in 1910 and never finished it. His son, who calls himself the literary executor of his father's estate, completed the manuscript and made it fit for publication. To me it really didn't feel like it deserved to be a book which, in turn, made it feel like a rather distasteful cash grab. After subtracting the 29 page introduction, the dozen or so page glossary and the random full color pictures (I am not even counting the double spaced type) you get to a book that is no more than about 100 pages long. In my view that's just too short for a self standing novel.

Setting that aside, this is the story of Turin, his mother Morwen and her newly born daughter. Hurin, Morwen's husband, is alive but captured very early in the book. The story is set in the first age of Middle Earth. At the beginning of the book Hurin joins an alliance of other men and elves to fight against the evil Morgoth in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Hurin and his allies are slaughtered and Morgoth captures Hurin alive and takes him back to his castle. When Hurin does not give Morgoth the information that he is seeking he chains Hurin to a giant stone chair and curses him with the ability to see and hear what Morgoth hears.

Morgoth's henchmen take over different parts of the earth including Hurin's home which forces Turin, Hurin's son, to flee. His mother cannot join them as she is pregnant with her third child. Turin, who is about nine years old, flees to a hidden town of elves where he grows up never forgetting his mother and father. The balance of the story relates Turin's deeds as head of a lawless band, his attacks on Morgoth and his search for his mother.

The book was reasonably good but it is more like a short story than a novel. I felt a little ripped off by the Tolkien family which left a bad taste in my mouth.

33. Philip K. Dick, The Unteleported Man

This book was first published by Ace as a novella. PKD submitted a 32,000 word book, based on a serialized novel in a magazine, to Ace for review, the editors liked it but felt that it was too short so they asked PKD to expand it into a novel. PKD agreed to do so and a few months later came back with a manuscript that was some 25,000 words longer. On reading it, however, Ace concluded that PKD's additions were not good and they went ahead and published the original novella instead. Much later, Berkely published the book in its full and added an introduction that was highly critical of Ace for not publishing the full novel in the first place.

The book fits, I think, into the alternative history science fiction genre. Unlike The Man in the High Castle where the Germans actually win World War II, in this story the Germans lose the war but regain worldwide political power and eventually end up controlling both the United Nations and the one of the world's largest and most powerful corporations (there are only a few corporations left). This company, called THL, develops a telportation system which, they claim, is only capable of teleporting people to the destination but not back. Because the world is severely over populated and because someone has discovered a far off planet that is much like the earth, THL gets a concession to develop and colonize that planet which they call Whale's Mouth. In addition, the Germans running the UN don't really question THL since they are both run by Germans. THL sets up its teleportation machines in hundreds of outlets throughout the world and runs a captivating advertising campaign which shows off the wide open spaces and pastoral beauty fo Whale's Mouth. By the start of the book some forty million people have moved to Whale's Mouth.

The teleportation machine puts an inter-planetary shipping and travel company out of business. The stress of the bankruptcy ends up killing the founder of that company. His son, Rachmael ben Applebaum, takes over and begins the dissolution of the company. He is suspicious of THL and what they are doing in Whale's Mouth though and he holds on to his last inter-planetary ferry and plans on making the 18 year long journey over to Whale's Mouth to see what is actually going on there. He enlists the head of another large corporation, called LIES, Inc., to help him in this effort. LIES is a private spying and security firm which has grown to be so powerful that it is accepted by the authorities. Instead of joining ben Applebaum on his ship the head of LIES decides to send 2,000 of his agents across to Whale's Mouth through the THL telportation machines to start a coup instead. Days into his journey, after hearing about LIES' plans Appelbaum also abandons his plan and follows the agents across.

When they get there they are confronted by the horror of THL's actions. Instead of a beautiful spacious pastoral land Whale's Mouth is a barracks fenced in by high barbed wire trimmed fences. The forty million colonists are being trained as an army which will eventually invade earth. When the LIES agents arrive the THL army is one million strong. The story briefly covers the ass kicking that the LIES agents are receiving but then quickly focuses on ben Applebaum who, on arrival, is almost immediately engaged in combat by one of the members of the THL army. He loses that fight when he is hit by an LSD tipped dart. The next part of the book is the part that Ace found too stupid to publish.

For the next 50 plus pages PKD describes ben Applebaum's acid trip like only someone who has taken a lot of acid could do. The narrative is brilliantly written in such a twisting logic that someone who isn't high has a difficult time following along. I differ with Ace, while the added material is certainly a little incongruous it is also an imaginative description of an acid trip. Once the acid trip narrative ends the book returns to its original plot and the story unfolds much as it should.

I would highly recommend this book to my few readers as I know that they would find it just as interesting as I did.

32. Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

The problem I have with Arthur C. Clarke's and, to a much lesser degree, Asimov's brands of science fiction is that they often paint such a clean image of the future: vibrant democracies, happy people, great technology etc. Don't get me wrong, their books are not all happiness but, in comparison to other science fiction works they describe a more successful future.

After a number of asteroids either hit the earth or come too close for comfort the residents of earth and the human residents of the other colonized planets in the solar system decide to deploy a high tech early warning system to keep track of all the nearby asteroids. This early warning system detects Rama (which is an arbitrary name based on much the same system as, for example, we have today for hurricanes) a previously uncatalogued asteroid that has just entered the solar system and is on a path to go past many of the planets and shoot around the sun and out of the solar system.

Intrigued by this newcomer, the authorities send a manned space craft to land on the asteroid and to study it in more detail. Upon landing on Rama the astronauts discover that it is not an asteroid at all, rather it is a cylindrical space ship that is about 50KM long and some 8KM wide and is spinning from end to end. They manage to get inside the cylinder and discover a marvelously complicated but uninhabited world which they set about to explore.

Clarke's strength as a writer has always been his imaginative, believable and detailed view on future technologies, this book is a great example of the execution of his strengths. He describes the landscape, technology, mystery and atmosphere in breathtaking and yet accessible detail. His weakness as a writer, in my view, is that he cannot marry the tech with an interesting story involving the human actors in the book. It's like watching a movie with awesome technology but with cheesy lines and acting. He leaves a number of fascinating story lines just hanging: the entire mission to Rama is governed by a sub-committee of the now inter-planetary UN which has all sorts of diplomatic intrigue associated with it but Clarke doesn't really deal with that at all; similarly at one point, the renegade colonists on Mercury, launch a missile directed at Rama which is disarmed by the astronauts sent to Rama but Clarke doesn't deal with how the people from Mercury react to this affront.

You should read this book for the tech but not the story line.

31. Victor Canning, A Forest of Eyes

This is the second Canning novel that I have read after being introduced to them by the great Olman. This book is excellent and very different than the first VC book that I read which was more like a posh Desmond Bagley book. This one is set in 1950s Yugoslavia soon after Tito has cemented his power and just as he is beginning to show that he is not prepared to blindly follow Stalin's lead. The book is filled with underhanded criticism of Tito, Stalin and communism to the point that at one point I thought that this must be a propaganda book.

It is difficult to review spy fiction because one gives away so much during the course of the review but I will say what I can. The book is set in Dubrovnik where Raikes and Hudson, two engineers working for a British firm, are taking a short holiday while they wait for the Yugoslav Minister of Interior to return from a trip to Russia and sign a contract that they had given his office. The two of them have two weeks on their hand so they head south as special guests of the Yugoslav government. Dubrovnik is a great setting for a spy story with its cliff side geography, historic buildings and winding alley ways.

Canning's book is very well written, rarely slow and a great piece of spy fiction. I urge you all to pick it up.

30. Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, They'd Rather Be Right

The world is in a down swing and heading towards its end. The government's stifling control of opinions has killed off all innovation and left the masses stupid and resentful of the 'brains,' and the intelligentsia tightly controlled by the government so that, unknown to them, they are unable to think of any original ideas. A telepath called Joe Carter starts changing all that. Through his telepathic skills and using his position as secretary to a military project being developed at a university, he lifts the shround of opinion control and helps a group of scientists develop Bossy: a female machine that makes people young again by removing the different psychological inhibitions and restrictions that have built up over time but only so long as the person's mind is receptive to change.

The government's discovery of Bossy makes Joe and its two leading scientists take flight to avoid capture and certain jail time. They first hide out in San Francisco's skid row where they rebuild Bossy and run one person through the system which transforms their 70 year old ugly landlord to an 18 year old beautiful, intelligent blonde. News of this transformation leaks out and a super rich benefactor who is too rich and powerful to be subject to the government's control takes Bossy, Joe and the scientists into his trust.

The remainder of the story is about the fight between all the different parts of the government for control of Bossy, how the group fights back and the ultimate fate of Bossy and society. This is a pretty superficial story with a few high points but not too many (it won the Hugo award in 1957 and it has been widely acclaimed as the worst book to win a Hugo!).

29. Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

Asimov wrote a four part trilogy (I know...) of science fiction-detective fusion centered around Lije Bailey. This is the fist book of the series.

Many many years ago humans began colonizing nearby planets. At first, the colonists, known as Spcaers, and the earthmen were on friendly terms but as the Spacers adapted to their new environment and developed new cultural mores a certain friction built up between the two. The author alludes to, but never details, this friction culminating in some kind of war between the two groups which left the earthmen in the losers camp and in a position of inferiority to the Spacers.

The Spacer worlds were homogenous, somewhat fearful, societies which embraced technology. Consequently their weapons were much more powerful than the earthmen's weapons and their usage of robots in their society was much more prevalent than the earthmen's usage of the robots.

Earth developed in a very different way. The remaining residents of earth shunned further colonization; after seeing the Spacer societies' mores the population began to aggregate under a few massive domed cities. New York, for example, became one city that stretched from Boston down to Washington, DC with a small Spacer city, called Spacetown, sitting adjacent to it. As the earth's population grew its food supplies dwindled to the point that most people ate cubes of high protein food not real food.

The earth was run by a united nations like political body and each person was classified in levels, almost a caste system. A low classification meant that you could not even have an appartment whereas a higher classification got you an appartment and special food rations. There was also a strong Medievalist political force which advocated outdoor living, farming and far less use of robots in general society. Asimov portrays these Medievalists as rabble rousers who were out of touch with reality. They did not understand that living outside would be harmful to the population (he never says why) and that farming wouldn't yield nearly enough food to feed the billions of people living on earth.

The book opens with the murder of a prominent Spacer robot designer in Spacetown. Lije Bailey is paired up with an advanced humanoid Spacer robot to solve the crime.

The story is all about Lije: his issues with working with a robot, his personal life with his wife, his inner fears, his secret Medievalist tendencies and how he overcomes them and, finally, how he solves the crime and convinces humanity that in order to save itself it needs to begin colonizing new planets and introducing robots into its culture. I can't get into too many details without blowing the story but suffice it say that it was a cool book worth reading.

28. Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

This is a classic time travel themed science fiction story from the late 1950s. I found it really annoying. The premise of the story is that two warring groups - the Spiders and the Snakes - are battling each other by traveling back and forth through time and changing the future by changing the past. So, for example, they go to ancient Greece and destroy its classical ascendancy. Once the Spiders (the alleged good guys) have completed each mission the team goes on shore leave to the Place which is something that is not connected to the battles and is used for both physical and emotional recuperation. The story is mostly set in one of these Places and is about arguments and debates between a half a dozen or so people from all different times.

I think that this is a classic book but I couldn't deal with it.

27. Victor Canning, The Scorpio Letters

I read this book based on a review posted on Olman's Fifty. I fully agree with his review, it is a good Desmond Bagley-esque book. An excellent find, Olman.

26. Philip K. Dick, The Broken Bubble

PKD wrote a few novels that weren't science fiction, this is one of those novels.  It follows the stories of four people in San Francisco in 1956:  a radio DJ who gets suspended from his job for refusing to read an ad, his psychologically confused ex-wife, and two young fans.  After the DJ gets suspended their lives become intertwined and, for part of the story, the DJ takes on the younger female fan as his love interest and the ex-wife takes on the younger male fan as her lover.  In the midst of all this, all four of them get involved in a hair brained revolutionary movement that is seeking to overthrow the government.

This is supposed to be a dark comedy but it is a little more dark than comedy.  It is a well written book with an engaging story but I was not overwhelmed.

25. Georges Simenon, The Widow

Half way there, the next three months have to be big!

This is another one of Simenon's roman durs (I have reviewed some of his other roman durs here and here).  It is the tortured story of a Jean, an ex-con who comes to live with a widow, Tati.  Both of them have their problems.  Jean is in his late twenties, the son of a rich local playboy, and he has just been released from prison after a five year stint for murdering someone in Paris.  He is unsure of what he wants and unsure of himself and doesn't want to have anything to do with his father.  On the bus ride from the prison into a nearby town he catches the eye of a mid-40s, rather ugly, widow who takes him into her small farm to work as a farm hand and to be her lover.  Tati herself is not psychologically all together either.  She is obsessed with the family of her late husband who she thinks are trying to take her house away from her.

The two of them are, at first, a perfect match for one another, they feed off one another's insecurities and psychological problems but then Jean falls in love with Tati's niece which brings the brewing psychological battle between Tati and Jean more out in the open.  The whole thing does not end well.

I love these books because they are just so dark and this one does not fail to impress.

24. Harry Harrison, Captive Universe

The story begins in a typical Aztec village set in a river valley where the people are ruled by an almost despotic priesthood and mortified by the powers of their various gods.  Very quickly the author focuses in on Chimal, a resident of the village, who is clearly a little different than the other villagers.  He is the product of an illicit liaison between one of the villagers and another man from a small village located across the river.  Chimal is unsatisfied with the situation in the village, he does not respect the religious structure and he feels a certain claustrophobia and is constantly looking for different ways out of the village.  One day he is called in front of the higher priests on some minor infraction and the head priest has a heart attack and eventually dies.  The villagers believe that this is Chimal's fault and they first imprison him and then, after his mother breaks him out of jail, they launch a valley wide manhunt for him.  In his efforts to get away he finds a door that leads into a cave which is very different feeling than the rest of the valley.

Chimal has discovered a large network of tunnels and caves populated by humanoids who are at once futuristic and backwards.  The job of the people who live and work in these tunnels is to monitor and take care of the Aztec residents of the valley.  It turns out that the valley isn't located on earth rather the valley is a false environment built into a carved out asteroid.  A very long time ago, the leader of one of the country's on earth decided that it would be a good idea to launch a space mission to a different solar system.  After a lot of research they concluded that they could not build a space ship that could transport people over to a nearby solar system in anything less than 1,000 years.  So, they carved out the inside of a nearby asteroid, created this valley and populated it with two backwards Aztec tribes who wouldn't know any better.  Then, they constructed an elaborate network of tunnels, ventilation systems, weather patterns, and animal life operated by a staff of Watchmen and Overseers who lived in these tunnels to watch over and care for the residents of the valley.

In addition, before moving the Aztecs over the creators of the spaceship manipulated their DNA such that the progeny of a combination of a member of one Aztec village with a member of the other Aztec village would result in a genius child.  The idea here was that it would take the spaceship 1,000 years to get to the galaxy but once it neared the point of arrival the two villages would be allowed to mate which would result in very smart people who could then make sense of what the hell they were doing there.  Chimal was the first such child.

Once inside the cave structure Chimal quickly discovers that the people here are technologically advanced but have been genetically neutered in such a way that they can only comprehend one job.  For example, there's one guy who can figure out the ventilation systems and once he's gone nobody else can or has the means to learn what to do quickly.  Chimal also discovers that this lack of intelligence has resulted in the leadership of this group unilaterally deciding that the original planets that they were headed towards were not good destinations and setting a new course to some other, far more distant, planet.

Chimal spends his time trying to correct the ship's course and trying to overthrow the ship's order so that he can lift the blanket of ignorance that is shrouding his people.  The book has an imaginative theme and the author does a good job presenting it but I wasn't blown away.

23. Poul Anderson, Brain Wave* (cover by Richard Powers)

This was an interesting novel and is well reviewed over on Olman's Fifty.  One day the world wakes up to find that the IQ of all organic life forms has increased by up to two fold and is continuing to rise.  The symptoms of this change come in many different forms:  a rabbit figures out a way to let himself out of the trap that he has inadvertently stepped into; farm animals attack the farmers for their freedom; black Africans form an alliance with indigenous apes to attack the white man; people who cannot deal with their new found intelligence find themselves devolving into schizophrenics; and scientists begin to work industriously on new theories, explanations and technologies.

The increase in intelligence also results in the breakdown of society which begins when workers who had previously been content to work on farms, in factories, on subways, and in other menial jobs decide that those jobs are no longer interesting and quit.  This means that food is no longer mass produced, there's no more transportation, there are no more policemen among others.  All of this ultimately results in violence.  The societal breakdown is further manifested by fringe religions that emerge into the mainstream and advocate violence against the state.

The story focuses on a group of scientists working at a private, New York based, research facility called the Institute.  These scientists collectively bring a semblance of order back to at least the New York area, develop a theory of what has happened, and build a spaceship that can travel faster than light.

One of the Institute's scientists suggests that the earth, and the entire solar system, has been traveling through a dampening cone for the past two millennia which reduces the firing frequency of certain neurons attached to the grey matter portion of human brains.  The day when people became smarter was the same day as the earth emerged from this dampening field.  The spaceship made by the Institute's scientists goes out to validate this theory.

This book could have been three or four times as long as it was (hell, it should be turned into a video game) if the author had taken the time to really explore each of the issues that he superficially raises in his novel.  The kernel of the story is fascinating but the fact that the author did not develop it in more detail really left me wanting.

22. Brian Aldiss, Starship

I picked up a hard cover first edition of this book at a used bookstore in Toronto for $7.95!  I think that that must be a hell of a deal and I can't believe that the owner of the bookstore would have this sitting in a general bin with a bunch of other, far less interesting, books.  This is the actual cover of the book.

This book is a precursor to Aldiss' other exploration of human mutation themed science fiction called Hothouse.  The story is set in a large spaceship which has been overrun by vegitation, called Ponics (short for hydroponics), which are plants that are super sensitive to light and grow rapdily when the lights are on and visibly wilt when the lights are off.  The spaceship is also populated by miniature humans (called dizzies), full sized humans (called giants), telepathic rats, and aliens (called outsiders).

30 generations ago the earth, facing severe over population and dwindling resources, decided to send a spaceship to a planet which was 11 light years away to start a new colony.  The space ship made the journey and dropped off the first set of colonists on the new planet.  Immediatly before departing for home, the ship's captain took on a fresh stock of water from the new planet.  This water contained a new amino acid, dubbed paynine, which cuased the fast growing Ponics and the death of the bulk of the ship's complement.  The paynine changed the metabolism and physiology of the surviors such that their bodies operated at four times the speed of regular humans.  As a result, the lifespan of these people was reduced to 20 years.

Soon after the departure from the new planet, the remaining crew became depressed, started shrugging off the authority of the captain, inventing strange religions based on the teaching of Jung and Freud, and, after the outbreak of the paynine related disease, mutinied against the captain.  The fast growing Ponics seperated the crew in different areas with minimal contact with one another resulting in the development of different tribes.

Roy Complain is a hunter in one such tribe which lives in an area called Quarters.  After he loses his wife in a hunting accident he sets off with four other men to find the control room of the ship.  The journey means that they have to leave Quarters which is at one end of the ship, travel through the Deadways, where a bunch of lawless brigands live, and end up in Forwards which, it turns out, is a much more organized, almost authoritarian tribe.  During the course of the journey they come accross the Giants and the telpathic rats and eventually figure out the secrets of the ship and try to devise a way to get back to earth.

[Spoiler Alert]

It turns out though that the ship has been orbiting the earth for many years and none of the people on the ship realized it because all of the port holes have been blocked off.  The ship made it back to earth orbit on schedule but the leadership on earth decided that they should not return to the planet because of the physiological changes to their bodies:  they were now much smaller than normal humans and they lived in something like dog years.  The giants on the ship were guards who had been placed there to monitor the ship's complements.

Just as in Hothouse, Aldiss tries to metaphorically deal with certain social issues.  In this instance he brings up themes associated with racism, freedom, religion, democracy, and lawlessness.  However, beyond bringing them up he doesn't really do much with them.  Perhaps that was his intention.

I found the first part of this book to be a little slow, the story becomes much more engaging in the second half of the book when Roy Complain is getting closer to Forwards and eventually make it into Forwards.  The most entertaining part of the book was the end which turns into an all out disorganized looting battle between the rats, the Giants and the dizzies.  It's a pretty good book but it is not great.

21. Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity*

I really enjoyed reading this book.  The ruling hierarchy of the post 27th century future is divided between the Timers and the Eternals.  The Timers are the regular people living on earth.  The Eternals are an elite group who travel in time and are responsible for trade between different times and for adjusting the realities in each time.  In one century, for example, the Timers have developed a cure for cancer, the Eternals field applications from other centuries for this cure, they determine if administering the cure will result in a negative, positive or neutral outcome on the future and then decide on whether the century with the cure can sell the cure to the centuries without the cure.  In addition, the Eternals are constantly monitoring and adjusting the reality of each century in order to avoid wars or other cataclysmic events.  If they see some kind of negative reality approaching the Eternals make adjustments to the current reality to avoid the negative outcome.  Within the Eternals they are divided by rank:  the highest rank is a Senior Computer who are people that have the skills required to calculate and execute the changes to reality; Technicians who are responsible for doing the field work required to come up with suggested changes to realities which are then verified and executed by the Computers; Observers who are just responsible for monitoring the realities; and Maintenance who are responsible for the upkeep of the time travel machines called Kettles.

The story is focused on a Technician called Harlan and a Computer called Twissell.  Harlan is a Technician prodigy who has been selected from the ranks to serve as Twissell's personal Technician and Twissell is the most senior living Computer.  Harlan breaks the Eternal's code by falling in love with a super hot Timer, the story develops around his efforts to secure his love interest in the world of the Eternals.  But it is more than a science fiction love story as it is eclipsed by a much bigger battle between the forces that want to continue with the current Eternal hierarchy and those who want to tear it down.  I would be giving the story away if I described it in more detail.

This is an outstanding book that all of you will enjoy, even those of you who typically don't enjoy time travel themed science fiction.

20. Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust*

My friend Adam Sugerman's father, Arthur Sugerman, passed away about a year and a half ago.  Earlier this summer Adam went to Princeton to help pack up his belongings and he came across a collection of science fiction and mystery novels that he kindly decided to send up to me.  Many of the books that I will be reading during the remainder of the year will be from this collection, this is the first of those books, this and future books will be marked with an asterisk to show their source.

This book is a classic disaster story about a tourist sight seeing ship on the moon that gets buried as a result of an earthquake and subsequent avalanche.  The majority of the story is about what takes place after the earthquake on the ship, among the moon's bureaucrats, among the scientists who are trying to figure out where the ship is located and among the reporters who are going to great lengths to secure special access to the rescuers and the scene of the rescue.

Arthur C. Clarke always puts forward very polished and well thought out science fiction.  I am always struck by his attention to detail and sometimes struck by how accurately he depicts the future (the book was published in 1963 and is set in the mid-twenty first century).  Having said that I found this book to be a little like Chriton's Andromeda Strain where the story and suspense are almost too polished and where the author builds a great platform but then fails to capitalize on the story.  Clarke begins the story by describing the voyage of the ship and alluding to an event that will happen that is going to change the world/moon for ever.  When I was reading this I was getting really psyched because I thought that the moon was going to blow up or some cataclysmic event of that magnitude was going to occur.  I was a little disappointed that it turned out to be just a traditional disaster-rescue story.  This book is well written, it feels more like a good paperback that one should take on vacation.

19. Georges Simenon, The Bar on the Seine

This Maigret novel is about how the renowned detective solves a double murder committed by one of the members of a group of happy go lucky weekenders who make a bar on the Seine just outside Paris their local haunt.  It is a great exploration of how the lives of seemingly clean cut Parisian professionals becomes very dark just under the surface.

18. Brian Aldiss, Hothouse

This book is set six millennia in the future when, because the sun has begun to go super nova and its solar radiation has increased, vegetation has climbed to the top of the life form hierarchy.  The ascendancy of the vegetable world began with a battle amongst the trees which began to grow very quickly because of the increased heat.  Ultimately the Banyan tree won and a single enormous Banyan tree now covers the entire sunny side of the planet.  Different kinds of mostly predatory vegetable life forms live on different levels of the Banyan tree.

As the solar radiation was increasing human skulls began to shrink and then human bodies themselves began to shrink too.  It was actually discovered that humans were comprised of the humans themselves and morel mushrooms which acted as the humans' brains and the increased radiation killed the morel mushrooms which resulted in the changes to the human form.  Consequently, in this world humans are no more than a few inches tall and are dumb as doors.

This book is the story of a particular tribe of humans which is forced to split up and the journey of the members of the tribe after the split.  A group of them end up on the moon and prepare for an attack on the earth, another group faces attacks from all kinds of predatory creatures, and the final group adventures all around the earth after some of them have been occupied by morel mushrooms.

The book uses the cover of an almost childish theme to discuss some fairly sophisticated ideas.  The tenuous ascendancy of humans is obviously front and center, however, the author deals with the violent tendencies of the morel mushrooms and the implications of gender reversal as women take on a very different role in this world than men.  This is a very imaginative piece of science fiction which is well worth a read even though it is not as fast paced as one would like it to be.

17. Jack London, The Iron Heel

Jack London's forays into science fiction are subtle, tastefully written stories that almost present themselves as rather boring slow moving affairs.  But after I have read them I have looked back on them and realized how excellent they are.  The Iron Heel is a manuscript written by Avis Everhard (you have to excuse the porn star name) describing the socialist revolutionary movement in North America between about 1912 and 1920.  The manuscript had been hidden in a great oak tree and was found some 700 years later.

The story begins by tracing the early years of Ernest Everhard (Avis' soon to be husband) as a revolutionary thinker preaching socialism in the Bay Area around 1912.  Ernest's preaching gains greater momentum and is joined by a network of national and international socialists all of whom want to overthrow the current capitalist regimes in their respective countries.  The European socialists achieve the earliest success by staging a global general strike which overthrows the German monarchy and prevents a war with the United States (presumably World War I).

The North American socialists, however, meet with far less success.  In the United States the all powerful trusts (big monopolist corporations) form a powerful oligarchy that ends up taking over the Canadian, US, Mexican and Cuban governments.  This oligarchy is the Iron Heel which stamps out the labor movement and engages in a prolonged cold and hot war with the socialists.  Once the Iron Heel has firmly put itself in power it raises a mercenary army to fight the socialists who engage in a number of all out revolts to try to overthrow the Oligarchy.  The introduction, written by the person who found the manuscript, suggests that the socialists are eventually successful but not until they have tried four or five times and have been rebuffed each time.

The narrative is initially rather polemical but is graphic when it turns to describing the great socialist prison break, the stamping out of the Grange party and the labor movement and the first revolution known as the Chicago Commune.

16. Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music

This book was recommended to me by my friend Adam Sugerman.  The story takes place in a freaky interpretation of the near future when everyone is taking government approved drugs, when genetic experiments have sprinkled the human population with evolved animals who walk on their hind legs and speak English and freaky 'baby heads' who have failed to grow physically but have grown mentally, and when the government dispenses the news primarily in musical form as opposed to spoken word.

The story centers around the murder of a prominent physician, the Office's (that's the name of the central bureaucracy) corrupt and ham-fisted solution to the case, and one hard boiled private investigator's search for the truth of the matter.  The book is filled with unexpected twists and turns and even a deftly written love story sub-plot.  I found the hard boiled writing style, a la Raymond Chandler, a little contrived and slightly annoying but it did not over power the quality of the rest of the book.  I would highly recommend this book.

15. Graham Greene, No Man's Land

This is a recently uncovered Graham Greene story about a British spy who crosses into the Russian controlled zone of Germany to complete a mission.  Once he crosses the border he discovers a strange group of Catholic zealots who believe that the virgin mary appeared in a cave in the mountains.  Upon visiting the cave he falls in love with a beautiful woman and discovers that she works in his captor's jail.  This is a great old cold war spy story.

14. Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year

This story takes place in and around the year 2055 when the world is allied with the heartless people of Lilistar in an all out inter-planetary war against the reegs.  The world's capital is located in Cheyenne, WY and the world's leader, the UN Secretary, is a guy who goes by the nickname the Mole.  The story follows the lives of Virgil Ackerman, the vein older wartime profiteer;  Dr. Eric Sweetscent and his wife Kathy, the kind man and the shrill woman caught in a loveless marriage;  and the Mole, the calculating but misunderstood good leader of the world.

The Lilstar spies who have posted themselves throughout the world begin to introduce a potent drug, intended to be a weapon to be used against the reegs, called JJ-180 to selected humans.  Kathy is one of their victims.  Once taken, the drug transports the user either backwards, forwards or laterally in time and, after the high is over, unless the user takes another dose it slowly shuts down the user's liver until he dies.  In this way it is instantaneously addictive.  Kathy takes the drug one night and is blackmailed to join her husband, who by now has become one of the surgeons taking care of the Mole, in order to spy on both her husband and the Mole.

Desperate to feed her habit, Kathy shows up in Cheyenne and drops a JJ-180 pill in her husband's water and gets him addicted to the drug.  He then secures a supply of the drug for Kathy and returns her to the west coast and then sets off to find the antidote for the drug by taking the drug, traveling into the future and buying the cure.  In the mean time he discovers that the Mole has been prolonging his rule over the people by traveling laterally in time using JJ-180 and bringing other Moles back with him to replace him each time he dies in the current time line.

The story is made more complex by both Eric's search for a peaceful end to the war as he bounces back and forth in time and the Mole's complex strategy of staying in power using his counterparts from other time lines.

In this short book Philip K. Dick weaves a futuristic war time political thriller and a psychological drama together with a group of diverse and eccentric characters into one coherent story line.  Then he adds a lot of depth to all of the characters, even the minor ones, by, for example, giving them telepathic or pre-cognitive skills.  It is this complex weave which makes this one of the better PKD stories that I have read.  I urge you to pick it up as soon as you can.

13. Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

A&E recently aired a made for TV remake of the Andromeda Strain that was broadcast over two nights.  My wife, who is not a fan of science fiction, really enjoyed the first night of the series - she missed the second night - which is why I decided to pick up this book.  I got an old 1969 edition of the book in pretty good condition along with tear out advertising in the middle, anyone want a 20 week subscription to Time magazine for $2.67?

This is a mass market science fiction story with a happy ending.  A secret experimental satellite lands in a small town in Arizona and when the town doctor opens up the casing all but two of the town's residents die.  The overseers of the program send their team in to find the satellite and the team is also instantaneously killed when they open their van's doors in the town's main street.  The leader of the program decides to activate Wildfire, a secret government contingency plan designed to try to deal with extraterrestrial bacteria that are brought back to earth.

The Wildfire team assembles in a secret underground lab and tries to first identify and then cure the bacteria that killed the residents of Piedmont.  They go through the usual steps to do this and then they discover that the bacteria first mutates into something that destroys plastic and then mutates into something entirely benign.  There are some obvious tense moments in the Wildfire lab with potential breaches of seals letting the disease out through the lab and things like that.

The book has an awesome premise, it is amazingly well researched and Crichton's prose is fluid and easy to follow but it is a mass market story and it epitomizes why I tend to stay away from authors like Crichton:  they take an idea that has so much potential and then they dumb it down to the point that it is entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying.

Padding My Stats

Every night around 8 I sit down with my young daughter and read her a story.  Sometimes I read a few pages from the book that I am reading and other times I read stories about Grufallos, naughty mice or some other appropriate theme.  I want to know if I can count these books as part of my reading for 2008 because with these books I would be reading fifty books per month!

12. Georges Simenon, Tropic Moon

This is another one of Georges Simenon's roman durs.  It is the story of a young Frenchman, Timar, from La Rochelle who uses his politically well placed uncle's connections to get a job at a French company's colonial outpost in Gabon.  When he gets there to report for duty he finds that the only launch that can take him to his post in the interior is broken and, even if it worked, the guy who is currently in the post refuses to leave and has threatened to shoot anyone who tries to come and replace him.  With that plan on the shelf for now he checks into a local ex-pat hotel run by the beautiful Adele and her husband.  One morning Adele comes to him in his room and starts a tormented love affair that eventually drives him insane.

After their first morning together Adele withholds her tenderness which makes him increasingly wanting and insecure.  He wears his emotions on his sleeve and becomes the butt of the jokes of the more rugged ex-pat loggers who live in the hotel.  One night Adele's husband succumbs to an indigenous virus and dies the next day.  On the same day the police chief calls Timar in to question him about the shooting of a native which has caused a lot of tension among the native population.  Shortly after Adele's husband's death, the two recommence their love affair in a more bona fide manner and Adele, manipulative temptress that she is, convinces him to buy a logging concession in the interior.  After getting themselves organized the two of them set off for the interior.

Things go poorly from the start.  They first stop at a small native village and Adele mysteriously heads into one of the huts and comes out fifteen minutes later but refuses to say what she was doing in there.  This begins to drive Timar crazy which, compounded with the infection that he has picked up, makes him attack the boat's captain as they are pulling into their concession's dock.  Timar spends the next few days with a high fever, hearing things and behaving erratically towards Adele.  In these three days he figures out that Adele was the person who killed the native man in the city and that she hid the murder weapon in the hut that she went into on their way up here.  Before he is fully recovered, Adele is called back to the city to appear as a witness in the framed person's trial.  On hearing this, Timar canoes back to the city partially because he cannot bear to be without her and partially because he wants to tell the truth.

He shows up at the trial and after hours of testimony he screams that Adele is the real culprit and not the poor black man who's on trial.  Adele ends up in jail, though it's not entirely clear as the book leaves a lot to the reader's imagination at this point, and he ends up on a steamer back to France having gone insane and muttering "it isn't real," over and over again as he walks up and down the ship.

This is a murder story that is tightly tied up with a tortured love story.  It is excellent.

11. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

This book is so much better than the movie!  Where the movie is a superficial, pleasant, happy ending show this is a dark, angry, sad ending book.  The book is set after the end of a war, maybe a nuclear war though the author never says so.  The chemical weapons used in the war have released some kind of germ which turns people into vampires.  Because of the nuclear winter-like dust storms the germs are quickly transported throughout the world and they turn almost everyone into vampires except Robert Neville.

After his wife and daughter turn into vampires, Neville turns into a hermit drunk spending most days drinking from the morning till the night until he starts doing research on the germ which becomes an all consuming project for him.  He is joyous one day when he finds a dog that hasn't turned into a vampire already but he crashes a few nights later when the dog returns as a vampire.  At the same time as he is trying to find a cure for the vampire germ the vampires themselves are evolving and the story hits its climax over a physical and emotional battle between Neville and the advanced vampires.

This is nicely told but short story.

10. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

To my surprise I never read this rite of passage book when all my friends were reading it in high school.  What a great and sad story.  I am sure that my paltry audience of three or four has read this book so I won't bother summarizing the story for you.  The ending didn't come as a surprise, you knew that the bitch nurse was going to lobotomize him from about halfway through the book, but it still left me saddened that the tortured good guy lost his life.

We all have a lot of unread books on our shelves but this strikes me as one of those books that is worth re-reading.

9. Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad

Pulling out the big guns for the ninth book of the year!  I don't remember where I heard about this book, it could have been a book review somewhere, it caught my eye because it is the story of a tough Chechen fighter's interaction with his Russian adversaries.

Hadji Murad is the tough fighter and his former superior, Shamil, feeling threatened by Murad's courage and success has taken Murad's family hostage and has sent Murad into exile.  Murad turns to the Russians and gives himself up with the promise to fight on their behalf as long as the Russians give him his personal Cossack guard.  The Russians agree and Murad returns to Chechnya to fight Shamil.

This passage from the book could apply today just as well as it did 100 years ago:

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians.  The feeling experience by all Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate.  It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them - like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves - was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.

8. Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

This is a book of short stories published after KV's death.  Most of them are stories about the goings on in POW camps towards the end of WWII, others are about the havoc that followed the allied victory and there are a couple of other random ones about different subjects.

The stories are all quite sarcastic in the traditional KV style.  I particularly enjoyed the title story which is about an institute that is set up on Oklahoma to proove that people are crazy because they are possessed by the devil.  The institute is backed by a rich oil magnate who pours his entire wealth into the thing and the "scientists" there conduct experiments - and one large scale clinical trial - with devices that are supposed to rid the body of the devil.  One device is a headset that shoots a low intensity current between the person's ears.

There is some controversy about how finished these stories actually were when they were found and how much work the author's son, Mark, put into finishing them.

7. John Christopher, The World in Winter

This is a PA love story (better reviewed by the Mount Benson Report and Olman's 50).  A sudden reduction in solar radiation results in a significant cooling of the northern hemisphere and the emergence of a new ice age.  The story centers around Andrew, David and their wives.  Andrew produces a television show and David is a mid-level civil servant.  They are introduced to one another at a cocktail party.  Andrew's wife subsequently leaves him for David and David's timid wife begins a loving relationship with Andrew even though it lacks intimacy.

As the weather gets colder, critical supplies begin to dwindle and violence increases.  The government gives up most of the country and establishes "green zones" around key cities leaving most of the population outside the zones to fend for themselves.  Carol, Andrew's ex-wife, leaves with their children and moves to Nigeria and soon afterwards Andrew and David's ex-wife move to Nigeria as well on the promise that David will follow them soon.  There is subtle social commentary throughout the book focused on racism in the west, this commentary is magnified when the elite white's move to Nigeria and find that they are the underclass and are forced into doing menial low paying jobs for their black task masters.

In Nigeria, after a dark false start, Andrew manages to land another television production job and begins to lead a good life for himself and David's ex.  At the same time his ex-wife becomes a live in prostitute for a wealthy Nigerian business man.  The Nigerian authorities concoct a plan to invade England and Andrew joins the mission and returns to London where he finds David's ex-wife who had left Andrew and moved back to England in order to be with David.

I have not described the soap opera aspects of this book in as much detail as I could but I think that you catch the drift.  It's a good book and a quick read.

6. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

In a word this book is gruesome, for example:

Two thick ropes of blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire.  The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree.  They were skewered through the cords of their heels with the sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and their brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes.  Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.  Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths.

Blood Meridian is the story of the wild west in the 1870s as told through the eyes of a 24 year old always referred to as the kid.  The kid joins up with a division of the army who doesn't want to give up fighting the Apaches even though the American-Mexican war is officially over.  The division wanders down into a valley and is promptly slaughtered by the Apaches.  The kid gets away and joins a band of protection for hire thugs who provide protection to, at this time, Mexican villages and towns and are paid by the number of scalps that they bring in.  The band does reasonably well, if you can call it that, indiscriminately killing whomever crosses their path - Apaches or otherwise - however, it meets its end when one day it is attacked by the Yumas.

As with his other books the writing is so light and fluid that one does not ever feel absorbed by the book.  Nevertheless, it is a great story that is well put together and nicely told.

5. Barbara Smit, Sneaker Wars

The subtitle - the enemy brothers who founded adidas and puma and the family feud that forever changed the business of sport - says a lot about what the book's about.  Adi (short for Adolf) and Rudi (short for Rudolf) Dasler founded a shoe company in the town of Herzegonaurach in what became West Germany.  At first the outfit can best be described as a cobbler's shop where Adi made custom sports shoes and Rudi went out team to team and tried to sell the shoes.  As the business grew the brothers and their wives began to feud until shortly after WWII they decided to split the company into two.  Adi came away with the manufacturing side of the business and Rudi came away with the sales side of the business.  Adi named his company Adidas (short for Adi Dasler).  Rudi was going to name his company Rudas (short for Rudi Dasler) but felt that the name was unwieldy and changed it to Puma instead.

The book recounts the early years of the sports shoe and apparel business, the competition between the two brothers' companies, the emergence of Nike and later Reebok, the decline of both Adidas and Puma and the re-emergence of both companies in their current form.  The most interesting part of the story takes place in the earlier years:  the fight between the two brothers and the transformation of the sports business from an 'amateur' enterprise to the big money business that it is today.  After that the book is not so interesting.

4. Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underwater

I've lost track where this book falls in the Ripley series but I think that it falls immediately after Ripley's Game.  In this story two inquisitive Americans move into Ripley's suburban village and start making uncomfortably invasive inquiries about Ripley's life.  It later becomes clear that the Americans are on a mission to out Ripley.  I have to say that the suspense is a little more flat in this one and the ending is a little weaker.  Nevertheless it is an enjoyable book.

One, Two and Three

Cabeza de Vaca, The Shipwrecked Man

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver

Michael E. Porter, Competitive Analysis

The Shipwrecked Man was given to me by Kate and Jason and since I really enjoy reading about Spain's colonial adventures in Southern and Central America I quickly got into it.  Admittedly at 145 pages or so it was a quick read.  This is the story of a mission to explore Florida and Mexico gone horribly wrong.  Led by an incompetent Governor the explorers land somewhere in southern Florida, their group is divided and the ones that remain on land slowly die from various diseases.  One man, the narrator, survives the ordeal and recounts his point of view in this book.  "They perished one after the other.  The survivors sliced the dead for meat...."

Simenon is my new Dick Francis.  His Maigret novels are simple yet suspenseful.  This tells the story of Maigret's assignment in a rural French farming town where a beautiful young girl's boyfriend has been murdered.  I really can't say more without spoiling the story.

Porter is an Harvard Business School professor who specializes in the theory of competition.  His books, which date back to the 1970s, have formed the backbone of this field and he is widely renowned as a great business theorist.  As with many business books they are more common sense than anything else.  This one lays out a framework for analyzing your own company's competitive position and applying the framework to your industry as well as the competitors in your industry.  Once you have done that then you will be in a strong position to further analyze and change your competitive stance in a way that will increase your chance of success.  Anyone involved in business should read this.

I Am Back!

I took a long break from reading and blogging.  I was just getting bored of it all and couldn't find anything to keep me motivated.  Then, earlier this year, I picked up a Patricia Highsmith book.  I chose it because the Ripley series are always an easy and entertaining read and are good to get you back in the game.  It did the trick.  I ploughed through it.  Then I turned to a Maigret mystery for the same reason and I killed it and now I am onto a couple of new books that I am enjoying.  I will blog about all of these in the next few days.  Right now, you should just be happy that I am back.