What I Read Over Thanksgiving

So, I read some books over Thanksgiving and all I can say is that some of my favorite authors really disappointed me.

First up is Kage Baker. Her first book about the Company, In the Garden of Iden was terrific and the sequel, Coyote Sky was even better. This series, about a company from the future that time-travels in order to save precious objects and turns teenagers into cyborgs in order to get what they want, has been very good-well written and with a biting sense of humor. This book is clearly a transitional one-the three incarnations of one man (with only ine human body and two other versions that only exist in cyberspace, but can still take control of the human nody) have rescued the Botanist Mendoza from the Company's prison and have regrown her body (there wasn't much left of her, the guard had been ripping apart all the cyborgs sent to him) with the help of an artificial intelligence that is loyal to all three incarnations. The problem is that not much happens-they rescue and regrow her and have some adventures. Some odd things happen that no doubt will come back to haunt all of them-and one incarnation talks Mendoza into having a child, so he can have a human body-infuriating the other two incarnations and the artificial intelligence (which seems to be the most human of any of the characters). I'm not sure that the book after this one (which is scheduled to be released in early January) will offer any answers-the problem is that the questions (for me) were not that pressing. I loved the characters,the descriptions of the past, the sense of humor and the pathos involved when the cyborgs invariably became involved with someone not of their time. We'll see what happens in the next book.

Next up is Charles Stross-I've been reading a lot of Stross lately, but I have to say The Jennifer Morgue was not his best book. The Atrocity Archive was great, but this sequel, while turning archetypes on their collective heads which was pretty funny, was not as good. Yes, Bob Howard is a great character and there are many clever ideas in it with a clearly somewhat twisted sense of humor, but still. It didn't enthrall me like Atrocity did-although I still love the idea that math is dangerous and that incorrectly writing down the wrong theorem will summon a demon (this makes sense to me) it was worth the read, but only in paperback.

And then there's Jack McDevitt. I've loved his books-Polaris is great and creepy, Moonfall is scary and tense but Odyssey was not that great. The suspense was missing and without that, the book (as characterization is NOT one his strengths, at least not in this book) falls flat.

I'm going to start another Stross and maybe Spook-about science and the supernatural-I have hopes for them and for the books I'm going to read at Christmas, I'll see how it goes.

Michael Moore

This is a link to an open letter from Democrats to the neocons-it's great....

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=201

Yes, I signed it.

Heroes

Did anyone watch Heroes last night? I had to laugh at the cops doing the New York Times crossword puzzle -"I hate will Will Shortz"-how many times have I felt that way? I felt it last night when I thought Monday's puzzle was far too hard for a Monday. But I LOVED the waitress with the perfect memory ("Yes, I remember everything lately"). As someone whose friends call her with the oddest questions-who starred in Pillow Talk with Doris Day? Name some famous classical composers...is Fox News more liberal than CNN?-I could realte to her spitting out the answers to anything they asked her. And when one cop said to the other "she's not Google!" I burst out laughing-my friend M last week asked me about The Office and I told him I didn't know the answer to his question as I didn't watch it (sorry, I watch Smallville and Supernatural) and he said "What! That's unacceptable! That's like using Google and getting back a 'page not found message!'" Unfortunately, said waitress had her brain sucked out by the evil Sylar, and is now deader than a doornail, but I have hopes that Hiro (geeky, sweet, time-freezing Hiro) will be able to go back in time and rescue her-she is clearly one of the heroes, after all. Save the cheerleader, save the world is great, but please bring back the waitress who knows everything.

2 Movies and 1 Book

So, I finished Rennie Airth's The Blood-Dimmed Tide over the weekend-it was really good. I wish there had been a little more about the bad guy, but considering he was a sociopath, that would have been a bit difficult-and it wasn't a complete copy of his previous book, so that was good as well. I'm not sure about how genuine the language used was, or the terminology, but that's okay-Airth tells a compelling storyvery well.

Spoilers ahead for both movies....
I saw two movies over the weekend-and it's odd that the one about the magicians has stayed with longer than the one about people in three continents who are all in danger of losing people that are valuable to them. First up is Babel-and let me qualify this by saying that I really liked 21 Grams. I usually hate Sean Penn and I even liked him in 21 Grams, so I had a lot of goodwill going into Babel. Unfortunately, it was misplaced. I really didn't like this movie and I've spent a little time trying to figure out why. Was it the stock bad Americans? I'm okay with Americans being played as bad people in movies and most of the time it's justified. Was it the stock happy and partying Mexicans who show the little white kids the real world? Was it the names of the little white kids? (take it from me, people in the social class of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett would NOT name their kids Mike and Debbie-could those names be more stereotypically American?) I actually did like the deaf-mute Japanese girl-she was angry and frustrated and expressing it inappropriate ways-I've known a few people like that and Rink Keikuchi did a great job. Maybe it was how we were manipulated to feel badly for the nanny who gets busted by the border patrol and is sent back to Mexico for being illegal. Yes, she was yelled at for leaving the kids alone when she was trying to find help for them and that was unfair. And yes, it was unfair to deport her when all she wanted to do was go to her son's wedding. But if she had gone without the kids and all that bad stuff hadn't happened-what did she think would happen at the border on her return? Did she think they would just wave her on through without a pssport or any kind of documentation? That seems a bit naive-and I have to say that if she had been living in the US for 20 years, how did she get back and forth over the border without documentation? I thought it was pretty difficult these days and that (of all people) illegals knew this. Also, I juat had a friend tell me that apparently it can be quite easy for illegals to get across the border at customs, so now I don't feel badly at all. It was things like this that annoyed me-the small things that are supposed to tell a bigger story-but when the small things don't add them the picture falls apart.

But The Prestige really stayed with me. I'm not going to compare it to The Illusionist-even though both are about turn of the century magicians, they are so different that you can't really compare them fairly. Hugh Jackman (playing the American and his accent was pretty good) and Christian Bale (playing the lower-class Brit and doing that accent pretty well) start off as assistants to Ricky Jay (who I wish had been given some lines-I love him) and they are doing fairly well-although both want their own acts-until Bale ties a knot (or does he?) that Jackman's wife can't slip out of during a drowning man trick. She drowns as a result and a lifelong feud is born. Yes, Jackan tries to steal Bale's tricks-Bale is the better magician after all. Yes, Bale does his best to hurt Jackman and make fun of him right in the middle of his act-it's all in the name of getting more people into their shows and being a better magician-isn't it? Michael Caine (not phoning it in and giving a charming performance) tells them that they need to get their hands dirty in doing their magic and they both do, in different ways. The crux of the feud teuns on the trick The Transported Man, in which Bale goes through a door at one end of the stage and seemingly reappears through another door at the other end of the stage only a second or two later. How does he do it? This question torments Jackman-does he use a double? Is it a trick? He sends his assistant, Scarlett Johannsen to find out-and she ends up falling in love with Bale, despite the presence of his wife and child. Bale tells him that Nikola Tesla helped him-and Jackman goes to Colorado Springs to see Tesla (this part is true, Tesla did live in Colorado around the turn of the century and did experiments in his lab there). Tesla, does not end up transporting Jackman, but he does end up being able to create an exact copy of him. So, who has the trick? Is it magic? The truth is that Bale really DOES have a twin (who spends the whole movie in glasses, a wig and whiskers and padding to make him bigger. It really IS a trick. But Jackman does his trick every night for 100 nights-and when he does the trick, he creates a duplicate every time. so where are all the duplicates? He drowns each one, every night-until Bale comes downstairs to see how the trick is done and finds himself in the dock, being tried for Jackman's murder. So, who gets set up and who doesn't? Who wins in the end? They both have lost a part of themselves-Bales loses his twin (the one who doesn't love his wife and child) and Jackman loses....everything that he meant to win. It's a twisty movie and not particularly nice but it's very good-and David Bowie plays Tesla which was a nice surprise.

Some good books, others-not so much

So, I went on vacation-I drank a lot of champagne and had some wonderful meals (well, I was in San Francisco and Napa Valley, what do you expect?) and I read a lot-it was great...and some of the books were wonderful and others....weren't.

1) Harbingers by F. Paul Wilson. Wilson is not the greatest prose stylist in the world, but he is a great storyteller and this latest addition to the Repairman Jack series was very good and much better than it's predecessor. It's full of horror, fear, revenge, action and angst. If you don't like supernatural horror, this isn't the book for you (and truth to tell, I find it a little annoying that Wilson is REALLY dragging this story out, especially since he's rewriting/revisiting a story he's alread written) but it's still a heck of a story. If you haven't read the Repairman Jack series, I really recommend it-just stick with it when it heads into weirdness-and it would help if you read The Keep (a great book) first. It may not seem like it there is a connection, but trust me on this.

2) The Jaguar Hunter by Lucius Shepard. Oy. The reviews on this book were uniformly excellent and I can understand why. The writing is good, and the story plots (it's a collection of short stories) taken one by one are interesting. But as a collection...let's just say as a woman who likes science fiction and has been reading it for over 20 years now, I found it a tad ridiculous. Granted, most of the stories were written in the 80's, but still. It seemed to me that almost every story had a lone man meeting a beautiful woman who turns out to be A) A shapeshifter or B) an alien or C) a spirit that will ruin his life. Honestly, all I could think of were all those old cliches about science fiction being for geeky boys who couldn't meet girls-so they dreamed up their girls in comic books or science fiction. At this point, after reading so many books with well-rounded female characters, it seemed a bit silly.

3) River of Darkness by Rennie Airth. This is a great book. I admit that I read it because my sister recommended it and we don't always agree on books, as she will only read mysteries and my tastes are a little more varied, but she was right about this one. John Madden, who lost hise wife and infant daughter to the influenza epidemic of 1918, and then lived and fought through the horrors of WWI is now at Scotland Yard and investigating the murder of a family in the countryside. Were they targeted? Why? Is it a serial killer? Set against the backdrop of the ending of the War, this is a great book-scary, dramatic, evocative..I loved it. I'm starting to read the sequel A Blood-Dimmed Tide and I expect great things from it. It took Airth six years to get it written, so I'm hoping the next one (I've heard) won't take as long

4) Newton's Wake by Ken Mcleod. Yes, I liked this book. It's not the best written book, but it was very entertaining and fun. If you like science fiction, this story about a clan of interstellar explorers/gang that controls a main passage though space and it's main character, a member of the clan who lands on an unknown planet and inadvertantly starts a war with three other sentient races. It was not deep, but it was fun.

5) Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr. I first started reading this book about a year ago, when I read the first book in this trilogy-March Violets. It takes place in Nazi Germany, circa 1936. The 2nd book, The Pale Criminal, takes place in 1938 and the third book of the trilogy, A German Requiem, atkes place after the war, in 1947. These are three great books, depsite the fact it took me a year to get to them. Set against Nazi Germany, Benard Gunther, a private detective, tries to live his life and earn a living, while still being a decent person who hates the Nazis. Every case he gets involved in brings him straight up against those he hates the most, and each time he believes he has at least delayed the horror what is bound to happen, he finds that he has not done even that. The second book-The Pale Criminal is deeply scary in that you know if Bernie runs afoul of the person who hired him (the Nazi Heydrich), you know he'll be killed. But the criminal of the title is good friends with someone even worse...Himmler. Actually, the pale criminal could refer to a variety of people, Himmler among them-so it's anyones guess whether he's referring to the actual killer or the all the Nazis. These books follow all the traditions of noir fiction-the tough guy dialogue, the perverse physical descriptions, the first-person narrative, so you never know exactly what is going on-until the end, when you find out just how badly the main character has been kept in the dark. The Pale Criminal is a bit different in that, if you know a bit of German history, you know that no matter how hard Bernie tries he cannot prevent Kristallnacht from taking place and nor can he prevent the demonization of the Jews.

Also, Democrats have taken the House, may take take the Senate and Rumsfeld has resigned..Yay Democrats! They aren't an organized political party (like the Republicans are) but my heart will always be with them....