Reading: Tatooine Ghost (Troy Dennison)

I really need to work out a better booklog system. The end-of-the-month smorgasboard makes for long entries, but the individual entries seem to just wind up clumped together at the end of the month. Grr.

Anyway. ( The summary. )

( The backtalk. )

Take my grumbling with a grain of salt. It's a SW novel, after all, which makes it sort of fluffy reading by definition. The length was the real killer; 250 or 300 pages of action with numerous nods to related material is fun, but the rest is just filler.

Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command(Timothy Zahn)

The terrible thing about reading something at the age of ten is that it's really hard to reread with anything like objectivity later in life. It's warm and fuzzy comfort reading. You tend to overlook a lot of flaws. This is probably also true of movies, and likely goes a long way toward explaining my unkillable love of the original Star Wars trilogy and my bitter disappointment in the prequels. Well, that and the terrible directing and dialogue.

Thank goodness for professional fanfic.

The thing that struck me this time is how much Zahn likes misdirection and playing with the flow of information. ( Huge spoilers, of course. )

Mother Aegypt and Other Stories (Kage Baker)

A collection of stories, most standalone and some set in the same universe as her series. Serii? The first three ("Leaving His Cares Behind", "The Briscian Saint", "Desolation Rose") are set in the same universe as her novel The Anvil of the World. The bulk of the book is standalones - "Miss Yahoo Has Her Say", "What the Tyger Told Her" , "Nightmare Mountain" (the Cupid and Psyche myth mets a vaguely Poe or Gaiman-ish sensibility), "Merry Christmas From Navarro Lodge, 1928" is an elegant one-trick time travel short; "Her Father's Eyes", set shortly after WWII, is inspired by Tam Lin according to Baker's website, but seems to be only the first half the story; "Two Old Men"I think is about God and the Devil making a deal; "The Summer People" is the meeting of California trailer trash with Hollywood-ish Elf types (not happy Tolkien Elves, the morally chancy sort from ballads); I don't know what "How They Tried to Talk Indian Tony Down" is; "Pueblo, Colorado Has the Answers" deals once again with time travel technology, this time with government cover-up; "Mother Aegypt" is the story of a swindler out to get rich, a Zeus Company Immortal who desperately wants to die, and the Immortal's strange servant Emil. The standalones are dominated by stories set in California, often told by or about fairly normal people caught in the fringe of strange events. Subtly strange little stories. When's the next Company novel due out again?

Forty Signs of Rain (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Near-future novel about science policy, rapid climate change, emerging biotech, stay-at-home working fatherhood, Buddhists in Washington, and water in unexpected places.

Anyone who picks up this book smacks into KSR's heavily environmentalist slant within the first pages, and people familiar with his other novels won't be surprised by the disparagement of contemporary American conservatism, the Buddhist influence on the narrative (embodied in the embassy staff of the fictional nation Khembalung, which I've almost certainly misspelled) or the strength of the warm fuzzy feelings for the scientific community and method.* Suggestions about the interaction of scientific exploration, politics and funding aren't particularly new, but the National Science Foundation's prominence in the plot really foregrounds those considerations.

*I'm slowly coming to realize that scientific results are fascinating, but actual lab work tends to be dead boring. There's a lot of waiting, either for the protein to crystallize, or the filtrate to come off the column, or the NMR lab to finish running your sample, or... you get the picture. Maybe being a working stiff adult is dead boring in general. I really hope not.

( More specific spoilers. )

Having Forty Signs land on my lap at the end of August was an interesting coincidence of timing and placement, the exquisitely unpredictable whim of chance throwing me a huge hint: this is how you got here. Where are you going next?

(An exercise for the student: impending climatic catastrophe as a metaphor for dynamic life change. Discuss the narcissism of the review writer.)

Forty Signs of Rain hits all my narrative buttons. When's part two due out? I may have to get it in hardcover.