Book review: Pavane

And oldie from Keith Roberts. I liked it enough that I've just ordered The Grain Kings, which I also read oh so many years ago. These are not super high quality stuff, but they have a flavour which modern stuff lacks.

This is an alternate-history "novel" constructed from some loosely-connected short stories: Queen Elizabeth was assasinated, the Armada succeeded, the Catholic Church controls the world; edicts such as Petroleum Veto restrict progress. But in a way it is really about the Isle of Purbeck and Corfe Castle. I think I'd like to visit there in the spring. Let's see if I remember.

Mixed into the stories of traction-engine folk, with their lovingly-described tending, and the signalling, and the lords and ladies, there is the Faery folk as an edge presence, nicely handled, almost as a ghost story when first introduced. Possibly not quite consistently - this is fixup after all - because the Seneschal turns out to be one. Trivia: in the end, the Seneschal turns out to have a primitive radio; but it doesn't do much and it isn't clear how he got it, or who he talks to. This seems to be an oddity. I think this is part of a not-quite-realised plan to have tech start creeping in.

Wiki says "The location and flavour, nostalgic yet tragic in outlook..." which fits fairly well; tragic is too strong though. As everyone say, the coda - "explaining" the Church's cunning plan to restrict science just long enough that humanity has time to mature and not to nuke ourselves to death - jars; I recommend not reading it.

Trivia: given the detail about headers and duplex and routing protocol from the semaphore chains, I'd expected him to have some kind of technical background, but it seems not.

Book review: The Witch Roads

By Kate "Cold Magic" Elliot, though I read that before I started routinely reviewing stuff. Perhaps I'll now read volume three. Aanyway, as to this: I enjoyed it, though it feels somewhat Young Adult-y, although then again perhaps that is why I enjoyed it. And I look forward to volume two.

There are decent characters, decent world-building, and a decet plot. Is that all a bit too decent, perhaps?

The takeover of the Prince by the Haunt - only a minor spoiler - is a good excuse for insinuating <low-status, female, main character> into the plot. And the setup of the Empire is nice, complete with Interlocutor to speak for officials whose status is too high to allow them to speak to peons; shades of White Queen. The shame is that Our Author allows herself to break these rules, so that the <spunky low-status characters> can speak up. It would have been a better, more interesting, book if this wasn't allowed. Or if she would let her characters get cuffed to the ground for their temerity.

Kem being Kema being female is a bit weird. At least in volume one it is apparently pointless, and appears out of character for the society. Although it isn't obvious that the society is quite consistent: females occupy high-status positions, yet the soldiery is rather "rapey", as one Goodreads review put it.

Trivia: the climatic crossing-of-the-gap-by-rope-bridge is a bit strange, as the bunch of wimps that they are require four ropes, two for feet and two handrails, to get across, even in an emergency. This is pretty feeble; one-hand-one-foot would not be out of order; and really, with some kind of support loop just one rope would be enough, so I say they're a bit wet. Trivia two: the theurgist avoids climbing out of the hole-behind-the-waterfall by using up one of her bound air spirits. This is obviously stupid: they are limited and valuable, why waste one merely in order to give the other characters something to talk about?

New heart rate monitor

My Garmin chest-strap heart rate monitor became unreliable, and I realised it was because the casing was falling apart; I "fixed" it but that made it totally dead; so after a few weeks without and realising that the Forerunner 55 light-based HR is unreliable for climbing or erging, I decided to buy a new one. Initially I assumed I needed a Garmin one; but "research" said that any Ant or BT one should do; so I risked a Polar. And lo, it connects and works. Here it is.

And here is the old Garmin one.

They are about the same size and weight; the strap design is similar; they both take coin cell batteries. The Polar one was a "Polar H9 Heart Rate Sensor – ANT Plus/Bluetooth - Waterproof HR Monitor with Soft Chest Strap for Gym, Cycling, Running, Outdoor Sports", £49. A replacement Garmin one would have been £79 I think.

Book review: Maigret a New York

In French, no less. I read it for my mental health. My French comprehension is acceptable, but my vocabulary by no means includes all the words that Simenon uses, so I read this with a combination of blipping, guesswork and Google translate. Wiki isn't interested in it.

This feels to me more like mood-music than kewful: by which I mean it isn't a Poirot, where the Klews are laid out for you if you care to follow them; instead it is more of a novel that happens to be a detective story. Either that or my poor French missed the clues.

Side note: the book is of course in French, as is all the dialogue, except where rarely someone speaks to Maigret in very deliberate English. But it is understood that Maigret is actually speaking English to the New Yorkers. I think this would not in practice have worked: his English, as he notes himself, just isn't good enough.

Laying that aside, what of the story: the famous Commisionaire Maigret, despite being retired,  goes to New York at the behest of a Young Man, concerned that his loving father has had a strange change of tone - letters are shown - and perhaps fears for his life. Arriving by ocean liner, this being 1946, the young man disappears and Maigret meets the Father, and Strangely Undocile Secretary. They are uninterested in Maigret and his mission, and curiously uninterested in the disappearance of the young man.

After anough local colour has been applied to make an interesting book, and enough alcohol drunk to render and entire police department senseless, it turns out that the SUS is actually a lovechild of the F but only Recently Reunited after being given away at birth; that the F had - somewhat improbably, but roll with it, - killed the mother, who he loved, jealous of an affair, thirty years ago; and is being blackmailed by the archetypical and always available New York Gangsters including the notorious Sicilians. Anyway, the RR and the NYG explain the change of tone of the letters, since the YM, the second son of the second wife, was always a bit meh, and only loved when he was the only one available; some flim-flammery excuse is offered for his disappearance-at-disembarcation. Maigret decides not to trouble the NYPD about the stale murder, and sails off home. The End.

Book review: The Shapes of Sleep

By J. B. "An Inspector Calls" Priestley. Not a well-known book; judge that by its Wiki page. Old JB is an intelligent and well-brought up chap, and so has written a corresponding book. Without being too unkind to it I suppose I shall say that it would raise no great enthusiam; it is a workmanlike product to entertain one for a while, and then be put back into an appropriately coloured room¹.

Somewhat surprisingly the cover fits the story: a bygone-looking town - likely Gottingen in Germany - with a shady character in the lamp-dark streets carrying some purloined portfolio to an unknown destination. From the cover this could be between the wars, but it was written in 1962, and includes the dangerous border between East and West Germany, so is set about then.

Priestly was born in 1894 and so is antique by the time of this book, and rather comes across as a grumpy old man: the larded-on social commentary towards the end is of the everything's-going-to-the-dogs kind; in some respects he would be regarded now as unenlightened: he even says "poofter" at one point. He is also under the impression that Hamburg doesn't have much nightlife, which seems odd.

The story is a mystery, or a spy thriller, assuming we can discard the social commentary which I did. Our Hero - as tradition demands, tall, strong of arm and of character, down on his luck and yet living in a nice central flat, disappointed in love, clever - is called in by a chum to try to discover who has stolen a piece of paper from an advertising exec's desk. This elaborates into being hit on the head by a Girl, and chasing off to Germany for colour, in a manner to me curiously familiar from Jack Vance in Ecce and Old Earth. In the end - look away now if you want to read it - it turns out that this is both spy and detective-mystery: because Dr Voss who has invented The Shapes of Sleep and therefore interested the admen who want to use them to lull people into buying products, is also a hardened Communist and has been passing info to the East and therefore interested the Spooks; and this combination neatly explains the rather confused Klews which have been scattered through the book. This is... clever, I think, but somehow not terribly interesting. I spare you the society of Antiants, which although he declines the etymology I feel sure is a play on Antients, aka an obsolete form (see Hobbes) of Ancients.

Notes

1. This is a reference to R, who kindly lent it to me; he had bought it because it fit the colour scheme of his "retro room". This is not a criticism of his reading habits. I should perhaps add that if you were to take the book seriously, and go about remembering all the Klews and stuff, it might be harder work. For example, I still don't know why K wanted to offer the UK exec the piece of paper in the first place, or how the US exec came to know about the Shapes, but I'll just glide over that.

Book review: The Dosadi Experiment

Mumblings from the author of Dune. It lacks the epic sweep of Dune, but alas shares, but displays to a greater extent, Dune's worst flaw: it tells but doesn't show. Time and again we are told how clever the characters are being; we are told there are wheels within wheels and plots within plots; but we are never shown these things; instead we get the fairly routine events that FH's mind can devise.

The second major problem is FH's sociology / politics / Darwinism: the idea is that a massively over-crowded society left to evolve for a twenty generations will develope into something interesting; in particular that the people will become hyper-capable. This deosn't seem particularly likely; more likely is barbarism and oppression. But this again is a "Dune" theme; he has his Arrakis, and his Salusa Secundus. FH is clearly interested in these ideas; but doesn't really have anything to say about them.

Far too much of it is too incoherent to really attempt to analyse properly. By the end, at the "trial", it seems like almost everyone is in someone else's body, for no particularly obvious reason.  By that point I was just reading through hoping to get to the end, which mercifully eventually arrived.

Book review: Broken Angels

SciFi tosh, but better than the usual run, for slightly hard to identify reasons. The summary: <tough battle-hardened man> is recruited in a a warzone on a distant planet and after <recruiting the rest of the team> travels to an archeological dig to explore a <mysterious alien artifact> and <people die> before Our Hero wins the <climatic fight> in <surprising way> is quite generic, but the writing is better and the sense of mystery retained for longer than usual.

In the universe - and I like this bit - it turns out that Mars was inhabited, until about 50 kyr ago, by "Martians", though they came from elsewhere; and humanity is now slowly picking through the remains of their civilisation, including their star maps of where other inhabitable planets are (though if these creatures preferred Mars to Earth, their ideas of inhabitability clearly differ wildly from ours; the book carefully avoids the slightest discussion of whether they ever came to Earth).

It would be nice if the book thought about how this encounter has affected humanity, but apart from a little throwaway stuff - religions adapted - it doesn't. Did science wither, in favour of archeology? Or was it accelerated? I think RM's science is too weak for him to write around it.

Wiki tells me that "Writing for The Guardian, Colin Greenland found that Altered Carbon was about fighting against wealth and power"; when you look at his pic you'll see why; and anyway he wrote Take Back Plenty, on of the few SciFi books crappy enough that I didn't bother to finish. The book might possibly be said to have such themes; but really any philosophy in it is incoherent; it is ranting of the "You shot him! Meh, I'm a mercenary, blame the merchants for my evil!" variety or whatever. I think it is better considered as scene-setting, or simply dialogue. You can just as easily consider it a plea for free-market freedom which actually achieves things against the dead hand of government.

The bits along the lines of "the Martians were winged predadators, therefore their psychology must have been X" were annoyingly stupid. Ditto the Quellist mock-thought, which recalls the worst bits of Dune.

Plot holes are numerous. People's conciousness / memory / personality can be transmitted between the stars, and "resleeved" in new bodies. Mysteriously, no-one at all discusses the sources of the new bodies. Mysteriously, there is no market in fat old rich people dropping into toned young bodies. Mysteriously, no-one plays at swapping to a body of alternate sex; and so on. All of that, which would be social commentary, is just suppressed, because it would be terribly inconvenient. As would the familiar problems of duplication. As would the problems of "wouldn't you rather live in virtuality, it is much nicer in there?" - which would helpfully solve the problem of sourcing bodies. Weirdly, the only backup most people have is in their "cortical stack" whereas it would be natural to have a public repository; then people suffering "real death" - i.e., body and stack - would only lose since-last-backup. Banks, I'm pretty sure, faces up to this.

Oh yes, and despite all this re-animation, with mercenaries guaranteed a new body if killed, the characters still continue to treat death as a terrible thing and talk like grunts out of 'Nam. That brings me to the "torture people to death in public" scene which I thought tasteless and silly: having a policy like that is just dumb, for the reasons that become apparent.

Space travel is only roughly sketched in, and not very realistically: the colony ships can travel at near lightspeed (not very plausible in itself), whereas the military ships are much slower. But I think this is needed for him to get the expansion rate he needs.

The novel provides us with two wonders: a instantaneous-travel-gate, and a giant-alien-spaceship (and never really considers the lack of compatibility between these two items). They display a remarkable lack of interest in these wonders; pressure of situation might possibly justify that, but I still consider the book stunted for its lack of response. The reason being, of course, that Our Author has enough imagination to create / copy these items, but can't really fill them in. On the other hand the atmosphere on board the space ship is nicely done.

The "Our space ship is under attack from another space ship! Never mind, it is just an eternally-recurring 1.2 kyr pattern!" is dumb, because (as Our Author realises a little bit later) it would be too much of a coincidence for them to have turned up just at the right time. He is reduced to ridiculous straits, and decides that there's a whole fleet of suchlike, attacking, what, every day? (Using mega-weaponry, whose bleedin' obvious detonations are mysteriously invisible from not-very-far-away. Also, their deduction that the weapons are FTL isn't believable). That bit needed heavy rewriting to make some kind of sense. Just delete the attacks, I think, and find the sense of menace elsewhere. The book is, obvs, very much wham-bam; but that kind of storyline makes me think it was written that way too, without much prior plot outline or editing.

Trivia: this review points out his use of periods to write speech. The reviewer hated it; I liked it; perhaps because I do it myself.