Miscellany – March 2008

It's been a long February, and it will be a long March. Somewhere in between, some reading got done.

1. Michael White's The Fruits of War has interesting content. It's a sort of compendium of technologies that humans have picked up in the heat of the crucible of war. But he overdoes things, gets boring, and has a terrible ear for a phrase.

2. I went on to John Zakour's and Lawrence Ganem's The Radioactive Redhead and Zakour's first solo effort, The Frost-Haired Vixen. They made me decide that an over-reliance on supercomputing and pyschic powers as plot drivers is unhealthy. Zakour's latest is The Blue-Haired Bombshell. I'm not sure if it will be worth reading.

3. John Scalzi's Old Man's War however was an excellent read. Analogies have been drawn between it and Heinlein's Starship Troopers, as well as Haldeman's The Forever War. But Scalzi's Earthmen-at-war-against-inscrutable-aliens effort builds unashamedly on such classic antecedents and does reasonably well. It is not as deep as Alastair Reynolds or Iain Banks, in terms of space opera, but it's good, and so is the sequel, The Ghost Brigades. Actually, I think the latter is better. There's one more to go in this trilogy.

4. I liked Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas enough to splurge on Forever Odd and Brother Odd. They were worthy sequels about the unreliable ghost-seeing narrator. However, the nature of evil receives a different treatment each time: Forever Odd explores the nature of Thomas's gift and its limits; Brother Odd handles the grey area between the unnatural and supernatural. I must admit Koontz's narrative pacing is superb, and I would buy another in the series.

5. The Highwaymen is a trade collection of the DC Wildstorm series by Bernardin, Freeman & Garbett. I seldom add graphic novels to this list, but it's an excellent example of retro action-adventure storytelling; the two protagonists, 'Mr McQueen' and 'Able Monroe' remind one slightly of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' and 'Felix Leiter' respectively. They are ageing heroes in a future world who find themselves executing one last mission for their late boss, a certain President William Jefferson Clinton. Superpowers do appear, as they tend to in such excursions, but our unpowered heroes win through.

6. Kim Newman's Bad Dreams is an old book; it was his first novel, I think. Yet another London noir horror effort, it is about as creative as early Christopher Fowler or Neil Gaiman, but a lot nastier in spots. He's improved a lot, so this one's not a good starting point if you want to read Newman. I would recommend Anno Dracula, personally.

Well, that's it for now. I'll be too busy to write for a while, or even read, more's the pity.