Richter 10
by Arthur C. Clarke and Mike McQuay
The authorship of this book, as far as I can glean from the blurb and the afterword,
should actually read "By Mike McQuay from a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke." But,
of course, Clarke has the bigger name, ergo, to sell the book, put his name first.
The book is set in the not-to-distant future and deals with earthquakes, their
prediction and possible resolution. The hero, Crane, is a slightly crazy character
who’d lost both his parents in the Northridge quake of 1994 and vowed to learn what
he could about the reasons for earthquakes to see if he can find out when they occur.
However, the world seems hell bent on destruction anyway: the Middle East has disappeared
in some nuclear conflagration, there’s a group of Muslims trying to create a Nation
of Islam in the US, which itself happens to be run by a Chinese conglomerate that has
installed a puppet President in the White House.
Crane has indeed discovered a way of predicting earthquakes, and wants to sell the
predictive technology to the US, in order to save lots of lives and to provide the money
for a grandiose scheme to weld the world’s tectonic plates together by means of
gigaton nuclear explosions. Once they’re locked, there would be no more volcanoes or
earthquakes.
In my view, the book was too long. The premise was interesting but to be sustained
throughout the 400 pages we had to have a lot of not particularly interesting characters
and situations. Everybody seemed to be herculean in some sense - out of the ordinary
people: beautiful intelligent women, strong men with definite views, all casually drawn,
all unbelievable. I didn’t particularly care for anybody; all the main characters
were god-like, not men/women in the street.
Would I reread it? No. So, it gets a 5 out of 10.
This was a fascinating novel with a breathtaking twist at the end. McGrath writes very
well, drawing you into his story about madness until you no longer know what is true or
false.
Stella Raphael is good-looking, intelligent and knows what she wants. She’s
married to a psychiatrist who works at a maximum security mental institution in England in
the 1950’s. She’s bored with her husband and her life when one summer she meets
and is attracted by one of the inmates, an artist who brutally murdered his wife. They
embark on an illicit affair, their passion destroying all in their path.
The tale is told by another psychiatrist, a friend of Stella’s husband and doctor
to the inmate. He tells the story as told to him by Stella and we soon realize that she
too is to become his patient. We are drawn in by the inevitability of the affair, left on
tenterhooks (will the inmate repeat his murder?), and follow the plot into the aftermath
when everything falls apart.
The ending left me and the narrator trying to regain our balance. In a very clever but
subtle twist, obvious with hindsight, we are left without the foundation we’d been
building on whilst getting embroiled in the story. Our edifice we’d constructed was
swept away. It reminded me somewhat of the story telling style of Christopher Priest where
in the final pages you find out that the novel you’d been reading wasn’t really
about what you’d thought it was (I’m thinking especially of The Affirmation
here which has the most audacious ending I know of, after the most simple and engrossing
story-telling, consequently making it my all time favorite novel).
The Asylum is well worth reading. I got it as a Christmas present, read it
within a couple of weeks, and now am anxious to try out some more of this author. Warmly
recommended.
A hoot. A complete hoot. On the one hand, it’s a detective novel with Aurelio Zen,
Dibdin’s methodical Italian police inspector, the intelligent protagonist of such
novels as Ratking and Dead Lagoon. A man with scruples in a country
where corruption is rife. A plot that twists and turns in a most satisfying manner.
Missing persons, murders, casual violence. Stabs at Italian political life. And then, on
the other hand, this novel is a modern interpretation of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte.
Mistaken identities, double identities, clownish characters, people falling in love with
each other at the drop of a hat (sometimes with entirely the wrong person), lovers trysts
being tested, baddies turning into goodies, the real baddies getting their comeuppance,
farcical situations. You can almost hear the chamber orchestra playing in the background.
It would be pointless to try and describe the plot, for there are many. All the
subplots seem to go their own separate ways until suddenly they gather together, neatly
resolving themselves, at the end. You can almost imagine the line "And everybody
lived happily ever after" at the end. Well, apart from some high-living criminals
crushed in a maverick garbage truck.
Well up to Dibdin’s usual level, and well recommended. In fact, any Aurelio Zen
mystery is worth reading; be warned, they’re not all as full of fun as this one
though.
A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest
Chris Priest, I have to admit, is one of my all time favorite authors. I just know that
any novel he writes is going to be fascinating, lyrical, intelligent, bloody well written
and will leave you thinking about it long after you’ve finished. I started reading
him in the Seventies, books like Fugue for a Darkening Island, Inverted World
and this one, A Dream of Wessex. I hasten to add that these are all unfortunately
out of print, and it’s a real shame. The reason I’m writing about the latter is
that last time I was in England, I raided my books that my parents are storing for me to
grab a few novels I wanted to reread. A Dream of Wessex was one of them.
The book has a science-fiction premise where a new machine enables people to dream
together at the same time. They manage to communally imagine a future England, one where
massive flooding has occurred due to the melting of the ice caps, altering the shape of
the country. Dorchester is now a seaside resort, the population is much lower, the whole
place is much more beautiful, restful and quiet. Once in the dream, the investigators are
‘locked’ in, they can’t be woken up, they can only be retrieved by hypnosis
in the dream world. Of course in the real world, the country is going to hell in a
handbasket: continual rain, IRA bomb threats, and so on, so the dream world becomes more
and more attractive and some experimenters just don’t want to return. Priest is very
lyrical describing this new Wessex, and makes you yearn to be there too. Life is simpler
there, less stressful, more attractive, better.
Into this idyll comes a newcomer, a brash forceful character who’s employed by the
Foundation doing the experiments to find out where their money is going and what benefits
this research should have. Pretty soon he forces himself into the dream world and we
discover that, though his forceful vicious personality, he changes the dream world and
injects industry, pollution and the rest of the twentieth century into the dream. Priest
makes you feel the pain of the loss of the idyll, even as his characters don’t
notice.
The resolution of the dilemma and the restoration of the beauty is a tour de force.
Like all Priest novels there’s an audacious twist that gets you thinking so much your
head hurts. Basically the evil character brings a dream machine into the dream world, and
forces everybody to dream back into reality. But do they? Is this dream within a dream,
real? Or is it another layer? The heroine manages to escape back to the original dream
world where the hero was waiting by using the dream machine in this new real world (the
dream squared world, if you like). But has she returned? Or is she dreaming the hero in a
dream within a dream within a dream?
The final chapter takes the reader into another layer, a dream sequence within the
dream. Except it seems to break into reality.
A novel, as I said, to get you thinking. For me, I feel almost physical desire to be
there in Priest’s Wessex. It’s worse than homesickness in a way. He describes
this English (oh so English) world so well, you feel almost lost when you look up from the
page. The novel gets you wondering about what reality is: is it manufactured from our own
minds? Do we singly or communally dream up what happens in the world? If you can find this
book in a second-hand store, buy it and read it. I’m hoping that the new novels
Priest is writing (the latest I have is The Prestige written in 1995, and I
notice that there’s now a new one in hardback) will cause some publisher to reprint
his older fiction.
It's now been a while since I read this (I didn't have time to write a review
immediately I finished it, and I'm catching up), so let's see what I can remember of it.
Frank Poole (of 2001 fame - he was sent tumbling into space by a murderous HAL, if you
recall) is discovered out in the farthest regions of the solar system around the turn of
the next millenium and is resuscitated. Through Poole, Arthur C Clarke explores with us
human society one thousand years in the future. And I must admit Clarke's imagination has
been running riot, not only do we have Poole being revived, but also religion being
abandoned, space needle elevators from Earth to geosychonous orbit (something he's
advocated before) that are being joined by a ring (something new and quite frankly
awe-inspiring and mind-boggling), intertia-less drive, computerised personal assistants,
super-infectious computer viruses, etc. And the plot? Well, I don't really remember. It
involved Poole descending onto Europa (which if you recall had been confiscated by the
master monolith after turning Jupiter into another mini-sun), meeting the mega-monolith
and managing to communicate with HAL and Dave Bowman (the monolith has 'downloaded' them).
Through HAL and Bowman interfacing with the mega-monolith Poole and Earth discover that
the monoliths and their makers don't have good intentions towards the human race (I can't
remember why). Poole and the downloaded duo manage to destroy the mega-monolith (which
also causes all other monoliths in the solar system to disappear as well) and we're left
with the vague threat of their makers coming to invade, and for another sequel.
Did I like the book? Well, no, not really, I'm afraid. I disliked the monoliths being
reduced to mere computers destroyable via a human written virus (oops, I let the cat out
of the bag!). It was always more fascinating to have them unknown and unknowable, rather
than prosaically explained. (Wow, spooky, I'm playing a CD of tone poems by Richard
Strauss and the Introduction to Also Sprach Zarathrustra just came on.) Also the plot just
seemed to be 'tacked on' to an exploration of Clarke's ideas for the future. It is better
that 2061, though. That one I disliked so much I can't even remember what
happened in it.
It's been a while since I read this as well, and in the interim my views on it have
ebbed and flowed, rather like the ever-present Atlantic in the book. Quoyle is one of
life's failures, a spineless, fat non-entity who tries to be a reporter on a local paper.
Through some unconvincing events he manages to get married to a comlete bitch, who then
cuckolds him right, left and centre. She eventually runs away with her latest beau and is
killed in a car accident. Quoyle collects on the insurance and takes his two daughters and
aunt to go live in a little port in Newfoundland, their ancestral home. Quoyle joins the
local paper there and writes the shipping news. He meets a lot of pecularly wierd
characters, has various adventures and relevatory happenings, before gaining a sense of
self-worth and a new wife.
The prose style Proulx uses irritated me at first. She drops sentence subjects,
prepositions, sometimes verbs. It produces a very staccato style, rushing headlong,
dragging you with it. Eventually, I got used to it and started enjoying the story. The
problem for me was that Quoyle was so spineless, it just didn't ring true. He's
ripped off all over the place. He's also incredibly dumb (e.g., against all advice he
persists in buying this badly built boat, ignoring warnings that it'll capsize and drown
him, and lo and behold it does and he almost does). It just didn't gel for me.
Overall, parts of the book managed to capture the imagination, but other parts were
just too self-conscious in their own cleverness. I'm glad I read it, but I'm not sure why
it won the Pulitzer.
Lethal Exposure
by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason
The third of a series starring the FBI agent Craig Kreident, an efficiently written
thriller series with a science bent. This one was a bit of a disappointment though, I
guessed who'd done it (both crimes, that is) and was cursing Agent Kreident's complete
lack of imagination in getting the crimes solved. The characters were stereotypes, the
crimes laughable, the lack of intelligence by the characters stupid. Don't bother, unless
you want to have a book for a rainy afternoon (that's all it'll take to read it).
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett (UK: �5.99)
(Sorry about this, but this book is not yet available in the US - you can order it from
Blackwell's in the UK though.)
I just don't know how I did it. I bought this latest Discworld novel last Christmas
when I was in England, and how I managed not to read it until now, I just don't know.
Pratchett's Discworld novels are funny, wiity, worldly and wise, great lampoons on our
society and world that have a hidden subtext that gets to you after reading them. I love
them to death (or should that be Death?). I enjoy every one of them and have to spread
them out somehow.
For those of you who don't know anything about the Discworld, it's like this. Imagine a
world that's flat, and that goes through space on the back of four giant elephants on the
back of the great turtle A'Tuin. In this world (or, on... ?) live the most amazing set of
characters you could ever want to meet. There's wizards, humans, trolls, dwarves, dragons,
pixies; and of course Death (you know, the skeleton in a black cape and with a magic
scythe that collects your soul when you die). The novels generally explore one facet of
the Discworld, which in turn is a facet of our own society - but twisted. For
example, Guards, Guards is about Ankh-Morpork's new, burgeoning police force. The
novel explores crime and punishment, honesty and Dirty Harry movies.
Anyway, Hogfather details what happens when the Auditors (a creepy bunch of
ethereal characters out to destroy life in the Universe, just because it's so messy)
almost kill the Hogfather (the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus) and try to cause most
of the children on Discworld to stop believing in him (the Auditors have raided the Tooth
Fairy's collection of teeth, you see, and are controlling the children through them).
Suddenly there's an excess of 'belief' in the world which causes other fairy tale
characters to be spontaneously created, just because someone believes in them. In short
order, the Eater of Socks appears in the Unseen University (it's the wizards' university)
laundry room (hey, you've lost at least one sock in the laundry, haven't you?), and the
Cheerful Fairy comes out of thin air to make every one feel happy. Along the way, Death
works out the Auditors' plan and tries to cover by driving the Hogfather's sleigh and
visiting all the children to deliver presents on Hogswatch Eve and trying to say "Ho
Ho Ho!" and being jolly. His servant Albert is along for the ride (and all the
glasses of sherry).
For me, Pratchett's discussion of the new sentient computer Hex, invented by one of the
wizards, provides some of the more hilarious bits of the book. At one time, Hex refused to
work until he was given a mouse and a supply of cheese. Whenever Hex is doing some
calculations, down comes this hourglass on a spring. Even the inventor doesn't quite
understand where the ram skulls fit in, but somehow they're needed. And so on. The best
bit: the computer works somehow by a myriad of ants moving around inside (plus some
magic). On the computer housing is the legend "Anthill Inside."
And whilst telling this wonderful tale, Pratchett discusses how we all need to believe
in something, even something irrational. It's part of what makes us human.
Recommended wholeheartedly.
Ian Stewart is a mathematician at the University of Warwick in England. Pretty
unremarkable, but he has a wonderful gift for writing about mathematics and for making the
subject easy to understand.
Every year the Royal Institution (a building in London that houses laboratories, a
science library, etc) hosts a series of children's lectures on some scientific subject at
Christmas time. The tradition was started by Michael Faraday in 1826, and has been
continued through the years. These days, it is broadcast by BBC TV during the holiday
season. The lectures attract the best scientists and popularizers to present them, past
years have included people like Richard Dawkins for example.
Anyway, the Christmas 1997 lectures were on mathematics (only the second time in its
history) and were presented by Ian Stewart (I'm sorry to say I missed them, even though I
was in England at the time). The book is based on those lectures.
Although aimed at children, Stewart does not patronize them, or us, with his writing.
He explains mathematical concepts clearly and with a distinctive voice. He outlines proofs
without being totally rigorous. The book is arranged as if it were a maze - the maze being
mathematics - and each chapter illustrates just part of the maze. Through this idiom, he
shows how some disparate parts of mathematics are linked, how the ebb and flow of
mathematical ideas are generated and nourished from other sources, how sometimes you get
to a dead end. I have a degree in mathematics, but even I was fascinated by things I
didn't know.
He starts off the book by some number theory and basic algebra. Except you don't really
realize it's algebra (instead of x he uses a pictorial heap that looks
like nothing more than some doggy doo doo) because he's illustrating some Carrollian
nonsense from The Snark. And the number theory is the good old Fibonacci series
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ..., where every term in the series is the sum of the previous two.
Chapter 2 (or in his idiom, Passage 2) covers graph theory and how to solve those
annoying puzzles like: a farmer with a panther, pig and bowl of porridge has to cross a
river in a small boat. The boat is so small he can only carry one other thing along with
him to the other side. Given that if he leaves the panther with the pig, the latter will
get eaten, and if he leaves the pig with the porridge, he'll lose tomorrow's breakfast,
how does he do it? Along the way he introduces the Tower of Hanoi problem, and shows a
graph that has a peculiar triangular shape which will be met later.
Chapter 3 is for probability, including the desperately annoying Monty Hall problem
that intuition solves incorrectly. (A game show contestant is presented with three closed
doors. The host, Monty Hall, explains that behind one of the doors is a car, behind the
others nothing. He asks the contestant to choose a door. Before the door is opened, Monty
opens one of the two remaining doors to reveal nothing, and then asks the contestant
whether he wants to change his mind and choose the other door. Would the contestant be
better off choosing the third door or should he stay with his first choice?)
Chapter 4 is about patterns and symmetry. Chapter 5 about how animals move and whether
their gaits (walking, trotting, galloping and the like) can be expressed mathematically
(actually, this is Stewart's own research). Chapter 6 introduces Godel's undecidability
theorem and Turing machines and provability. Chapter 7 talks about networks again and soap
bubbles and shoe laces.
Chapter 8 jumps into fractals, including fractional dimensions and Sierpinski gaskets
(the triangular shape from chapter 2). He also delves into chaos theory and shows how
chaos comes from simple expressions. (It was in this chapter that I had the biggest Wow:
he shows how Pascal's triangle can be viewed as a Sierpinski gasket.)
All in all, a fascinating book with some novel insights and some feel-good factors
because you feel you've learned something. I enjoyed it immensely, and so I recommend it
unreservedly.
I'm a great fan of Larry Niven. When I was younger and starting to read
science fiction, his books and short stories were the ones I read and enjoyed the most:
fiction with hard science. Stuff you could almost believe in. At the time, I didn't worry
too much about character development, but it seems to me, from this vantage point of
several years later, that Niven could make his characters believable and enable us to care
for them. I'm not just talking of his familiar Known Space series either, consider The Integral
Trees for a well written hard science fiction book with great characters.
And now I've just completed reading Destiny's Road. It seems to be all character
development and hardly any science. Worse, it seems to take the modern trend of being
bulky just for the sake of being bulky. He seems to have got the Arthur C. Clarke disease:
as an example of what I mean consider the original Rendezvous
with Rama (all taut exposition and story, short by modern blockbuster standards)
versus the last in the series, Rama
Revealed (rambling, in dire need of a diet).
The plot is a rite of passage type story. Jemmy Bloocher has grown up in a bizarre town
called Spiral Town which is on the recently colonized planet Destiny. 'Spiral' because
about 200 years ago, one of the colonists' ships had departed (the other having broken
down) and had left by playing its rocket exhaust across the ground in a spiral, causing
the rocks to melt and form a road. The rocketship and hence the road then went off into
the distance, lands unknown to the Spiral Town inhabitants. Jemmy, due to an error on his
part, kills a 'yutz', a worker on a periodic trader caravan. He then flees down the Road,
the first person to leave Spiral Town in 200 years (why no one else?).
On his journey along the Road he finds various settlements, joins a caravan himself as
a yutz, has several adventures. He also finds out the meaning behind 'speckles,' a seed
that humans have to eat regularly and that the traders sell to everyone on their path.
The trouble is Niven takes far too long to describe all this. He's great at describing
the flora and fauna of Destiny (plants that have fractal leaves - great invention). But
the problem was I got bored; everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Jemmy moves back
and forth along the Road, sometimes in plain view, sometimes hiding from one or other
groups of people. There was also a completely bizarre jump in the narrative at the end
from Jemmy in his early twenties to 47. It also didn't help that I'd worked out the secret
of 'speckles' long before the end, and how to break the reliance of Spiral Town on the
traders.
Overall, I suppose I'd say it's worth a three out of five. But, like the last Ringworld
novel (The
Ringworld Throne), I got the feeling that Niven was padding the book to give it a
satisfying heft, rather than giving us a satisfying read. It could certainly have been a
smaller, tighter novel. I'm afraid that Niven has slipped in my SF author pantheon to be
replaced by the likes of Iain M Banks (who does write damn good hard science
fiction with heft - read Excession,
now).
So what did happen at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947? A crashed UFO, spilling out
extra-terrestrials both alive and dead, or a rather more mundane weather balloon? With the
coverage over the past couple of years, in both print media and TV (not forgetting 1997's
50 year anniversary jamboree in the town itself), you'd be justified in wondering whether
the US government was covering up details of alien autopsies, metallurgical miracles,
missing people.
Or maybe you wouldn't.
I'm one of those skeptics who just don't have the paranoia required to believe the
pro-UFO lobby when they say that the US government has covered up (over the last 50 years?)
details of contact with ET races and machines. I'm a proponent of Ockham's razor: the
simplest explanation is usually the right one. Philip J. Klass is a skeptic too, and
brilliantly, if a little pedantically, shows the laughable evidence put forward for a UFO
crash at Roswell.
He starts out by reviewing the irrefutable evidence, mainly in the form of the
newspaper stories of the period, and the interviews done at the time with Major Marcel,
rancher Mac Brazel (who found the weird debris) and so on. He points out the recent
history: pilot Kenneth Arnold had only just sighted his famous kite like objects on June
24, 1947 causing the initial UFO fever-pitch excitement across the country. So when Lt.
Haut of the Roswell Army Air Force base drove round to the Roswell Daily Record on July 8
with a press release detailing a 'flying object,' a 'disk,' had been recovered from a
nearby ranch, they held the front page and rewrote it with the headline "RAAF
Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region." Over the next couple of days, the
truth came out: the crashed saucer was really debris from a weather balloon made of rubber
and tin foil, discovered by a rancher called Brazel on his ranch over three weeks
previously. Photos were taken of Major Marcel, the intelligence officer at the RAAF base,
holding up this debris; and I must say he looks kind of sheepish to me.
After that, nothing. Klass points out that this version of events was accepted as the
truth for over thirty years. The UFO craze grew and grew, but Roswell was never included
in any list of important UFO sightings throughout the sixties and seventies, until 1978
when pro-UFO researcher Stanton T. Friedman interviewed ex-Major Marcel, since retired and
proprietor of a TV repair shop. From this point comes a veritable farrago of tall tales,
gullible researchers, forgeries of evidence, suspension of disbelief, all admirably laid
out by Klass. 'Witnesses" came forward who'd seen extra terrestrials: one saw three,
one alive; another three, all dead; another five, all dead; another four, all dead; yet
another just one and dead. One even saw an ET walk into an RAAF building. 'Autopsies' were
done, a nurse who was present went missing afterwards, or did she even exist? The Roswell
crash site 'moved around,' some witnesses said it was here, some there, others elsewhere.
Some researchers believed one set of 'facts,' others others. They all made a mint writing
and selling books on the subject, whereas witnesses appeared on national TV propounding
their own version of events.
If it wasn't believed by so many people, it would be funny. It is funny, in a
funny-peculiar way rather than funny-ha-ha, that so many people will latch onto the
flimsiest of evidence just because it bolsters their world view. Klass, over and over
again, in this book demolishes witnesses accounts, points out the holes in the so-called
incontrovertible evidence, exposes the UFO researchers for what they are, gullible. After
chapter after chapter of this debunking, I started to get a little depressed: why are
people so easily deceived like this? Do they suspend their disbelief because they want
some excitement in their lives? The Universe isn't exciting enough as it is? I certainly
believe that there are other civilizations out there in the Universe; I don't believe that
there is any real evidence that any have visited us in the near or distant past.
Klass does tend to repeat himself in this book, though, which does tend to detract from
the research. A couple of times I had a sense of d�j� vu reading a particular
section, assuming that one of the cats had knocked the book on the floor and I'd resumed
reading something I'd already gone over. But no, Klass was repeating something.
All in all, I think this book is worth reading. Klass is non-sensationalist (until the
last sentence, anyway) and even-handed. It's even persuaded me to read one or two of the
pro-UFO-at-Roswell books just so I can get a feel for the other camp. I doubt that this
experiment will change my mind though - no, I don't believe Von Daniken's or Charles
Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle theories either, and the books debunking them were better
written and researched.
And the real cover-up? Read the book and see.
