Observe The Banana

I have just finished reading The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak
Peter Maxwell, Professor of Supernatural Studies at Time University, takes a transport beam to another planet to try to investigate reports of a dragon, but he never arrives where he was going. Instead he is diverted to a strange crystal planet by some alien intelligence. When he finally returns home he is rather surprised to learn that a copy of himself did make it to his original destination and returned home to earth a month earlier, and was then killed in an accident under suspicious circumstances. His finds his belongings have been disposed of, his apartment rented to a new tenant and his position at the university filled by a new employee. He has little time to deal with these personal problems though as a mystery involving his trip and a strange prehistoric artifact being kept by the department of Time quickly develops. Accompanied by the woman now living in his apartment, her pet biomech saber tooth tiger, his Neanderthal friend Oop and their friend Ghost he sets out to unravel the mystery. Throw in William Shakespeare, aliens with wheels, a few goblins and trolls, and a time traveling painter, and the adventure takes off.
This a was a fast easy read, but still had an interesting story line worthy of some thought, and some fun characters and pretenses. Since this book lacks the ever present steamy sex scenes in all the John Varley books I have been reading lately, I was able to let my 10 year old son read and enjoy this book also, instead of just sharing the highlights as I have been with Varley. I decided to read this after after reading a good review on Dustyloft and I will keep my eyes open for more Simak books, although every time I say his name I think of some tall silver robed Star Trek alien. “I am am Simak! You have entered our space and we will now take your ship!”

I have just finish reading The John Varley Reader by John Varley. This one took me a while to get through, through not fault of the book though. I have just been busy, and it contains so much. Having only recently discovered author John Varley, (through his excellent Red Thunder trilogy) this collection of short stories exposed me to a much greater cross section of his works. It also introduced me to his Eight Worlds theme which is carried in many of his books. In some unspecified time in the future, aliens invade the earth and the human race is forced to leave the planet and move to colonies on other worlds in the solar system. The stories in this book vary greatly in their theme, tone and length. I of course enjoyed some more than others, but overall it was journey (and that’s what it felt like) worth taking. It also offers an interesting insight into John Varley the man, as each story is preceded by a personal introduction where he shares some background about how the story came to be, or about what was happening in his life when he wrote it. It is interesting to connect his young adulthood in the 60’s alternative lifestyle scene in California as an influence on his vision of the future. Like Heinlein he envisions (or perhaps hopes for) a future where people have overcome many of the social taboos about nudity, love and sex. If you want to learn more about John Varley and be exposed to a nice cross section of his work, this book is worth a read.

I have just finished reading The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. This is the third book in his robot trilogy and is again a great combination of the science fiction and mystery genres. The main character, Elijah Baley, whom we got to know in the first two books is off into space again to solve another murder mystery, this time to the planet Aurora. Aurora lies somewhere between Earth and Solaris on the sociological spectrum. It combines the lower population density and ample use of robots of Solaris, with the social interactions and personal relationships of earth. The victim is a robot, which makes the crime not technically a murder, but the circumstances are entwined with global and galactic politics. Baley is summoned to duty and given no choice but to accept, and the future of not only his career but of earth itself rests on his success. Baley gets to team up with his old partner R. Daneel Olivaw, and must use every bit of his cleverness to unwrap the mystery. Similar to the last book, The Naked Sun, he is presented with only one suspect who could have committed the crime, and the assertion that that suspect could not have committed the crime. He has been conditioning himself to face the Outside and is not as crippled by his agoraphobia, but faces a new personal challenge when faced with his first experience with being outside during a thunderstorm.
When I started this series I commented on the apparent differences between Asimov and Heinlein’s writing style, but I found this book to actually be much more similar to Heinlein’s style than either of the other two books in the series had been. The Robots of Dawn was actually written 30 some years after The Naked Sun and it is apparent that Asimov’s style changed over that time. The text is full of long intricate conversations between sharp individuals engaging in a kind verbal fencing to outmaneuver each other, which is a style I had previously associated more with Heinlein. While the intriguing mystery held my attention, the long-winded dialog did get a little tiresome at points. Overall, I am very glad I finally got around to reading this classic trilogy and get to know Elijah Baley and the esteemed R. Daneel Olivaw.

I have just finished reading The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov.
Elijah Baley is off on another murder investigation involving robots. This time he has to leave earth and head to the planet Solaris, where through generations of isolation and social conditioning human nature has been turned on its head (compared to earth). Where, on earth modern people live in dense population centers in close quarters to other people and never ever venture outside, most having never seen the sun or open sky, on Solaris, the population size is strictly regulated and people live on huge individual estates in isolation from others. Through use of 3D tele-viewing systems people never have to actually be in the physical presence of another and have grown to be terrified of actually seeing each other in person. Also, unlike the earth population which has shunned the use of robots in jobs involving humans, the Solarians each employ dozens of personal servant robots to meet their every need. Elijah is forced to reconcile these great differences as he struggles with his own debilitating discomfort of being outdoors, and the Solarians’ great anxiety of seeing him in person. This book is a both a murder mystery and sociological study of human nature (and nurture). I noticed that the Elijah Baley character seems to have matured some from the first book, Caves of Steel, and frequently seems to be more in charge of his behavior. After finishing this, I am jumping right in to the third book of the trilogy, Robots of Dawn.

I have just finished reading Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. I decided to read this book after a friendly commenter suggested the addition of R. Daneel Olivaw to my list of favorite robots. As with most of Asimov’s works  this is a well written fiction that takes place in earth’s future. It is a murder mystery as well as science fiction. The main character, Elijah Baley, is a plain-clothed detective in New York city assigned to solve the politically charged murder of a top robotics expert in “Space City”, where the only inhabitants are humans from other worlds, and robots. After earth colonized other planets, the inhabitants of those colonies decided to become separate and independent of earth and over time evolved into a very different society where populations are low, the use of robots is embraced and a lack of natural immunity to disease makes them fear earth people and their germs. While robots are used on earth for mining and farming, their use in the city around people is slow to be accepted with many people distrustful and angry about people losing their jobs to robots. With the earth’s population topping 8 billion, cities have become massive enclosed population centers with strict rationing and social ranking. Most people have never been outdoors and seen the natural sky, sunlight or non-airconditioned air and are naturally somewhat agoraphobic, a lifestyle eluded to in the title. The countryside between cities is occupied only by robots who work the farms and mines. Not an attractive future in my opinion. Like Asimov’s I Robot stories which came before, this book deals a lot with human robot interaction issues and Asimov’s three laws of robotoics.

I think I may have the tendency to mix up Asimov’s writing with that of Robert Heinlein in my head sometimes due to the similar time periods they wrote, and the similar reality based, future earth, science fiction style they used. Having read of a lot of Heinlein recently some of the differences stood out while reading this book. Even though Asimov is also known for writing science non-fiction works, I find his fiction contains less of the science lesson factoids so common with Heinlein. I also notice that Asimov’s characters are often more fallible and human, as opposed to Heinlein’s tendency to depict highly effective, rational and clever characters. Elijah Baley is frequently very emotional and makes some irrational decisions based on those emotions, but in the end puts the pieces together cleverly to solve the mystery. I would guess his emotional behavior serves to accentuate the contrast of his emotionless and logical partner, Robot Daneel Olivaw. One similarity to Heinlein is his believable descriptions of future advancements in engineering and technology. I particularly liked his transport system which involved rows of moving conveyor belts, each row moving slightly faster than the next. In the center is a continuously moving transport vehicle. People can easily step onto the outer slowest belt, then work their way inward accelerating more at each level until they are moving at 60mph, the same as the transport vehicles, and can step into the vehicle easily. For shorter distances they can just choose a middle speed belt and ride it to their destination. Reminds me of the moving belts used at Disneyland to allow people to step onto ride cars without the ride having to stop.

Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and by the time I have gotten around to writing this, I am already half way through The Naked Sun, the next book in the robot trilogy.

I have finished reading Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven.

It is the year 1108 AE (Atomic Era, starting in 1945 with the first atomic explosion). In this post industrial age almost all plant and animal life has been driven to extinction by the poisons of industry in the air and water, leaving only the humans who were able to adapt to the pollution, and the farmed yeast they live on.  Waldemar the Eleventh  is the new Secretary-General, the latest in the line of monarchy of leaders of the United Nations. Waldemar the Tenth liked extinct animals, Waldemar the Eleventh likes planets and the stars, and they say he is not a mental deficient (unlike Waldemar the Tenth who was 26, but whose inbred family had left him with the intelligence of a 6 year old). Hanille Svetz, an agent for the Institute of Temporal Research, no longer being sent into the past to find extinct animals, is now assigned to travel to Mars’ past, when canals were observed on the planets surface, and find Martian life. They find much more life than they expected, including a giant tree extending from the planet’s surface into space. As usual, the mission does not end up going the way it was planned. They end up in earth’s own past struggling to make it back to the present, and then to restore the time line they knew.

This book was a little hard for me to get in to at first, as the writing style is so drastically different than the Heinlein and Varley I have been reading recently. It seemed somewhat less smooth, and the temporal jumps and paradoxes left me struggling to follow it at times, but the overall premise was interesting enough to keep me going. They use ‘extension cages’ to travel in time. The cage itself is just the vehicle attached to the time machine which stays in the present time. The arm between the two “fades off in a direction the human eye can’t follow”.  Time travel is still somewhat difficult and very expensive and is reserved for satisfying the whims of the current leader. Post industrial humans have evolved to breath the polluted atmosphere, and now cannot breathe pre-industrial air as it does not have enough carbon dioxide in it to trigger their body’s autonomic breathing mechanism and they just forget to breathe. They use a filter hood over their head which passes the needed gases in the needed ratios for them to breath in the past, or in a martian atmosphere.

After the main story ends, this books includes several stand alone chapters covering the earlier exploits of Svetz, which were eluded to in the main story line. With tidbits of incomplete information from ancient children’s books, he goes to recover extinct animals from the past, often ending up with something which was not exactly what he went looking for. These actually helped fill in a lot details for me and in some ways I enjoyed them as much if not more than the rest of the book, or at least they increased my enjoyment of the main story. I am not sure, but I almost think these should have come first.
Even though I was not so sure in the beginning, by the end I ended up enjoying this book quite a bit, although I am not going to run out and find more books by Larry Niven to read. I think he might be best known for his Ringworld series.

I have just finished reading John Varley’s excellent trilogy and I would recommend it highly to science fictions readers looking for something new and intelligent to read, especially fans of Robert Heinlein whose style Varley seems to emulate well. Here is my take on Rolling Thunder, and you can read my comments on the others on my books page.

As I finished the third Varley book in the Red Thunder, Red Lightening, Rolling Thunder Trilogy I was wishing there was a fourth. His writing is intelligent and his characters are complex and interesting. This one picks up with the daughter, Podkayne, of Ray from Red Lightening, and the granddaughter of Manny from Red Thunder. It follows her adventures in the Martian Navy Music Corps as she get caught up in new dangers unfolding on Europa. The comparison to Robert Heinlein is just as valid in this book as the previous. Like some of Heinlein’s works this book has large sections with very little story developments and instead just shares the thoughts and feelings of the main character while educating the reader about planets, gravity and space travel trivia. At times all the factoids can come across as the author showing off his knowledge (or research more likely) but overall it works well and when the story does pick up it goes in a major way. Also like Heinlein, Varley can’t resist a few good jabs at organized religion, making fun of the rapurists who pop up every time there is a major disaster.  I also got a good chuckle out of Podkayne’s take on intelligent design while explaining why she doesn’t want to have kids with an imaginary conversation with her vagina:

ME: Babies are so cute!
MS V: Honey, you need to get a tape measure. Measure me, then measure a baby’s head. Then … you do the math
ME: Oh.
Not a pretty picture. In Homeland America there is an accepted church dogma called “intelligent design”. [...] And if you need another example, tell me why a human baby should be expected to emerge from an opening that can’t accommodate a lemon without discomfort. Design maybe, but not intelligent. If that was God’s intent, then God is a dunce.

This book didn’t wrap up nice and neat at the end, as the main character even admits many stories do, but is still satisfying in it’s conclusion. There is definitely lots and lots of open doors for a next book.

We are very avid users of our local library. We go to the library at least once a week, frequently twice or more. We get loads of children’s books for our son the super reader, and adult fiction and non fiction, and sometimes videos (although less now that we Netflix). We love the easy interlibrary loan system available to us and are always requesting things from other libraries in the system. We often have 20-30 items out at one time with 3 or 4 different due dates. With all this going on it would be impossible to keep track of when things were due without the help of the wonderful free service “Library Elf“. This service checks our library account online daily and sends us email notifying us of when books are due the following day, or when interlibrary requests have arrived. You can configure how early it alerts you, or how often it emails. They have almost every major library system available, or (as in our case) they will be happy to add your local library system if it is a Polaris PowerPac (v3.2 or later) or a Dynix library system. Check them out!

From www.libraryelf.com:

Track your library books

Let Elf help you manage your library loans and holds

Avoid overdues with email alerts Check multiple library cards Track books, DVDs, CDs, videos, etc. Join for free

Who uses Elf?

• Anyone who wants to reduce overdues

• Families with children and lots of books

• Individuals with several library cards

• Anyone who requests a lot of holds

What’s delivered?

• Email and/or RSS alerts before items are due

• Email and/or RSS alerts on overdues and holds

• Consolidated list of yours or your family’s library loans and holds

• Cellphone text message alerts for holds (US and Canada)

• Real-time checking by browser

I am somewhat new to the world of podcast fiction, but was looking for something to occupy my attention on long bike rides and came across the excellent Escape Pod Science Fiction podcast magazine at http://escapepod.org/ . Today I enjoyed listening to the rather humorous story “Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush” and I look forward to discovering more good treasures on their site. I also really like that each entry includes a rating like movies and video games so I know which ones I can share with B, who really enjoyed todays G rated story of the talking electric toothbrush.