Mountebank Blog

Today’s Patrick O’Brian quote is a description of Jack Aubrey–but I think it applies to me, too.

He derives a greater pleasure from a smaller stream of wit than any man I have ever known.

🙂

I’ve read all of the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels, from number one (Master and Commander) to number twenty (Blue at the Mizzen) at least five times. The series (it’s really one multi-volume work) is probably the best historical fiction I’ve ever read, and absolutely one of my favorite, most enjoyable reads of all time. I love the language, the stories, the characters, everything. Even though the series seemed to lose a bit of steam in the last couple of books, I was terribly sad when O’Brian died and we knew that there would be no more.

Although I love the Geoff Hunt covers on my paperback editions, they’re getting a bit tattered and worn, from the multiple readings. And for a full hardcover set, the price runs into the hundreds of dollars. So I was enormously excited early last month when I saw that John Berg at Sea Room was going to be selling a new “Omnibus Edition” handsomely hardbound in a boxed set of five volumes, and that the fifth volume includes the small part of 21–the book O’Brian was working on, the little bit that was on his desk, when he died. I ordered it immediately (John Berg’s price is fifty dollars less than anywhere else!), even though it wasn’t going to be officially released until November 4. Yesterday it arrived! And the volumes are handsome indeed, with ribbon bookmarks in the binding, and a good size for reading on the subway or in bed.

I’m ecstatically plunging back into the “music-room in the Governor’s House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon,” and to the “triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C major,” I’m preparing for an extended cruise aboard the HMS Surprise (and other vessels) in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic wars.

I’m a little late, but this week is the American Library Association‘s Banned Books Week. It’s a good time to buy and read a banned book or two! (what time isn’t a good time?) I’ve been wanting to re-read Fahrenheit 451 for a while, and I just discovered that my copy is missing. Probably loaned to a student somewhere, somewhen, and never returned. Which is the best way I know of to lose a book! So I get to buy a new copy. In fact, it might be time for me to indulge in a little Bradbury festival. It’s been a while, and I think I’m ready for a fond re-visiting. The ALA has a list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000, and it’s interesting to see that in that decade, at least, Fahrenheit didn’t make the list. Still a fun list to examine, though.

Locus Magazine Online has a great (but pessimistic!) piece this week–Global to Local: The Social Future as seen by six SF Writers. John Shirley asked Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton to comment on a whole bunch of issues–including war, the environment, information technology and control, and of course, the upcoming US election.

These guys are pretty perceptive, generally, but their visions are really a major downer. I’m not hearing much sense of wonder, not much wide-eyed gazing ahead at the progress and shining future we have in store.

Unfortunately, I think they’re pretty much correct! Especially on the election results. Here’s Ken Wharton:

It’ll be decided by a million Red Queens: swing-voters who are so overburdened with busy lives that they’re running just as fast as they can to stay in the same place. It’s a big decision, with big implications, so you’d hope that these people will take at least a few hours to find relevant information that isn’t spoon-fed from the campaigns. But with no time to weigh how hundreds of complex issues are going to affect their families, a big part of the final vote will come down to gut instinct. Instincts that may have served us well on the African savannah a hundred thousand years ago, but are now all-too-helpless in the face of well-financed Hari Seldons. And unlike Asimov’s legendary character, I’m not convinced that these guys have our best interests at heart.

I loved Neal Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon. I thought he had really fulfilled the promise of Snow Crash–which had some great ideas, some romping and rollicking storytelling, but way too much lecturing. Diamond Age and Zodiac were fun, but just didn’t quite satisfy deeply enough. But in Cryptonomicon, by abandoning (pretty much) SF, Stephenson gave me a massive novel, consistently interesting and engaging, with characters who seemed real, some laughs and thrills, but maybe not quite enough emotional investment.

So when I got to Quicksilver, I was expecting it to be an improvement on Cryptonomicon, and I was terribly excited to read it. Finally, though (and it took me around 800 pages to admit it), I was disappointed. There were long stretches which were (like Snow Crash) too lecture-y, and just plain dull. And the emotional component was, again, missing.

I delayed, for that reason, for a long time before finally plunging into The Confusion. Boy, did I make a mistake! The Confusion is terrific. It seems that Quicksilver was a necessary first step, because with that foundation, Stephenson managed to make The Confusion a total blast. This time he weaves in the lecturing info-dumps much more neatly, and the parallel stories work together perfectly, and I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner. It’s great fun, exciting, and there’s some true emotion, with some cutting irony, and you can begin to care about the characters, and there are some truly grimace-worthy anachronistic puns (“These Vagabond boots are longing to Stray”), and all in all I have to say that I’d gladly read it again, and I’m eagerly looking forward to volume 3, The System of the World, next week.

I read an excellent Mike Resnick story last night, “The Elephants on Neptune.” It won a well-deserved Nebula last year. Resnick is really amazing. He writes and publishes so much, and so much of it is good, and every story is so different. Just when I think I’ve got him pinned down, and think “OK, so this is what Mike Resnick is like,” he comes out with something else entirely. This story is dark, and funny, and beautifully written, and perfectly paced. The review at Best SF compares it to Golden Age SF. That’s high praise, and not inaccurate…but to me it really reads like Vonnegut. What a little gem!