The Northworld Trilogy is a really weird retelling of ancient
Norse myth, mostly drawn from the Elder Eddas. Though I’m not familiar
with the Elder Eddas myself–it sounds like something from the pages of
H.P. Lovecraft–I’m savvy enough to recognize the most
obvious elements (Chief God with one eye, Valhalla, Valkyries, and so on
and so forth). And indeed, I spotted the Valkyries and a few other
things. But I didn’t really catch on that it was a
retelling of Norse myth until I read the afterword at the end of the first
of the three tales.

The trick is, the trilogy bills itself as science fiction rather than
fantasy. The framing story is straightforward: Northworld is a potential
colony world. A number of expeditions have been sent to explore it and
tame it; all have disappeared. The last expedition reported that the
planet itself had disappeared; and then that expedition disappeared. So
the Powers That Be tapped one Nils Hansen, top cop and extremely
successful troubleshooter, to go to where Northworld is supposed to be
and found out what happened to it. The trilogy is ostensibly about his
mission.

Except that it isn’t, of course; it’s about the various myths that
Drake’s trying to retell, and that’s the problem. He’s bent over
backward to cloak the world of Norse myth with science-fictional
garments, and while the result is interesting, it’s predictably contorted.

It’s an ambitious and valiant effort, but Drake doesn’t quite bring it
off.

The battle suits are cool, though. And I’d sure like to have Nils Hansen
at my back during a fight.

This is another book I picked up in Australia, and it’s rather different
than anything else of his I’ve read. To begin with, it’s not a
Dalziel/Pascoe mystery; it’s not even a police procedural. Instead, it
concerns a machinist-turned-private-eye named Joe Sixsmith. He’s black,
and he’s lives in the mean streets of Luton, which I gather might be a
redundant statement. At least, Hill doesn’t go out of his way to tell us
that Sixsmith is black, which caused a number of events in the book to be
rather perplexing until I finally clued in.

This is not the first Joe Sixsmith novel, but it’s the only one I found
while I was there. Joe’s Aunt Mirabelle is a staunch member
of the Boyling Corner Chapel, and a cornerstone of the chapel’s choir.
Joe, I gather, isn’t much of a member of the chapel, but thanks to his
singing voice and the wishes of his redoubtable aunt is also a member of
the choir, which is on its way to a choral festival in Wales. They’re
big on this sort of thing in Wales, so I’m given to understand. And
naturally once they get to Llanffugiol there are alarums and excursions
and Joe is called upon to help the locals–several different groups of
locals–with their investigations.

I haven’t made up my mind about this book yet. It didn’t hold my
attention nearly was well as Hill’s other books have, but I was suffering
from jet lag at the time, so it might not be Hill’s fault. And then,
Luton, not Llanfugiol, is really Joe’s place. It’s hard to judge him
without seeing him in his native surroundings.

I liked Joe
Sixsmith and his aunt, though we didn’t see much of her; I liked his
girlfriend, but we didn’t see much of her either; I didn’t like his best
friend particularly, and this book didn’t give me much reason to. I
might feel differently if I’d read the earlier books first, of course.
The book clearly suffers from being in the middle of a series; Hill
slacked off on the character development of the continuing characters.

So the book gets an extremely qualified thumbs up, in that I’d gladly
read more of the series. But that’s the most I can say.

I first heard of Nevil Shute when I was in elementary school
and tried (and failed) to read On The Beach under the mistaken
impression that it was a science fiction novel. Whatever else it was, it
was completely over my head.

I first heard of A Town Like Alice when they made a
mini-series out of it on national TV, many, many years ago (the
mid-1970’s, maybe)? I didn’t watch it, though my parents did, and I saw
snippets. I knew it took place in Australia, and somehow I got the idea
that it was about a convict, a woman who had been transported to
Australia and was having to work as a housemaid. Possibly I’m conflating
two different TV spectaculars, but that’s how it stuck in my memory.

I didn’t put the two names together, or contemplate reading
A Town Like Alice, until
Ian Hamet wrote me a note and suggested
that as I was going to Australia I should give Nevil Shute a try. I’m a
history buff, I thought to myself, and A Town Like Alice is a
historical novel; and I’m going to Australia, and
A Town Like Alice is about Australia; and most likely I’ll
find a copy of it there.

And in fact, though I looked for it in several of the bookstores I
visited, I didn’t see anything by Shute at all while I was in Australia.
Go figure. But I found a copy shortly after I got back to the States,
and opened it, and finally stayed up late to finish it, which was a
really bad idea given my jet lag, but was satisfying none the less. And
this, even though everything I knew about the book was wrong.

It’s the story of an English woman named Jean Paget, and the action
begins during the second world war. Jean’s family has business
interests in Malaya, and after going to school in England she’s working
as a secretary in the company office there when the Japanese invade.
She’s captured and marched off to a POW camp with a
large group of other women and children–except that there is no camp to
receive them. Eventually, after many hardships and forced marches over a
good bit of Malaya, the surviving women, led by Jean, manage to settle
down in a village and wait out the war. During their marches, they
encounter an Australian POW named Joe Harman who’s being made to drive a
truck for the Japanese, and who helps the women out at the risk of his
own life.

Years later, when the war is over, Jean receives a legacy from a distant
relative, and becomes reasonably wealthy. She visits Malaya to say thank
you to the villagers who took her in–and while there discovers that Joe
Harman, a man she’d thought had been killed by the Japanese, is in fact
still alive, and everything changes for her.

It says something about the book that the plot I’ve summarized so far is
only part of the story; the best is yet to come, and I won’t spoil it for
you.

I’ve been trying to think what else to say about this book, other than
“Go find a copy and read it.” It’s a little slow getting started (though
not in a bad way), as the
story is narrated by the solicitor who is the executor of Jean Paget’s
legacy and it takes him a while to locate her and longer still for her to
begin to tell him her story. But once we’ve passed that, things take
off. I’m still pondering why Shute felt that the solicitor was necessary
to the story; he mostly serves to distance us from Jean Paget and Joe
Harman. Perhaps Shute simply felt that the horrors of war were still too
close to most people (the book was published in 1950), and that some
distance was needed. I dunno.

But the book works, and where it especially works is not the broad sweep
of the story but the little details along the way, especially the details
of frontier life in mid-20th-century Australia. (Rather like the Wild
West–and yet, very different.) I was especially
taken with the explanation of why Joe Harman didn’t die at the hands of
the Japanese–and it’s a great frustation to me, because if I tell you,
I’ll spoil it.

So.

Go find a copy and read it, or you’ll never know what poddy dodging is
all about.

This is the third volume in the trilogy that began with
Rhapsody and continued with
Prophecy, and it has a suitable
title. The events of the book are more-or-less destined to occur, and
they play out more-or-less as they are supposed to. The romance that
buds in the first book and blossoms in the second comes to fruition
after a suitable number of obstacles are overcome (most of them,
it’s only fair to say, are really rather novel); sundered kindreds
are united, old feuds are put aside, and Rhapsody and her beau usher in a
new era of gladness. Whew, I was worried for a moment that she might not
make it.

All in all…pretty good for a new author, though not perfect. If you
like epic fantasy, and you enjoy a little romance with it, you’ll
probably enjoy these. My major complaint is with Haydon’s handling of
history. More than anything else, this trilogy is about
about healing the wounds of past conflicts. The history of her world,
both recent and ancient, are key. And the problem is that real history
is complicated. It doesn’t flow naturally in ways that
support the story you want to tell. When history is presented too
simply, it looks comic book, as though it’s painted in all primary
colors, and I have trouble taking it seriously.

Maybe that’s just me, though; we aren’t all history buffs.

I must be missing something. This guy’s books have a huge cult following
and I DON’T get it. This one was just plain bad. It’s dated, the premise
is stupid and the characters bored me to tears. I finished it, but only
because it wasn’t too long and I was too lazy to get up and get something
else to read. A co-worker of mine loves Dick and tells me he’s right out
of the 60’s drug culture which may explain it. My co-worker, from what I
can tell, is still halfway back in the 60’s drug culture which somehow is
interesting face to face but doesn’t really work very well on paper.

The story is that Mars has been colonized by Men. All of Earth’s
political and national divisions have been brought along to Mars. They
are using the canals dug by the, get this, indigenous Martians to
transport the precious little water they have up there. Everyone is
paranoid about mutations that have shown up due to the gamma ray exposure
during the long trip to Mars and autism and schizophrenia are seen as
manifestations of a mutation rather than as a neurological condition. The
native Martians are called Bleekmen and are sort of like the Australian
Aborigines in appearance except really small and kind of dried up. They
have a kind of mystical shamanist culture as well. And they are able to
communicate on some other mental plain that’s not really explained except
that that is where the autistic children and the schizophrenic’s minds are
really at.

That is the setting. I won’t go into the plot except to say that the 50’s
bored housewife messing around with the milkman comes into it, tediously,
and that it tries to imitate the social climate of the post war years,
badly.

Skip this one. Hated it. Hated it. Read something a little more developed
or thought out.