The March issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now available. Enjoy!

I apologize for the slow rate of posting recently; I’ve been battling a nasty cold and haven’t felt much like writing (or much like reading, truth to tell). But I hope to be getting back in harness over the next few days.

This is the third of Barnes’ Jak Jinnaka series; I like it considerably better than
its immediate predecessor, A Princess of the Aerie, though not
as much as the first book, The Prince of Uranium.

In this episode, Jak Jinnaka is serving his time in his first post as
Vice Provost of Hive’s base on Deimos. Ostensibly he’s a civil servant;
really, he’s an agent of Hive Intelligence. His boss, the Provost, is a
wise and canny fellow who unaccountably likes living on Deimos, has two
ways of dealing with his VPs: either they are incompetent, in which case
he sacks them for the good of Deimos, or he arranges for them to look so
good they get promoted elsewhere. As the book begins, said boss is about
to take a trip to Earth, living Jak in charge. There’s bound to be a
crisis of one kind or another while he’s gone, so he tells Jak; if Jak
can rise to it, it will make his career.

A crisis does arise, of course, and a variety of funny, distressing, and
action-packed scenes follow, and as I say I enjoyed the ride.
Nevertheless, the series leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It
appears to be Jak’s fate to be double-crossed by everyone he trusts, and
in particular by his employers, and to be swept hither and yon by powers
too subtle for him to perceive until it’s too late. It’s as though
Barnes has a kind of anti-Heinlein thing going. Instead of a main
character who’s too amazingly competent for belief, we’ve got a guy whose
own desires are almost literally beside the point.

I enjoyed it enough to read the next one, if there is a next one, but it’s
still a little too cynical for my taste.

This one’s much better than the last Barnard I read,
Death of an Old Goat, better in every way.
The plot is better, the characters are better, the
mystery is better, and it doesn’t drip with scorn.
It’s true, the most obnoxious character in the book
is Australian, but you get the sense that she’d
have been just as annoying no matter what her origin.

It involves a young but promising opera company in the
north of England. They are just beginning their second
season with a staging of Rigoletto–and Barnard
clearly knows and loves Rigoletto just as much
as he (apparently) dislikes Australia. There are lots of
nice twists and turns, and it ends up quite satisfactorily.

One of the interesting things about Barnard’s work is that he
doesn’t have a consistent tone. Sometimes he plays for laughs;
sometimes he’s more serious; and in this one, it almost seems
like he’s trying to play Ngaio Marsh. If so, he
doesn’t quite make it…but the results are pleasingly
Marsh-like nevertheless.

An aging Oxford professor of English is travelling across Australia,
giving “guest lectures” at all of the institutes of higher learning
(so called) in that country. It is the mid-1970s; he wrote the two lectures he is
giving in the 1920s, when he was a young don, and has been giving them
unchanged, word-for-word ever since. He is deadly dull.

And at one of his stops, a particularly back-water sort of University
even for Australia, he is murdered for no discernible reason.

If you’ve detected a note of disdain for Australia in this review, it’s
simply because I’m trying to maintain the tone of the book itself, a
so-called “satire” in which Australia is shown to be in every way
dirtier, shabbier, and coarser than the mother country, even down to its
academic politics (which, heaven knows, are pretty shabby no matter where
you go).

But if, on the one hand, you’ve got a book that repeats all of the usual
pommie slanders, then on the other the mystery is fairly lightweight.

The book is, I hasten to add, well-written–the characters are all
marvelously well-drawn and very much themselves. But one doesn’t like
them, or the constant English snobbery, and the mystery does little to
make up for it.

Oh, well.

This morning I got the weirdest piece of spam I’ve yet received–nothing much, just a little text telling me that there’s now a web page for THE OLD ONES.

I usually ignore spam, but for some reason I clicked on the link. It took me to a web page for a Czech band called “The Old Ones” whose first album, Al Azif, contains songs inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. The leader of the band calls himself “Black Pharoah”.

What a weird and wonderful world it is, to be sure.

The Old Man in the Hat has acquired another verse. Now I need to figure out what to say about Weathertop…if anything.

I’ve found promising new blog; apparently it’s going to focus on linguistics, with excursions into linguistics in science fiction.

Ten extra credit points if you know where the title of the blog (and this post!) come from without peeking.

Having finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings, it seemed reasonable to
keep moving along and re-read The Silmarillion. And I’m glad I did; but at
the same time I find I don’t have much to say about it. It’s history
rather than narrative, and except for a few points (notably the story of
Beren and Luthien) I don’t find it nearly as moving as the trilogy.
There’s pleasure in it; but it’s a different kind of pleasure.

So I took my PowerBook down to the Apple Store today, and discovered that there was Good News and Bad News.

The Good News is that all I needed to replace was the power adaptor–effectively, the power cord. This makes no sense to me at all, mind you. How can it be that the power adaptor can power the computer, but can’t charge the battery? I don’t get it. Nevertheless, it’s good news–they gave me a new power adaptor under the warranty (which has a couple of months left to run) and I got to take my laptop home.

The Bad News is that my laptop has a nasty dent on one back corner that I wasn’t aware of. It probably got there last Spring when I went to Australia; I slipped and fell in the airport and dropped the laptop case. But I looked the laptop over then and I don’t remember seeing it. If it didn’t happen back then, I’m at a loss–it clearly got a pretty good whack. It doesn’t seem to have affected the computer’s behavior at all, but I was informed today that it’s enough to void the warranty if I ever do have to send the whole thing for service. Ugh.