The March issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line.

Along with my diet, I’m supposed to walk for 30 minutes every day. It took me a couple of days to work out a nice route, but I’ve been keeping up with it pretty well. The two big obstacles have been the rain and boredom. I solved the rain problem at the end of President’s Day weekend, when it rained pretty much non-stop–I went out and got us a family membership at the local YMCA. On days when it rains I can go in and use a treadmill for half-an-hour instead. It’s not the same, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

So far as boredom goes, well, I’ve got my iPod. While walking, I prefer to listen to something with a bit of a narrative thread to it, so I started with my Monty Python albums, followed by Flanders & Swann (At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat). At that point I was in danger of running dry, and so I decided to check out Audible.com‘s collection of audiobooks. And just on the off-chance, I did a search, and wonder of wonders, what did they have but….

Well, you see, one of my favorite books is The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. And it so happens that ten or fifteen years ago John Cleese, of all people, recorded an absolutely wonderful two-cassette reading of the book. Our copy died of old age, and I’ve never found a replacement. I’ve checked Amazon occasionally, and they will indeed get you a used copy–for $100. That’s One Hundred Dollars. When last I checked, they had 1 copy for sale and two buyers waiting. So when I went to Audible.com, I naturally took a look. And in fact, they have it available for download for $10. That’s Ten Dollars. (You do the math.)

So this last Friday it rained, and I went to the gym and used the treadmill to Flanders & Swann, and that evening I downloaded The Screwtape Letters. And the next morning, my two boys decided to go on my walk with me. And on Sunday, my younger boy, James, wanted to come again. And he wanted to come walk with me today, too. And while we’ve been walking, we’ve talked about all manner of things: flood control dams, and wells, and the water table, and how we learn, and power generation, and wind mills, and hydro-electric turbines, and salmon, and golden retrievers.

Meanwhile, ol’ Uncle Screwtape is languishing on the iPod, unlistened to. But I’ll tell you, I’m not bored. If necessary, Uncle Screwtape can languish until the next rainy day.

I suppose I should give an update on my awful diet.

Oddly, Jane’s having a harder time with it than I am. I’m over the head and body aches of the first week, and I’m feeling rather good; I’m just bored with the food I have to eat. Jane, on the other hand, is sick to death of providing it, for which I do not blame her. When my next appointment with my doctor rolls around, Jane says she’s going to do her best to get the doctor to expand the list of acceptable foods a bit, just to make life easier on the cook.

For my part, I don’t want to get involved. I find I do better if I simply eat what’s put in front of me, and try not to think about it too much. Fortunately, I’m not a gourmet; not thinking about it is easier than I would have guessed.

I guess there is one milestone I should note: today I went to a real restaurant for the first time since I started my diet just over two weeks ago; it was a goodbye-lunch for one of my co-workers. We went to a local Persian barbecue place where I had something called “chicken barg”–a chicken breast pounded into a long, flat

ribbon and barbecued on a skewer. Now, frankly, seasoned chicken breast is seasoned chicken breast; I’ve been eating a lot of it recently, and it’s getting a bit tiresome. But this was still pretty good–and it means that Jane and I can actually get a baby-sitter and go out to eat somewhere. Woo-hoo!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve reviewed a Dalziel/Pascoe novel;
mostly because I acquired its predecessor,
Dialogues of the Dead, while I was in
Australia a couple of years ago, and apparently the Commonwealth
countries get them before we do. Consequently, it’s been a long dry spell.

No matter. Death’s Jest Book is worth the wait. Not only is it
a fine murder mystery in its own right, easily as good as the earlier
books in the series, but it also picks up a number of threads that
Dialogues left dangling and ties them neatly into bows.
The enigmatic Franny Roote–is he an innocent man, or a charming
sociopath? And will the true perpetrator of the Wordman murders ever be
discovered? I hesitate to say any more for fear of giving something
important away.

It’s an odd and unusual book, even for Hill, and I read it with great
enjoyment. For obvious reasons, though, it’s not the one to start with.

The boys loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and so I
immediately went looking for the sequel, which I dimly remembered from my
childhood. On the whole I’m rather sorry I did, because it’s a lesser
book altogether. The book contains two mostly disconnected stories of
only moderate interest, a few verbal gems, and vast dollops of cynicism
with regard to the office of the President of the United States. It’s not
that I regard the President to be beyond criticism; it’s just that I don’t
really think cynicism about our society and its institutions is proper in
a book I’m reading to an eight-year-old and his little brother. My fault;
I should have re-read it myself before starting it with David and James.

That said, the Vermicious Knids are pretty cool, and I rather like the
Nurse’s song about how her charge became President:

And now that I am eighty-nine,
It’s too late to repent.
The fault was mine the little swine
Became the President.

This is an interesting book–a little slow to get started, but an
interesting book, and a remarkable achievement. Ringo has created a
fantasy realm with all of the usual trappings–warriors, great heroes,
elves, dragons, orcs, demons, wizards, and so forth–and he’s set it in
the far future and given it a science-fictional explanation. That’s
right, it’s really a science-fictional world (O the wonders of
nanotechnology) in which all of the trappings of traditional heroic
fantasy make sense!

It’s that last bit that makes the premise so remarkable. It requires extremely
high-tech, the kind that’s indistinguishable from magic, to breed elves
who live forever, orcs who will fight whenever, and dragons that can fly
whereever, and yet given the pre-industrial setting that tech can’t be
available to the general public. If it were, everyone in the book would
be a wizard.

And so, in fact, they were. Earth was a veritable utopia. Every citizen
could spend his time doing
anything that interested him, with every need met by the nanites of the
‘Net. Even food production was no issue–Mother, the vast AI that
maintained and protectedthe ‘Net, had records of every kind of dish one
could wish for, and the nanites could assemble it from atoms in moments.
Indeed, one could have one’s body sculpted into almost any form

And then came a division in the Council, the small group of individuals
who oversaw Mother and the rest of the ‘Net. The division turned deadly,
and soon the two factions were fighting in earnest to wrest full control
of the ‘Net from each other. As all power reserves were drawn upon to
this end, power became unavailable to the rest of the population–and all
that nice, juicy high-tech magic became unavailable. Civilization crashed
over night. Only a very few people retained any kind of use of the ‘Net.
The remainder were forced to learn to grub for food and build shelters
out of natural wood, and all manner of archaic unnatural acts.

Unnatural, that is, except for a handled of “reenactors”, descendants of
our present day Society for Creative Anachronism, who knew how to farm,
and to forge iron and steel, and raise animals, and mine for ore, all
because, in their long lives, that’s what they had become interested in.
And around the settlements of such folk, civilization slowly began to
grow again.

As I say, it’s an interesting book, with a number of memorable
characters; and though there are some parts I disliked, I plan to
keep an eye out for the sequel.

Ian (whose blog is not the only one I read, though for some reason it’s one of the few I regularly link to) today posted an excerpt from L. Sprague de Camp’s beautiful essay “On Thud and Blunder”, which de Camp has made available on-line at the SFWA website. I’ve got a copy of it in an old de Camp anthology, but I hadn’t read it in years.

The essay is a call for authors of heroic fantasy, aka “swords and sorcery”, to spend more time getting the details right, with lots of examples of things authors and would-be authors get wrong. For example: nobody rides stallions; it’s dangerous and unnecessary. You can’t ride a horse at a gallup all day long; you must alternate gaits, and probably you’ll need to bring some remounts with you, and there are lots of other things you’d better do or your beast is likely to drop dead. It’s extremely dark in a city at night when there are no electric lights, much darker than in an open field, and there are just as many interesting things to step in. Swords will not, in general, cut through either mail or plate armor no matter how much you’d like them to. Like that. It’s a fun article, and it makes me want to go out and read some more period history so’s I can set fiction in it.

Better than that, it’s just one entry on the SFWA’s Writing page. There are quite a few other essays there; many concern practical matters like how to find an agent, how to submit a manuscript, and so forth, but many concern the craft of writing fiction itself. If you have any desire to write fiction, I suggest you hie yourself over there immediately, as it may save you trouble in the long run.

Update: Speaking of blunders, I attributed the essay to L. Sprague de Camp when in fact it’s by Poul Anderson–no small mistake. The odd thing is that I distinctly remember reading this essay in an anthology of de Camp stories I’ve got. I don’t have time to check it now, but of course it won’t be there. Which leaves the question, where did I read it? I don’t believe I have any corresponding Anderson anthology that it could be lurking in. Might it have been in one of the Flashing Swords anthologies? (Chuck, do you remember where the heck we read this? I remember you pointing it out to me….)

Update: My brother Charles assures me that I did read “On Thud and Blunder” in one of the Flashing Swords anthologies, except that the series wasn’t entitled Flashing Swords, but rather Swords Against Darkness. In fact, it was in Swords Against Darkness #3, published in 1973, which he still has.

Do you ever have the feeling that sometime in the last decade you’ve stepped into an alternate time stream? I was sure the series was entitled Flashing Swords, and I’d have been willing to bet money that Swords Against Darkness was one of Fritz Leiber’s Fahrd and Gray Mouser novels. I’m mistaken, of course, convicted in the court of Google and Amazon. Ah, well.

Some reasonably disjointed observations:

Well, I’ve now completed the first week of my diet. So far I haven’t cheated on the diet, or been seriously tempted to, for which I thank the Good Lord. And also Jane, who’s been making sure that I’m well fed even if on unusual things. And although we’re still experimenting with new dishes there’s been nothing else as bad as the Greenish-Brown Cylinders of Doom.

I’ve even been getting my 30 minutes of walking in every day, until today. Today it’s raining, and we haven’t worked out a solution for that yet. Either we’re going to get a treadmill or a membership at the local YMCA, and most likely it will be the latter. That gives me an opportunity to use a treadmill on rainy days without giving it house room. Today, though, I have neither treadmill nor membership, and it’s pouring, and there are frustrated drivers out there. I’m staying in here.

How I feel is actually kind of ironic. All week, I’ve felt like I had the flu. All the women at work have told me that it’s normal to feel lousy during the first week of a diet, especially a no-carbs diet, because your body’s craving that sugar. Today, though, I feel a lot better…except for that nasty cough that started to develop yesterday afternoon. I’m willing to attribute body aches and head aches to the diet, but the cough, I think, has to be due to a cold. Lovely.

Everything always happens at once. As it happens, today, tomorrow, and Tuesday are days when I simply have to be at work–my project’s making a delivery, and if I’m not there to make sure that the correct hoops are jumped through by the correct seals (myself chief among them) there will be no end of grief. Fortunately I can more or less collapse this weekend.

Uneasy Money came as quite a pleasant surprise. It’s a
transitional work, published in 1916, before he’d fully constructed his
world of farce and foolishness, and hence has a more realistic tone than
the Jeeves or Blandings tales–indeed, except for a few short moments it
isn’t really a farce at all. On the other hand, the overly realistic
atmosphere that mars the earlier A Gentleman
of Leisure is completely missing.

In consequence, Uneasy Money falls into a category all of its
own: it’s a delightful romantic comedy written in Wodehouse’ remarkable
style. Because of the extra bit of realism, it matters that our hero
marries the right girl, who is indeed a real peach, sweet, pretty, and
capable of taking care of herself in every way that matters.

Our hero, William Lord Dawlish (Bill to everyone), is especially
remarkable. Like many a Wodehouse leading man, he isn’t the sharpest tack
in the carpet; but he’s solid. He has integrity–if it’s not playing the
game he simply won’t do it. He’d love more than anything else to settle
down and farm or something of the kind, but as impoverished peer he’s got
no money to invest, as a peer of any kind employers won’t take him
seriously, and he won’t suck up to the kind of bounders who might advance
his career for their own sakes.

It’s a common scene: one of a pair of lovers is found in a seemingly
compromising but actually innocent situation, and the other refuses even
to listen, instead rushing off in a snit. (Don’t you hate that?)
Bill’s the kind of guy who would listen–and assume his girl was
telling him the truth, purely as a matter of course.

Anyway, I enjoyed this one thoroughly, which in this case means “more than
usual for Wodehouse”. Don’t miss it.

Ramble 0.4 is now available for download at the
Ramble Home Page. It
has a number of major enhancements over Ramble 0.3.

Update: 7:29 PM: If you’ve already downloaded Ramble 0.4, you should do so again;
the original version had a trivial error that breaks detection potions.

The more notable changes are as follows:

Continue reading →