This has got to be the single most interesting article on Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code that I’ve yet seen. There’s no there there, folks.

This is the third book in John Ringo’s “Council Wars” series; and though it has some good moments I’m afraid it was a disappointment overall. Plot-wise it carries on from the previous book in a rather obvious way, with few surprises or new ideas. Worse, Ringo has a taste for sex games and fantasies of a sort I really dislike, and after showing a certain amount of restraint in the previous book he lets himself go again here. I really don’t need to hear major characters lecturing on how to properly conduct dominant/submissive sex games, thank you very much. I suppose he’s entitled to his kinks, but I’d really prefer it if he refrained from sharing.

The fourth book is out in hardcover; I’ll take a look at it when it comes out in paperback, and we’ll see if it’s worth continuing with.

This is yet another of Lovesey’s Peter Diamond mysteries, and frankly it’s not up to par. The writing’s nice, and I enjoyed it well enough, but the Maguffin fails to convince.

The book begins with that hoary chestnut, a person waking up in the hospital with no memory of their past life. I can cope with that; if it’s hoary it’s also remarkably effective if properly used. In fact, I was with Lovesey right up to the moment where we find out why the individual has amnesia. I won’t go into details–it’s a good series, and if you like the others you might as well read this one as well–but the mechanism failed to satisfy. Diamond doesn’t seem entirely himself, either; I think he’s a bit restrained. But there are some good characters, and if the story isn’t up to snuff Lovesey’s story-telling almost makes up for it.

Ah, well, no one bats a thousand.

By rights, the next Nevil Shute I opened should have been An Old Captivity, as Ian‘s been practically with child to find out what I think of it. But I found Pastoral at the used bookstore last night, it’s been highly recommended, and anyway I started reading it in the bookstore while Jane was still browsing.

What we have here is nothing more nor less than a nice little wartime romance. Peter Marshall is a British bomber pilot, and a veteran of over 50 missions to Germany. Gervase Robertson is a WAAF officer. Both are stationed at Hartley air field. It is, of course, completely against regulations for the two of them to fall in love, but when did that stop anyone?

I’m told that many people find this to be their favorite of Shute’s novels; I can’t see that myself. It’s a plain, simple story, and moreover a story that’s undoubtedly been told hundreds of times over with respect to WWII alone. I’d have to say that I liked A Town Like Alice rather better. On the other hand, I did enjoy Pastoral rather thoroughly. If there are few surprises, Shute nevertheless spins his tale deftly; the characters are believable, the incidental details are charming, the climax is suitably climactic, boy gets girl and all is well (with the two of them, at least). The flying scenes are particularly well done, and there was one moment–one of the few real surprises in the book–that stole the breath from my lungs and brought tears to my eyes.

All in all, a good outing for Mr. Shute, and I wish there was rather more of it.

In There Will Be Dragons, John Ringo invents a delightfully preposterous world. Thanks to breakthroughs in nanotechnology, energy production and control, and artificial intelligence, all mediated by the technological descendant of today’s Internet and overseen by a nearly omniscient, nearly omnipotent AI named “Mother”, mankind lives in a near utopia. Every person can do pretty much what he or she wants to do and live how he or she wants to live. There’s plenty of food, plenty of energy, and plenty of time–most people live to be over three-hundred years old. There’s no government to speak of; all that remains is the Council, a small body that oversees the operations of the Net.

Want to be a dolphin? Go for it! Want to fly? There are personal devices that will allow that. Want to fly like a bird, with your own wings? You can do that too. Want to spend a century studying genetics, or blacksmithing, or the Roman Legions? Feel free. Almost anything is possible.

Some things we’re familiar with have been made impossible. Explosions are prohibited at the molecular level; if something is made to explode, Mother quietly siphons the energy away. Bombs don’t work. Firearms don’t work. Steam engines don’t work. But nobody misses them, so it’s no big deal.

Then one day there’s a split in the council, and one faction uses violence to try to take control of the Net. The opposing faction responds, and quickly each faction is using all of the energy reserves available to it to destroy the other. Normal citizens have a limit on how much energy they can draw; council-members do not. In short order, all of the energy normally used to transport food, to power houses and appliances, to suspend thrill seekers high in the air, is withdrawn. Mother is programmed to preserve herself and her functions, but otherwise not to interfere if her charges go to war; so Mother goes on, and the constraints she places on the world (such as the ban on explosions) go on, but there is literally no power available for anyone else but Mother and the council-members.

Civilization crashes overnight; indeed, many people perish in the first minutes of the war. The rest struggle to rebuild, forming communities primarily around groups of reenactors–folks who, like our Society for Creative Anachronism, get their kicks learning primitive skills and living without all of the modern conveniences. In this crisis, they are the only ones who have the skills needed to survive. And with centuries of experience, some of them are a darn sight better at it than their medieval ancestors.

At least, that’s what the good guys do. The evil faction on the Council captured control of slightly more energy than the good faction, and they’ve dealt with their civilian population in a different way: by “Changing” refugees into the kind of people they need: slow, stolid, hardworking farmers–or big, hulking, angry warriors. Orcs, in a word.

What Ringo has done is create a high-tech, science-fictional (if thoroughly preposterous) background for writing heroic fantasy. There are a very few wizards with miraculous powers–the council-members. The available weapons are low-tech: swords, spears, bows and arrows. There are dragons, elves, dwarves, merfolk, and intelligent dolphins–and, now, orcs–all created through the miracle of biotechnology.

This first book in Ringo’s “Council Wars” series sets everything up for the initial crash, and describes the efforts of one particular community to rebuild and then defend itself. The second book, Emerald Sea carries the story forward; and here’s where Ringo really begins to enjoy himself.

It seems that the “good” faction on the council, the faction with which our heroes are aligned, has managed to gain control of most of the Americas. The “bad” faction has its stronghold in Europe. The bad guys (and they are most certainly bad guys) want to invade North America; but they haven’t enough of an energy edge over the good guys to transport their orcs to America from Europe by pre-collapse means. That means they’ll need to use low-tech, which is to say, sailing ships. The good guys realize this, and they intend to prevent it. Being low-tech doesn’t mean you can’t innovate; and there are some serious history buffs on the good side.

In the 20th century, air power was the key to control of the sea. Our heroes don’t have airplanes; but they’ve got a number of dragons; and a bunch of wyverns trained (indeed, created) to be ridden by trained dragonriders. So how do you carry these dragons and wyverns to where they’ll be useful in an ocean battle? Enter the sail-powered dragon-carrier….

As Jane would say, Ringo had far too much fun writing this book; it’s evident in every chapter, and in fact Ringo says much the same in an author’s note at the end. It’s glorious fun, although thoroughly preposterous; and the presence of a certain chaotic rabbit is almost worth the price of admission all by itself. I’m looking forward to the next book.

The Far Country is the second of my recently acquired Nevil Shute novels, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s a romance, certainly; spunky English lass meets spunky Czechoslovakian immigrant in rural Australia. The setting is post-WWII, at a time when rationing is still in force in England and wool is finally beginning to command a good price in Australia. England is presented as a drab, hopeless place, with nothing to attract the ambitious or industrious (and Shute notes several times that the socialists are in power), while Australia is bustling, prosperous, and very much the Land of Opportunity. The characters are well-drawn and interesting, as always with Shute, and I enjoyed sharing their lives for a while; but I can’t help feeling that the plot is driven more by heavy-handed social commentary than anything else. It seems to be telling the English socialists, “Wake up, folks! You’d better change your tune or we’re going to lose our best and brightest to other shores.”

In the book’s favor, all this is the result of subsequent contemplation. The first chapter was a bit slow, but after that I was drawn in and couldn’t help but be carried along by the narrative. And although on first reading No Highway seems the more substantial book, I’ve a suspicion that The Far Country will be the more rewarding on re-reading. Really, the book’s main problem is that its setting begs comparison with A Town Like Alice, and it can’t help but look a little pale and wan in such robust company.

Ian introduced me to Nevil Shute’s books some years ago now. The trouble is that while Shute wrote a fair number of books they can be a little hard to find; so far as I can tell, only A Town Like Alice and On the Beach are in print. Used book stores are a must, then; and since we’re blest with a number of excellent large book stores in our area, I’m not often in a used book store.

Yes, I know, lots of used books are available via Amazon. I’ve gone that route, on occasion; but frankly, it’s much more fun to go hunting. The thrill of the chase, you know. The problem is, most used book stores I’ve checked will have only one or two books by Shute–the books I named above. To date, I’d found only one by this route: Lonely Road.

So Jane and I were out on a date, and happened to stop by a used book shop I’d not previously entered. And they had not one, not two, but eight (!) books by Shute, with multiple copies of several, none of which I’d previously seen. I bought four of them (carefully eschewing the first editions in favor of lower price and increased durability), and this is the first of the four. It’s a doozy.

When writing about Shute’s books, I always wonder what to say. The plots are always rich and involved; the characters always have the breath of life; and nothing I come up with really seems to capture the essence. But I’ll try.

The book concerns a British scientist, the quaintly named Mr. Honey, whose life work is studying metal fatigue in airplane structures. As the book opens, his current research involves the tail section of the Rutland Reindeer, a new trans-Atlantic passenger liner which has just gone into active service. His calculations suggest that the tail plane might fracture due to metal fatigue after about 1440 hours of service. Being the absent-minded type, Honey hasn’t considered the practical aspects of his research–that is, if he’s correct the Reindeer which have just begun carrying passengers might start falling out of the sky. His boss inquires discreetly, and discovers that all of the Reindeer but one have flown for 200 hours or less; the one exception is the prototype, which crashed in Labrador after about 1300 hours. Ominous, yes–but it appears they have a little time to think before grounding the fleet. Honey is sent to Labrador to investigate the crash and look for signs of metal fatigue in the tail section. He’s flying (naturally) on a Rutland Reindeer–and he discovers that contrary to what his boss had been told, this Reindeer already has 1400 hours on its clock….

This probably makes the book sound like a disaster novel–something like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno, which is far from the case. And what I remember most are the characters: Honey himself, and his daughter; Honey’s boss, and his wife; the aging movie actress from Terre Haute, Indiana; the stewardess. And in the end, the story isn’t really about planes and metal fatigue; it’s about people, and courage, and redemption.

On top of being a good story, the book is guilty of precognition. There’s a disclaimer at the end of the book that says that the Rutland Reindeer bears no resemblance to any actual airplane. However, No Highway was published in 1948 as the world’s first jet-powered passenger liner, the DeHaviland Comet, was being designed and built. (“Comet”‘s one of Santa’s reindeer.) The Comet first flew in 1949. In 1951, Shute’s novel was filmed as No Highway in the Sky with Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Honey, Marlene Dietrich as the movie actress, and Glynis Johns as the stewardess. In 1952 came the first Comet crash; more would follow. And investigation revealed that the culprit was, naturally, metal fatigue.

Shute was out in one way: the tail wasn’t involved. Rather, the Comet had large rectangular windows; and it develops that large rectangular openings diminish the structural integrity of a sheet of metal by quite a bit. Later Comets were designed with small round windows, and the crashes ceased.