…especially coming after the Science
Fiction Book Club’s fifty most significant science fiction and fantasy
books of the last fifty years. I received e-mail from Borders Books
saying that they now had a web page listing
essential science fiction and
fantasy books–and here’s their complete list:

• Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
• Dune, by Frank Herbert
• The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan
• The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
• A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Leguin
• Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

Now, I can’t deny the quality of most of these. I think
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series has degenerated into
pointlessness, and I have doubts about
Terry Goodkind, as no one has ever recommended his stuff (her
stuff?) to me. But why only nine? And why these nine in particular?
Why The Hobbit, rather than The Lord of the Rings?

And therein lies the answer–every one of the books listed above, except
for poor, lonely Fahrenheit 451, is the first in a series.

Over at

Banana Oil,
Ian Hamet takes issue with my suggestion that
Lois McMaster Bujold belongs on the list of 50 most
significant science fiction and fantasy novels of the last 50 years,
and thinks that C.J. Cherryh belongs there instead. I’ll
go one farther, and say that they should have included Cherryh’s masterwork
Cyteen (or any one of a number of others).

He questions Bujold because he’s not sure how influential she’s been; but
on the other hand he’s only read a couple of her short stories and
Ethan of Athos. That’s one of her two or three weakest
books. Ian, if you’ve only read “Ethan”, you’ve never read Bujold.
Go find a copy of The Warrior’s Apprentice, and have fun.

I first discovered Ngaio Marsh a couple of years ago. I usually like to
read an author’s books in the order they were written, but as Marsh wrote
lots of books, and as the inside cover of the current edition list them
all in alphabetical order, I didn’t bother; instead, I just grabbed three
every time I went to the book store, and over a period of some months I’d
read them all.

Now, I’m off on a business trip to Australia in a couple of weeks, and
I’ve been saving new, unread books for the flight. So I was looking for
something to read last week, and decided that it would be fun to start
with Marsh’s first book and read them in order, just to see how her
writing and her characters evolve. Not all at once, mind you; I’ll be
reading other things as well.

So, A Man Lay Dead is her first book; it not only marks the
first appearance of Inspector Roderick Alleyn, but also that of his
friend and occasional Watson, reporter Nigel Bathgate, and of Nigel’s
sweetie Angela North. And frankly, it’s only the presence of the three
of them that really save this book.

It’s not a bad book, by any means; I enjoyed it. But it’s a typical
country house mystery, nothing too special there, and the subplot
involving a mysterious Russian secret society makes it sound just a
little too much like one of Bertie Wooster’s favored brand of pulp thriller
for comfort.

But if the plot and the perpetrators don’t shine, Nigel and Angela do;
and while Inspector Alleyn isn’t quite himself yet, he gets the job done.

There’s been a fair
amount of talk on the web lately about the book
A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al.
Although it’s a book on architecture and urban planning, I first heard of
it in the context of software engineering. Alexander uses the term
“pattern” to mean an archetypal solution to a certain kind of problem–a
solution you can apply over and over again in different situations which
nevertheless match the pattern. For a while, patterns were the next
silver bullet in software engineering; that initial glow has faded, but
both the idea of patterns and a number of specific patterns have taken
firm root in the software community.

But I’m not intending to talk about patterns in software; instead, I want
to talk about Alexander’s book. It’s been recommended to me by several
people, some on line, and some I’ve actually met; the idea of patterns is
appealing to me; and the recent discussions piqued my curiousity to the
extent that I actually bought a copy. But the thing is, I find I can’t
review it the way I ordinarily would. It’s a big, thick book, chock-full
of ideas, all of them cross-referenced to other ideas. It’s not the sort
of thing you read cover to cover; it’s the sort of thing you browse. And
any short review I might right will utterly fail to do it justice. So
I’ve decided to embark on a rather more ambitious plan.

I’m going to browse in it, and read it, and browse some more, and every
so often I’m going to write about one single pattern. That’s an idea
that’s completely incompatible with Alexander’s goals, by the way; the
patterns aren’t intended to stand alone. But it’s the only way I’ll be
able to present my thoughts.

The book is divided into three sections, called “Towns”, “Buildings”, and
“Construction”. The first section contains patterns on how to lay out
towns and the things in them so as to make them delightful places to
live. And the first of those is called Independent Regions
(1). (That “1” is the pattern number; by convention
that’s always included in the name, to help people look them up.)

In Alexander’s view, the world should be divided into a thousand
or more independent regions, each with its own local government, and each
part of a world federation. (What this has to do with architecture, I’m
not sure.) Surprisingly, he doesn’t suggest this as a
means of centralizing urban planning within each region; Alexander
doesn’t believe in central planning. Within the region, each city and
town is responsible for its own land; and within each city and town, each
group or individual is similarly responsible for its own territory. If
all of them conscientiously rely on Alexander’s patterns as they do their
planning, the world will be a beautiful place.

Instead, he lists several other reasons: government becomes unwieldly
at any other size; the current trend toward globalization is homogenizing
cultures the world over, whereas his notion would preserve them; those
times and places where the basic political unit has been the city-state
have been seen an outpouring of art and architecture.

What he seems to forget is that those same times and places
also saw frequent outpourings of blood. The Italian Renaissance produced
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and scads of other
noteworthy turtles–ah, artists–but it was also the golden age of the
European Mercenary Company, and the city-states of Italy were constantly
at war. The great ruling families were patrons of the arts, it’s true,
but there’s a reason why the names Borgia and Medici have an ominous
sound in our ears.

I suppose he thinks this “world federation” will somehow manage to keep
the peace among the thousand regions. But just because fifty states can
be stable, it doesn’t follow that 1000 states will also be stable.
With fifty states, every state is important; even little New Hampshire is
the star of every presidential campaign. With 1000 states, no individual
state is important enough to make its voice heard in the assembly. I
can’t see that such a body can keep order without instituting such tight
control over the member regions as to destroy the indepence that’s their
reason for being.

And then, I think that there’s another reason the United States has
gotten along so well (mostly) for over two centuries–they began with a
relatively homogeneous political, legal, and moral culture rooted in the
rights of Englishmen and the English common law. It’s true that America
is a melting pot, and I’ve no wish to disparage the contributions of
any of the other groups involved. But there’s a distinct different
between the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man–the Bill of Rights is a record of rights the founding
fathers felt that they already had, even if they sometimes had them only
in the breach. They wrote the Bill of Rights to
protect those rights, and to make sure that no one could take them away
in the future. They’d gone to war with England because England hadn’t
respected their rights as Englishmen. The Declaration of the Rights of
Man, by contrast, is a record of rights most Frenchmen had never enjoyed
up until that time, the rights the leaders of the Revolution felt that
they should have–and given that the French have since had two
emperors, a number of kings, and (if I recall correctly) five or six
republics, not to mention two German invasions, it’s not clear how often
they’ve enjoyed them since.

Thus, I think the diversity of cultures that Alexander wishes to protect
with his thousand independent regions would instead prevent
his “world federation” from keeping the peace–and his plan would
degenerate into warfare and bloodshed until the regions would be forced to
join into larger countries for their own safety. Just as they did
historically.

So OK, Alexander’s a utopian dreamer. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise
me. But it does bug me a little that this is one of the patterns he and
his co-authors marked with two asterisks, “**”, indicating that it
presents a solution that they are absolutely, positively, 100% sure of
despite being architects rather than political theorists or historians.
But I gather that no one has ever accused Alexander of modesty.

The most significant science fiction and fantasy books of the last
50 years? The Science Fiction Book Club thinks so, and
Ian Hamet
has some comments. I have some comments of my own, some of which are
comments on his comments. To wit, he says,

Now let’s peruse 11 through 20. I read SF avidly, and am utterly
unfamiliar with The Children of the Atom (number 14),
or Cities in Flight
(number 15), though the title of the former sounds familiar, and I’ve
read some stories by the author of the latter. But then we have number
16, Terry Pratchett‘s The Colour of Magic.
I’ve never gotten into Pratchett, but isn’t this one of his lesser works?

I can only assume they wanted to reference Pratchett’s Discworld series
and rather than choose between the many excellent possibilities, they
just chose the first one. It’s OK, but Pratchett gets much, much
better. Me, I’d have chosen Wyrd Sisters instead.

Cities in Flight is a collection of four short novels, of
which the first is marginal, the middle two are pretty good, and the last
is OK (it’s basically a continuation of the third one). The first novel
talks about the invention of a space drive that’s capable of lifting
entire cities into space effortlessly, providing both motive power and
pressure containment; the remaining three take place in the world that
results. It’s dated; in one book germanium is a treasure metal because
they make transistors out of it, and the drive on particular city is
so old it still uses vacuum tubes. But it’s good stuff, a book I
discovered in my teens and still pick up now and again.

I have never heard of The Children of the Atom, and I’ve
been reading this stuff voraciously for thirty years.

Ian also wonders where Poul Anderson is, and mentions
Three Hearts and Three Lions; I have to agree. If you’re
speaking of influence, I don’t see how you can omit it and still
include Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer. Moorcock
made a career out that one book by Anderson. He also thinks that
Robert
A. Heinlein‘s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
should be there, and again I agree.

But I’ve got some problems of my own with this list. I can’t argue with
the inclusion of Neuromancer, given that it spawned an entire
sub-genre, even though I found it possible to read. Including
John Crowley’s book Little Big is silly; it’s got
lots of style, but it didn’t make much sense the first time through and
I’ve never managed to get through it again. The most significant thing
about Dhalgren is that most people can’t get through it.
I never saw anything special in either Timescape or
Gateway, and whatever the author has done since,
The Sword of Shannara is an egregious piece of derivative
hackwork (an opinion I’ve held since I read it as a young, not
particularly discerning Tolkien fan).

And then there are the omissions: where is
Lois McMaster Bujold? If I’m not mistaken, she’s won more
Hugo awards than anybody but Heinlein; surely at least one of
her Miles Vorkosigan books should be listed (I nominate
A Civil Campaign). Where’s C.S. Lewis?
They might be kid’s books, but any of the seven books in “The Chronicles
of Narnia” is a darn sight better than The Sword of Shannara.
Where’s Steven Brust? Where’s Neil Gaiman?
Good grief, where’s L.E. Modesitt? And though I’ve given
up on Robert Jordan, you can’t deny his presence in the field.

I’m glad to see Cordwainer
Smith listed, though. The book The Rediscovery of Man is a
fairly recent anthology of all of his short fiction, and deserves a
spot on your shelf.

This is the most recent of Block’s Matthew Scudder novels. Matt is on
the wagon, married, and reasonably respectable. And after a gala evening
at the Mostly Mozart festival, Matt discovers that a pair of his fellow
Patrons of the Arts were murdered in a particularly gruesome way when
they returned home from the Lincoln Center. It’s really nothing to do
with him, but eventually he starts looking into it anyway.

And that’s the problem with this book–it’s really nothing to do with
Matt Scudder. It’s about the perpetrator, and Matt’s just a foil. Block
would have done better to rewrite this without Matt Scudder at all.

I thought about this book a lot. I am in awe of how the author created
such a complete picture of a human being with such spare prose. It’s not
a very long book and yet it felt like I had read it for weeks instead of
a couple days.

Artemisia is an actual historical person, Artemisia Gentileschi, who
painted during the Baroque period of art in Italy. She was the first
woman to be admitted to the Accademia dell’ Arte in Florence, knew and
corresponded with Galileo, had Cosimo De Medici II as her patron and
supported herself and her children with her painting. She was also raped
by her father’s co-worker and tortured in court to verify her accusation.
Apparently, if a woman didn’t recant her story while in extreme pain, she
really was telling the truth.

What Vreeland does is take the bare bones of her story and turn it into a
searching, thoughtful story about the struggle of a woman who must choose
between her personal happiness and her God given gifts. Artemisia is
passionate about painting but she suffers for her passion. The title is
double entendre. I actually looked up the word “passion” to make sure I
wasn’t imagining things. She cannot deny her ability to paint but as a
woman it costs her the men she loves to continue with her art.
Particularly touching was her struggle watching her daughter grow up to
have conventional desires and aims in life, denying her mother’s gifts.

I recommend this book highly. It is packaged like a “chick” book but the
content is so much better than the impression the cover makes. By the
time I was done, I knew Artemisia like a friend.

Usually, I can read a mystery in much less than the week it took me to
complete this one. They’re light and don’t normally require thoughtful
reading to get the plot, etc. But this one was pleasantly different.
Now on paper, the premise does sound fairly sappy. Sometime in antiquity,
ancient people made a powerful chess set that holds the key to some
mysterious formula. The set was owned by Charlemagne and then disappeared
from sight but not from memory. Two narrators tell the story of its
resurfacing and the measures taken to keep it out of the hands of those
wanting to use it for personal advancement. Surrounding the mystique of
the chess set is the number 8, which laid on its side is also the symbol
for infinity.

The first narrator is a nun in the abbey that part of the chess set has
been buried in for 200 years. The French Revolution is on and Marat has
learned of its existence. The abbess shuts the abbey and sends the pieces
individually away with trusted nuns, designating Mireille to be the locus
of the network. She watches the Terror, meets just about everyone
important in the whole mess and her story goes from there. Back in the
future, Catherine Velis is narrating the strange story of her involvement
with the chess set. She is a computer programmer/data analyst who dabbles
in painting and mathematics. On New Years Eve, a fortune teller reads her
hand and gives her a strange prophecy, which she, of course, promptly
forgets. She also has a figure eight described in the fold lines of her
hands. Strange things start happening, she meets a ton of interesting
people and her story goes from there.

Before I read this I really didn’t know more than the basic moves in
chess–nor did I wish to know more. But the book’s descriptions of the
mathematical properties of the game, the mathematics of music and
acoustics, and the use of numbers in mystical beliefs was fascinating.
Whether it’s actually true or not I haven’t a clue, but it made a darn
good story. Even switching back and forth between narrators wasn’t
cumbersome because the mystery was so riveting. I am definitely going to
seek out more of her fiction to see if it holds forth with the same
quality.

This is the sequel to The Duke of Uranium, which I
reviewed a couple of days ago. Jak Jannika travels with his buddies to
the habitat of Greenwood in the Aerie, where his former girlfriend is a
princess. He’s going because she sent him a secret message asking him to
come and “do something for her”, and to fulfill the requirement for his
Junior Project at the Public Service Academy. The action takes him as
far as the mines of Mercury.

The book has much the same strengths and flaws as its predecessor, but
there was more about it to dislike. In particular, parts of it combine
some really ugly sexual domination with a really cynical take on
relationships that I found unpleasant. It wasn’t gratuitous, I’ll give
Barnes that–he was establishing that a particular character is a
sociopathic bitch, and by the time he was done I believed him. But it
was unpleasant, never the less, and I could have done without it.

There are clearly more books to come; I’ll probably buy the next one.
But unless there’s a clear improvement I may not go any farther than that.

This is the third book in the Isles series, and Drake is still going
strong. Garric, Sharina, Cashel, and Ilna, and various friends, continue
trying to save civilization, while the threat this time is the
culmination of a plot a thousand years in the making. I won’t give away
any details, save to say that our heroes aren’t fighting by themselves;
the bad guys have been making free with the mummy of a long dead wizard,
and said long dead wizard isn’t happy about it. The only problem is that
he’s, well, long dead.