Priscilla Hutchins—”Hutch” to her friends—is a starship pilot for the Academy of Science and Technology, circa 2200 AD. It seems that faster-than-light space travel (“superluminal” travel in the parlance of the book) has caused a revolution in the field of archaeology; intelligent races are scarce in the galaxy, but relics of intelligent races are surprising common. Thus, Hutch spends her time ferrying archaeological teams around and about, here and there, and willy-nilly participating in the grand foolishness they get involved in.

To date, Jack McDevitt has written six books about Hutch and her colleagues, along with some short stories; I’ve read the first four books, which are uniformly entertaining, with lots of gosh-wowness, neat alien tech, ancient alien civilizations, and deadly mysteries in the depth of space.

In The Engines of God, we find out why there are so few advanced civilizations out and about in the galaxy, and that archaeologists won’t leave a promising site until the very last minute, even if it’s likely to get them killed. We also learn that Jack McDevitt has a taste for destruction on the planetary scale, and breathtaking last-minute escapes.

In Deepsix, we learn that about more advanced civilizations that at least used to be around and about the galaxy, and Hutch and her crew are nearly killed investigating archaeological sites on a planet that is about to be destroyed by a rogue star. To be fair, the archaeological team would have loved to be able to leave the site well before the last minute, but were prevented. The final rescue is more convoluted and involved than the denouement of Toy Story 3.

Are you detecting a pattern, here?

In Chindi, the death and destruction are on a somewhat smaller scale, if I’m remembering correctly, which is to say that I don’t think we lose any planets. I could be mistaken about that. Nevertheless, there are still breathtaking last minute escapes, and even a little true love, and archaelogists who won’t leave a promising site until the very last minute. I think I like this one the best of the four.

In Omega, there’s yet another breathtaking last-minute escape, yet again involving an entire planet, and much is learned about why the galaxy is as it is. There’s also a lot of reflection about religion.

So basically, we’re talking here good hard science fiction mind candy. The science is reasonable, the archeology well-done (so far as I can tell), and the plots and situations are both spectacular and completely over the top. Not five stars, consequently; but sufficiently entertaining to keep me coming back for more.

I will say, I find McDevitt’s approach to religion refreshing. The books are not overtly about religion—certainly, I have no idea what McDevitt’s religious views might be, assuming he even has any—but there are religious people in them. This usually comes out at funerals, of which there are an appalling number, where the religion of the deceased is duly noted. And that’s simply right: religion is part of life, and despite the New Athiests people will go on being religious right on into the future. Not all of them—Hutch, herself, expresses a materialist worldview—but some of them. It’s not the main thing, there’s nothing like advocacy here, one way or the other, but it’s present.

These are not kids’ books, either in style or substance; McDevitt is reasonably frank about the presence of sexual relationships and the wide variety of possibilities that can arise when bored travelers are cooped on superluminal starships for months on end. But he’s not graphic either, which is pleasant.

Recently I reviewed Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. In the interests of equal time, I recently got Louis L’Amour’s Silver Canyon, and read that. And I have to say, the two books are both westerns, by which I mean they both have guns and horses and cattle and strong men and beautiful women, but beyond that they have almost nothing in common.

Riders of the Purple Sage reads like a well-researched historical novel. The plot and dialog are rather melodramatic, I don’t quite buy all of the characters, and it’s absolutely lacking in any sense of fun, but the settings seem real and the sense of place is astounding. It’s like Blu-Ray for your imagination.

Silver Canyon, on the other hand, is precisely what I was expecting Riders of the Purple Sage to be: a Wild West shoot-em-up from the great era of the Western Movie. It’s great fun, don’t get me wrong—but an honest picture of cowboy days it ain’t.

Our hero is a young drifter with a steady eye and a fast draw. Inside of three pages he’s met the girl he intends to marry—and has told her so—and has pissed off both sides in the range war that’s currently dividing the town. Inside of six pages he’s been half beaten to death by the girl’s boyfriend, and inside of eight he’s signed up with the third rancher in town, the one whose ranch the other two are fighting over. During the course of the book he gets shot, of course, and recovers fully with no treatment but hot water and clean living (to be fair, this happens in Grey’s book, too), is nearly lynched, unites the town, and gives the bad guy his comeuppance. Oh, and naturally he gets the girl. The only things missing are a conflict between the cattlemen and the sheepherders, and between both and the railroad.

The book’s well-enough written, but there’s a kind of ramshackle feel to the whole thing, like a movie set where the buildings are all false fronts with nothing behind them. The whole thing kind of reminds me of an old movie called Rustler’s Rhapsody, in which there are supposed to be vast cattle herds, but you never actually see them, you just hear them offstage.

But it’s a rousing tale, and would be a grand thing to read at the beach or by the pool. You might want to get several, because it goes by really quick; I don’t think the whole book took me more than a couple of hours.

Another of the Oxford’s World Classics I picked up on sale is Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, a title I’ve been familiar with just about forever. Note well: it’s not the book I’ve been familiar with, just the title. For some reason, people like to riff on it. There’s a country rock band, “New Riders of the Purple Sage”; Philip Jose Farmer wrote at least two tales with variants of the title, a Thieves’ World story called “Spiders of the Purple Mage” and a novella called “Riders of the Purple Wage”, and I seem to recall seeing others by him with similar titles.

I’m not vouching for any of these, you understand. I just mention them.

But though I seem to have always known the title, I had never read the book, and knew nothing about it except that it was a western. I was in a susceptible mood, so when I saw it on sale with the others I grabbed it, and this last week I read it.

First, a brief precis. It’s set on the southern Utah border in the days of Mormon polygamy. Jane Withersteen is the unmarried daughter and heir of a Mormon rancher. Her father founded the town she lives near, and she’s now the largest rancher and land-owner in the vicinity. She’s rejected the advances of some of the more powerful men in town; and being almost supernaturally good, kind, loving, gentle, and charitable she’s in bad odor with them because of her charity to the poor Gentiles (non-Mormons) in the vicinity. They are determined to use every means at hand, licit and illicit, open and under-handed, to “break” her.

Yes, this is a book in which the Mormons are the villains.

Strike that. This is a book in which the Mormon men are the villains, who are only out for lust and power even if they put a pretty face on it. The Mormon women (and most especially Jane Withersteen) are strong, faithful, ill-used, long-suffering, kind, gentle women who deserve much better than they are getting. Jane is ultimately saved by a gunman in black, a man whose love she tries to win to prevent him from killing Mormons. Plus, there are horses, and riders, and canyons, and rocks, and rustlers, and gunshots, and wild chases, and stampedes, and evil and goodness, and you know, like that.

I’ll pass lightly over the anti-Mormon message. Grey was writing about a rough place in a rough time, and I’ve no doubt that there were some real pieces of work among the Mormon community in southern Utah in those days, if only because real pieces of work are fairly evenly distributed across the family of Man. I’m sure there were those who were attracted more by polygamy than by the other aspects of the LDS church. More than that, there certainly was violence between the Mormon communities and outsiders from time to time; you can google the Mountain Meadow Massacre if you like. All that said, there are lots of Mormons here where I live, there have been as long as I’ve been around, and to have them painted as villains strikes me as odd.

The themes of the book should be clear from what I’ve already said. Hypocrisy, and especially religious hypocrisy, are front and center. Frontier justice is often violent, and sometimes it’s necessary to cut corners to see that justice is done. None of that surprised me.

So what did I think of it as a story?

First, Zane Grey had an extraordinary ability to describe the landscapes of his stories. Southern Utah is not the prairie, flat and broad; it’s broken into canyons of all sorts, and I was consistently amazed by his skill at describing extremely complex terrain in a way that I could visualize it, and least think I knew what he was getting at. I think he’d be worth studying for that alone.

Second, the dialog, and less often the prose, can be rather purple and melodramatic. Grey puts the “opera” in “horse opera”.

Third, the foreshadowing is at times heavy-handed. We’ve all heard the dictum that if there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it had better be fired before the end of Act III. It’s not unreasonable to have a character contemplate the gun and think, “You know, when that gun is fired nothing will ever be the same.” It’s probably overdoing it to have the character reflect on those cosmic repercussions four or five times. Those who have read the book will know what I’m talking about.

Fourth, there’s not a trace of humor from one end to the other. Emotions are huge, vibrant, rolling with thunder from one end of the sky to another. There’s great joy, and enormous, ponderous happiness, massive sorrow, hatred, guile, and so on, but there’s no quiet, wry amusement. This is a not a book where people laugh. Consequently, I found it a bit of a slog. There was much to like, but it wasn’t what you’d call fun.

So there you go. I’m in awe of Grey’s descriptive skills; I may well re-read certain passages just to figure out how he did it. Beyond that, I’ve no particular interest in looking up his other books.

Amazon had a sale a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of books for $0.99. Five of them were classics published by Oxford World’s Classics, i.e., by Oxford University Press; and I figured that at $0.99 it was worth grabbing them just for the chance that the production would be better than the average low-price public domain conversion.

One of them was The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins. I’d heard the name of the book, and I remembered rather vaguely having heard that it was worth reading, and the brief description on the Amazon page indicated that it was a mystery, the first detective novel in the English language…and I thought, why not?

Why not, indeed. The book, let me tell you, is a hoot. It is great fun, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

Written in 1868 as a weekly serial, it concerns an enormous diamond, the Moonstone, once stolen by a Muslim prince from a Hindu temple in India. The keepers of the temple swore to recover it, it is said, but it remained in the strongroom of the prince and his descendants until it was removed by an Englishman named Herncastle. From him it passed, on his death, to his niece, Rachel Verinder…and with that the cat is among the pigeons. The stone is stolen (of course; who could doubt it) and the story takes off in earnest.

Collins was a contemporary and great friend of Charles Dickens, and like him had a gift for creating odd and memorable characters; but unlike him, he also had a gift for making them seem realistic. Mr. Pickwick is an outstanding and memorable character, Sam Weller is an outstanding and memorable character, Nicholas Nickleby is an outstanding and memorable character…but none of them are the least bit likely. Collins’ characters, in this book at least, seem altogether likely.

And thanks to Collins’ plan for the novel, we have the opportunity to see all of them fully rounded. The book is told in the form of a series of narratives, each by a different eyewitness, each of which brings the story forward. Thus, we see each of the major characters through others’ eyes, and often enough through their own eyes as well. The difference between the various views of a single character is often striking, and especially when you can compare how they present themselves with how others see them.

My favorite of the characters, and the narrator of the longest segment of the book, is Gabriel Betteredge, an old family retainer of the Verinder family. Devoted to his ladyship and her family, possessed of his own homespun and rather eccentric philosophy, and utterly dependent for his personal stability on his pipe and his worn copy of Robinson Crusoe, he turns out to be an excellent observer of events, a not particularly good judge of individuals, and the one character who is, within, as others see him to be without. I am perfectly delighted to make his acquaintance.

As a detective story, the tale is adequate, if a bit slow paced—not that I minded. I might as well say that the essential point of the plot, the dreadful secret on which the whole plot turns, struck me as being too completely absurd. It would not have seemed so in 1868, however, so I didn’t let it bother me.

Highly recommended. I often find Dickens long-winded, grotesque, and tedious; Collins seems to be just to my taste.

Jane noticed today that Patrick O’Brian’s complete Aubrey/Maturin series (Master and Commander, et al) are available in Amazon’s Kindle Store for $3.99 a book. Time to stock up!

I am not a Civil War buff. I’m a history buff, but not a Civil War buff. I know the general outlines of the war, and how the Union generals in the East were a sorry bunch for much of the war, and like that; but I confess I haven’t studied it. Consequently, I’d never seriously considered reading The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara until Julie and Scott picked it for their A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast. I’ve not listened to the podcast, mind you; but I thought, well, I’ll give it a try.

And frankly, it’s nothing short of amazing.

The Killer Angels is simply the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the entire war. Shaara’s primary viewpoint characters are General Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man after the death of Stonewall Jackson, and Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, an infantry commander from Maine. There are also scattered chapters from the points of view of Lee himself and a few others. Shaara digs deep into these characters; they, and their companions in arms, are as well and finely drawn as any I can think of. And, I gather, Shaara is exceedingly accurate. Gettysburg, and the Civil War in general, is one of the best documented wars in history. All the well-known survivors wrote about it, and many of the less well-known, and I can’t help thinking that Shaara picked his viewpoint characters based entirely on the material available. (Signficantly, I don’t believe anyone who died in the battle is used as a viewpoint character.)

I was especially impressed by Joshua Chamberlain. A college professor from Bowdoin University, he somehow ended up a Colonel…and to his surprise, found that he was remarkably good at it. He ended the war a Major General, and because of his accomplishments was honored by being chosen to receive Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Later he became Governor of Maine, and President of Bowdoin University.

Anyway. Highly recommended.

Indentured is a short science fiction tale by Scott McElhaney, the first book in a series called The Mystic Saga. I found it on Amazon’s Kindle store after buying Nathan Lowell’s Quarter Share; it was highly rated, and inexpensive, and so I decided to give it a try.

I do not plan to read the remaining books in the series.

First, a little about the book; and then some general remarks about the current state of the publishing world, and e-book publishing in particular.

Declan Singletree is injured during a vigilante raid on some big guys in the illegal drug business. He’s given an MRI. And the next thing he knows, he’s on board a starship, apparently en route to a colony planet where he’s going to be one of the first responders. Thing is, he’s not quite himself. According to what he was told, his MRI was recorded, and the recording was saved, and in order to come up with a quick supply of indentured servants the people behind the colony ship impressed his MRI records on a force grown clone, thus giving it his personality. He, of course, rebels, and looks for support.

Now, the MRI thing is absurd on the face of it. I do not believe that it will ever be possible to record personality in any electronic form; but certainly not as a standard MRI. If the author had done a little more work—that is, if he’d made something up, if he had told me that it was an Ultra-High-Resolution Rhodo-Magnetic Resonance Imager, based on fancy new technology, I might have bought it. C’mon, show some imagination!

The story doesn’t get any better from there. It seems that the sexy nurse who was kind to him in the hospital also had an MRI shortly after his, and a clone based on her recording is on the same ship. Declan is given four devices, which he’s to give to the nurse’s clone and other people he trusts to help in a rebellion. He immediately gives one of them to another clone whose only recommendation is that he’s too stupid to keep his head down while working against the authorities. In fact, stupidity is the rule of the day.

So, color me unimpressed.

Now, I know that the big thing in publishing is for new authors to bypass the traditional publishers by going straight to the e-book market with low prices: $0.99 to $4.99. I’m in favor of that, especially given that the publishers have largely abrogated their responsibilities with regard to editing and publicity anyway. However, it also means that you need to wade knee-deep through a lot of dreck in order to find the good stuff.

So I buy this book, which somehow has gotten four stars at Amazon (53 reviews), and it was a waste of my time.

At the risk of sounding like the lady who said, “The food here is awful—and the portions are so small!” I’ve got another complaint. Now, the book was $0.99; not a lot. But it was also remarkably short. In Kindle format, it’s maximum location is 1475. By comparison, Quarter Share, which is also very short, has a max location of 3167. The Alchemyst, a not terribly long juvenile by Michael Scott, has a max location of 4830. Jane Eyre clocks in at 8649.

In short, Indentured is a short story masquerading as a novel. And that brings me to a general problem with e-books in general.

When you’re looking at books at the bookstore, you can see immediately how thick the book is. Granted, it might have large print; it might have small print; it’s often worthwhile to check. But you can get an immediate notion of how much book you’re buying, without even thinking about it. That doesn’t happen when you’re looking at a book on Amazon. Amazon does tell you the “Print Length”, 94 pages in this case, if you go looking for that (and I will, from now on, when dealing with books by unknown authors)—but it’s not obvious. It should be.

And in this particular case, I hope I can be forgiven for thinking that the author is trying to take advantage of the $0.99 trend by breaking a full-sized novel up into surprisingly small $0.99 chunks, instead of simply giving me a decent piece of work at a decent price. (I’d not quite so put out if I hadn’t read a number of full-sized novels at $0.99.) I’d much rather he give me the whole thing at $3.99 or $5.99 than try to fool me like this.

I’ve been reading Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper Traders series, which begins with Quarter Share. The books concern one Ishmael Wang, who at 18 finds himself parentless, friendless, and most importantly, jobless, on a company world. The company doesn’t want him, and he’s got to get off-planet PDQ. He can join the marines; or he can find a berth on a freighter plying its way from star to star. To make a short story shorter, he does the latter and becomes the most junior crew-member of the Solar Clipper Lois McKendrick. The “quarter share” of the title is Ishmael’s share of the profits from any voyage; by tradition, the owner gets 20%, the captain gets 10%, and the remaining crew split up the rest by shares: quarter, full, half, or double. The books in the series are named according to these shares, up to Owner’s Share (not yet released), and so I imagine that the rags to riches story continues until our hero is independently wealthy.

I’ve read the first four books in the series, and I’ve rather enjoyed them. They are light, pleasant, short, mostly frothy, and entertaining. There’s a fair amount of sex, but though (apparently) steamy it’s mostly non-graphic. On the other hand, the books are completely, utterly, totally absurd.

Some books are absurd because they are meant to be. Some books are absurd because the author has people behaving in ways that people just don’t behave, and this is one of those…and you knew I just had to talk about it.

Our hero, Ishmael, is the son of a university professor, a teacher of “ancient literature” (hence his name). He apparently has managed to get to 18 without having any real friends. He has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He’s wicked smart. Almost anything he wants to pick up, he picks up absurdly easily. He’s embarassingly decent, kind, cheerful, friendly, helpful. He discovers that he’s amazingly good-looking and sexy. All of the women he knows want to have sex with him. All of the men like him, except for a very few who are bad, evil, misogynistic monsters (and they don’t show up until the fourth book). He’s naturally good at finding trade goods, at trouble-shooting problems, and at saving the ship and its crew. He’s the kind of guy who will pitch in to help with the dirty jobs, even when they aren’t in his department. Despite never having had any friends until he boards the Lois McKendrick, he is never at a loss for a word, always knows what to say, and can charm the pants off of the ladies (literally) when he tries to.

Frankly, his humble awesomeness does get a little wearing after a while. He’s simply too damned good. (Ladies tell him, “You’re damned good,” until it becomes a joke.)

Which brings me to the “fraternization policy” of the Lois McKendrick, and, we gather, the majority of trading ships: “you don’t screw crew.” In some ships, open fraternization is allowed, and the pretty girls are known as “bunk-bunnies”. But this leads to friction, hurt feelings, and other relationship problems when you’re in flight for three months between ports, and so most ships don’t allow it. You don’t have sex with your crewmembers on ship or in port. You just don’t.

This is the source of what drama there is in the second book, Half Share. There are three ladies in particular on the Lois McKendrick who are extremely fond of Ish, and very attracted to him; but it’s just part of a spacer’s life that you can’t have sex with the one you’re with and that you like, and you have to have sex, and so when you make port you go and find someone else. These three ladies, all of whom are drooling for him, go out of their way to make sure that he’s able to get some. They aren’t jealous, but they are all a little sad because they can’t have what they want. It’s the tragedy of the spacer’s life.

Now, you’d think that if sex between crew-members was forbidden, the ship might be organized to reduce temptation. But no. All berthing areas are co-ed, and there’s all manner of ogling, innuendo, and so forth. And yet somehow the taboo against sex between crew-members is so engrained that it just simply never happens. Never.

I’m reminded of H.M.S. Pinafore:

“What, never?”
“No, never!”
“What, never????”
“Well, hardly ever!!!!”

They’ve got things set up to make it as hard as possible to stick to the rules…and yet everyone does, without fail. I’m not buying it.

(To be fair, there are small, family run trading ships as well, where a saner kind of interaction between the sexes seems to prevail…but that’s not where Ish is working.)

So the books are absurdly beholden to the zeitgeist. Still, they’re fun: good beach reading.