I spent a good bit of the evening working on an essay about maze generation, but it’s not done yet. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve just learned from Jaquandor that mystery novelist Charlotte MacLeod has died. The announcement is here. Ms. MacLeod hadn’t been able to write in several years, and perhaps this came as a release. In any event, she will be missed. If you’ve not read her books, you can find a list at our Charlotte MacLeod page.

The is the latest in Drake’s Daniel Leary/Adele Mundy series of space
operas, and I have mixed feelings about it.

In the wake of Lieutenant Leary Commanding, Cinnabar and the
Alliance have signed a peace treaty, with all that that entails for
junior naval officers. Things are tight all round, and even so famous a
hero as Leary isn’t sure of getting a ship. But just because a treaty’s
been signed, that doesn’t mean that the Alliance is sleeping; and
Cinnabaran Intelligence never sleeps. A number of interests come
together: A wealthy but eccentric
couple from the planet of Novy Sverdlovsk wish to explore the
Galactic North, a region of loosely federated, mostly primitive systems
nominally friendly to Cinnabar. Supposedly they are travelling for
pleasure, to indulge their interests in archaeology and big game hunting;
actually, they are looking for signs of a man named John Tsetzes, one
time dictator of Novy Sverdlovsk, who upon his overthrow a century before
was known to have fled to the North with a number of planetary treasures.
Meanwhile, Bernis Sand, head of Cinnabaran Intelligence, wants to get a
skilled observer into the Galactic North, to look for signs of Alliance
activity. There have been reports that the Alliance has begun building
a base in the system of Radiance, and she wants the straight dope. Adele
Mundy is her agent of choice.

Leary is in need of a command. The Klimovs are in need of a ship.
Bernis Sand is in need of a spy. And the Princess Cecile is being
sold out of the service. Leary finds himself the civilian captain of the
Cecile, under contract to the Klimovs, to a place where Cinnabaran
officers have but rarely gone.

It’s an interesting story, with the usual smash-bang ending; my complaint
is that large parts of it were too pat. For example, once they arrive in the Galactic
North and begin searching in earnest they just happen to find a relic of
John Tsetzes in the first house they enter on the first planet they
visit, and thereafter track his steps in the most unlikely way, with nary
a misstep or red herring or backtrack.

Still, it was quite a good read, and I’ll certainly get the next Lt.
Leary, should there be one.

I’d like to begin with a couple of observations.

• When I remember myself in past years, I’m often impressed with
  how much I’ve changed. And when I go back and look at things I
  wrote or built or created in past years, I’m often impressed with
  with how little I’ve changed.

• It pays to be anal-retentive.

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This is the second of Drake’s Daniel Leary/Adele Mundy series, and though
I enjoyed it well enough on second reading, I found that it dragged a bit.
A ripping yarn, yes, but a bit slow to get going. The general outlines
of the plot are similar to the previous book; Leary is sent to a
nominally friendly place where the Alliance is secretly busy, and Leary
saves the day with a big win against great odds due to equal parts of luck,
talent, skill, and bullheaded determination. There’s a fair amount of
political intrigue that goes on toward the beginning, resulting in a
surprising zoological discovery on Leary’s part that I expect will have
long term repercussions as the series progresses; but on the other hand,
it had little enough to do with the present story.

So, good fun; but Drake can do better.

The first time I read this book, the first in Drake’s Lieutenant Leary
series, I suggested that Drake was channeling
David Weber–he of Honor Harrington fame. By the time I’d
finished the second book in the series I’d gotten the clue. Drake wasn’t trying to
out-Weber Weber, he was doing an homage to
Patrick O’Brian‘s
Aubrey/Maturin novels. There were just too many parallels for it to be by
accident, and so when I set out to re-read
With the Lightnings I had my eyes open. But more of that anon.

For those coming in late, the Lieutenant Leary series is pure military space
opera. Daniel Leary is a Lieutenant in the Royal Cinnabaran Navy; the
Empire of Cinnabar is one of two leading powers in the human-explored
galaxy. He’s come to the planet Kostroma as part of a diplomatic mission
to the new ruler of Kostroma, but he has no particular duties; he was
chosen only because he’s the son of Corder Leary, one of the most
powerful men in the Empire, and someone thought the Kostromans would be
impressed by that. In fact, Leary hasn’t spoken to his father since some
years prior, when they fell out over his joining the RCN. Since then he’s
been scraping along, trying to get ship duty. Now he’s got it, and he’s
bound and determined to enjoy it as much as he can.

Meanwhile, Adele Mundy has accepted a position as librarian to the ruler
of Kostroma; the fellow wants to be accepted as a patron of learning, so
he began his rule by looting every other library in the capital. Mundy’s
a post-graduate of the Academy on Bryce, and is extremely accomplished at
winnowing, categorizing, cataloging, and above all retrieving
data–whether she’s supposed to have access to it or not. She’s a
Cinnabarran citizen–a member of one of the great Cinnabaran families,
just as Daniel Leary is–but hasn’t been back to Cinnabar in sixteen
years, when the bulk of her family was put to death in the aftermath of a
failed coup, by order of Daniel’s father. Later it came out that
the Alliance was behind the coup; the Alliance is the other major power
in the galaxy. Adele’s parents and baby-sister were among the dead,
leaving her with a kind of pox-on-both-their-houses attitude toward both
Cinnabar and the Alliance.

Daniel and Adele meet under uncomfortable circumstances, and surprisingly
become friends. This is just a few days before the Alliance foments an
uprising on Kostroma–and by chance Daniel is the only RCN officer left
at large after the first hours. He’s got a chance to save the day, and
given the kind of book this is, you just know he’s going to pull it off;
it’s time to sit back and enjoy the ride.

As I say, I was looking for the Aubrey and Maturin parallels this time
through, and I found one that’s just plain silly. Probably the best
known scene in all of O’Brian’s work is in the very first book,
Master and Commander. And it’s the best known because it’s
the scene that’s most likely to cause first-time readers to put the book
down and stop reading O’Brian forever. It’s Stephen Maturin’s first time
aboard Jack Aubrey’s new command, the sloop Sophy, and Jack has
requested a midshipman to give Stephen a tour of the rigging. And
Stephen is afraid of heights. What follows is, when read in the right
spirit, a remarkably funny scene composed of two monologues–the
midshipman reciting the names of all of the parts of each mast, and the
different sails, and so on and so forth, in exacting detail, ad
infinitum ad nauseum, and Stephen not listening because he’s so
worried about falling to the deck and killing himself, while yet trying to make
the appropriate responses. Really, you shouldn’t pay any more attention
to the rigging than Stephen does, and then you’ll get through the passage
OK. But people always try to make sense of it, and then they fall out of
the book. Pity.

Shortly before the uprising begins it’s Founder’s Day on Kostroma, when
they celebrate the first landing on the planet. There’s quite a
spectacular parade, and Leary has figured out that they best place to sit
and watch is on the roof of the ruler’s palace–provided that one has
binocular goggles to look through. And so Leary waltzes into the palace
library and then waltzes Adele Mundy up to the roof to watch the parade.
He nonchalantly walks down the tile roof (a 30 degree slope) to the very
edge, where he can rest his feet in the rain gutter; while Adele makes
her slow and painful way down to him backwards on her hands and knees,
she being (natch) afraid of heights. And as she’s coming slowly down the
roof, Leary begins a long disquisition about what it’s like to be out on
the hull of a starship during a passage between systems, and what all the
different parts are, and did I mention that in Drake’s universe the starships
have masts and sails? There’s no reason for him to be talking about it at
that particular point in the story, except to counterpoint Adele’s
internal monologue about what she’d look like after she hit the pavement.

It’s all quite silly, and I had a good time re-reading it.

This is not so much an essay as a brief rant on a couple of things I don’t intend to put in Ramble. Read on!

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I decided that I’d done enough work since Ramble 0.1 to make it worth taking a snapshot; and if I were going to take a snapshot, I figured I might as well put it on the web. You can download Ramble 0.2 as a Windows or Mac OS X executable, or you can get a Tcl starkit. Read on for a description of the changes; you might also want to (re)read the description of Ramble 0.1.

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Once again I spent the evening working on Ramble instead of writing blog posts. And I’ve got a lot of write about: a bunch of books, and a bunch of Ramble topics; I suspect that the next Ramble Chronicles will be on maze generation. Come on back tomorrow, and I’ll try to have more for you.

NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft was successfully launched into space today, and yours truly was there to watch…sort of. I wasn’t at Kennedy Space Center; instead, I was at the “ROC”, which is where the project “NOPE” (Network Operations Project Engineer) keeps tabs on all the things that have to go right for JPL to track the spacecraft, receive its telemetry, and send it commands. Among those things are the various subsystems of JPL’s Deep Space Network. For critical events (such as launch and first acquisition) the flight projects like to have subsystem engineers on-tap in case anything should go wrong. And since I work on the Uplink subsystem, that meant me, or one of my co-workers. This time it was me.

The experience was both exciting, as I’d not supported a launch before, and terribly, terribly boring, as nothing went wrong that I had to deal with. Please note: I’m not complaining. Boring is what I was hoping for.

But a full day of boring leaves me tolerably brain-dead and in no mood for blogging, so I will leave you with a link to the Deep Impact home page. Don’t miss it!