Paul's Down-Home Page

Anywhere But Here

by Jerry Oltion

I remember the first time I started reading a book and then just couldn’t make myself finish it– I was in fourth grade. It seemed sacreligious to start a book but not finish it, but the book in question (whose title I mercifully forget) was just too bad to keep reading. So with Oltion’s Anywhere but Here, a not-very-thinly disguised attack on The Evil American Empire and That Idiot In the White House. Oltion’s characters are amiable enough, but despite the effort he takes to portray them as (somewhat bumptious) ordinary home folks, they come off as sock puppets. The initial third of the book is sloppily paced and just flat not very interesting. Perhaps the rest of the book’s better; I wouldn’t know because that’s the point where I abandoned it. Very disappointing.

Peeps

by Scott Westerfeld

Clever, scary novel with a great premise: what if vampires are really people infected with a parasite? There’s a lot of icky detail about various other kinds of parasites, which makes the book remarkably educational. It was fun to read a spec-fic novel that didn’t have any lasers, robots, or aliens. A fun, quick read.

Another cool MS white paper, this one is an overview of site resilience solutions. The paper discusses inter-site replication, stretched clusters, and some other goodies, citing their pros and cons. (It also links to Microsoft’s guidelines for deploying inter-site replication— well worth reading too.)

Kyle Mills is usually an unorthodox writer. His books are usually thought-provoking– for example, Smoke Screen posed the question of what might happen if a major tobacco company said “to heck with it” and shut its doors. However, Fade is a straightforward action novel, and IMHO not a particularly good one. The main character is a former Navy SEAL who is forced to retire after being wounded. He’s bitter, understandably enough, because there’s a bullet lodged near his spine that will inevitably paralyze him, and the government refused to help him get surgery while the problem was still fixable. Now the Department of Homeland Security is trying to recruit Fade to come back, and he doesn’t want to. What follows is a pretty stock tale, uplifted by Mills’ gift for witty dialogue. In the second half of the book, the characters suddenly develop; that’s a weird way to put it, but it’s almost like seeing a flat 2-D drawing morph into a fully rendered 3-D representation. That’s not enough to save the book, though. The ending is predictable, and this just isn’t up to Mills’ usual standards.

Fun time-travel romp. The best part: Varley doesn’t even try to explain how the time machine works, which saves a lot of tedious handwaving. Instead, we get extended descriptions of how a very focused (not to say monomaniacal) multi-billionaire locates a frozen mammoth that he wants to clone. He ends up with rather more than that, namely a live juvenile mammoth named Fuzzy, plus some adults. That’s where the story really takes off. Were it not for an excess of bad language, this would be a great young adult book. As it is, this is a fun, if light, read even for non-SF fans.

Sometimes when I read a book that’s part of a series, I get the feeling that I’m dropping into a long-running relationship between the author and his previous readers. For example, I don’t think many people who pick up Reynolds’ Absolution Gap will find that it’s a satisfying read absent the knowledge of what happened in the first two books in that series.
Fortunately, Chuck Logan doesn’t have that problem. In After the Rain, he continues the relationship between his two primary characters from other books. Nina Pryce is a US Army officer and a member of SFOD-Delta (that’s just “Delta” to civilians), and her sometimes-estranged husband, Phil Broker, is an undercover cop. There’s a lot of history between them, or so we understand from their interplay in this book (I haven’t read any of Logan’s earlier books). Pryce is trying to penetrate what appears to be a terrorist plot in– get ready– North Dakota, and when she uses their 7-year-old daughter as an actress, Broker comes to town to pick her up. Of course, Broker ends up involved in the plot, which is reasonably twisty and turny. In the end, the bad guys fail, although not without cost to the good guys.
Logan’s strength in this book is its characterizations. Both Nina and Phil come off as real, multi-dimensional people: parents, lovers, and sheepdogs. Both of them have strengths and flaws in about equal measure, and the tumultuous nature of their relationships makes for some interesting interplay between them. I didn’t think the primary villain was nearly as well-defined, though– he was much more a cardboard bad guy from the psycho-killer bin at Characters-R-Us. The descriptions of the weather and terrain of a North Dakota summer are quite good, too, although not quite on a par with the lyricism of James Lee Burke or the noir of Barry Eisler.
Put it this way: I’ve already reserved Logan’s earlier Nina-and-Phil books from the library. I may or may not read them all, but I’m willing to give them a try.