Starship Octopi

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Book Review: Black Cherry Blues

James Lee Burke
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book was well-paced and suspenseful. The core plot was good. It wasn’t cheap or sloppy or half-heartedly put together. Otherwise, however, it was pretty much a disappointment.

The descriptions of the Louisiana and Montana landscapes, cuisine, and people seemed self-conscious and smug. So did the main character’s constant running and weightlifting. Conversations were full of phrases that I think were supposed to be clever but just came out as annoying. The treatment of race was weird. And the hero had a streak of violence in him that seriously undercut his indignation about violent behavior in others.

The story is about a former cop, Dave Robicheaux, who lives on the Louisiana coast making a modest living running a bait shop and fishing boat rental business. His inner circle consists of two people who help him out around the shop and his house, and an adopted daughter, Alafair, from El Salvador. He is continually haunted by dreams of both the Vietnam war and his dead wife, who was killed by gangsters getting revenge on him for some past escapade.

Aside from the dreams, all is basically well with Robicheaux’s life until he bumps into an old friend: a drug-addicted, down-on-his-luck former rock-and-roll star now working as a leaseman for an oil company. His friend asks him to investigate a conversation that he overheard between two co-workers talking about how they killed a couple guys up in Montana. Before he knows it, Robicheaux is sucked up into a web of danger and intrigue involving mobsters, hired hit men, hot-blooded Salish Indian women, and, of course, winsome elementary school principals who have such incredible generosity they don’t mind that he keeps dumping his kid on them when he needs to go beat up a guy or confront a mobster or otherwise put himself in a life-threatening situation.

In the course of his investigation, Robicheaux has to travel from Louisiana to Montana, giving the author plenty of opportunity to show his intimate knowledge of both (Burke lives in Louisiana and spends a lot of vacation time in Montana). Sometimes an author will bring you into a country with them, sharing it with you, making you feel like you understand it too (as in The Healer’s War, Dance Hall of the Dead, or The Lingala Code). But Burke’s descriptions mostly came off as either braggadocio or as inside jokes I wasn’t privy to. Also, although his descriptions of scenery are quite detailed, I nevertheless found it strangely hard to picture.

I had a bit of a hard time with how Burke portrays black people in the book. Robicheaux is white. About the black man and woman who work for him (whose poor grammar he is constantly making fun of), he says: “I was always amazed by the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.” I think this is supposed to come across as a compliment, or perhaps wryly funny, but, since he shows no real understanding of what his employees are like as people, it comes across as a tad patronizing. When push comes to shove, who’s really in charge of that bait shop? This is also the only time in the book he calls them anything but “Negro.” I might be a prude, and I might not be understanding the cultural context in Louisiana, but I’m not sure that “Negro” is the absolutely best term for 1989.

Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic, but I found his recovery very glossy. It felt more like a gimmick than an integral part of his character. He goes through a dry drunk complete with fever and tremors one day, and then the next day goes to get an ice cream cone with his daughter like nothing ever happened. He is also very smug about abstinence with his rock-and-roller friend, who still struggles with self-control every day. It is a pale shadow of Lawrence Block’s excellent Matt Scudder novels, another detective series with an alcoholic lead, which, fortunately, I’ve had a chance to rave about already.

And, finally, Robicheaux is self-righteous and judgmental about the violence of the mobsters he’s investigating, but he himself has horrifyingly violent episodes. At one point, for example, he ambushes two goons who threatened the life of his daughter and spends probably fifteen minutes beating them within an inch of their lives with a five-foot length of chain. It doesn’t fit. If you’re going to be an anti-hero, you can’t go around on the one hand talking like you’re a saint and then on the other hand be eagerly and gratuitously bloody in your revenge. You need to take care of your problems with reluctant but necessary dispatch.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

I Ate Him

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Book Review: Helliconia Spring

Brian W. Aldiss

1982

Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Nebula, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

Sometimes it seems to me that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘50s and ‘60s was promoted as “the greatest epic since The Lord of the Rings,” and that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘70s and ‘80s was promoted as “the greatest epic since Dune.”

Very few of the books thus described actually measure up to either of these standards. Helliconia Spring is a case in point, advertised on its back cover as “the most magnificent epic since Dune.” It certainly is epic in its ambition, but as for its magnificence, I beg to differ.

Helliconia Spring is set on Helliconia, an Earth-like planet orbiting a binary star system. Helliconia circles its primary star once every 2,000 Earth years. During each of these Helliconian years the planet suffers through a devastating, icy-cold winter that is 600 Earth years long.

This means that the inhabitants are stuck in a stultifying cycle: civilizations flourish and advance technologically during the summers, but then any progress they make is wiped out when winter comes; the cold drives them back to a hunter-gatherer existence, leaving them to scrape out whatever kind of living they can.

The novel sweeps across hundreds of Earth years, starting in the middle of one of these prolonged winters and ending with the onset of spring. It mainly tells the life stories of three principal patriarchs of the same family, several generations apart (but there are plenty of digressions into other characters’ narratives along the way).

The first of these patriarchs is Yuli, a nomadic hunter living deep in the heart of winter. Yuli and his father are out on a hunting trip when they are attacked by a band of the other intelligent beings living on Helliconia: the horned, furry, goat-like, human-hating phagors. The phagors kill Yuli’s father but Yuli himself escapes. Eventually Yuli finds his way to Pannoval, a huge and relatively advanced but repressive underground city where he is adopted into a foster family. He gets the best education Pannoval can give him and even becomes a priest, but he never forgets his former life above ground. Eventually he runs away from Pannoval with a few friends and makes his way back up to the surface where he founds a new village, Oldorando.

The story is then taken up many generations later with Yuli’s direct descendant “Little” Yuli, who is the leader of the now much larger town of Oldorando. Little Yuli gets pretty short shrift; he dies soon after he is introduced, and we learn more about his life from the stories told by the citizens gathered at his funeral rather than seeing events happen for ourselves. The main contribution Little Yuli makes to the novel is that his death opens up a succession controversy; his only child is a daughter (and everyone knows that women cannot rule), and his only grandson, Laintal Ay, is too little to govern.

The rest of the book is a frustratingly aimless recitation of Laintal Ay’s twisting, turning early life story. He grows up under a series of interim town leaders, none of whom are model citizens. He becomes a trusted lieutenant of one of them, then falls out of favor; he falls in love and is rewarded, and then rebuffed; he goes on a heart-stricken pilgrimage far away during which he contracts a horrible disease, then he comes back.

I started out optimistically at the beginning of this book, moderately bored but hopeful that it would pick up steam, and ended up actively resentful at sitting through meandering story lines with little resolution to them. Time really whips along: people grow, marry, have children, and die, and you can barely keep track of them (and barely want to). At one point, in just six pages, Oldorando changed from a backwards agricultural settlement to a village that launched mounted raids on other villages to a trade economy using metal currency.

There are occasional tantalizing hints of more interesting things we could explore further—in particular, an approaching phagor invasion, a woman who revolts against traditional women’s work and founds an academy of learning, and an Earth observation satellite hovering unseen above all the action—but we get no real long-term satisfaction from of any of them.

I think Lord of the Rings and Dune worked as epics because, even though they are incredibly long and detailed, they also center on distinctive, charismatic characters that I really grew to know and understand and often care about. Helliconia Spring, on the other hand, is more of a dispassionate biblical litany, a string of names and places and incidents happening to people to whom I felt no particular attachment.

The tone isn’t helped by Aldiss’ somewhat formal prose and his frequent use of the passive voice, as in “the Vakka had been bridged” and “his figure could be seen.” The characters’ names also tend to be a little bit ridiculous, and are easy to confuse with each other if you aren’t paying close enough attention. To wit:

                                          

Raynil Layan

Laintal Ay

Loil Bry

            Loilanun

Eline Tal

Rol Sakil

            Dol Sakil

            Hrr-Brahl Yprt

Yhamm-Whrrmar

I think I am probably more disappointed in this book than I might otherwise be because I had higher expectations for Aldiss. His novella The Saliva Tree, which won the Nebula in 1965, was really very good. It just may be that the epic is not his best format.

Geordi Cat: Beam Me Up a Treat Right Meow

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Book Review: The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
1970
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book was an enjoyable combination of decent plot, good characters, and great style.

It is a murder mystery set in Stockholm. It sucks you in right away, starting with a pretty gripping description of the shooting of nine people on a double-decker bus late at night in a remote part of the city. Two less-than-enthusiastic patrolmen from the bordering suburb of Solna stumble across the bus first and trample all over the scene, eliminating many of the clues.

To make matters worse, one of the murdered passengers turns out to be an off-duty member of the homicide squad who had no discernable reason for being on that bus.

The case, naturally, becomes a red ball for the Stockholm P.D. and you spend the rest of the book watching the stressed-out detectives solve the crime.

It was neat to read a mystery set in Stockholm. I got to see not only the Swedish police but also a bit of Swedish culture from the inside. Stockholm becomes not an abstract, glamorous European destination but a big, real, gritty city. Northern and southern Swedish accents set peers apart and make them feel inferior. Americans start to look a little bit strange and foreign.

I liked that the team of Stockholm detectives is made up of distinctive, believable characters. You see the story from almost every detective’s point of view and you see how confused and frustrated they all are.

I also loved the writing style. The authors (a husband and wife team) use matter-of-fact, uncomplicated sentences that are just a little bit quirky. The book was originally written in Swedish but I don’t think it’s the translation to the English that makes the writing style so entertaining. This is the description of the patrol route the uninspired Solna patrolmen chose before they ran across the bus – a route designed to avoid running into anything that might actually require policing:

“It was a brilliantly thought-out course, leading through areas which were almost guaranteed empty of people. They met not a single car the whole way and saw only two living creatures, first a cat and then another cat.”

Often what the authors will do is start out with a really short sentence that has only basic information in it. Then they’ll repeat the sentence, making it a little bit longer by elaborating just a little bit. And then they’ll do that again… and again. Until after about five sentences, you have this really long sentence with all kinds of crazy detail in it that is a hundred times more informative than the original sentence. It’s like they’re reluctant to tell the story but can’t help letting it dribble out in spite of themselves.

There were, however, a couple things about the book that were annoying. For one thing, sometimes key pieces of information would be withheld from me and then would be revealed by the policeman I’d been following without me even knowing that he’d been doing any extra investigation. I don’t mind surprises but I like at least knowing that there’s something I don’t know. This felt like my characters were sneaking around behind my back.

And, frankly, the motives of the culprit, some of the victims, and the dead policeman’s girlfriend, all of which were key to the plot, seemed a bit dicey and unrealistic.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: A Cold Red Sunrise

Stuart M. Kaminsky
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I really liked most of the characters and the setting of this book. But the main murder plot just wasn’t very gripping.

The story is set in the tiny town of Tumsk, Siberia. Police detective Rostnikov is sent from Moscow to investigate the murder of another detective who was killed while investigating the death of a little girl – the daughter of a dissident who is about to get deported to the west.

Rostnikov is extremely appealing; gruff and plainspoken. He is honest and works very hard but has run afoul of the KGB a couple times back in Moscow, so this is sort of a test for him. He has a very tall, unemotional, doggedly loyal assistant, Karpo, who is a little like Lurch from the Addams Family. The Party watchdogs are, of course, totally incompetent and full of bluster. I felt like all the townspeople were well-defined, down to the nervous old woman who serves the visiting policemen their food. The conversation was spare and direct.

Siberia itself also plays a great part in the book. Rostnikov is sent to Tumsk during the winter, so it is always ridiculously cold and the sun barely rises at all in the sky in the daytime. Snow is piled everywhere, several feet high. A snowplow (run by the Navy personnel manning the town’s weather station) clears the streets at 6:00 am every morning and serves as the town alarm clock. Most of the town’s residents are dissidents or skeptics or (like the incompetent Party watchdogs) rejects from Moscow of some kind. Everyone seems very much alone, isolated by the cold and the remote location.

The problem is that the murder story itself is a little simple and maybe a little tired. Rostnikov keeps all his information close to the vest, including from the reader, which is frustrating because you aren’t really able to make your own guesses (and thereby build up your suspense) from the evidence he uncovers. I do appreciate last-minute surprise revelations but in this book practically all the information you need comes out in the last ten pages.

It turned out that I did correctly guess who the murderer was, but mainly I just guessed that person because he/she seemed like the least likely suspect, and that’s who Agatha Christie teaches you to look out for. I still am not sure I really understand his/her motive.

Because of the plot issues, I was a bit surprised that this book won the Edgar. But the book did come out at the perfect time: the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was in its final crumble. Kaminsky’s detective and his assistant both have integrity and are just trying to do their jobs, and yet–or maybe because of that–they both end up struggling in their own ways against the oppressive system they live in. They are very sympathetic characters for the end of the Cold War.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Clash of the Titans

In 1980, a book named Titan won the Locus award for best novel. In 2007, another book named Titan won the Campbell award for best novel. Herewith, I give you a comparison of the two.

Novel	Titan	Titan
Author	John Varley	Ben Bova
Year Published	1979	2006
Award Won	Locus	Campbell
Stars	2	2
Plot Summary	Group of Earth scientists goes out to Saturn and gets swallowed up by giant alien orbital construct	Group of Earth scientists goes out to Saturn and gets swallowed up in convoluted melodrama
Ostensible reason for main characters visiting Saturn	Scientific exploration and research (investigating anomalies on Saturn’s moons)	Scientific research (mixed bag of atmospheric, ring, and moon investigation)
Intended duration of visit	Temporary	Permanent
Name of spaceship	Ringmaster	Goddard
Percent of book actually taking place on Titan	0%	20%
Snappy, male-sounding name of female spaceship captain main character	Cirocco Jones	Pancho Lane
Female main characters’ view of procreation	Determined to control their own procreation; three have to have an abortion to do so	Determined to get the right to have children in their space habitat; one has to run for chief administrator to do so
Forms of life discovered by humans	Centaurs; winged humanoids; killer mudfish; intelligent gas-filled blimps	Microbes in Titan’s methane seas; tiny creatures in Saturn’s ring ice
Irritating writing habits of author	Gratuitous use of palm-slapping, knuckle biting, and lip chewing	Silly regional accents; gratuitous use of dipping of the chin

Book Review: Titan (by Ben Bova)

Ben Bova

2006

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Before I begin trashing the plot and characters of Ben Bova’s Titan, let me say first that the parts of this book that were actually directly related to science fiction are fine. Bova does a perfectly reasonable job of describing futuristic capabilities of medical nanotechnology, the components of a space station habitat, and the methane slush and smog on the surface of Titan. Not as great a job as, say, Kim Stanley Robinson, but perfectly good.

                                                                      

Unfortunately, the science fiction parts of this book are largely drowned out by the irritating, unlikeable characters and the tiresome soap opera going on among them. Not to mention the tremendously awkward presentation of gender conflicts.

In Titan, a group of ten thousand people have all flown out together from Earth on the spacecraft Goddard and are now living in it in the orbit of Saturn. Their voyage has been funded by a coalition of universities and is primarily meant for scientific research, but the Goddard also carries Earth exiles, administrators, mechanics, and rich tourists interested in exploring the solar system.

The book has a huge cast of characters, few of whom have identifiably distinct personalities. And they are all introduced rapid-fire in the first part of the book, so there is no real chance to get to know any of them well. This is just one book in Bova’s multi-part “Grand Tour” series of solar system exploration and it’s possible that some of these characters would be more familiar and appealing to me if I had read the earlier installments of that series, but I haven’t, and they aren’t.

If any characters can be said to be particularly central to the plot, I guess it would be protagonist Pancho Lane and antagonist Malcolm Eberly. Lane is the retired former CEO of a giant tech company and an accomplished space pilot. She is on Goddard partly because she’s there visiting her sister Holly, and partly because she’s bored with life back on Earth. Eberly is the nauseatingly selfish and manipulative chief administrator of the Goddard habitat, and he is willing to do anything it takes to enhance his own power.

For most of the book, the main dramatic tension centers around Eberly’s run for reelection. He initially thinks he is a shoe-in, since he promises untold wealth for everyone in the habitat if they allow him to mine water from Saturn’s rings for export to other space outposts. But he doesn’t count on two things:

(1) Pancho Lane teaming up with an admiral, a stuntman, and a plucky group of scientists to try to prove that there are living organisms in the rings of Saturn, which would prevent them from being mined; and

(2) Pancho’s sister Holly Lane, who decides to run against Eberly in the election.

There is also a good amount of time spent on a secondary plotline about an exploratory probe sent to Titan. The probe goes dead as soon as it gets to the moon’s surface, and the leader of the project, Edouard Urbain, drives his staff over the edge of exhaustion trying to reactivate it. This story had far more potential than the election melodrama, but, unfortunately, nothing major plot-wise ever really came from it, so I sort of wondered what the point of it was.

No, unfortunately, far more time is spent not on exploratory moon probes but on internal habitat politics and, in particular, the grossly mishandled topic of zero population growth. The Goddard has limited space, so everyone on it signed an agreement that they wouldn’t have any children on the flight out to Saturn. Now that they have reached Saturn, however, they want to start having babies. Eberly refuses to even talk about it, so Holly runs against him, not because she thinks she has a prayer of winning, but just to force the issue.

The debate quickly divides the habitat cleanly down gender lines. Nearly 100% of all women aboard are apparently universally in favor of and desperately in need of the unfettered production of children, and nearly 100% of the men aboard, are at the very most, neutral on the topic, if not actively against it.

Some women on the ship refuse to have sex with their husbands until they agree to Holly’s platform—and their men, of course, relent. Holly’s rallies are almost 100% women except for a few men who have either been forced to come by their wives or who are there to cover it for the media.

And her speeches are smugly described by her supporters as “women’s issues,” even though population control in this context is hardly only a women’s issue. People are motivated to reproduce—or not—for a host of complex motives. There are plenty of men who want to have children. There are plenty of women who don’t. There are people of both sexes who are unsure. I think Bova thought that he was making a relevant cultural statement with this presentation of the topic. I couldn’t decide whether it was actually offensive, or just plain ridiculous.

Bova handles the writing of competent women, and their relationships with men and between each other, pretty badly in general. At one point, the head of the nanotech lab doesn’t want to re-assert a request for something she needs for her work because she doesn’t want to be thought of as a “nagging little woman.” At another point, two women—the head of the biology department and the leader of the project to find life in the rings of Saturn—can’t find a way to talk to each other professionally at first, but at last bond like giggling schoolgirls over lunch talking about how to get a man to like them.

And in another sparkling incident, one of these same women, the biology department head, tries to convince Urbain to let her work on a different project than his stuck probe. He refuses and she leaves his office crying, where she bumps into the meek, shy head of the computer science department. Her crying suddenly transforms the computer science head into a paragon of assertiveness who marches into Urbain’s office and demands that he treat his employees better. And then the biology department head and the computer science head promptly start dating.

One other thing I can’t help mentioning is that the sisters Holly and Pancho Lane have an incredibly annoying accent. One of them (Holly) is the head of human resources for the habitat and is running for chief administrator, and the other (Pancho) is a former head of a giant tech company and an accomplished space pilot. And yet they have this accent in which they use slang, jargon, and contractions in ways that make them sound like Valley Girls. It’s hard to take someone seriously when their vocabulary is sprinkled with f’real, c’mon, prob’ly, coupla, damfino, dontcha, jeeps, and terrif.

Okay, one more thing. Bova seems to be preoccupied with the chin as an indicator of emotion. I counted six instances where he had someone “dip” his or her “chin” to signify agreement (instead of, I suppose, just nodding). There are also a couple of times where someone scratches their chin to indicate confusion, and a couple times when people tipped their chins in surprise. It is a habit worthy of the lip-biting of Cyteen.

Book Review: Titan (by John Varley)

John Varley

1979

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

At the beginning of John Varley’s Titan, a small group of seven astronauts are headed out towards Saturn in the spaceship Ringmaster on an international mission of scientific exploration. Led by the independent and strong-willed but also somewhat irritatingly insecure Captain Cirocco Jones, it is a tight-knit crew with flexible romantic arrangements: by the end of the voyage, almost every person has slept with almost every other person of the opposite gender, and occasionally some people of the same gender.

The story is pretty slow to get going. During the first two chapters, which cover the voyage to Saturn, I was turned off enough by the characters’ personalities, the impersonal games of sexual musical chairs, and some of the author’s more annoying habits of prose that I was ready to give up.

Fortunately, things got better for a while. When the Ringmaster gets to Saturn, they discover a huge object in orbit around the planet. At first they think it is an undocumented moon, but as they get nearer it turns out to be an enormous, rotating torus-shaped artificial construct. They fly in close to investigate, their ship gets forcibly hauled in by a tentacled beast coming from the object, and they all go unconscious.

They then go through a surreal period of mental limbo after which they are all deposited in disparate places around the interior rim of the torus, which turns out to be an enormous oxygen-rich habitat filled with alien trees and grasses and animals. This is the best part of the book, as the members of the crew reunite and try to prevent themselves from being eaten by the native wildlife and killed by the indigenous sentient beings while they figure out how to escape and get home.

It seems very much like a combination of two earlier novels: Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go. The torus is like a mini version of Ringworld in its artificiality, its huge scale, the abruptly defined sections of night and day, and the variety of environments and life forms. And the characters’ rebirth inside it is reminiscent of the resurrection process from Farmer’s book: they emerge into a strange raw environment completely naked and hairless, and they have to rebuild their clothes, technology, and, in some cases, memories from scratch. (And, like Farmer’s characters, they also even eventually wind up traveling up a big central river in their own handmade boats.)

Unfortunately, the plot takes a turn for the worse in the last third of the book when Captain Jones decides she wants answers about what has happened to her crew, and that the only way to get those answers is by taking an arduous, tedious, months-long trek up to the center of the torus. I got exhausted by it long before the characters did. They would conquer one obstacle and then would be presented with another five times more daunting, including, at one point, a horrible rapist. Personally, I would have given up in the first week and gone back to the calm grassy land with the nice centaur people.

It started to seem especially pointless when they started downgrading the purpose behind the trek. Originally, they wanted to figure out how to escape the torus—which they had by this time started calling Gaea—and to get home. But later on they shift to just wanting an explanation for what happened, and then eventually they don’t care about saving themselves anymore but just want to prevent war between the indigenous sentient life forms of Gaea.

And when they do finally get to the center of Gaea, it is disappointingly anticlimactic. The entity at the center is a bit annoying, frankly, and offers pretty contrived reasoning for why they were captured, held, changed, stripped, and released. After the huge build-up of their journey, the whole thing was hastily explained in a matter of fifteen or so pages, and then everybody (or almost everybody) goes back to their preferred homes with new-found celebrity status and lives happily ever after.

One aspect of the writing that didn’t help is that descriptions of physical locations were sometimes very confusing. For the most part, the writing was very straightforward, but during particularly dramatic moments or crucial expository sections, settings suddenly became un-picturable. For example:

     The support cables came in rows of five organized into groups of fifteen, and rows of three standing alone.

     Each night region had fifteen cables associated with it. There was a row of five vertical cables that went straight up the hollow horn in the roof that was the inside of one of the spokes of Gaea’s wheel. Two of these came to the ground in the highlands and were virtually a part of the wall, one north and the other south. One emerged from a point midway between the outermost cables, and the other two were spaced evenly between the center and edge cables.

     In addition to these central cables, the night regions had two more rows of five that radiated from the spokes but attached in daylight areas, one row twenty degrees east and the other twenty degrees west of the central row.   (Titan, Page 121)

I don’t think I should have to be a geographer or an architect to be able to imagine this scene. Ringworld, too, was an artificial ring-shaped habitat created by aliens, and had more diversity of habitat on a much larger scale, but it was so vividly and clearly described that I felt like I always could picture the environment and structure with no problems—even the complicated side wall ports where ships docked and the suspended sheets creating night and day.

And one other final peeve: it seemed that in the sections of the book where the plot was laboring the hardest, Varley would slip into expressing his characters’ emotions through overdramatic physical actions that human beings don’t often really do. People chewed on their knuckles; they palmed, slammed, or slapped control panel buttons; they variously hit their palm on a bed, smacked a tree with the palm of their hand, and hit their forehead with the heel of their hand; and, of course, they bit their lips and their tongues.