Rest in Peace, Leonard Nimoy

From Emily Asher-Perrin: Goodbye, Mr. Nimoy.

Book Review: The Eye of the Needle

Ken Follett
1978
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book is a blockbuster page-turner with all the ingredients - war, sex, human drama, and international intrigue with the fate of the free world at stake. It also has several elements that I am a particular sucker for: spies, WWII-era Britain, remote Scottish islands, and violent storms at sea.

The main character is Henry Faber, a careful, ruthless, handsome German spy. Faber is known as Die Nadel (The Needle) because of the trademark stiletto he carries and with which he kills a fair number of people over the course of the book.

Traveling around the southeast coast of England in early 1944, Faber discovers that the forces the Germans have been observing building up in East Anglia, which they believe will be used to invade France at Calais, are a hoax. He even is able to take a roll of pictures of dummy cardboard planes to prove it. This leads him to the natural (and correct) conclusion that the Allies are planning to invade at Normandy instead. If he is able to let his bosses in Germany know this, it could change the entire course of the war.

Faber then tries to make his way up from London to his contact, a U-boat stationed off the coast of Scotland, before he is caught by the pesky MI5 agents on his tail. He runs into a number of frustrating delays and setbacks. Desperate, he eventually steals a fishing boat and sets out for sea in the middle of a huge storm, only to get shipwrecked on a barren, windswept island populated by only four people: an old shepherd, a young farmer who lost his legs in a car accident, the farmer’s sexy estranged wife, and their baby son.

The shepherd and farmer are immediately hostile and suspicious, but the wife, Lucy, is quite receptive to Faber... to say the least. The challenge for Die Nadel then is to elude the two men, find a way to contact the U-boat by radio or boat, and to avoid getting distracted by falling in love with Lucy.

Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan are pensive in the
1981 screen adaptation of this blockbuster.

Like The Day of the Jackal, the story is told primarily from the point of view of the bad guy. This can get emotionally confusing. On the one hand, Faber is the enemy and you want him to get caught, and you don’t like that he kills Home Guards and innocent rooming house landladies. But, on the other hand, almost up to the very end, you root for him to win his hand-to-hand fights and to get it on with Lucy.

The details of spycraft are not as gritty and realistic as in, say, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - but then again, Follett doesn’t have the advantage of a background in British intelligence like LeCarré does.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Fact vs. Fiction in The Imitation Game

In December, L.V. Anderson published an article on Slate.com called "How Accurate Is The Imitation Game?" which went item by item through the film to see how close it was to reality.

The verdict: not too darned close. As Anderson says,

I discovered that The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of events, and misrepresenting the very nature of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park. At the same time, the film might paint Turing as being more unlovable than he actually was.

It appears that the only the truly accurate parts of the film were that Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, that he was trying to crack the German Enigma machine, and that he worked on the prototype of the modern computer. 

Other than that, well ... not much else sticks to the facts. His co-workers say he was a very likeable guy, he was quite open about his sexuality, he likely never even knew John Cairncross (the man who turned out to be a Soviet spy), and there's no indication that he ever needed to separate his carrots and peas.

Ah, well... I enjoyed the movie anyway.

Middle Earth in Google Maps

Map created by mbingcrosby and posted on Reddit. Full version here. 

Book Review: Citizen Vince

Jess Walter
2005
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

This book started out with promise but ended up being a disappointment.

Part of my disappointment was in the ridiculously unrealistic naiveté of the gangsters. The other part was that I let myself get cool ideas about what might happen to the main character, but what actually happened was not nearly as exciting as what I had imagined.

The main character, Marty Hagen, is a small-time hood from New York City. He had a successful racket going in credit-card theft until he got himself in debt to some bigger-time hoods. He then turned state’s evidence, was put into the witness protection program, took a new name (Vince Camden), and moved to Spokane, Washington, where he became a baker in a doughnut shop.

The story opens in Spokane when, unfortunately, Vince’s old life has caught up to him in the form of a hit man sent by his New York creditors to kill him after they discovered where he was living.

It’s a typical formula for a gangster book – an essentially well-meaning, nonviolent hood trying to work towards a better, less felonious life.

What I liked about it was that it takes place in 1980, during the last few months leading up to the Carter/Reagan election. Vince, who had never cared for politics in the past, and who certainly has enough to deal with already with the hit man after him, gets more and more distracted by the race until it’s almost all he can think about. He gets his voter registration card, goes to hear politicians speak, and even befriends a guy running for local office. It gives him a new focus and new reasons for pursuing his dreams.

The politics give a colorful background and atmosphere to the otherwise run-of-the-mill plot. Vince hears Reagan’s now-legendary one-liners and reads headlines about the hostage negotiations with Iran and has to react and interpret them in real time, as we had to, without the benefit of hindsight. There are even a couple short entertaining sections written from Carter’s and Reagan’s points of view (judiciously informed by the twenty-five years that passed between then and when the book was written).

The problem is that the political background is just that–background. At first, I thought for sure that Vince was going to get more deeply involved in it and maybe even run for office himself. He shows a natural ability for it and makes contacts very quickly. I thought it would end up being a story about redemption through public service, or at the very least an ironic statement about the type of person it takes to succeed in politics. But it doesn’t. Vince never does anything besides vote, and even that, by the time he does it, seems a bit pointless and hollow. (Even for me, a rabid voter.)

The other problem with this book that I mentioned earlier is that the gangsters really do not act like gangsters. Get this: When Vince realizes that his creditors in New York have sent a hit man to kill him, he flies to New York, finagles his way into a poker game with them, reveals who he is, and tells them that he is in witness protection. He then tells them that he bears them no ill will, that he will pay them back everything that he owes them, and that he has had an epiphany and that all he wants to do is to go back to Spokane and become a full-time donut baker, and he does this so convincingly that they believe him, and they let him go back to Spokane, with only a relatively minor favor to do in return.

Come on. I watched The Sopranos. I know they had to kill Adriana once she got caught by the Feds, no matter what she promised or how much Christopher loved her. No way would these guys let a snitch leave New York alive.


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

Red Shirt

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

How to Tell if You Are in a High Fantasy Novel (from The Toast)

Excerpts below from a recent post on The Toast entitled How To Tell if You Are in a High Fantasy Novel.

The Elders would like a word with you.

Something that has not happened in a thousand years is happening.

Certain members of the Council are displeased with your family’s recent actions.

A bard is providing occasional comic relief; no one hired or invited him and his method of earning a living is unclear.

The High Priest is not to be trusted.

Someone is eating an apple mockingly.

It is the first page, and you are already late for something. Your mother affectionately chides you as you gulp down a few spoonfuls of porridge; she will be dead by page forty-two.

The real trouble began the day you arrived at court. Every last nobleman hides a viper in his smile. How you long for the purity of life in your village, which is currently on fire or something.

Will Red Mars FInally Make it to TV?

According to Tor.com, Spike TV now has real plans to adapt Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Red Mars for television. From their January 22nd blog post:

Finally, Spike TV took over the rights—and according to Deadline, they’ve signed on Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski to adapt Red Mars...

“The heart of this series tackles the question of what it means to be human—and can we sustain our humanity under incredible duress,” said Sharon Levy, Spike TV’s Executive VP of Original Series. Robinson will serve as consultant on the series, which is being produced by Game of Thrones co-executive producer Vince Gerardis.

I hope this isn't another false hope... 

Book Review: The Integral Trees

Larry Niven

1983

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Larry Niven has done it again: created a clever, original, self-contained, outer-space habitat of strange configuration and enormous scope. It may not be as fully realized as his Ringworld, but it is still unique and impressive.

                                                  

Niven’s new bio-zone exists in a binary star system thousands of light years from Earth. One of the stars is a tiny, almost defunct neutron star. The neutron star is orbited by an enormous torus of gaseous cloud, which is probably the remnants of a large gas planet destroyed when the star went nova. The whole package—gas torus and central star—orbits together around the system’s other star, a bright yellow dwarf.

The gas torus is filled with oxygen and completely hospitable to a wide variety of life forms. The only catch is that there is no real gravity in the torus, just strong winds blowing around it which create tidal pulls: west-to-east on the inner rim and east-to-west on the outer rim. All indigenous fauna have adapted accordingly, each species having their own form of winged or expelled-gas-driven locomotion. I loved the strange native beasties that Niven created for this gravity-less environment.

And there are a number of neat places for the torus’s inhabitants to live. There are ponds: large globules of water drifting slowly around in the winds. There are jungles: conglomerations of plants and vines held together by a web of their own roots and branches. And there are trees: trees with enormous trunks, some a hundred kilometers tall, growing radially out from the central neutron star to the outer edge of the torus. The trunks are completely straight and smooth except for a small tuft of leaves and branches at each end. These tufts blow in the wind, eastward at the inner end and westward at the outer end, so that from afar, the entire tree looks like an integral symbol.
 

These various habitats are home not only to many native species, but also to humans—perhaps hundreds of them. These humans are the descendants of a handful of Earth space explorers who emerged from cryo-sleep far from home, mutinied against their ship’s oppressive AI guardian, and fled in research modules to start a new life of freedom in the torus. Centuries have passed since the original mutiny and the mutineers’ descendants have forgotten most of their history and science and now live as rudimentary farmers, hunters, and artisans.

I have to admit that I thought this was all a bit goofy at first. But I was sucked in to the story despite myself.

The story starts on one of the enormous integral trees, Quinn Tree, which has recently been pulled into a dry lower zone of the torus by the gravitational field of a passing planet remnant. The tree is dying, suffering from drought, and so is the human settlement on its inward tuft. The chief administrator of the settlement orders a troupe of nine misfits to climb up the trunk to try to find new sources of food and water for their starving village. After the misfits cross the midpoint of the tree they run into another population of humans they never knew about, which has completely different customs and taboos. The two groups fight, but the rotting tree bursts apart during their skirmish, casting the Quinn settlement misfits and one of the strangers adrift. They are all left floating together in the air, clutching a large piece of bark as a life raft.

Through creativity and cooperation, the bark-raft refugees survive and eventually make their way to a jungle. They only just start making friends with the humans living there when the jungle is invaded by a more technologically advanced group of humans from another tree. The whole batch of them—the original Quinn Tree misfits, the same-tree adoptee, and their new jungle allies—are all taken prisoner, brought to the invaders’ London Tree, and made into slaves and/or prostitutes. There they all suffer to varying degrees, trying to survive and doing what they can to stay in touch with each other, and carefully waiting and watching for a time when they can make their escape and get to a tree of their own.

The Integral Trees is almost Asimovian in that there is very little actual action, and that the story keeps you involved instead by having characters that are sympathetic and interesting, and constantly giving those characters new and complex problems to solve to survive. When there is action, it is exciting, but most of the book is exposition, conversations, problem-solving, journeying, and discovery.

The one character that didn’t really seem to have much of a point was Sharls Davis Kendy, the cyber-copy AI on board the original colonists’ ship, who has been locked in orbit for the past 500 years, waiting for the mutineers to come back so he can discipline them. The Quinn Tree misfits come close to him at one point, and even talk to him briefly, but in the end nothing comes of it and he is relegated to his waiting role once again.

But the rest of the characters and the rest of the story more than make up for the Kendy dead end. And the best thing about the book is the message running throughout about the importance of inclusiveness and the benefits that diversity brings. The original nine from Quinn Tribe are continually thrust into new life-threatening situations, but they overcome every obstacle by opening themselves up to new friends and allies, by working together, and by learning about and making good use of everyone’s skills—even the oldest and the most seemingly physically incapable. Their journey is really all about building a new tribe that includes members from all the varied places they come across, where they all can be free and be themselves. It’s an optimistic and uplifting message, and it doesn’t really ever get too hokey.

Suggestions for Narragansett Brewing Company's Line of H.P. Lovecraft Beer

According to a recent story in Boston Magazine, the Narragansett Brewing Company in Rhode Island is  coming out with a series of beers memorializing H. P. Lovecraft. From the story:

Narragansett will release their new Lovecraft Honey Ale on January 19, the birthday of Lovecraft’s biggest literary influence, Edgar Allan Poe. The collaboration with Revival Brewing, another Rhode Island product, will be the first “chapter” in a four-part series of beers celebrating Providence’s most famous native son.

Not being a big fan of hoppy beer, Cthulhu is skeptical of this first offering, but is nevertheless excited about the new product line in general. Eager for a nice porter or cream stout, some Lovecraft aficionados of my acquaintance came up with these other suggestions for the remaining beers in Narragansett's promising new line. What do you say, NBC?

Unspeakable Oathmeal Stout (gibbous in color, unnamable in taste)

The Black Book Porter

Mi-Go Space Mead

Impossible Geometry IPA

Yellow Sign Weissbier

Mountains of Madness Ice Beer
Miskatonic Blueberry Ale
Eldritch Ichor Dunkelweiss

The magazine says that the next beer in the Lovecraft series will be an Innsmouth old ale. Hopefully it will not taste too much like Atlantic codfish.