a-cubed.info

The third installment of the “Trains in Space” sequence see Frank once again confronted by a murder (almost) on his doorstep. Barely has he got home from the last adventure but he finds a beautiful woman waiting in his house – having broken in. Having ejected her he’s then called to her murder scene, since she stole his gun which puts him under suspicion. There follows the usual routine o on-planet and on-train shenanigens between Frank and his arch-enemy the Modhri. Once again there’s plenty of action and a few twists in the tail. it is, however, getting harder for Zahn to retain the tension of the onboard adventures. The limiting factor of the trains was an interesting one in an SF setting to start with but it’s now getting quite restrictive for this action-adventure series. Still good, but there it’s getting harder to sustain, I think.

Japanese has a lot of homophones. This is at least partly due to their importing of Chinese characters and their pronunciation. Japanese has a much more limited set of phonemes than Chinese and so symbols which have different sounds in Chinese get imported into the same sound in Japanese. These collisions or near collisions make Japanese a great language for puns, as are Chinese and English for both related and different reasons. My flashcard system Anki is set to give me 15 new cards a day from (currently) the JLPT 1 set of vocabulary, which some kind other user have entered (I alter them to my needs and preferences as they come up). Today, the word 幹部 pronounced “kanbu” meaning executive, senior manager or officer came up. I often double-check words for extra meanings (and particularly for use as adjectives – many Japanese nouns can be used as adjectives with the particle な or the adjectival phrase 的な added). The electronic dictionary I use does lookup by phonetic entry (using roman letters though it has a kana entry option as well, though most Japanese people seem to use the roman letters, too). The first entry for “kanbu” is not the word I was looking for, but the homophone 患部 meaning “diseased part”. Great fun for puns, methinks.

Apologies if the Japanese characters don’t get transferred to LJ properly.

The sequel to Night Train to Rigel continues the adventures of Frank Compton, the interstellar Quadrail system and his sworn enemy the Modhri group mind. In this installment, further machinations by the progenitures (OK, the Shonkla-raa they’re caled in this universe) are revealed and despite the “Third Man” reference in the title, this is a bit more of a Maltese Falcon than anything else. A bit of breaking and entering, a 1%er getting beaten to death on a train (we pretty much know who from the start, so this is a “whydunnit” rather than a “who dunnit”). Enough plot twists to create the Monaco Grand Prix circuit, with a few bits of paranoia thrown in. If you like the first, it’s definitely worth keeping on with these.

I’m not caught up yet with reviews, but this one is fairly easy to do since, in the best “Blue Peter” tradition, “Here’s one I prepared earlier”. I first read and reviewed this book when it came out and re-reading the review, my views didn’t change on a second reading. It’s still tightly plotted, with a great background, nice characters who get rounded out. Plus, “Trains in Spaaaaaace!”

Original Vector Review:

Night Train to Rigel is, as the name suggests, something of a homage to the hard boiled detective novel. Unlike many such pastiches, however, this one involves a real Space Opera background to go with the cliches of the beautiful woman, the convoluted plot twists and the gun play.

We start with the almost-obligatory corpse. Not only is this in complete keeping with the hard boiled genre, but it provides the staple start to the story with the hero knowing a lot less than everyone supposes (allowing the author to keep us as well as the main character in the dark) while providing the other characters with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. Frank Compton is an engaging principal character whose own present agenda is kept nicely hidden from the reader while his background and character are revealed in just enough detail to flesh him out. His James Bond antics are believable given the sacked government agent background, and his connections at the highest level of this multi-lifeform society provides enough clues and red herrings to keep the reader guessing about the main plot until the end.

In fact, the whole book is a nicely judged balance of detail and broad brush, explanation, obfuscation and revelation. Building not just a single new world but a number of them, complete with fast than light transit system between them, would be enough for several books this long for many authors but Zahn presents a mostly convincing past, present and potentially holocaust-riven future in a mere 350 pages while bringing the plot along at a fair clip. In scenes reminiscent not just of books from the forties but a whole sub-genre of movies, too, a substantial chunk of the action takes place aboard a nicely imagined interstellar train service, allowing for the usual sense of isolation yet urgency this provides.  In a nod to his own inspirations, even, the principle character realises the parallels between his own situation and classics such as The Lady Vanishes.

The final expose of the plot is a satisfying explanation of the underlying mysteries of everyone involved, while the bad guys are given both justification and a measure of pathos to round things out, while the good guys have their own moral dilemmas and secretes, so neither side are cardboard cut-outs.

We may see Frank Compton back on the interstellar rails again at some point in the future, gumshoeing his way around the galaxy, but then again after saving not one but several space-going civilisations, how could he top this? Given the skill with which Zahn presents a whole new world in one reasonable length volume, he could go on to a whole new setup each time.

Definitely worth catching if you like any or all of rip-roaring space opera adventure stories, hard boiled SF or futuristic train travel.

This is the fourth and very newly released Laundry novel. Unlike The Fuller Memorandum, Amazon Japan had it available pretty much as soon as it was published in the US. Normally I’d have re-read the series before going into this one but as those reading my book blogging know I’ve already re-read the sequence this year.

This time, Bob is up against a US televangelist. As with Fuller Memorandum, this deviates from first-person storytelling. This time, even more so. I remember Charlie struggling with how to tell the story he wanted to tell within the constraint of a first person “memoir” narrative but where the narrator in question is being moved into a management role and therefore lacking direct experience. The end point of this conundrum is deftly handled, but I’ll leave you to find out how he deals with it yourself.

This is, as usual, a well-written piece and a worthy addition to the Laundry Files. It is, though, not as scary as The Fuller Memorandum. I had to think hard to work out why. I think the problem is that both the bad guy and the “reveal” in TFM twist things around a lot and in particular the identity of the bad guy works well with the Buffy Principle (real life is scarier than monsters). This time the bad guy is a US televanglist. These guys are horrible, creepy and scary to begin with, so I at least am already inured to the horror of their actions.

Not that this isn’t scary, but it’s a different sort of scary. As CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN approaches, Bob’s scary life is getting scarier, including the fact that he’s not in control any more. Well, he is in control, but in the same way that a navigator in a rally car is in control, rather than the way a driver is in control. Now he’s got to set tactics and policy and wait for the results.

Interestingly, as I blogged about before, there are some interesting parallels with the Simon Canderous series, that come through even more so when the reality behind Mahogany Row is revealed. Not that I think either author is cribbing from the other – they’re just writing from a similar playbook style, I think.

If you haven’t read the Laundry, and aren’t totally freaked by Lovecraftian horrors (written into algorithmic science fiction) then what are you waiting for?

I’ve got way behind on my book blogging again recently, so a catch-up post for a series instead of dealing wth them all separately.

More urban fantasy again. The main character of this one is a former low-level thief and grifter with a talent for psychometry: the ability to psychically read the history of an object. He’s recruited to the New York Department of Extraordinary Affairs and does his best to go straight, though he still uses his talent to make extra money on the side, just without crossing the lines. There are some shades of the Laundry Files, with much more of an American slant to it, of course. The eldritch horrors of cultists, zombies, ghosts, vampires and sundry other bumps in the night are counterpoised with budget constraints, huge towering piles of paperwork, the Mayor’s Office of Plausible Deniability and management training courses.

In the first installment Simon Canderous, the aofrementioned psychometrist, has to deal with cultists gone mainstream: the Sectarian Defense League (cultists with a good PR agent) are planning some nasty shenanigans from their office in the Empire State Building and during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the meantime they send a fomer temp now benefits-enabled office worker to spy on and perhaps assassinate Simon. That works out well for him since they turn on her when she fails, and since she was only ever in it for the dental coverage she also turns, to him in more ways than one.

In the second installment, Simon’s past catches up with him and one of his former criminal associates gets him mixed up in something which seems just criminal at first but turns out to be intimately linked to the previous case. In the process Simon falsely triggers a vampire alert, but right at the end does encounter a vampire being tortured by the bad guy by being kep in vaporous state and unable to reform.

This turns out to be a major plot element of installment number three where we find out ust why vampires hadn’t been seen in the city for over two years. It’s not that they were gone, it’s that they have turned into a different sort of nasty. I’m rather unsure of this turn. It nicely pays off a mystery about SImon’s partner’s past which was introduced in the first book, but it’s a bit cliched these days to have vampires turn non-evil, but also the idea that  vampires who spent centuries being blood-thirsty vicious beasts should be forgiven is morally rather dubious. I don’t think he quite pulls this off.

The fourth installment slightly reminds me of Jim Butcher’s “Proven Guilty” in which much of the action takes place at a Horror movie convention. This one starts with the death by supernatural causes of a professor of film at NYU, who turns out to have been a partner of Simon’s boss thirty years before. The main plotline is quite nice in this one, but I think the personal denouement at the end may mean this series ust jumped the shark – the whole vampire girlfriend thing is very hard to get right and too easy to screw up badly.

I’ll see what the next one is like, but this may have gone off the rails at this point.

I hit another personal best in the pool today. Not bad for a guy with a hole in his leg. I did 50 lengths of a 25m pool using two lanes in 25 minutes and 45 seconds. My previous best was 26 minutes 38 seconds in a single lane. I’m pretty sure that changing lanes slows me down a tad (over 50 lengths even half a second per length adds 25 seconds) so I’m interested what I can manage when I’m next in one lane. This is also a best at the Ryogoku pool. The previous best was in the Kinshicho pool. In the Ryogoku pool they usually have two lanes set up for serious swimming, each one being fo an inner (quick) and outer (slow) half-lane. When there’s a class (they do young kids swimming classes, adult/elder exercise and swimming classes) or a school swimming club in, they restrict it to one lan. Kinshicho alwyas have at least two lanes allocated to serious swimming, sometimes up to four. In general these are all back and forth half lanes, though sometimes one side of the pool is set for one pair marked for “outer overtaking” (the Ryogoku concept is better for that one, I think). When I first started using the Kinshicho pool when it opened I always seemed to be slowed in there. I’m not sure if it was the extra walk and stairs (at the station and in the gym building) though I suspect it’s that the water/air temperature in that pool was a touch higher. They seem to have dropped the air and water temperature in there and that seems to help with my swimming speed. Or maybe I was just levelling up anyway and it’s coincidence that I seem to be faster at Kinshicho than even in one lane at Ryogoku. If it’s two lanes tomorrow at Ryogoku, then it will be one lane in Kinshicho on Tuesday anyway. I’ve had a dream of getting down to 25 minutes for fifty lengths, but wasn’t sure i could do it. It’s down to technique as much as anything at this point. I noticed that I had a “hitch” in my crawl style just after my hand enters the water and worked yesterday and today to kep a smoother action. It seem to have worked. I do alternate lengths crawl and breaststroke to work out different muscles.

Yesterday I took $DAUGHTER to Kinshicho Park. She reall enjoys the fountain (with sideshows) and the playground in there. It’s all new, rebuilt in the last two years. On the pedestrian way in nearest the train station there are 15 inch high removable bollards. I know exactly how high they are because there’s a hole in the skin on my shin 15 inches up where I walked into one of them. It’s hard to see down there them when carrying a toddler on your front and you’re paying attention to elders with walking frames, kids and adults on bikes and other parents with pushchairs.

Ouch.

Fascinating article in the Atlantic magazine showing pictures from the only official photographer in the Manhattan Project’s secret city.

The second Eddie LaCrosse novel following up The Sword-Edged Blonde. This is a slightly more assured book in style than the first. It’s a nice continuation of the character development while telling a fairly different kind of story. The magical mcGuffin of the first was a maybe-goddess incarnating amongst humans. This time it’s the perhaps mythical dragons of legend come back to haunt the waking world of “private sword jockey” Eddie. Some wry commentary on modern life slips in amongst the fantasy tropes here, adding a little bnit more depth to some pretty good escapism. Definitely worth a look if you like classic fantasy crossed with hard-boiled detective noir.