Keep Portland Weird

Do you suppose this is what they mean?

Dutiful daughter got up early and drove to downtown Portland for an exercise class at The Bar Method and locked her keys in the car so I was called upon to interrupt my busy schedule (come on, I was reveling in being quoted by Dustbury) and rescue her. Since I am all the way downtown and it is still morning I should get my self a cup of coffee and since I have done my good deed for the day, I deserve a donut. I find a coffee shop two blocks away, but there is no reading material that appeals, so I continue on to Powell's, which ends up being a ten minute walk. I prowl the Science Fiction and Mystery sections looking for something good. I've recently read a couple of good books:

• The Madness Season by C.S. Friedman
• A Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst

and put down several that I couldn't (mostly science fiction):

• A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo
• Angelmass by Timothy Zahn
• Cobblestone by Peter Lengyet, an Eastern European detective story
• The Run To Chaos Keep by Jack L. Chalker
• A Signal Shattered by Eric S. Nylund
• Aces High by Bill Yenne, true story from WWII

Most of the science fiction was marred by over extensive arguing between characters. Aces High was just miserable, I don't know exactly what was wrong with it but I only got a few pages into it before I put it down.

I get Timothy Zahn and Eric Nylund confused. They both wrote stuff for the Star Wars universe. Eric also wrote Halo, which is a novel adaptation of the game, which has got to be a really silly idea, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. A Signal Shattered was bad. I got a couple of chapters in before I gave up.

I keep picking up Timothy Zahn books because there are several of them lying around the house and I think maybe one of them will be another Halo. Oh, he didn't write that? Never mind. There is a lot to like about Anglemass, and maybe some of his more recent books are better, but the continuing hostile conversations just wore me out. I got half way through before stopping.

The Run To Chaos Keep is complicated enough that you could use a small encyclopedia to keep track of the characters and all their special paranormal abilities. It would be an interesting story even if the characters were all human without any telepathic abilities. Making them all different aliens makes it too complicated to track.

I had hopes for Cobblestone, but it just did not engage me.

Alan Furst is my current favorite. He has written several books about espionage before and during WWII in Europe and they are just great. A Kingdom of Shadows is about the nephew of Hungary's ambassador to France. They both come from the upper class, meaning they have money. For example, at one point while he is on an errand for his uncle, the nephew calls Cartier in Paris from somewhere in Eastern Europe and orders a brooch, or a bracelet, or something, for his girlfriend, sight unseen. At another point he is arrested by the Roumanian police. He is on horseback and has just ridden down out of the mountains with a briefcase full of cash he has collected from a Hungarian Count for the support of the anti-Fascists. He is in jail for several weeks before his uncle manages to get him sprung. The cash disappears without a trace.

C.S. Friedman is one of my old favorites. She doesn't write a lot of books. Her style is maybe a bit overblown, but it's easy to read, i.e. it goes down smooth. In this one she posits the existence of longships: large spaceships made of rock, or perhaps hollowed out asteroids, that do not slow down when they approach a star and planets. Their velocity is not that high. Skimships (small ships capable of large changes in velocity) act as shuttles, decelerating when they depart the long ship to land on a planet, and then accelerating after leaving the planet to meet up with the longship again. This limits the time you can transit between the longship and the planets. It makes a sort of sense, changing the velocity of a three mile long asteroid would take a great deal of energy. Let the little ships do the hard work. They would be much more fuel efficient for these kind of maneuvers.

However, any velocity that would allow smaller ships to catch up with the long ship would really be unsuitable for travel between stars, at least in the lifetime of human characters, so ... we have "translations" that let the longships make giant jumps across interstellar space, making any velocity they do have insignificant.

It was still a good story. We have vampires, creatures of pure energy, evil armored lizard men, hive mind telepathy, wholesale enslavement of the entire explored universe, emotions running wild and best of all, revenge:

"There is no other pleasure, Ntaya exulted, equal to that of killing one's enemies." - top of p.473

I picked up several books recently:

• Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs. A Mercy Thompson novel. I read another one a while back and I really enjoyed it.
• A Case Of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong
• Russian Beauty by Victor Erofeyev
• Bellwether by Connie Willis. The most famous science fiction author I have never heard of. She has won numerous awards.

I have no idea about the two foreign books. We shall see how they pan out.

Update March 2016 replaced the missing picture.