Light-Years from the Vatican

A couple of short stories this time. One of them is an old favorite, first published in 1991: “A Walk in the Sun” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Luckily, Trish Mulligan is alive after a crash landing on the moon. Unluckily, a rescue is thirty days away. Luckily, her solar powered spacesuit is operational. If she’s going to survive, she’s got to keep her suit working, and to keep her suit working she’s got to keep those solar panels. Her solution is to keep walking, fast enough to avoid sunrise. The diameter of the moon = 6786 miles. The moon rotates once every 27 days. So to pull this off, Trish needs to average 10.47 miles per hour for 27 days.

I still like the Infinivox audio version of this story, read by Amy Bruce. It brought back Vox: SF for Your Ears.

The other short I read was “Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette from 2008. Here’s the opening:

The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by.

The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.

Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.

This was the first time I’ve read this one, and I liked it quite a bit. On this ship is a person who works in the engineering section named Black Alice. We follow her as she feels the Lavinia Whateley’s “shiver of anticipation” as it sense prey. The authors captured the feel of walking and working inside this creature, and of a person that felt connected to it. Very nice!

For a long while the only Louis L’Amour books I’d read were not westerns: The Walking Drum (set in Europe in the Middle Ages), and The Last of the Breed (about a Native American pilot who is shot down by Soviet Russia). I liked both books, but having heard that L’Amour writes westerns (ha ha) I tried a few, and I love them. I have read a handful of them now, and yeah they are good.

The Quick and the Dead is a terrific quick read about a city dweller family of three who gets in over their head on their way across the prairie. Luckily, Con Vallian happens by and lends a hand.

I read this book while in a rented cabin in central Utah near the Capitol Reef National Park. I left it in there on the bookshelf for the next person…

I’m still keeping up with Shawn D. Standfast’s Asimov Future History Project. For three weeks (including next week; I’m a week ahead now) we’ve been reading the I, Robot trilogy written by Mickey Zucker Reichert and published from 2011 to 2016. The books are: I, Robot: To Protect; I, Robot: To Obey; and I, Robot: To Preserve. I’ve read all three now, part of the second and all of the third on audio.

They… are not terrific. But there’s some good in there too.

The books are about Susan Calvin, the famous robopsychologist character in some of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. In Asimov’s stories, she’s described as a cold, logical, and brilliant.

But that Susan Calvin isn’t the one in these novels. From the first pages, I knew we weren’t in Asimov’s universe, since those pages say “Chapter 1: July 2, 2035” and introduce us to a twenty-something Susan Calvin who is starting her clinicals as a psychologist (treating humans) at a Manhattan hospital. Asimov’s Susan Calvin was born in 1982, so there was no attempt to fit this Susan Calvin with Asimov’s.

What I liked best about the books didn’t have anything to do with robots. Reichert skillfully wrote several character medical scenarios that would have fit very well in episodes of House, with Susan Calvin playing House. Solving those mysteries was compelling stuff, and it kept me going.

Robots are not the main part of the plot in books one and two. The third book is a robot mystery. The overall aim of the plots are to bring this book’s Susan Calvin from a brilliant psychologist solving problems for humans to the brilliant but cold robopsychologist we all know. Reichert’s Susan goes through a lot.

In the end, though, I can’t recommend the books. They were quick easy reads and I read all three, which says something positive about them, but the characters and situations didn’t rung true for me.

Julie and I finished Njal’s Saga and posted a Good Story podcast. I enjoyed it even more the second time. I’ll leave the talking about it to the podcast, but we barely scratched the surface! There was so much more to Hallgerd and Njal and Gunnar… if you want a fantastic resource to learn everything you ever wanted to know about Njal’s Saga (and other Icelandic sagas), check out the Saga Thing podcast.

I originally read this saga in a Booktube group. The hosts of the group included myself (first video here) and these fine folks:

Elena Makridina
Bookish North
Richardson Reads
A Cruel Reader’s Thesis
Steve Donoghue
The Bookish Bryants
Rambling Raconteur

In April, this group and I will do this again with Egil’s Saga. We all posted an announcement video on the Saturday I was on vacation, so here’s mine. It’s got absolutely no information about the saga AT ALL.

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Those vampires are still waiting. And so is Asimov.

How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Life is a beautiful little book. Daniele Cybulskie, part of the crew over at the medievalists.net website, blog, and podcast, wrote this book about monks, nuns, and their practices during medieval times. I really like the author’s style, and loved the details of monkish life. I wasn’t as enamored with the “wisdom for modern life” parts, but it’s the smaller part of the book. It’s possible that I’ve read enough life advice over the years that nothing offered here struck me as new. But the medieval monkish bits I liked quite a lot!

I started Dayworld by Philip Jose Farmer, a book recommended by Tom LA Books and a book I’m buddy reading with David Wiley, who has a website and a YouTube channel, both worth your time.

Dayworld starts with a quick few pages of info dump. Farmer explains a bit about the world in a way that doesn’t feel like part of the narrative, but like the author talking to the reader. This is fun stuff, Farmer says. Check it out. On this crowded world, people spend 6 of 7 days in a “stoner”, and 1 glorious day out and about in the world. In other words: every day of the week, one seventh of the population runs around living while the other six sevenths sit in their stoner pods, hibernating.

Our protagonist, though, is a daybreaker. He has found a way to stay active all seven days. I’m 100 pages in and have seen his Tuesday life and part of his Wednesday life. I’ve seen his Tuesday wife and his Wednesday wife. And I’ve seen how complicated it was getting safely from Tuesday to Wednesday. Fun book so far!

I haven’t read a lot of Philip Jose Farmer, but I did like To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

I’m listening to Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The subtitle is: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again. I’m interested in books about reclaiming deep thought and have read several of them. This is a good one because Hari is a very good writer (and a very good narrator), and he looks at the problem of lost focus from a number of different angles, including but not limited to the what-is-social-media-doing-to-my-brain angle that other authors focus on (if they’ve figured out how to focus, that is).

Some sample chapter titles:

 
He addresses each subject in a conversational style, and interviews experts in various disciplines, letting us know what he found. Christopher Hitchens once said that “the most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed”. Johann Hari makes me feel personally addressed in both his prose and narration, and the book, so far, is time very well spent.

I’m currently in the “Cause Six” chapter. Could fixing social media be as simple as moving away from an ad-supported model to a subscription model?

Last thing: I am continuing Njal’s Saga, more than halfway there. Still enjoying this second visit quite a bit. More on Njal soon!

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My goodness time flies. January is behind us.

I haven’t read a whole lot in the last two weeks. I did read another five Asimov stories in the Future History Project, but the goal was ten, so now I’m a week behind. The five stories I read were “Segregationist”, “Let’s Get Together”, “The Tercentenary Incident”, “First Law”, and “Runaround”.

These stories were all vaguely familiar and very enjoyable. My favorite was “The Tercentenary Incident”, in which the president of the future United States (which is now part of a bigger Earth government) is assassinated right after giving a Tercentenary speech on July 4, 2076. The method of assassination was interesting; the president simply disappeared in a “glitter of dust”. Clearly a Q36 Explosive Space Modulator. Shortly after that, the same president reappears and gives a different speech. Now we know one of the two presidents is a robot, but which one? Lots of that kind of thing coming as we move forward with Asimov’s stories.

Three of the next five stories are Susan Calvin stories. I’m looking forward to them!

I read Dan Simmons’ first published story, a horror tale called “The River Styx Runs Upstream”. It reminds me of Bradbury, but darker. In the story, the mother of the family dies for an unknown reason. The father spends a great deal of money, a financially ruinous sum, to have “The Resurrectionists” reanimate the corpse in some kind of technological way. The mother is now present physically, but not at all present in spirit. She walks around but doesn’t respond to interaction. I won’t spoil the story further, but it’s unsettling. This family is not at all well.

In the introduction, Simmons talks about Harlan Ellison reading this story during a workshop, and how he felt being taken seriously by both him and other writers.

I’m also well into Njal’s Saga for the second time. I’m loving it again, and look forward to reading other Icelandic sagas. I have a big book full of them right over there. We’ll talk about it on Good Story soon, but first we’ve got a movie to discuss: “Master and Commander” starring Russell Crowe, which was a terrific movie that reminds me of a whole mess of books I’d like to read.

And I still haven’t forgotten about Mignola’s vampires. Huzzah!

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