That being the case, I can’t say I was disappointed by it particularly. But, man, was it so not my type of book. The best thing I can say about it was that it didn’t take long to read. Perhaps an hour and a half or so.

The main character, whose name I have already forgotten, — Callum? Collum? — has this crazy, sick guy screaming at him about how he should go into hiding for the next year. So we begin our countdown. The story is told by day and by hour:minute, hence at least part of the reason to equate it to “24″. The page count also goes down, something I didn’t figure out until more than halfway through, because I was reading so fast it took me that long to look at the page numbers twice. (I was impressed I’d gotten to page 121 as quickly as I did! Until I discovered a little later I was ‘only’ on page 091.) What struck me as odd about this format was that the story was still told in the past tense. If the goal was to give a sense of immediacy and ‘in the moment’, then it should’ve been in present tense.

So right after this guy rants at him and gets carted off by police or some mysterious people, the main character is in a storm in a boat. And then nearly eaten by sharks. Yea, just like that! We haven’t had a chance to get to know this character at all, and he’s already, randomly, nearly dying a few times. The book continues like that. Kidnappings, shootings, mysterious notes, without any real sense that the main character is truly affected by any of it. The frequent use of exclamation points seems to stand in for his emotion. ! !!

About the time he’s running around and choosing not to tell his mother or the cops about being kidnapped, I’m thinking.. at least he’s like.. 17 or 18, right? (The picture on the cover certainly looks about that.) But no, I’d missed a page right at the beginning that states right up front he’s 15. At this point, I’m finding it all rather incredible. And not at all in a good way. Who has their house broken into and burgled and the cops don’t come? Who gets kidnapped and doesn’t tell their mother or the cops? Who runs away rather than go up to the police and say ‘hey, dude, I totally didn’t hurt my little sister?’ What was he afraid of? At that point, he should’ve been glad if they had arrested him and stuck him in jail. It would’ve been safer for him! (!!)

I get sick and tired of male characters, particularly teenage boy ones, who think they have to ‘protect’ their mother by not telling her things! She’s a freaking adult. You’re a freaking kid. Tell her you were kidnapped!!!

An odd note, the little sister is named Gabbi. The author’s name is Gabrielle. I find it rather odd to name a character after yourself.

Oh yea, so the mystery. His Dad caught some weird brain virus and died. Not that he seems to have been isolated at all. Or cremated. Really? No fear this weird virus you know nothing about is going to spread to other people?

And there’s an Ormond Riddle, Ormond Angel, Ormond Singularity thing. Ormond is their last name. Don’t expect to ever find out what that’s all about, because as you may have guessed, there’s 12 of these books. In fact, this book ends in a really bad place and with no sense of closure whatsoever. It’s a good thing I don’t care at all, because I’m totally not reading the other books.

This would make better television than prose, as there’s a lot, a lot of action, but even so, I wouldn’t be at all interested in watching it. And it would still be unbelievable on several counts.

Next!

My Thoughts
January begins our year long spotlight on New Zealand and Australian authors. We start with a look at a series which intrigued me greatly when I first saw it — a series of twelve books, one for each month of the year, recounting in ‘real time’ the increasingly frantic efforts of 15 year old Callum Ormond to solve the mystery surrounding the discovery his father made just before his death.

Why the series caught my attention will probably be obvious when I admit that I’m a big fan of the TV series “24″. The conceit of that show, that all the action takes place continuously within a 24 hour time period, with each episode taking place ‘in real time’ with one hour of action, works extremely well on television. (Even better as a marathon!) Conspiracy 365 looks to take that idea and transfer it to text. Rather than exactly replicate it, author Gabrielle Lord has decided to spread the action out over the course of a year and spread the series over 12 books, one for each month.

I think this is a wise choice; “24″ was necessarily restricted in the complexity of the plots it could present because of the inability of the characters to travel long distances or do anything that took longer than an hour or two. With an entire year to work with, the conspiracy of the title can be that much more twisty, that much more suspenseful. Plus, the 15 year old protagonist, Cal Ormond, can be a bit more realistic.

As expected, this first book sets up the initial mystery: a few months ago, Tom Ormond, Callum’s father, discovered something big, something he claimed could “change history”. Then, before he could do more than write a quick letter to his son, he was struck down by a virus that destroyed his ability to communicate before it killed him altogether. Callum is puzzled by the letter he received from his father and by a drawing which accompanied it, but the events of New Year’s Eve and Day are what really start things going: Cal is warned of coming danger by a crazy man who’s then carted off by paramedics, and then a few hours later is nearly killed in a boating accident which turns out to be not nearly so accidental.

The situation deteriorates quickly from there, with Callum attempting to make progress on solving the mystery while trying at the same time to stay alive. He ends the month with a new plan and in a cliffhanger situation that makes me glad we also got the February book at the same time. (And worried that we haven’t yet got the rest!)

The book reads very quickly, structured as one would expect, by day and time. One interesting choice is that the pages are numbered backwards, though only within this book, not backwards to get to page 1 at the very end of the series. It was an interesting choice and did contribute to the feeling of counting down to the end of the month.

This is definitely not a character driven series; Cal is a fine main character, but he’s not given a lot of depth, and everyone else is sketched very lightly. But in depth characterization is not the point: it’s the plot, which races along at a very satisfactory rate.

In Short
From the description of the Conspiracy 365 I expected this to be very similar to “24″ in book form. I was not disappointed. January sets up the scenario, introduces our main character, and gets Cal on the road to trying to solve the mystery. Hopefully I won’t have too much trouble acquiring the rest of the series, because it’s going to be impossible not to blow through the entire thing.

My Thoughts
Farmer Boy opens in the winter, with the four Wilder children in the midst of the winter school term. The four are quite close in age, the eldest, Royal, being 13ish and the youngest, Almanzo, only a few weeks shy of nine. But in spite of the fact that he’s only a little bit younger than his next oldest sibling, Almanzo very much occupies the position of family baby, being indulged by his parents and bossed by the older children.

We follow Almanzo, and to a lesser extent all of the Wilders, over the course of slightly more than a year. The book strives to present in detail the various tasks (and pleasures) of a child growing up on a successful farm in New York state. To this end, though the narrative covers most of two winters, we really only see each task once, even though surely things such as timber hauling were a yearly chore. Perhaps one is meant to conclude that the first winter, Almanzo wasn’t involved due to his age (and the fact that Royal was at home to provide more competent help.)

Since Almanzo is a boy (and because the rest of the books focus so much on the tasks of women, being about Laura), Farmer Boy keeps its focus on the male sphere of farm work, with only brief glimpses now and then into the tasks which occupy the time and energy of Almanzo’s mother (and sisters). The women aren’t ignored or unacknowledged so much as their occupations just aren’t part of the list of skills that Almanzo is expected to acquire. It’s made abundantly clear that the talents of both Mr and Mrs. Wilder are essential to the smooth running of the farm and the family.

The book ends with Almanzo tacitly deciding he wants to be a farmer when he grows up, rather than a tradesman. He wins his parents’ approval as well as the chance to help train a young horse, something he’s been clamoring to do for years.

When I was younger, I was always annoyed when I came to Farmer Boy in the series. I had the box set in which Farmer Boy (in spite of being published second) was number 3. So I’d have been reading right along about Laura and her family and then, after being left at a surprising near cliffhanger at the end of book 2, I’d have to suddenly shift gears to New York and Almanzo’s well-to-do family. It really interrupted the flow of the narrative.

I still think it does, but I’ve solved the problem by reading it before the Laura books — since chronologically it would be ahead of them all, given Almanzo’s age. It’s not entirely clear if that’s still the case within the timeline of the books; the Wilders, even more than the Ingalls, have been tinkered with for the purposes of the books. Almanzo’s oldest sister is omitted entirely, perhaps due to her misfortune in also being named Laura, and the other extant siblings (his youngest brother wouldn’t have been born yet during the time period covered by Farmer Boy) have had their ages compressed quite a bit to make them closer together.

But how well the characters match up to their real life counterparts is irrelevant, since this is historical fiction, not a history. And it really is fabulous historical fiction. Now, more than 80 years after the story was originally written, we’re even further removed from the time period Laura Ingalls Wilder was trying to capture. But the level of detail she provides about the small things — the way the yoke attached to the oxen, or the way they loaded logs onto the sleds — makes it possible to imagine the scene even without much knowledge of 19th century farming.

I find Farmer Boy interesting for a number of other reasons as well. Geographically, it takes place in a part of New York I’m not super familiar with. Malone, the town nearest the Wilder farm, is very far upstate, mere miles from Quebec. It’s not stated in the text, but the presence of ‘French’ people nearby is probably the result of the non-border we shared with Canada at the time. (It wasn’t until after 1906 that anyone even bothered to start keeping track of Canadians entering the US.) Their portrayal plays to a popular stereotype of French-Canadians at the time (see: the works of L.M. Montgomery) the origins of which I don’t really know, but which interests me as someone with a significant amount of Québécois ancestry.

But even more than interesting historical sidetracks, what’s most compelling about Farmer Boy is the FOOD. It’s dangerous to read this book while hungry; the loving descriptions of the heaps of food eaten by the Wilder family make it extremely difficult to resist getting something to eat. Popcorn, cider, ice cream, ham, pancakes, potatoes, goose, gravy, sausage, maple syrup, bread, lemonade, egg nog, pies of all types: mealtime is the most frequent scene and it always leaves me desperately wanting to pig out.

In Short
Farmer Boy is unique among the Little House series: it’s the only book with a male main character. This holds true even taking into account the large extended series — the prequels and sequels authored by others. As such, though Almanzo and some of his relatives appear again in the later books, this one about his childhood is really very much stand alone. But it’s fascinating anyway — especially as the Wilders lived not too far from where some of my own ancestors were during that time period — and highlights very well the big difference between Almanzo’s early life and Laura’s.

My Thoughts
Except for special reasons, we typically disqualify a book from Tripletake consideration if one of us has already read it. In the case of Ellen Hart’s Hallowed Murder, the first book in the Jane Lawless series, the one who had already read it was I. I picked it up ten years ago at the same time as a few other books featuring LGBT characters (as I can see from the amazon order) and my book list from that time indicates I read it. However, all I could remember about the plot was that the sleuth was a lesbian restaurant owner from Minneapolis – so reading it again would be practically as good as reading it for the first time.

The book opens with Jane and her friend Cordelia out for a brisk morning walk around one of Minneapolis’s lakes. (I lived very near the location of this opening scene and reading it brought back feelings of guilt for having not taken full advantage of living in the Twin Cities for two years.) Jane’s two dogs are attracted by something in the frigid water and when she goes to retrieve them, she discovers the body of Allison Lord, a senior at UMN and a current member of Jane’s sorority. There’s nothing to indicate foul play and the death is soon classified as a suicide/accident and the police are prepared to close the case. This does not sit well with Jane or with Allison’s friends, and Jane begins to do a bit of nosing around.

It comes out (ha ha) almost immediately that Allison, after some years of attempting to deny it, has recently accepted that she’s a lesbian. She’d been involved with a young grad student by the name of Emily and had been cut off by her father who couldn’t accept her sexuality. As Jane continues to question the people around Allison, it seems like almost everyone is hiding something that could be relevant. Allison’s friends at the sorority house have been party to covering up some thefts and peeping-tom incidents; Allison’s ex-boyfriend was meeting with her the night of her death for reasons unknown; the ex’s new girlfriend may be lying to give him an alibi; the born-again Christian sorority board member who is loud in her insistence that homosexuality is a sin has a very weak explanation for where she was at the time of the death.

In the end, Jane manages to mostly untangle the irrelevant information from the relevant and sets a trap to lure out the killer with the assistance of Cordelia and some other unexpected sidekicks.

Going into the book, I had forgotten how long ago it had been published — 1989! — and as it would probably have been written a year or two before it was published, we’re talking about 25 years ago. Which isn’t so very long, except that in that time period a great deal has changed, both technologically and socially. Though maybe not as much as one would hope. The mechanics of the crimes and the actual events of the book would need considerable retooling to match today’s technology and cultural mores. But I think the central seed of the plot is still viable even now. The idea that a sorority girl might feel the need to stay closeted? Depends a bit on the sorority and the location and nature of the college, but that’s definitely possible. That a Bible-obsessed fundamentalist might feel the inclination to go out and begin casting some stones? Very believable. Realistic even.

The mystery here does have a number of weaknesses. I’m not 100% positive this was Hart’s first book, but it definitely feels like the work of someone without a lot of experience. The writing and characterization is uneven, and there are several places where characters who seemed like they ought to be important just disappeared or weren’t involved. For instance, at the very start of the book we’re told that Allison was close friends with three other girls: Sigrid, Maggie and Kari. The four of them were close friends who apparently did everything together, including filling the important officer positions at the sorority. And yet Kari, the fourth girl, completely disappears from the story after she’s established as one of Allison’s best friends. We don’t even discover where she’s gone until well into the second half of the book where we find she’s fled the sorority house (and apparently resigned and quit?). But neither of her remaining ‘best friends’ finds this anything worth talking about or mentions attempting to visit her. Maggie and Sigrid fare better, getting significant page-time, but their interactions make it difficult to feel as if they’re really friends. They come off more as casual acquaintances.

There’s also the question of why Jane Lawless, a not-quite-closeted lesbian herself, was a member of this seemingly reactionary sorority during her time at school. At least here the incongruity is mentioned in character — by Jane’s still incredulous friend Cordelia — but I wasn’t satisfied by the response. And how did she manage to remain friends with Cordelia, an outspoken activist type if I’ve ever seen one, and still keep her own secret under wraps to everyone else? Perhaps these questions are answered later in the series, but here we’re just supposed to accept that the past happened as described and move on. Fine, but I do want my backstory to make sense.

But in spite of these weaknesses, the story was certainly no worse than the plethora of gimmicky crafter/orchard owner/bookstore owner/knitter/cat lover/librarian/reporter/party planner/cupcake baker/cookie baker/ice cream shop owner-solves-a-murder series that have been churned out over the past few years, and quite a bit better than many. Even if the premise can be boilt down to restaurateur-solves-a-murder, at least we have the pioneering fact that Jane is not straight and a well-drawn portrait of the Twin Cities to lend it additional interest.

In Short
Though the actual events of this 20 year old mystery are beginning to be dated, the plot central to Hallowed Murder is still very relevant to today: the risks and rewards of coming out of the closet and the sometimes surprising reactions of people to the news. This is the first of a series which features the Minneapolis restaurant-owner Jane Lawless as the investigator and even though the book is not unflawed, it still presents Jane as a character I’m willing to read more about. And that really must be the main goal of any series.

In the 22nd century, humans have spread out all over the Solar System, colonizing everywhere from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. But in spite of their expansion, the fabled ‘space drive’ has still eluded scientists and many believe it’s not even possible to construct. All is thrown into question by the appearance of a strange object which enters the Solar System on a course to swing around the sun. The object is clearly artificial — the work of another race. The spaceship Endeavour is the only ship within range of its projected path and thus its crew is given the task of making contact with the object, now named “Rama”, and attempting to collect as much information as possible before its path goes too close to the sun for humans to follow. Though the collective governments of the various human settlements are excited by this unprecedented arrival, they are also quite nervous: is Rama a threat? The Endeavour crew will need to try and discover that as well.

J: I’d read some Arthur C. Clarke when I was a teenager. I thought Rendezvous with Rama would be easy to read and interesting. But.. not so much. My overall impression after having read it is that it would’ve made a far more interesting short story.

B: I could certainly see this being adapted to a short story form, although it would mean cutting some things out. And you could probably cut out things like the lengthy explanations of the politics of the situation, or some of the background technologies that could have just been left for granted. But I actually kind of appreciate having them there, even it means the story progresses at a glacial pace.

K: It definitely does progress at a glacial pace. But I actually did like that: I agree with J that the story could easily have been shortened, but it would have ended up a much different story in that case. It was clear that Clarke had given a lot of thought to what technologies might be found in this environment and why and he wanted to get across very clearly the issues that humans were going to encounter when attempting to understand a completely alien species with nothing but a single (very large) artifact from which to draw conclusions. So I felt like the pace was justified, and I didn’t find it too boring. Slow, but not boring. Though I also had a hard time shaking a feeling of forboding; it really really read in parts like a horror novel, and I couldn’t help but keep waiting for something inexplicably awful to happen.

J: If the characters had been.. actual characters, I wouldn’t have minded so much. I guess I’m just not into the ‘explore this strange thing’ as the main driving point of a novel.

B: The characters were fairly generic, I will give you that. They did not go far beyond the archetypes they were modeled after, other than little personal touches like the captain’s multiple families, that engineer guy’s religious background, and so forth. But expanding on K’s point, not only did Clarke go to great lengths to write about the challenges of exploring an alien environment, he also spent a lot of time on the background challenges as well — getting the approval of governments, getting funding, maintaining public support… I cannot think of many examples of stories that go that far into the depth of the situation. It comes at the expense of interesting characters, certainly, but if you can get past that, there is a lot there that is still interesting.

K: Yes, the characters were absolutely generic. Even though there were some passing efforts made at establishing a backstory for them, they didn’t add much, if anything, to the story. Things were just stated about them – such as the random existence of plural marriage – without explanation or context. I didn’t exactly want an infodump on the socioeconomic status of the Solar System, but if you’re going to bring up interesting social points, you shouldn’t just lob them out there and let them thunk on the ground without further attention. It was distracting. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out things about the various planetary/colonial societies when that was neither the focus nor the purpose of the book.

J: I was definitely hoping to see these wives of the captain. Why they married him, since he’s such a jerk about it, writing them generic letters. And that, yea, I think it’s _one_ mention of these other two guys who are together and have a wife/girlfriend back home. Instead the guy who seems to get the most attention and screentime is the guy who flies around.

B: Well, Jimmy (of course his name was Jimmy) was just about the only character who saw any actual action. Everyone else mostly climbed up and down stairs, looked through telescopes, or cut into things. (Alright, I’m oversimplifying a little — there was a lot of background activity — but almost none of it was anything I would call action.) Also, until the very end, he is the only one who actually discovered anything concrete about Rama. It was his trip that really provided the most clues, by a large margin, about what Rama was actually doing out in space.Getting back to the sociopolitical info-dump for a second though, I think that was Arthur C. Clarke, Futurist, seeping through into the story. I read a bunch of other essays of his with much of the same kind of thing — in the future, there will be fewer social restrictions, buildings will be way sturdier, people will stop wearing clothing, etc. As far as what goes on in the story, though, you can pretty much ignore all of it.

K: That is interesting. I’ve not really read a great deal of his writing, so I just had this to go on, and I found it very difficult to pin down his views from here. (On social issues, that is.) On the one hand, societies which allow a man to have more than one wife are typically regressive and patriarchal. But here we also have the suggestion that women can have more than one husband — though he then sort of negates that by suggesting the guys may have come up with the idea and that they’re also bi. (Progressive in and of itself, but it doesn’t speak toward the status of women.) So there was progressiveness, but it wasn’t pervasive in all aspects of life. Judging just from this book alone, I can’t say I’m impressed with his future thoughts on the place of women in society. Yes, they are there on the ship – there’s even more than one – but their authority is either low or outside the general command structure. And there appears to be only one female scientist on the big Alien Encounter Council they convene (though for a few minutes I thought there would be zero, so at least we avoided that scenario.)

J: Yup. And his wives are both at (separate) homes taking care of the kids. Just a very typical arrangement, especially for a ship captain. He just happens to have two of them. Along with women, the society or societies if you want to call all the other planets/colonies that seemed also very white American/European. Despite calling it Rama, which we can discuss by itself, I only saw like one or two character names that could’ve been Indian or Asian. Even though it would’ve been dead simple to throw in names from all over. And for character descriptions, I don’t think he ever bothered to specify what race people were. At least for the most part.. my memory may be iffy here.

B: This book certainly does not come off as a shining example of progressive thinking, but it’s definitely farther than it could have been. If it were rewritten now, the captain would probably have been a woman with multiple husbands, and there would have been a greater diversity of ethnicities, genders and ages. Then again, he leaves so much to the imagination as far as the characters go, they really could have been any ethnicity, if not for their names. (Come to think of it, Jimmy’s last name, according to my five minutes of internet research to refresh my memory, is “Pak” — so his ethnicity could be debatable.) On the other hand, we are talking about a book from almost 40 years ago, so the progressive movement wasn’t as far along as it is now, so I’ll give him at least some credit there.

K: I definitely read Jimmy as of Asian ancestry of some sort. Perhaps because of the last name, or maybe it was even stated, I’m not sure. In any case, I think it’s true that most of the characters have so little information provided that there’s no reason they had to be white, though one might get the impression Clarke imagined them to be so. But I don’t think there’s any real proof either way. He was definitely far more interested in the thought experiment of the aliens.

J: Clarke had been living in Sri Lanka for more than 10 years by that point. Which makes me think he could’ve done a better job of making things appear global. From what little I know/remember of his other work, he is big on aliens. And on aliens that are more advanced than us. And the way those machines were eating things, it’s very easy to visualize this as an anime.

B: I definitely agree there: this is a story about humanity exploring an alien landscape. The actual representatives of humanity in the story are generic and forgettable — you can basically replace any of them with someone else and not affect the story in any significant way, as long as their actions are the same. But it’s all about human curiosity and the drive to investigate and understand everything trumping all of the forces that hold us back, like fear of the unknown, or fear of investing resources into pure science with no guarantee of a practical return. Really, the explorers in the story got nothing actually useful out of Rama — they didn’t bring back any new technologies, didn’t gain any really useful scientific knowledge — but the overall feeling from the story was that the trip was worth taking anyway.

K: Didn’t gain any immediate insights or scientific knowledge. I think it’s important to keep in mind that they didn’t expect to make any big breakthroughs while they were there; they weren’t equipped for it or trained. They were just collecting samples and data. And they did collect quite a bit of that. Of course, the book ends with the setup for the sequel, so I don’t know whether or not we get to see there scentific progress based on the fact that scientists now -know- this space drive is possible; that three legged creatures are a viable evolutionary branch; that organic machines are a way to achieve long-term space flight etc. etc.

J: It was surprising to me that the.. I think it was a xenoanthropologist? He just decided in the middle of the exploration that there wasn’t going to be anything of interest and wandered off to do whatever he usually did. Teach grad students or whatever. It wasn’t worth his time to sit and watch the exploration recordings and talk to his colleagues! Dude, just because there doesn’t appear to be any living sentient creatures doesn’t mean there isn’t things to study once it was clear it wasn’t a natural object. But anyway, at least some of the people thought they should be investigating it as a potential threat. And we humans love to investigate potential threats. We’ll commit all sorts of resources to that. Especially if it’s a potential imminent threat, and Rama was moving pretty quick.

B: Or assume that it is a threat, and try to blow it up — the good old 1% doctrine. Anyway, yeah, I guess I wasn’t thinking through all of the potential scientific benefits of the investigation, including the not-to-be-underestimated boost in support for science when people see what it is capable of when it is allowed to advance. That kind of goes along with other things I remember from the essays I read — how, for example, many inventions and technologies people use in their everyday lives came directly from technologies developed by NASA for the space program. The implication in the story was that if humanity had not been as active in space as it had been, there was no way we could have made it to Rama.

K: Or even been able to get a very good look at it from afar.

K: I did find it interesting that he spent a good bit of time during the first portion of the book talking about near-space collisions with asteroids and kind of attempting to justify why they might be looking for objects like Rama. Because scientists do that all the time nowadays, don’t they? It’s always in the news that some comet might have hit Earth but its trajectory will take it past without any issue. Was that started up after this book? Was it started because of this book?

J: I wouldn’t be surprised if Clarke was behind that somehow, if not this book in particular. It’s nice to think we’ll have the capability of blowing stuff up if we need to. Which I don’t think we currently do at the moment. So we’re watching for stuff, but we can’t do anything about it except shout ‘Duck!’.

B: I actually think I may have read something about near-earth objects in one of those essays as well, or I may just be imagining it, but I also wouldn’t surprised at all if Clarke was influential in getting that program going, at least by drawing attention to the need to have it. And of course, if you listen to scientists, they will tell you it is not a question of *if* we will one day have to contend with an actual planet-killing asteroid headed our way, but when. Not that listening to scientists is fashionable these days. But that is one of the reasons stories like this are good to have — because it’s one thing to say, “Science says we should be doing this,” but it’s another to create an interesting narrative that actually gives reasons why.

K: I suspect if you talked to the average person about planet-killing asteroids, they’d have more to say about Bruce Willis or Elijah Woods than Arthur C. Clarke.

K: It’s always interesting to me what sorts of bees authors get in their bonnets. Clarke obviously had several here: objects approaching Earth; a realistic scenario for an alien encounter (ie, one without any actual aliens); the way in which humanity may respond to perceived threats. But he also visited another trope none too dear to my heart. Yes, I’m afraid Rendezvous with Rama saw the return of the Perky Space Boobs. What the hell is the fascination with this idea?

J: It’s mandatory for any science fiction novel that takes place partly in space or low gravity. Though curiously you never see it mentioned on coverage of actual space missions. ‘Bill, please tell us what the astronauts are wearing.’ ‘Who cares? Look how perky those boobs are!’

K: It’s ridiculous! First, I sincerely doubt the ‘lift’ would be all that noticeable, and in practical terms most women wear something to keep them in one spot anyway. Seems to me men are far more likely to have something unrestrained to float around. But that never seems to be mentioned.

B: I’m going to refrain from analyzing this one, except to say that personally, I don’t care if this trope lives or dies.

J: I’ll bring it back to the name Rama then. All the Roman and Greek Gods were used up, so they moved to Indian ones. But that’s a living religion. Unless it’s not in the future of this book? I just can’t see people saying ‘Hey, here’s this weird thing coming. We’re up to J on the rotation. Shall we go for Judas or Jesus?’

K: Well, yes. Who do you think named it Jupiter? It wasn’t the Pope! It was the Romans trying to honor their god. So I don’t find the use of Rama incongruous at all.

J: Well, Jupiter is a big planet, which is hanging around. This is more on the order of an asteroid or comet that wandered by. I just think it’d make more sense to me if it was named after someone more minor. Or if it was Hindus doing the naming.

B: Well, since Christianity only has the one god, you wouldn’t want to go naming it Jehovah unless you want the name to have world-ending implications, so the nearest equivalent would be to pick from the names of angels, which would have seemed appropriate enough. But I honestly can’t say I know enough about Indian religions to judge just how appropriate Rama is as a name. My traditional five minutes of internet research when I do not know something has not brought me any closer to figuring it out, so I’m going to have to defer to people who know more about it.

K: I don’t think we’re given any indication that Indian astronomers were not part of the international body that decided on how to start naming these things. Though the Roman names won out for most of the planets, we still use many of the Arabic names for stars; the Chinese and the Indians had their own traditional names for the planets and stars and other visible objects, many of which were, surprise, the names of gods. I just really don’t find it to be disrespectful or outlandish. Maybe a Hindu person would disagree, but I really cannot make that call.

J: So there is a movie planned, right? I guess I’d be interested in seeing it. Though I hope it’s not as dull as 2001! I think I might have to wait for the DVD though. In case it is very dull. I can do something else while I watch it.

K: It might be more impactful on a big screen. Or 3D IMAX. It seems like the kind of movie that would be improved by increasing the sense of size.

B: It definitely has all of the components needed for a good movie. I’m sure it’d get the Hollywood treatment — lots of CGI, romantic subplots, more perky zero-G boobage — but I’d probably still be willing to give it a chance.

In the late 21st century, humans were contacted by beings from another universe. These beings provided what looked to be the answer to Earth’s energy problems: an endless source of power with only minimal side-effects. A consequence of this development was the near canonization of the man who happened to be there when the contact was made, and many scientists (more worthy, at least in their own minds) resent this. Thus there is much to be gained by someone who can discover and prove that the “electron pump” is not nearly as perfect as it’s been made out to be.

K: We’ve both just finished The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, the next winner in our Nebula list. Considering Asimov’s relative fame, it’s about time he showed up in the list! As far as I can tell, this book is a stand-alone unrelated to any of the series he worked on. Its plot centers around something called the “Electron Pump”, which has been established recently on Earth as a pretty much limitless source of energy. The book is divided into three sections which all tell parts of the story but which are only pretty loosely tied to one another.

J: Yea, in a way it was like reading 3 short stories. Or maybe novelettes. Not sure how long they all were individually. It felt to me kind of like reading Connie Willis (only more boring), followed by James Tiptree, followed by hrm.. not really Samuel Delany, it wasn’t weird enough by half. In short, they were all quite different in tone, POV, plot, everything.

K: They were definitely longer than short stories. And I can’t really compare them to most of those authors, though I have to disagree with your assessment about their differences. Part 2 was definitely distinctly different, but parts 1 and 3 were very similar, even though they focused on different characters.

J: Oh, they were definitely fairly similar. But they didn’t fit the same pattern. Part 1 was ‘scientists blather on about something’. Part 3 was ‘living on the moon is weird’. It actually surprised me when they were on the moon. Was there any hint in part 1 that there were people living on the moon?

K: See, that’s not how I read part 1′s pattern. To me, part 1 was ‘academic infighting’. And part 3 was ‘academic infighting on the moon’. So they were the same, just the scenery was different. I can’t say as I had picked up in part 1 that there was a lunar colony, though, no.

J: Should we take this in sections and talk about part 1 first?

K: Let’s. So part 1 we have a young scientist who has managed to tick off Dr. Hallam, who has managed to accrue all of the credit for ‘inventing’ the “Electron Pump”. As a result he has enormous influence and can easily ruin careers. The young guy is understandably annoyed at this so decides he’s going to try and find a flaw in the Electron Pump and bring down Hallam.

J: If you say so. No, I mean, I followed the plot okay. It was just so dull. It was a lot of talking heads. Except once I think someone pulled an orange out of his pocket to eat it. And while it wasn’t quite ever ‘as you know, Bob’, it was darned close to that for most of the first few sections. And the only woman in the whole section was a ‘graduate student’. So, yay for being a graduate student. But she was only mentioned as someone’s date. And we never see her or anything. It briefly got interesting when they were talking to people on the other side of the pump, but I was quite ready to speed read my way through the rest of the book if it was going to go on like that. It seemed to be all idea and no substance.

K: I agree it was not interesting as presented. I thought the idea of the pump was interesting, and I had to read it a few times before I had that settled in my head, but the characters were indistinguishable from one another. Completely. Pete and Myron and Bill and Bob and whatever. In my head they were all nerds in white shirts with ties and pocket protectors. I was both annoyed and disappointed to see that Asimov’s imagination couldn’t stretch far enough to include any women among the scientists at all — I just skimmed through and couldn’t spot the graduate reference, but my feeling is she wasn’t a scientist at all but some kind of humanities student. But that’s it. The senator? A dude. The environmental activist? A dude.

J: I don’t think what she’s a graduate student in is ever stated or implied. So yea, I definitely wouldn’t give him any credit for making her a science student. He only gets points for not calling her a ‘coed’. And I had a hard time telling everyone apart too. Their characters were entirely defined by their relationship to this Pump idea. The scientific underpinnings of which I didn’t think about too hard. I trust Asimov to know his physics better than me. And if I wasn’t going to pick apart the science, then no reason to think about it too much. ;)

K: I suppose not. There’s plenty to pick apart otherwise. This whole section is meandering and unfocused; it seems to have two or three or even more primary purposes: One, to establish the history of the Electron Pump and how Dr. Hallam opportunistically came to power in scientific circles. Two, to float the possibility there may be soemthing wrong with the idea. Three, to engage in a confusing philosophical discussion of whether or not the entities in the para-Universe are smarter than humans or simply more technologically advanced. Four, to randomly talk about linguistic challenges. Five, to make you fall asleep. There were a lot of ideas packed in here which weren’t really given a chance to flourish — instead, they were all treated in the most cursory and boring way possible.

J: He did a good job on Five then! I have to say that Part 1, if it had been the entirety of the book, would’ve made me seriously question what the SFWA members were thinking when they nominated it, let alone voted it to win.

K: I’d have to agree with you there! Are you ready to move on to section 2?

J: Yup. Part 2 was just soooo much better. Not that it didn’t have things I take issue with. But at least it was interesting!

K: Part 2 was a big surprise for me, considering part 1. In part 2 we shift entirely to the para-universe and it suddenly starts feeling like a science fiction novel instead of something set in amongst present-day whiny scientists. There were definitely some issues I had with this section, but it fired the imagination in a way that neither part 1 nor part 3 did for me.

J: Yea, exactly. It was different. And that part of why it was different was it was doing interesting sex and gender stuff only helped make it interesting to me personally. As a bonus, I could like the characters.

K: I’m not sure if the characters were really three dimensional enough for me to like them, though I definitely was interested in them, and what they were going to do. I was also interested in their world, their species, and everything that was going on there. I liked the way Asimov tried to come up with a species that had three genders required for reproduction rather than just two; a lot of times authors will just throw the fact out there without actually explaining it. For me, that doesn’t work, because I have a difficult time imagining it. Here, we don’t have a lot of details, but enough to let you grasp the concept.

J: Not that I could adequately envision what they even looked like… Translucent blobs is the best I can come up with. I do take objection to which of the sexes he chose a male pronoun for and which the female. :P

K: That’s about what I came up with, though initially I had been confused by Asimov’s references to the ‘surface’ into thinking that they were living in water – hence my conflating them with jellyfish. By the end, it sounded more like they were living underground in some caves filled with air, but I still wasn’t positive. And, in fact, it didn’t really matter much. I think translucent, amorphus blob is enough.

K: And I also was annoyed by his assignment of genders. Even though he made up for it a little by having the ‘female’ be smart and brave, she was clearly depicted as being unusual; in fact the narrative makes a point of noting that the vast majority of “Emotionals”, as the females are called, are completely uninterested in anything useful beyond chattering and gossip.

J: And flirting/preening. I think the literal definition of female is the one who provides the egg. Which there didn’t seem to even be. Unless it was the Rational’s ‘seed’ that was the egg. In which case he should be the female. Either that or the incubator should’ve been the female. I don’t see how the catalyst or whatever she is would make her female. And yet.. that the two ‘males’ got together first and were flirting and whatnot was very appealing. So I would hate to have that go away by getting the pronouns more accurate.

K: Maybe, but I think here was very definitely a place where some new pronouns might have done some good. Since the assignment of ‘male’ and ‘female’ seemed otherwise arbitrary (Asimov does get points for giving the ‘Parental’ unit a male pronoun) and unrelated to our concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Did he think he was being daring by having Dua, the female, essentially be the heroine of this section of the story? Would it have been different if Odeen, the intellectual male, had been an intellectual female instead, and Dua had been a male?

J: Definitely would’ve been different. Better, I dunno. There is at least one scene where Odeen’s telling her something about the para-universes and stuff and I’m thinking.. here we go again. Instead of ‘as you know, Bob’, it’s more of.. let me deliberately set someone up as the person who needs things explained to her. The role of the sidekick or lab assistant in many things. Like Robin in the 60′s Batman.

K: Yes, very convenient, that. But if you’re going to do an infodump of that nature, you really almost have to set it up that way, somehow. Because otherwise it’s just one char pontificating and all the others telling him/her to shut up, a la Brainy Smurf. I’m willing to cut a lot of slack for section 2, in spite of its defects, because I was really fascinated.

J: Yea. I was left very disappointed when we never hear about them again! Grr!

K: That was… pretty strange. It definitely contributed to the disconnected feeling between the three sections. I fully expected that after we got the backstory on the messages from the para-Universe we’d return to Earth where Lamont and that other guy were attempting to communicate with the aliens. But that’s not at all what we got.

J: Yea. We didn’t really get anything wrapped up at all. At least in my view. So in regards part 3, suddenly we’re back in our universe, but on the moon. And we get another girl! Who’s a tour guide. Sigh. Which means she gets to do a bunch of explaining about how people live on the moon. But then that gets flipped and Mr. Earthman gets to explain about the para-universes and stuff to her. And actually in this section, I do have things to say about the science. Or, at least about the science fiction.

K: Bra-less tour guide. Because everything’s more perky on the moon! And the moon people are naked, because uh, everything’s more perky on the moon? Rebelling against the (earth)man? It’s not really explained why to me. And don’t even get me started on her being named Selene. She even notes how lame it is to be named that in the text! So why do it?

J: Because the name is sex-ay. It’ll be interesting to see at what point in history we stop getting societies who like wandering around naked. Yea, no, just because your environment is pleasant doesn’t mean being naked is A) practical and B) something society is really dying to do given the first chance. As for her boobs, they are mentioned in nearly every, single, freaking scene. She brushes lint off one at some point! Why? Because… because she has boobs! Moon boobs!

K: And again, we have a girl who has been apparently bred to be magic somehow. But instead of lucky like in Ringworld, Selene’s superpower is intuition. But it’s a secret! So she has to stay a tour guide. ’cause some guy told her to. She couldn’t possibly become a scientist on her own and discover things.

J: Oh yea, that really ticked me off. And I made the same comparison to luck girl from Ringworld. Only now with the added bonus of intuition being a typically female trait already.

K: I was really puzzled by Dr. Neville, our lunar physicist. He was just so incredibly arrogant and snotty for no apparent reason. Egotistical with no justification, because he certainly wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. We’re given no reason at all to understand why Selene would listen to such a person, let alone sleep with him.

J: Yea. And then seemingly out of nowhere, we learn he wants to take the moon out into space.

K: I have to admit, I was pretty amused when the two Earth guys are all ‘yeah, so what?’

J: I can’t say as I was amused. I was boggling. Here I was trusting Asimov to have his science right and.. he didn’t foresee any problems to Earth with not having a moon suddenly? That’s sort of the whole plot to at least one series of books! Susan Beth Pfeffer’s books. And I’m pretty sure there’s a crappy sci-fi TV movie or miniseries with that as its focus too. Yea, no, I think we likes the moon right where it is. Preciousss.

K: Obviously there would be repercussions if the moon left, but in terms of what was being talked about here it was a moot point. In any case, I never felt that they really thought he was going to get to do it — they called his bluff, because really, he would never have been permitted to do it. By the Lunarites on the one hand, and frankly, by the Earth governments. We don’t really see much of government or the military in this book; there are vague references to some kind of crisis that killed 2/3rds of humanity, but we never find out what happened. Still, they surely exist and would step in if needed.

J: It was a world-wide war over who got tenure. Yea.. I dunno. I felt like this last part rambled more than the other ones. Did we need to see the gymnastics routine? No. Though I guess it’s better than people talking in offices.

K: I got the impression that, aside from the central section, which was very well structured and had development, that the beginning and the end just were kind of rambling onto whatever topic he thought might be interesting to discuss. The difficulty in speaking to a completely alien species? Sure. The effects of moon gravity on the human female form? Sure. The effects of gravity on sports and athletics? Sure. Jackassery in academia? Sure. But it was all very loosely tied together.

J: Yea. Which leaves me coming back to.. why did it win? But I guess we’ve had worse. Or at least books on par with it.

K: I dunno. I’d like to say it won for section 2, but who knows. People could have been really enthused by the idea of the energy pumps.

J: Or the boobs. Oh yea.. do you know why they couldn’t have sex? I couldn’t quite work it out. Was it because he’d be uncoordinated in low gravity or because her bones would break too easily under his superior Earth muscles?

K: I think it was a combination of both. That he would overcompensate because he was used to having sex in higher gravity and she would get broken. Plus he’s way older than her and all saggy, though that doesn’t seem to enter into it.

J: Now you’ve got me picturing the saggy, baggy elephant. :)

K: Hahaha.

J: I wish I could say something optimistic about our next one, but it’s Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Which just makes me fear some sort of mix between Ringworld and The Gods Themselves. But with any luck, nobody will be naked.

My Thoughts
Several years ago, when the first Nancy Drew graphic novel arrived, I was quite excited. While the literary value of Nancy Drew has been debated, the books have always been brisk and entertaining no matter what their incarnation. (Though I’ll be upfront: if forced to choose, my preference is for the original originals, the long form versions of 1-34.) Unfortunately, the quality of the first graphic novel was poor and, disappointed, I avoided them after that. But when we discovered there was an apparent relaunch of the graphic novels with the intriguing title of Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer it was impossible to pass up.

It seemed we were the only ones who felt that way, however, as the volumes proved extremely difficult to acquire through ILL — only one or two libraries in the state would even admit to having a copy, and in the end we weren’t able to borrow volume 2 at all. So I ended up buying them, and in the process discovered that while Vampire Slayer 1+2 provided a “complete” story there was an even more complete story comprised of five total graphic novels: the aforementioned Vampire Slayer 1-2, Hardy Boys relaunch volumes 1-2, and Nancy Drew volume 3, which was a Hardy Boys crossover and promised to tie up all of the plotlines. Immediately, my completist compulsion kicked in and I ended up with all 5 of the volumes.

First impressions were not great: the volumes themselves are disappointingly slender, with most of the money apparently gone to glossy full-color pages when it would be better spent on a longer script with black and white line drawings (because let’s face it, the crowd they’re trying to attract is fans of manga, not American comics). Nancy Drew 1 and 2 were written and illustrated by the same team responsible for the initial line of Nancy Drew graphic novels, a fact which immediately put me on alert.

Nancy Drew: Vampire Slayer opens with Nancy and her friends Bess and George on their way to a movie, all three of them in costume for the ticket discount they’ll get. George, always described as a tomboy, is nicely androgynous and ungirlified (she’s even dressed up as a teen wolf to start with) in contrast with her cousin Bess, who’s always been the girly girl of the bunch. Unfortunately, Bess’s other defining trait — her weight (by no means fat, she’s definitely not supposed to be really slender) — is not conveyed in the drawings well at all, as she appeared to me about the same size as Nancy. But then, the Sho Murase’s art overall was fairly uneven; the characters’ body shapes and faces often elongated or altered depending on the panel.

Our trio soon finds themselves being chased by a vampire, or at least a boy with fangs which are never adequately explained. But then, in a shocking twist, it turns out he’s not actually chasing them but fleeing from Nancy’s dog who we never see or hear of again. The boy’s socially-awkward and odd behavior cause Nancy’s mystery-sense to tingle, and by the time the three of them have finished watching the movie, she’s worked herself up to fever pitch.

Her fever is not relieved when the ‘vampire’ approaches the girls after the movie and introduces himself as Gregor Coffson. His secretive behavior only drives Nancy wild with curiosity and she’s soon devoting all of her time to cultivating him in the hopes he’ll spill the beans. Bess and George and Nancy’s boyfriend Ned, left pretty much completely out of the loop, are thus left to their own devices as they spin ever more ridiculous theories as to what Gregor’s secret might be.

The editing in these two volumes is truly horrid, as evidenced by the fact that no one managed to catch the fact that “Garina” is identified by name several pages before her identity was supposed to be revealed. But even a good editor couldn’t rescue a plot this lame. It reads like something I wrote in the seventh grade.

In contrast to Nancy’s inane outings, where we take two entire volumes to meander through Gregor’s amazing secrets, the two associated Hardy Boys volumes (Crawling with Zombies and Break-up!) are not completely awful. Written by Gerry Conway (famous as the killer of Gwen Stacy) and drawn by Paulo Henrique, the main weaknesses here seem to result from a lack of pages: more space would have given more time to develop character motivations which must necessarily remain very shallow. I again think the series would benefit from a more manga-esque treatment, meaning a longer B&W book instead of a short color one.

Each of the Hardy Boys volumes contains a complete adventure tied together with several underlying plot threads — the shady person or persons behind both schemes, and the growing frustration with one another that’s causing the unravelling of Joe and Frank Hardy’s relationship. Though the plots are simple, I found them better executed, and the artwork was far more consistent (and thus less distracting). Henrique’s artwork appeared to me heavily influenced by a combination of shonen manga and video games. There were several panels I felt might have come straight out of Dragonball Z or Double Dragon. My only complaint was a very weird continuity error introduced by the artwork in the volume Break-Up: Joe and Frank are knocked out and captured wearing one outfit and then when they next appear, they’re wearing something completely different. Are we supposed to believe that the kidnapper took the time to remove their clothing and redress them like a pair of Ken-dolls? If we are, that opens up a whole new can of creepy worms that’s not actually addressed anywhere by the script.

Naturally, the Hardy Boys soon discover that the only clue as to the criminal mastermind behind the rash of Bayport happenings is a phone number in River Heights. Coincidentally the home of Nancy Drew. So the boys head off to meet up with her in Nancy Drew Together With the Hardy Boys. This volume is pegged as Nancy Drew: The New Case Files #3, though I have to wonder if it’s also serving in that capacity for the Hardy Boys series. It’s not clear. The script for this volume was penned not by the Nancy Drew regulars, but by Gerry Conway, which gives it a tone far more in keeping with the Hardy Boys books than the Nancy Drews. Unfortunately, Conway is saddled with the ludicrous plot introduced in the two Vampire Slayer volumes, so after some random happenings in River Heights, everyone heads off to Romania — because, of course, Ned has fled the country in the wake of his supposed ‘breakup’ with Nancy and is now in need of rescue.

In the end, my biggest disappointment with the “New Case Files” series was perhaps the discovery that it wasn’t really new at all: even though the books are starting again at #1, they’re actually a direct continuation of the initial graphic novel lines and frequently reference previously established graphic novel canon. It’s not clear to me why the decision was made to return to #1; perhaps there was just a hope that more people will buy something labelled #1 as opposed to #21. Because this is the case, the “New Case Files” have all the same weaknesses and flaws that were inherent in the graphic novels before – no efforts have been made to improve the product – so they’re just as lousy.

It’s unfortunate, because there was a real opportunity here to reboot Nancy into the 21st century. Giving George and Bess some real skills to make them helpful to Nancy was also wise. But like the “Nancy Drew Case Files” series from the 80s, there were some missteps. For instance, in Nancy Drew Together With the Hardy Boys, Nancy loses her temper with the sniping Frank and Joe and tries to remind them how good they are together as a pair. But really, she is angsting about her breakup with Ned, and concludes by equating “Nancy and Ned” with “Frank and Joe”. Which is just patently ridiculous. Ned is and always has been a sidekick – not even the most important one – and nothing more. Mysteries come first with her, not him.

In Short
The Nancy Drew graphic novel series continues to disappoint with the latest installments, which have been labelled as “New Case Files” and marketed as #1 and #2 of a series. But actually they’re just a direct continuation of the previous graphic novel line, which favors gloss and show over actually taking the time and effort to tell a coherent and reasonable story. Take a pass and reread The Secret of the Old Clock which is infinitely better in either incarnation.

Not that I can recommend it to any library book selectors, because it’s pretty bad.

Nancy Drew has two friends, Bess and George. I was a little surprised to learn George was a girl, as two girl sidekicks is a little unusual. By the middle of the second volume, I was fantasizing they were a couple, just because it would’ve made things a little more interesting. And believe me, it needed all the help it could get.

Nancy also has a boyfriend, Ned. And she likes finding mysteries to solve. Even when none exist. In this story, she befriends a pale dude whom everyone thinks is a vampire. He’s being stalked by a vampire slayer even.

Let’s start with the artwork, because that’ll be quick and easy. It struck me as uninteresting, uninspired, uncreative. It just was sort of there.

Characters:
Nancy — Man, is she annoying. Mostly because of all the narration. A lot of narration. Excessive narration. Superfluous narration. And do people really refer to their friends as ‘pals’? Like, repeatedly?

Bess and George — Of course one of them, I already forget which, is like a computer hacker. Because every detective needs one of those if they aren’t one themselves. But mostly they just hang out and be girly and get themselves into trouble.

Ned — Dude sports a collared shirt and a sweater! I mean, probably this is a hangover from the original books.. that’s the only reason I can think he’d be dressed like that. Unless he’s on his way to prep school. He also gets totally jealous of Nancy hanging out with this vampire, but never actually talks to her about it in any useful way.

Vampire — This is going to be a total spoiler and ruin the mystery for you!!!! Okay, you’ve been warned. He has porpheria which means he can’t handle light and is totally obsessed with his homemade vegetable juice chock full of beta carotene. To the extent that he doesn’t seem to actually eat anything. Also, he’s rich. And he totally faints for some reason. And he’s a recluse, for some reason, so he doesn’t know how to socialize with people. And Nancy feels all protective and ‘poor guy’ because of his illness and his inability to socialize and just ugh, ugh, ugh. I was given no reason at all to like this guy. Towards the end I was hoping he really was a vampire and the whole porpheria thing was a lie, because then it wouldn’t have been so totally lame!

Yea, I won’t even bother to go into the whole… twin thing.

The mystery, was no mystery. The plot, was totally contrived. (Ohnoes, we’re trapped in the house with a vampire slayer. And I have no idea my plucky pals are right outside spying on us through the security cameras.)

Nancy’s girlfriends (ah, if only they were her girlfriends and not just friends who are girls) are obsessed with this vampire movie, “Dielight”. Which I thought was silly.. why not just name the movie you’re really thinking of? Or create a completely different movie they’re obsessed with, like “My Creepy Stalker is a Vampire” or, y’know, something. But I was willing to let that pass without comment until there was a reference to Myfacespace or.. something like that. It just gets ridiculous.

I did have to look at book 1 again to doublecheck, but nope, not a single person of color in either volume. Not even in the audience in the movie theatre. The characters come in just two shades: white and whiter.

Finally, protip — it’s spelled straitjacket, not straight jacket, ‘k? Thnx.

Also, did you know Nancy was in this vampire’s house before? In a previous graphic novel adventure starring a magician? What? You didn’t? Good thing they mention it at least three times in this one! Otherwise you’d miss out on running out to purchase it to find out what happened before in this house!!

Did I mention I hate footnotes that try to sell you other books by the same author/publisher? It’s like… let me just jar you out of the story for a minute for a commercial.

In short: Save yourself time and money and skip this.

You might wonder why I read a couple of Nancy Drew graphic novels, but when I tell you that these volumes comprise parts one and two of an arc called “Vampire Slayer,” perhaps you will understand. It was the unlikely union of Nancy Drew and Buffy—and yes, said show is specifically referenced in the endnotes—that compelled me and my compatriots at Triple Take to make this our pick for this month. I admit I didn’t expect to like this very much, but the story turned out to be even more blah than I was anticipating.

Here’s the premise: Nancy and friends Bess and George are on their way to see the hot new movie, Dielight. If they arrive in costume, they get a discount, so when they are chased by a pointy-toothed guy in the cemetery (is it supposed to be a fun twist when it’s revealed that he’s actually running from Nancy’s dog?) they assume he’s headed there, as well. He doesn’t show up for the film, but Nancy spots a mysterious-looking cloaked figure lurking alone in the back of the theatre.

Afterwards, tooth dude pops up again and introduces himself as Gregor Coffson. He is super intrigued by the fact that Nancy is a detective and asks her out, prompting this oh-so-hilarious exchange:

Nancy: Thanks… I’m flattered, but I already have a Ned… I mean… boyfriend.

Gregor: So?

Ned: Hi. I’m boyfriend. I mean Ned.

Gregor: Oh.

Oh boy am I ever rolling on the floor now. *eyeroll*

Anyway, things don’t improve very much from here. Gregor indicates that he has a secret, but he won’t divulge it until he is sure that he can trust Nancy. And because Nancy is a big nosypants, she ends up hanging out with him all the time, oblivious to Ned’s growing jealousy. At first I was pleased that Ned was confident that Nancy would not cheat on him, but that doesn’t last long and he soon begins throwing jealous hissy fits. Gregor’s secret turns out to be totally lame—someone’s stalking him because they think he’s a vampire—and so does the resolution of the story.

Ultimately, the adjective that most comes to mind when describing this story is “lazy.” In addition to the fact that Gregor’s secret is a letdown and Ned’s reaction predictable, there are other signs of shoddy craftsmanship. Gregor claims not to have a cell phone, but then how is he receiving threatening text messages from his stalker? The big reveal (spoilers, if you care) that the stalker is actually Gregor’s long-lost sister Garina is torpedoed when Nancy refers to the girl as Garina several pages before the existence of Gregor’s twin even comes up. And I’d swear that one scene of Gregor and Nancy sitting at a table was simply copied and pasted from one place to another, with only a slight adjustment of Gregor’s arm and the application of some green tint to Nancy’s shirt to differentiate them.

Probably they thought that only kids would read this and no one would notice, but kids deserve effort and originality, too. About the best thing I can say about this is that Nancy’s friend, George, is appealingly androgynous. She should get her own series.

When a man from Earth introduces prince-in-exile Kinnal Darival a telepathic drug from Kinnal’s own planet, he has a revolutionary epiphany. He takes the subversive and obscene step of writing his autobiography — in the first person, as part of a crusade to share this drug and this worldview with others.

J: I’d never heard of A Time of Changes before. And though Robert Silverberg is really prolific, I’d never read one of his novels before either. So I had no idea at all what to expect. Yet somehow I still managed to be disappointed.

K: I also went into this with what I must describe as complete ignorance of the author and the title. I had only just heard of him coincidentally a month or two prior to us coming to this book in the list. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to agree that this book was a disappointment on several levels.

J: I felt it was very similar to Left Hand of Darkness in a lot of ways, but with nothing at all in it to make it interesting. And a few things to actively dislike.

K: I’m again going to have to agree — the parallels to Left Hand sprang to mind almost immediately, with the surprising result of making Left Hand appear retrospectively way more progressive and daring than it felt at the time. There’s also a fairly unflattering (to A Time of Changes) comparison to Dune to be made here.

J: In what way? Other than being a colonized planet? And there really must be a term for that subgenre, but I don’t know it.

K: A colonized planet with a strange ‘native’ religion, people using drugs to achieve telepathy/communion with others, a person who comes in from the outside and begins imposing new ideas on the locals. It’s far more similar to Left Hand in plot shape, but I think the similarities to Dune are there.

J: I forgot about the drugs in Dune. And yea, again with the telepathy!! It’s like.. it’s not science fiction if someone’s not reading someone else’s mind.

K: That is getting pretty old. As are the long-lost/out of touch/vaguely medieval colonies from Earth. TIP: Just because you threw in a spaceman and set your story on a colony doesn’t make it seem like any less of a fantasy as compared to science fiction.

J: Agreed! Even the whole ‘can’t use I’ thing was sort of done in Babel-17, so there’s not much new here at all. But I do have to say that out of all the ones we’ve read so far, this one seems the most obviously dated to a time and place. Even moreso than Flowers for Algernon, which was pretty much set on contemporary Earth. Because it just screamed ’60s-70s drug culture’ and ‘let’s open our minds’ ‘let’s all love one another’.

K: It’s very dated. Very very dated. Though Silverberg admits in the preface that he discovered other languages already had constructs that avoided using the concept of ‘I’, it’s clear this was written very much from a position of western male privilege.

J: Oh, don’t even get me started on the gender stuff! I disliked the main character pretty quickly, right about the time he was all ‘I have a big penis’ and the backhanded insult he gave to himself about ‘women all over the place will attest I have no stamina’. I was ready to be sympathetic to him again when he was recounting his childhood, but that didn’t last long. And then it had utter fail right near the end with his bondsister. Spare me. She’s all pure and innocent and beautiful and youthful just because she never married or had a kid.

K: Well, of course. Because women aren’t actually people with interests and passions and thoughts of their own. They’re sperm receptacles. That was made completely clear when our main character Kinnal takes his telepathy drug with a woman — and instead of learning about her hopes and dreams and character, the only thing he learns about is her anatomy. Because apparently that’s all women can think about. Which means it makes complete sense that Silverberg rounds out our character by giving him the massive massive character flaw of premature ejaculation.

J: Like he wasn’t flawed enough by being a big old arrogant jerk! Which I have trouble thinking was entirely intentional. We never learned enough for me to be convinced there was anything particularly wrong with their society that ‘I’ was going to fix. Although the whole bondsister/bondbrother and drainer thing seems like a copout. If you’re going to keep yourself to yourself and not even have a self, well.. you need to do it all the way.

K: The whole society made very little sense to me, but I suspect most of the confusion resulted from Kinnal’s maunderings about how you can’t truly love anyone unless you love yourself. Which is incredibly trite and Oprah-ish to be the central point of any novel, let alone something which managed to win the Nebula Award. Especially when it’s not particularly well-explained how this so-called Covenant prevents people from loving themselves. Just because they don’t go around telling people their innermost thoughts? There were several parts where the philosophy was explained which I had to read over more than once and I still couldn’t follow some of the logic. Apparently, having a firm grasp of your inner self can lead you to make other people do things for you instead of standing on your own two feet? I swear that’s what it said at one point.

J: Some things I felt he hadn’t thought through very well. If you’re bonded to a bondsister and a bondbrother at or near birth, then it’s unlikely everyone’s going to be linked that way in a vast chain encompassing everyone. More likely you’ll get a closed loop of people about the same age, with maybe a few people lacking one or the other especially in geographically remote areas. And for all the main character says his relationships with his bondsister and brother are mutual, it just always feels one way.

K: Exactly. The bond-sibling thing was definitely not really thought through as well as it could have been — he mentions that high ranking children were often bonded to other high ranking children to try and create alliances. Okay, fine. But then to foster this ‘bond’, they all have to grow up together, so if they’re from far-flung locations, two of the bond-siblings have to come live with/near the other one. Okay, fine. Except -their- other bond-sibling presumably also needs to grow up near them, and that person’s other bond-sibling would need to grow up near them — even if eventually this turns into a closed chain, as you said, it really doesn’t make sense that suddenly the parent of child Y is responsible for some number n children where n>5 just due to all these bond-relationships.

J: Yea! And what happens if your bondsister and bondbrother both die, especially as children? Oh well, too bad for you.

K: Right. It really just didn’t make sense. Especially since Silverberg seems to go back and forth about how close the bond-siblings really are. Is there constraint between them or not? At times it’s suggested that these function as intimate friends and there is no such thing as self-baring between bond-siblings. But that’s clearly not true; the only set we see are incredibly formal with one another and for all they’re supposedly so close they keep secrets and completely flip out as a result of the ‘selfbaring’.

J: And it doesn’t seem to me he knows his bondsister any more than he knows his wife or that particular woman he was keeping on the side. But while I’m talking about her again, let me just say I’m sick of random suicides! Meant to like.. teach the main character something? Or something? Though it doesn’t seem to have worked in this case. He’s still ready to share some dope with whoever he can coerce into it.

K: Yes, he pretty much writes it off as a character weakness in her. He feels bad about it, but he seems pretty able to rationalize it in his head with ‘if only he’d known she was so fragile, he could have saved her’. Except, uh, you should have known that dude. You’ve known her for years and you were just inside her head.

J: Seriously. Maybe ‘I’ is exactly right. It was always only about him, and the drug isn’t so much about sharing with other people, it’s about making sure he shoves his worldview down everyone’s throat. Like, you think I’m only a younger son of a septarch, but I’ll make myself the most important person on the planet.

K: He definitely has that attitude. And not in a humble, messiah sort of way, even though it seems like he’s being cast in that role. Or rather, he’s making quite an effort to put himself in that role. But I’m sorry, dude, you can’t make yourself a martyr just because you think you’d be an awesome one.

J: *laugh* Yea. Exactly.

K: Getting back to things that didn’t seem particularly well thought out. I started to wonder very early on if this concept would work in a language which has a wider variety of personal pronouns. English has a very limited set, which is why people are constantly trying to invent new ones. But a language like Japanese, where I can think of 7 words for ‘I’ off the top of my head, all with their own nuances — how the heck would you even really translate this?

J: ‘One’ is a particularly interesting pronoun. I was reading a nonfiction book right after this and the author used ‘one’ and then in the same sentence used ‘my’ meaning.. yea, he was really the ‘one’ he was talking about. I wonder what languages it was translated into. I don’t know an easy way to check that. Wikipedia and ISFDB didn’t tell me, except that it seems to have been published in French. Mais le francais a ‘on’, alors c’est facil. In fact I think the French use ‘on’ more often than we use ‘one’, so maybe it didn’t even seem so weird.

K: It would probably have been more striking if Silverberg had omitted the whole ‘one’ business and gone with what showed up very briefly during Kinnal’s abortive visit to Glin — which is to speak without even mentioning yourself at all. Not even the copout ‘one’.

J: Yea, ‘one’ is definitely a copout. There are ways to use it where it isn’t a direct substitute for ‘I’, but mostly he didn’t do that.

K: Not at all. So in the end it didn’t really matter that they weren’t using one particular word, they were still referring to themselves directly.

J: It was actually jarring to me when they had no problem with ‘you’. It seemed to say.. hey, there’s a self, right there in front of me.

K: Yes! I noticed that too. More evidence of poor followthrough in the concept, or was it meant to be some kind of commentary on how an individual could acknowledge the existence of other people, just not themselves?

J: I don’t have faith it was meant like that. I feel like he thought ‘Let’s not use I’ and then stuck to that as he built up this society around it, without really thinking through the ‘we’ and ‘you’ at all.

K: I’m inclined to agree.

J: In the end, I think it’s a pretty forgettable book. And the title doesn’t help either. Unless I start thinking of it as the Menopause Book, I’m not going to remember it.

K: Ha ha ha. Yes, the title is pretty poor. There really didn’t seem to be much changing going on. No matter how many times we were told that Kinnal was shocked by the use of ‘I’ or was being a daring rebel, I never felt convinced he was any different than he always was. And in any case, I can feel the plot of this one already slipping into the plot of Left Hand, so little does it stand out in my mind on its own merits.