The Book Report

This is the first installment of The Book Report, a new occasional feature I'll be bringing to Backup Brain in 2008. Consider this to be jumping the gun a bit. It will consist of short blurbs about books I've recently read. I figure that if I enjoy a book, some of you will, too. For pleasure, I tend to read mostly science fiction, so most of my blurbs will focus on SF novels. Some books will be new, some not so much.

Here are my thoughts about a few of the books I've read over the past few months, in no particular order.

Radio Freefall, by Matthew Jarpe

This is Jarpe's first novel, and it's a big winner. It combines rock and roll, artificial intelligence, a megalomaniac with more than a passing resemblance to Bill Gates, a computer virus named the Digital Carnivore, and equally hungry corporations. The main character is an aging musician named (among other things) Aqualung. It's lots of fun. Go get it.

Shelter, by Susan Palwick

Set in near-future San Francisco, this book introduces us to a world devastated by climate change and a pandemic, the CV virus. One of the first victims, Preston Walford, is a rich industrialist who uploads his mind onto the Net, becoming a virtual being. The book focuses on his daughter, Meredith, who survives CV, but at a cost that severely affects her, her family, and many others. Like Radio Freefall, the concept of legal rights for AI's is a big theme. Perhaps too long at 576 pages, this book is nevertheless quite emotionally affecting.

Cauldron, by Jack McDivitt

McDivitt has done six novels in his Academy series, and this is probably (hopefully?) his last. Sad to say, he's not gone out with a bang. The heroine of the previous novels, Priscilla Hutchins, gets short shrift from the author, who seems more interested in cranking the Plot Handle than in providing us with characters or motivations we can care about. The MacGuffin in this book is a vastly faster hyperdrive that opens up much greater distances to the characters. This allows them to finally visit the source of the mysterious omega clouds, which McDivitt has been building up as fearsome galactic Doomsday machines for the past five novels. Turns out that the reason they exist is really kind of boring.

Ironically, the author said on his Web site quite some time ago:

To pursue it farther, to hunt down the source, to research the nuts and bolts of the clouds, would very quickly take the luster off the rose. Some things are best left to the reader's very able imagination.

He should have taken his own advice. If you've read all the previous Hutch novels, you'll probably want to read this just for completeness. But borrow it from the library; it's not worth your hard-earned cash.

Bizarrely refreshing

I love TV commercials. Not all of them, of course; most are just crap. But the best ones are amazing little snippets of cinema. In the early Eighties, back before I started in the computer biz, and way before I became a writer, I worked at a TV commercial production house in Los Angeles, N. Lee Lacy & Associates. My job was to cut together the director's sample reels. I did this first on 16mm film, then I moved them into 3/4" videocassette. Every one of the 10 directors they had under contract had done dozens or hundreds of spots, of course, so we created customized reels for each potential job that we bid out. It was part of my job to be familiar with just about all of each director's work, and to assemble an appropriate reel.

Basically, I spent a couple of years watching commercials. Perhaps that explains many things about me. But I saw some really great spots. I wish I still had the tape with director Adrian Lyne's ads (he wasn't one of our directors, but I got a copy of his reel). At a time when the reels I put together were about 8 minutes long, Lyne's was 30 minutes, and ended with a terrific 5 minute Levis spot meant for cinemas, with two girls making their way across America via Route 66.

OK, I'm digressing. I just saw a very strange spot for Orangina. It could be construed as Not Safe For Work, I guess. Enjoy.

Happy everything

We're visiting my family in Southern California for Christmas. Sean is home in Healdsburg, taking care of Pixel the Cat. Earlier today, before we drove down here, we exchanged presents. It was nice. We'll miss Sean on Christmas Day, but we recognize that at 19, he had other things that he wanted to do.

We hope that you are with the people you love this holiday season.