Investigating Stanislaw Lem

A few months ago I came across the Twitter feed of Rachel S. Cordasco. The name was familiar to me but I couldn't immediately place it. After some searching, I discovered that she was employed at the Wisconsin Historical Society for at least some of the time that I was there. I had no idea back then that she translated Italian speculative fiction into English and ran a website called Speculative Fiction in Translation.

October is Polish-American Heritage Month and Cordasco featured Polish speculative fiction writers this year. The only one I had even heard of was Stanislaw Lem. I read his novel Solaris long ago after having seen the Andrei Tarkovsky's film based on it but didn't read another one of his books until this past summer when I read The Futurological Congress. It served as the basis of the Ari Folman film The Congress starring Robin Wright.

It was a blatantly surreal trip and, while I enjoyed elements of it, the surrealism was overly scattershot for my taste. My next taste of Lem's oeuvre will be The Investigation, ostensibly a mystery/police procedural that takes a left turn into metaphysical realms. Should be interesting.

Deus in Machina: Transcendence

Like many people, I spent Sunday reflecting on a man who dies and then is resurrected. Unlike Christians who celebrated the death and rebirth of one incarnation of their tripartite deity, I was at my local IMAX cinema watching Johnny Depp's death and resurrection in Transcendence.

Transcendence is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, a cinematographer best known for his work with Christopher Nolan. Pfister surely knows how to lens a movie but I recalled the last time a DP whose work I respected tried his hand at directing - Lost Souls. Janusz Kaminski took a break from shooting Steven Spielberg's film to make this mediocre horror flick. Would Pfister fare any better?

The movie begins with a brief prelude featuring a man who we will come to know as Max wandering the streets of a city that has no electricity. Streetlights are dark, broken cell phones litter the ground, and a laptop is used to prop open a door. He makes his way into a backyard where he kneels before two sunflowers and begins to eulogize two of his friends.

Flashing back a couple years, we are introduced to Will (Johnny Depp) and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall). Will is an artificial intelligence researcher and his wife is trying to get him motivated to get to a conference where potential funders for his project can be found. Will is the dreamer type while Evelyn is more pragmatic. He focuses on getting a computer to be self-aware, much to the detriment of bathing and sartorial choices, while she plays the mom and gets him to change into something presentable.

After his speech, in which he admits to essentially "playing God", Will is shot by a member of a group called RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology) which launches attacks other AI research labs at the same time. Will survives only to discover that the bullet that he was shot with was laced with polonium and he is fated to die a slow, painful death from radiation poisoning. Evelyn recalls that Will had uploaded the "consciousness" of a monkey into his super-mega quantum computer and decides to upload Will's into it so that he may live on. Max questions this decision and whether the transferring the electrical activity of Will's brain into a computer will create something that can fairly be called Will.

At this point the movie has introduced a fair amount of interesting thematic ideas. What is consciousness? Is our humanity merely an admittedly highly complex series of electrical impulses? Unfortunately, we get a rather generic action/thriller. After Will asks to be connected to the Internet, Evelyn and Max have a falling out which leaves Evelyn to care for the electronic simulacrum of her husband alone. RIFT kidnap Max and learn of Will's transubstantiation. Meanwhile Will asks that he be connected to the Internet so that he can expand his capabilities.

With RIFT closing in, Evelyn moves to upload Will to the cloud via a satellite connection. Luckily there were no birds looking for a spot to perch and the consciousness of a human being is only a megabyte or so in size because she only had a couple of minutes to complete the upload. I wonder what file type the human consciousness comes in - .will?

With Will living on somehow on the Internet, he plays the stock market and makes tens of millions, if not more, for a company owned by Evelyn and then directs her to a small desert town called Brightwood where she is to build an underground data center where Will can live on and carry out his nebulous plan. The place ends up being massive with an even more enormous farm of solar panels powering the whole thing. Of course no one in the federal government at-large seems to notice that a very large computer laboratory is being built in the desert nor a vast amount of data traffic to and from some podunk town in the southwest. Maybe Will used IP6 and IANA never noticed.

Once fully armed and operational, Will miraculously becomes an expert in nanotechnology and begins experimenting on some of the local contractors making them into superheroes with incredible strength the and power to regenerate. In fact, Will is so goddamn good, he can grow a copy of his old body in the lab. Will has become a god and his ability to monitor Evelyn's limbic system in real time so perturbs that she loses trust in him and escapes his clutches. She is captured by the FBI who joins forces with RIFT and Will's buddy Joseph, who also ran an AI lab, to make their last stand for humanity. They get themselves some machine guns, a mortar, and a couple howitzers. Oh, and a computer virus which take out Will's systems as well as every other computer system on the planet. The plan calls for Evelyn to be infected with the virus so that, when Will uploads her consciousness into his system, it becomes infected. Bullets and explosives don't cut it against nanobots and the augmented contractors. It all comes to the bad ass RIFT lady threatening Max's life to get Will to upload the virus himself and end it all.

Perhaps it's because I work in IT but I just can't look beyond the techno-asshattery in this movie. Here the Internet is essentially magic instead of being a bunch of computers connected together. You just take a technology, add the Internet and – voila! – you have a god-like power. During the sequence when Will is being uploaded to his quantum computer, we see that it is a process that takes weeks. His face is scanned and Will is recorded reading the OED so that his likeness and voice can later be used in the interface. This takes weeks yet, after this, everything is done is done lickety split. Where did Evelyn upload Will's consciousness to? You don't upload something to the Internet, you upload it to a computer on the Internet. The electronic Will can advance nanotechnology beyond our wildest dreams, can build his old wetware body from scratch but he can't advance solar panel technology beyond the point of needing a few square miles of panels?

Beyond the IT realm, Transcendence disappoints in other ways. For instance, the world is faced with the gravest threat it's ever known short of nuclear war and all that humanity can muster in its defense is a handful of anti-technology radicals, a few G-men, a mortar, and a couple howitzers?

Moving onto the acting, I have to say that this move was a colossal waste. Johnny Depp spends a short while at the beginning playing a bland genius before spending the rest of his time doing a mediocre HAL 9000 imitation. Morgan Freeman as Joseph just called in his umpteenth performance as the wizened mentor. There was nothing unique or animated about anyone's performance here. For the most part, people stood around watching Will's next move in a mixture of awe and fear. The story didn't help much. The scene where the simulacrum of Will comes alive in the computer was positively anti-climactic. There was no time to dwell on such a momentous occasion because we had to race to Will's apotheosis. Indeed, there was no time to dwell on much at all. Why bother to consider questions about the nature of consciousness or our relationship with technology when Max has to be kidnapped and solar panels have to be erected? I think more time was devoted to showing nanobots rebulding those solar panels destroyed by mortar fire than to considering the "big questions" posed in the opening minutes of the film.

Another example of this comes at the end of the movie. The fully-resurrected Will and Evelyn are lying on a bed dying. Will reveals that the electronic simulacrum was really the old Will and that he did everything in order to bring her dream of a better world to fruition. Awwww. While a nice, tidy way to end a love story, the whole revelation was a dud because A) the movie avoided discussing whether or not the thing that the characters considered to be Will could really be loaded onto a computer and B) Will and Evelyn's relationship wasn't developed enough. The script sets Will up as an Apollonian figure – and individual who uses the human capacity of reason to its full extent while Evelyn is the Dionysian figure – she's all about advancing or healing the whole of humanity and is emotional. Will's cold expressions and voice dominate his UI while Evelyn cries and gets angry. But these antipodean dispositions don't conflict or intermingle very much and so, when Will gives his confession, it didn't feel like it resolved much. Rather than a relationship tempered by opposing outlooks ending with a bang, it limped to a conclusion with a whimper.

Transcendence reminded me of many cinematic adaptions of Philip K. Dick novels. Take the interesting concepts and then ignore them as ideas and instead use them as springboards for excitement, action, violence, and fresh fruit!

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

Looking at a bio of Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi I see that he has a degree in mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical Physics. He sounds like an erudite gentleman and his novel, The Quantum Thief, certainly reflects this. In the simplest terms, this book is a pulpy detective story with a lot of Phildickean reality bending and some heavy duty world building.

It begins with Jean le Flambeur in prison. But not just any prison. Indeed, he is in the Dilemma Prison and right from the get-go Rajaniemi 's background is evident as le Flambeur is serving his time acting out game theory against copies of himself. One day he is sprung by a woman named Mieli and they steal away in her ship, the Perhonen (sounds Finnish to me), which is sentient. In fact the ship has a personality which is alternately snarky and salacious.

Mieli, it turns out, is acting in the service of her goddess and towards something called the Great Common Task and she needs le Flambeur's help. While Mieli's ultimate goal is shrouded in mystery, their mission takes them to a Maritan city called Oubliette. There le Flambeur seeks out his past when he had a different name. He has forgotten it but his former self has left clues.

With Mieli and le Flambeur on their way we are introduced to a detective on the Oubliette named Isidore Beautrelet. As he solves the mystery of the murder of a chocolatier, the reader learns about the odd yet very rich world that is the Oubliette. It is a place where time is used as currency. You have an allotted amount of time to live in your "normal" body and, when your time runs out, your "gogol" or your soul is extracted and put into another body, a "Quiet", which does the menial labor that keeps the city running. People can communicate non-verbally by exposing their gogols to others and regulate this exposure by using "gevulots" which are akin to privacy settings on a Facebook profile. Indeed,

Beautrelet is hired by a wealthy man whose time is almost op and will be moving on as a Quiet soon. The man is throwing a going away party but learns that le Flambeur will be crashing it in order to steal something of value. And so le Flambeur and Beautrelet are on a collision course. Along the way we learn that all is not well in the Oubleitte with various factions working against one another and a civil war on the horizon. Beautrelet works with The Gentleman, a Tzaddikim which is a group of vigilantes that protect the citizenry against gogol piracy. The Tzaddikim are in conflict with the Cryptarchs who run the city and seek to control the citizens.

The Quantum Thief is a very dense novel. le Flambeur's story is multi-layered as there is his adventures with Mieli as well as his quest to recover his past. Mieli has her own motivations which remain obscured, for the most part. Beautrelet's tale brings in the detailed and often times confusing world of the Oubliette. I give Rajaniemi lots of credit for refraining from having characters give Gogol for Dummies type of lectures to the reader. On the other hand, I feel he could have done a better job in getting the reader up to speed on his concepts. If you stick with it, you'll eventually get the gist but I think most readers will be stuck with at least some confusing reading. The story also gets credit from me for beginning as a tale of individuals and their private quests to encompassing the politics of a whole world. It was a joy to read how Rajaniemi shifts the focus from two characters to their roles in the middle of grand stratagems playing out on a large scale.

The Quantum Thief had a vaguely Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? feel to it with a future private eye and the Oubliette having a dystopian air about it. Here Mercerism is replaced with an overlay of Internet concepts brought down to the personal level – the gevulots, etc.

Overall this is a wonderful book but I have to admit that it did get confusing and a bit frustrating trying to piece together the world that Rajaniemi has created. It is an interesting one, to be sure, but it takes a while to get one's bearings in it. Some passages read like Rajaniemi is writing for fellow mathematicians and physicists which can be off-putting. But, if you stick with it and re-read some passages it will eventually become clear. Or at least as clear as the author is willing to make it.

Europa Report Trailer

This looks pretty hoopy. It sounds like a more cerebral Apollo 18 from what I've read but we'll just have to wait and see. Arthur C. Clarke is no doubt smiling from beyond the grave.

Sci-Fi Theme Bars

io9 has a look at some science fiction-themed bars. Pretty hoopy.


Giger.


Lovecraft.


Doctor Who.

Does Madison have any theme bars whether they be sci-fi or not? Sports bars not included.

Goodbye Sixie: Spiral Scratch by Gary Russell

Being a big fan of the Sixth Doctor I approached Spiral Scratch with some anxiety. Yes, Sixie deserved to have a proper regeneration story but this was the end of the road for the Sixth Doctor PDAs. How would this farewell story hold up?

As with Instruments of Darkness Gary Russell devotes the opening chapters of the book to introducing a bevy of characters. First there are two alien children who find themselves in the medieval village of Wulpit. Then in Cold War Bucharest Prof. Joseph Tungard and his wife find themselves exiled to England after Joseph dares to go against the Romanian government. Over in England Sir Bertrand Lamprey loses his home and wife to a fire while in a different England two parents visit their daughter's grave.

For his part The Doctor gets it in his head to go visit his old friend Prof. Rummus who runs the Library of Carsus. But he and Mel both have surreal moments. Mel is in the console room when it plays host to various alternate Doctors and Mels including one incarnation of our hero clad in all black with a scar across one eye. This coterie of Time Lords act a bit like The Doctors in "The Five Doctors" as they try to put their heads together to puzzle things out but the new ones disappear before any answers are arrived at. The "real" Mel is left wondering who or what the Lamprey the other Doctors mentioned is. The "real" Doctor also had a strange encounter and is convinced that they must go to Carsus.

There they meet Rummus and experience more timey-wimey events including, disturbingly, the dead bodies of Rummus and The Doctor. With people's timelines running amok, Rummus and The Doctor postulate that the Vortex Spiral has been scratched and that something needs to be done pronto.

At this point I was completely enthralled with Spiral Scratch. Several characters have been introduced and time has gone all non-linear with alternate versions of the characters wandering into scenes, offering tantalizing clues, and then disappearing. Unfortunately, Russell can't keep the momentum going.

It turns out that Rummus stole an ancient Gallifreyan device called the Spiral Chamber and has used it to study the Lamprey, an inhabitant of the Vortex endowed with a voracious appetite for time. Rummus unknowingly allowed the Lamprey to cross from the Vortex into our reality and it is now running roughshod over everything and everyone, merrily eating timelines as it goes. This in itself is a fine story idea but the Lamprey – this eldritch creature from the Vortex which threatens the whole of reality – actually looks like a lamprey. Furthermore, while it's genuinely fun to read about The Doctor, Mel, and their various alternate incarnations running around in different time streams, the subsidiary characters just never quite gel for me. There's too much going on for the story to give them their due and they're just not that interesting.

It's not that they're horrible characters, but rather that Rummus and his relationship to The Doctor would have been more interesting to explore. He's not just some scientist meddling in areas which he shouldn't, he's a friend of The Doctor's who sets in motions events which could destroy everything. I'd much rather have had a more intimate story exploring the dynamic between these two as well as the Library on Carsus. It is billed as the largest repository of knowledge in the universe – what an interesting place! - and certainly could have been a wonderful jumping off point for investigation but instead is used sparingly.

I wish that Russell had narrowed the scope of the story a bit to include less characters and less worlds. There are some amusing moments but a bit here and a bit there in alternate timelines and other worlds just feels unsatisfying. It's like Russell dragged these places into the story more to broaden it and give it an epic feel than anything else. The alternate versions of The Doctor and Mel are a clever device here and I think it would have been more interesting to have them appearing leaving behind a tantalizing clue before disappearing throughout the story rather than being more fully-realized as they are here.

The setup in Spiral Scratch was great but the execution gets bogged down with too many people that aren't particularly interesting. To give Russell his due, the regeneration scene at the end was done well and leads directly into "Time and the Rani" with the Rani saying, “Leave the girl, it’s the man I want...”

Revenge of the Smythe: Instruments of Darkness by Gary Russell

Instruments of Darkness is the final book of a trilogy that began with The Scales of Injustice, which I haven't read, and continued with Business Unusual, the story which introduced Mel. I found the latter to be fun but it was a pretty standard DW story. Thusly I was rather surprised by this one which veered into territory that the New Series treads.

Russell opens his tale with a series of vignettes introducing us to various characters. We begin with a rather mysteriously with an albino and a blue light appearing at various points in the past with women being abducted each time. Finally in 1972 a "shadow man" steals away with a woman named Lori who, he proclaims, is his Ini-Ma. We also meet the aging Vice-Marshal Dickinson whose son disappeared while working for UNIT. Plus there's Captain Therese Gavalle whose mind is taken over by an alien.

The story moves into the present. Over in the village of Halcham the reclusive Sebastian Malvern provides shelter for the infamous Irish twins, Cellian and Ciara as well as a trio of teens who survived the nightmare of SenéNet in Business Unusual. Meanwhile in Park Gavalle responds to an anonymous invitation and finds herself in the employ of the Network, a secret organization that is a front for another secret organization bent on perpetrating evil and harnesses the power of psychics to do so. Trey Korte also returns here. He's been using his psychic abilities on behalf of UNIT and its doppelgänger C19. DI Bob Lines also makes an appearance here. He uses a beacon to signal The Doctor after Trey is abducted from a hospital.

Whew! That's a lot of characters and plot strands.

Luckily Russell is up to the task of bringing them all together. But what surprised me was that he brought Evelyn Smythe into the fold. She was a companion from the Doctor Who audio dramas from Big Finish. The Doctor and Mel meet up with her and it is revealed that The Doctor dropped Evelyn off on Earth to keep an eye out for the Irish Twins but that he did so without giving her any material support and left her there several earlier than he intended to. Unsurprisingly, Evelyn is angry. This leads to some wonderful prose delving into the relationship between The Doctor and his companions. Of her The Doctor says:

"But Evelyn... Evelyn was different. For the first time in some years, I met someone who was, well, an equal. Evelyn didn’t need rescuing too often – I can remember one or two ferocious creatures that needed rescuing from her. She used her brains, her wit and experience to get out of any real trouble and we faced things together. She’d had a lot of life experience you see – she was divorced, she had spent most of her life dealing with younger people, her students. Nothing fazed her.’ He laughed. ‘She even held her own against an entire Dalek army once. We read the same books, laughed at the same jokes. There was an unspoken respect and equality between us, I suppose."

Upon hearing this Mel begins to see The Doctor in a new light, one in which his bluster covers over "a very basic sadness". Perhaps The Doctor not only cared for Evelyn but cared about her as well.

The new series episode "School Reunion" comes to mind and I suppose that basic sadness is really a general theme of the New Series – last of the Time Lords and all that. Russell worked on the New Series although I'm not sure how much of this was his doing. What I like here is that this look into The Doctor's psyche comes courtesy of Sixie with all his outrage instead of the younger, hipper David Tennant. Moral indignation was such a defining characteristic of Colin Baker's Doctor that a look underneath the bluster and the chance that he had done wrong by Evelyn has more impact for me than what the New Series did. (Of course, I say this despite Sixie admitting to having misjudged Lytton in "Attack of the Cybermen".) That the Irish Twins are seeking redemption here adds another layer to the emotional core of the story and perhaps parallels The Doctor's movitivations.

All in all Instruments of Darkness was a fine PDA. The highlight is surely The Doctor and Evelyn's relationship laid bare but it's a fine adventure tale as well.

Doctor Who: Business Unusual by Gary Russell

I made the mistake of reading Business Unusual at the same time as I was listening to The Wrong Doctors by Big Finish which meant that I was consuming two stories at the same time both of which attempted to explain how Mel ended up traveling with The Doctor. It was confusing for a stretch as I kept thinking about Mel going to a play rehearsal while reading the book and wondering when The Doctor was going to head to SenéNet whilst listening to the audio drama.

Business Unusual begins with the rather gruesome death of Robert McLaughlin at the maw of a mutant dog of some kind which drools green saliva and has green eyes. McLaughlin was a member of C19, a Torchwood-like outfit, and his assignment was to investigate the technology company SenéNet. Next thing we know The Brigadier is doing the same thing. While spared the fate of being eaten by a mutant dog, he is taken prisoner.

Meanwhile The Doctor is helping out the Brighton constabulary by mopping up a mess that The Master had made in their computer system. While out and about he sees Mel from afar and does all he can to avoid her lest she become his traveling companion. If this is allowed to happen, he would move ever closer towards his own fate as The Valeyard. Time has a way of smoothing out changes made to it and of course our hero ends up meeting Mel. The Doctor runs into Trey Korte, an exchange student staying with Mel's family. Trey has some latent psychic powers which are discovered by the villains and this catches the attention of The Doctor. He is unable to avoid Mel at this point.

Together they take on SenéNet which is headed by a man named Townsend. He has stolen various bits of alien technology from C19 and appropriating them for his own ends. He had previously augmented his body with that technology but it is now showing its age and he seeks to upgrade his mortal coil. In Townsend's employ are the Irish twins Cellian and Ciara. I read afterwards that all three appeared in Russell's The Scales of Injustice, a Third Doctor novel but, not having read it, I cannot judge how well or interesting these characters develop.

The story here is reminiscent of The Green Death with the mysterious corporation and its equally mysterious CEO. But what makes Business Unusual different is how Russell gets into the heads of the supporting cast. Erskine is a former member of UNIT under Lethbridge-Stewart who was left for dead in one of the group's battles with invading aliens. As he seeks revenge against those who abandoned him and took his life away, The Brigadier contemplates the responsibilities of his job as well as the drastic consequences his decisions have at the human level. Cellian and Ciara had their minds manipulated by Townsend and are ruthless killers for most of the book but they eventually find what's left of their humanity.

In the books introduction Russell notes that he wanted to write a story that he "thought Colin Baker would have liked to be in". To this end I think he was mostly successful. While Mel and The Doctor bicker at first, they do settle in fairly quickly and develop a warm relationship. This is the kinder, gentler Doctor we saw in The Mysterious Planet and later in the Big Finish audios. His gaudy attire is remarked upon more than once plus it is revealed that he's a Pink Floyd fan:

Alan switched on the car stereo system, which included a CD player, and Mel automatically selected her father’s favourite Pink Floyd album.
‘Ah, Piper,’ murmured the Doctor. ‘Syd’s greatest hour.’

There is, however, a scene out of character for The Doctor. Part of Townsend's plan has a couple dozen or so kids turned into zombies attached to computers. In one scene as his scheme is being foiled by The Doctor, our hero seems to care little about their horrible fate. Indeed, other children also have horrendous things happen to them which Russell describes in heartbreaking detail.

A lot of Business Unusual is boilerplate Doctor Who but it is a very fun story. The Doctor-Brigadier combination was nice but it they are separated for most of the book so it was a bit of a letdown. What sets it apart is the way Russell treats the minor characters and gets into their heads and fleshes out their motivations and has them gradually change.

Gravity Trailer

Alfonso Cuarón finally returns with Gravity. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as two astronauts who survive the destruction of their space shuttle and are trapped in orbit. Presumably gravity gets a hold of them and they are slowly pulled towards the Earth. Emmanuel Lubezki is the DP here. He shot Children of Men for Cuarón and he's been Terrence Malick's cinematographer since 2005 so it should be pretty.

I am not sure I can watch this much less on 3D IMAX. I'd probably get vertigo.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

A few months before starting this book I listened to Cat Women of the Moon, a radio documentary about sex & gender in science fiction. In the program China Miéville talks about interspecies relationships and noted that he had paired up a human male with an insectoid female in one of his stories. I wasn't many pages in when I realized that he had been talking about Perdido Street Station.

The world here is one in which magic is no fantasy and steampunk is a reality too. The protagonist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, is a resident of the metropolis of New Crobuzon. New Crobuzon is a gritty place which resembles our own metropolises in many ways but also has a fantastic dystopian feel as well. There's a corrupt mayor with a heavy-handed police force that repels down from zeppelins. Neighborhoods are populated by the various races. Humans live side by side with Khepri (humanoid beetles), Garuda (humanoid birds), Cactacae (humanoid cacti), and others. Plus there are the Remades, beings whose bodies have been modified. Sometimes they have mechanical bits grafted onto their bodies while other times organic matter is.

Grimnebulin is a scientist who pays the bills by doing some work at a university but spends more time in a shared laboratory pursuing his whims, the major one being chaos energy. He is in love with Lin, a Khepri who is also an artist. At the beginning of the story Grimnebulin is approached by a Garuda named Yagharek who wants to hire the scientist to replace his wings which were hacked off in a sad episode of Garudan justice. Meanwhile Lin is hired by the drug lord Mr. Motley to create a sculpture.

The pair is doing well with each being paid to do what they love. As part of his research into flight, Isaac sends the word out onto the street that he's interested in creatures of flight and soon his lab is inundated with them. He also acquires a strange caterpillar-like creature which he discovers only eats a new hallucinogenic drug called dreamshit. It grows and eventually matures into a very large and very dangerous creature called a slake moth which feeds on the consciousness of sentient beings. It frees its brethren who are being held captive at a government research lab and all hell breaks loose in New Crobuzon.

Much of the story involves Isaac and Yagharek banding together with a rotating cast of other characters to kill the slake moths. In addition to teaming up with various rogues, Isaac also encounters some steampunk AI in a scrapyard. The scramble against time makes for some great reading but Lin is kidnapped by her benefactor and is thusly out of the picture for most of the story. This is unfortunate because Miéville takes some time at the opening of the story to get into her psyche where he examines her relationship with her fellow Khepri as well as how her interspecies relationship with Isaac is seen in the community at large. He also plumbs the depths of her obsession with art.

While one character study is set aside, we get another which is equally enthralling. New Crobuzon is a wonderful creation with its mixture of species, magic, and a steampunk take on the Industrial Revolution. There is political intrigue within the halls of power there while out on the streets the poor of various races assemble in neighborhoods and eke out an existence. Magic is the common thread which binds the city and its inhabitants together. Thaumaturgy is an academic subject at the university but it is also an engine of industry. It is used to punish criminals by transmogrifying them into Remades but it is also practiced by some striking dock workers. Miéville also spends a fair number of words describing the inhabitants of the city and their cultures – what they are like, their homelands, and how they adapt to life in the city. He really spared no expense in trying to make New Crobuzon as vivid as he could.

While I think that taking Lin out of the picture was a misstep, Perdido Street Station was still a brilliant novel. It's part action & suspense (the scene with our slake moth hunters entering the creatures' nest had me on the edge of my seat) but it's also an engaging peek inside the heads of various characters and a sociological examination of the weird yet wonderful fictional metropolis of New Crobuzon which bears more than a passing resemblance to our own world.

A Sixie Omnibus

When I met Kate Orman last fall at Chicago TARDIS, I was compelled to ask her if the references to Rush and Yes in this book were digs at progheads or if she enjoyed the music. I was pleased to discover that she too loves prog. Indeed, she was very friendly, as was her husband Jonathan Blum, and a joy to chat with and listen to at various panel discussions. Thankfully I can also report that Blue Box is a very fun read. The Past Doctor Adventures have been pretty kind to Sixie.

Blue Box plays with DW convention by having the story told by Chick Peters, a journalist. The book begins in late 1982 – about a year after the main events of the story take place – with Peters sneaking onto the grounds of Bainbridge Hospital in Virginia. There he spies Sarah Swan, a hacker who was recently at the top of her game but now is confined to giving a thousand yard stare from a wheelchair.

Peters then goes back and tells the story of how Swan ended up in her condition and that involves The Doctor, Peri, and some alien artifacts. Oh, and a lot of hacking. The Doctor has Peri contact a young hacker named Bob Salmon to recruit him to the cause which ends up being the theft of an alien device from Swan. There's a lot of cloak and dagger here and I'm told that Orman researched UNIX hacking on Usenet before writing the book so the scenes of Swan and The Doctor battling it out on keyboards is realistic instead of the usual stuff in fiction it takes the click of single button to bypass the most stringent security.

Having the story told from Peters' perspective instead of a generic third person works really well here. It gives Sixie something of the mysteriousness that his successor had in his novels. The Doctor is not always present but you know he's off somewhere scheming and he holds some stuff back. It's not that he's being manipulative in a bad way, but more that the narrator is not omniscient. It felt refreshing to have The Doctor give less explanations for everything or at least give them at much less regular intervals.



The return of Sabalom Glitz! And Frobisher too! The story opens with a bit of intergalactic larceny a la Mission Impossible as Jack Chance and his gang steal a Veltrochni artifact. We are then introduced to a couple of hit men, Sha'ol and Karthakh, whose next job is to kill The Doctor. Meanwhile our heroes are attending the premiere of Star Wars back in May 1977. After reading this far, I knew I was in for an entertaining romp.

Sha'ol and Karthakh somehow materialize inside the TARDIS but The Doctor is able to send them back from whence they came. They should never have been able to get in in the first place so The Doctor follows their time signature to the planet Vandor Prime. He and Frobisher meet up with Glitz and Dibber who are up to their old nefarious ways. They all run into trouble and, in order to extricate themselves from the long arm of the law, are recruited to reassemble Chance's team and steal the Veltrochni artifact, which is now in Vandorian possession, and return it to the Veltrochni who are on the war path.

McIntee spins a very fun tale here. There is political intrigue in the halls of Vandorian government, the Ogrons are running around causing trouble, an artifact is in need of being re-stolen, and all the while The Doctor is trying to figure out how those hit men got their hands on some extremely advanced technology – technology that only the Time Lords would have. As the Veltrochni and Vandorians find themselves poised on the brink of war, there are some asides in which Karthakh, a Veltrochni, ponders his relationship with Sha'ol, a Tzun. The two races do not exactly have a history of cordial relations. These bits of introspection aren't preachy and fit nicely into the story. They provided a little change of pace amongst all the other warring, conniving factions.



Apparently The Shadow in the Glass was a hastily written replacement for Instruments of Darkness which Gary Russell couldn't get done on schedule. While Mission Impractical threw in some seriousness, it was mostly good fun. This book, however, is pretty much all doom and gloom. It's not oppressive, mind you, but there is no shape-shifting penguin or Sabalom Glitz here for a bit of levity.

In the spring of 1944 the R.A.F. shoots down a mysterious object in the skies over Dorset and it lands in the village of Turelhampton. Less than a year later the Russians are taking Berlin and overrun Hitler's bunker. Curiously enough, they find a group of Tibetans dressed there in German uniforms who have committed suicide.

Back in the present – the books was published in 2001 – the army still keeps watch over Turelhampton. A reporter named Claire Aldwych, who works for the Conspiracy Channel, investigates the crash site and even gets some footage on video. They're discovered and flee. Claire gets away with the tape while her cameraman stays behind. The acting commander at Turelhampton calls in UNIT to find Claire and retrieve the tape which shows some mysterious imps.

Luckily for the reader, UNIT means the Brigadier who is retired here but brought on to help. He, in turn, calls The Doctor. It's a nice match. Lethbridge-Stewart keeps his friend on track when The Doctor gets all techobabbley. There's also a cult and it appears that Der Führer is alive and well. I liked how the book brought the occult into the picture along with the Nazis. Claire is a stand-in companion as we have The Doctor traveling alone here and she proves extremely capable.

I really enjoyed this adventure as it had a rather dark tone and it kept you guessing for a long time instead of giving the game away earlier and having a large chunk of the book being devoted to The Doctor simply racing against time to stop the bad guy. I appreciated the suspense. Plus the scene where The Doctor and the Brigadier meet Hitler was rather amusing.

I have only one gripe. In the process of trying to determine if Hitler could have really escaped Berlin ahead of the Russians, the Brigadier goes to Russia to investigate their archives. Claire plants a small camera in his briefcase since she is not allowed to accompany him. As I read it, I was completely flummoxed as to how the camera transmitted images from Russia to the UK. I kept asking myself, "How is she watching that in real time?"

Despite this, The Shadow in the Glass was another fine outing for Sixie.