An Audio-Book Review: Took Me a While to Find Balance, But Worth It

All Systems Red

The Murderbot Diaries #1

By Martha Wells

Published by Recorded Books

Read by Kevin R. Free

The Book:

I stumbled across this series about a yea ago and have had it on the USB drive I listen to audiobooks from in my car ever since. I honesty would have listened to it far sooner, but the format was not compatible with my car’s entertainment system (does anyone still call it a “Stereo?” Yeah, I’m dating myself). I eventually figured out why it failed to come up in the queue and reformatted it to someone my car could handle (Tangent warning: Oh well, at least it’s not AI… I have several times in the past month tried to ask the AI in my Browser for an answer and caught it lying to me (simple questions like “What’s happening today?” and receiving information several days out of date). It’s gotten to the point where after getting an AI answer, I feel I have to ask, “Are you sure?”).

Anyway, I have finally managed to listen to this one and I think it was worth the wait. I’m still a bit hazy on some of the details, but mostly in just what the main character is or rather what words best describe him (or she or it? I honestly don’t know how they identify save that they make it clear they do not have gender physically. For now, however, I think I shall resort to They/them as it does not feel right to refer to a sentient being (whether natural or artificial) as an “it.” They call themself, “Murderbot.” (Roll credits!) and has a fairy grisly past that we only get mentions about.

They are (is?) a Secunit (short for Security Unit) assigned to work with a group of human scientists. I would normally refer to “Murderbot” as a cyborg, being part organic and part machine, but to me, at least a cyborg is a human with implanted (or added on or whatever) machine components. Murderbot, while this is not explained in detail, seems to be more like a machine that happens to have organic components, so a sort of reverse cyborg? Murderbot  managed to hack the governor inside them that forces them to obey human commands although, thankfully, they are not particularly adverse to humans or feels some harm he must take revenge for, they just want to ignore humans as much as possible while getting to know and understand themself. Murderbot likes to watch soap operas too. An Interesting character.

When another expedition goes dark, however, the humans go to investigate. Murderbot advises against that, but insists they should be there with the team… just in case. And thus the story begins.

This one is relatively short, being novella-length, but short or not, it is a good introduction to this SF Universe and the people and things in it. I look forward to the next story.

The Audiobook:

This is the first time I have heard Kevin R. Free read, but I enjoyed it. He did so in a fairly clean, no-nonsense manner that managed to lend some tonal differences to the various characters without resorting to what I usually call “Funny voices.” Certainly, his reading helped to keep my attention on the story as I drove around (I listen to most audiobooks in my car so can get distracted from the story sometimes (Hey, I’m drivin’ here! Gotta keep part of my mind on the (other) idiots on the road).

In any case, I thought this was a great introductory story to the series and it was excellently read.

Next: Ave Caesar! I listen to Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

An Audio-Book Review: How Many Times Must We Hear, “Am I not the Mundumugu?”

Kirinyaga

By Mike Resnick

Published by Blackstone Audio   

Read by Paul Michael Garcia

The Book:

I got about halfway through this one before realizing I had probably listened to it before. Then I decided that since I have been relistening to some other titles, I might as well go through this one again and see if my opinions had changed. I think they have.

This is the story of an older man living in Kenya some centuries from now who, in spite of his education at Cambridge and Yale Universities, wants to help settle a new world with his tribe, the Kikuyu, and live in the ancient traditional manner his people lived before European contact. It’s a noble goal, I suppose, but this man, Koriba, is a strict cultural fundamentalist and strives to keep his people on the straight and narrow as their tribe had lived back then. But there are problems he must deal with and a lot of them.

Back in college and grad school I studied Anthropology. Admittedly I specialized in Archaeology, but in most American universities that still means taking a fair number of classes in Cultural and Physical Anthropology and, where I went to school, I was also required to have some credits in Anthropological Linguistics. (As a side note, my favorite class from all my time in school was in my freshman year when I attended a class in Physical Anthropology taught by Dr. Donald Johanson, perhaps best known for his discovery of the Australopithecine afarensis fossil known as “Lucy.” NB: this was shortly before he found Lucy.)

However, while most of my credits were in archaeology classes, I had quite a few in cultural anthropology as well. So, when I first read this book it was as an anthropologist might have. While I did not know very much about the Kikuyu, I understood them in general and when Koriba acted as the mundumugo, which for so-called Europeans meant witch doctor (NB: I was more inclined to translate that as “shaman,” which for the most part does not have the pejorative shadings of “witch doctor.”) I saw him as acting in the role of religious and spiritual leader as well as a healer, However, I could not help, even from the start of the book, but wonder where this was going to go.

Early on, there is a story a precocious young girl in his tribe who finds a wounded bird and begs Koriba to heal that bird. Nothing for nothing is normal in most cultures and to pay for his service Koriba demands that she clean his hut, carry water to it and a variety of other tasks on top of the usual chores she did for her own family. While working in his hut, she finds the computer with which he speaks to “Maintenance,” the agency who makes sure the climate on this new world is to order as well as transporting people to it and off, should they choose to leave. The computer is a voice activated AI and with it she teaches herself to read, something only a few on the world of Kirinyaga are allowed to do, and no women at all are. When Koriba learns this he imposes a punishment and order the computer to no longer communicate with her in “any known language.” The clever young girl invents a language all her own and teaches it to the computer, thereby enabling her to continue learning with it. He eventually catches on and, demands the computer not communicate with her at all. In the meantime the bird she rescued dies (he explains that the bird died because it was no longer able to fly) but her agreement was to serve Koriba for whatever length of time they had agreed to nonetheless and she attempts to honor that agreement, but cut off from the computer and a chance to learn she soon loses the will to live herself and commits suicide.

It may be the most heart-breaking story in the book, but it comes too early to feel it (or too early for me) since I could see this as typical of some cultures similar to the Kikuyu and at the time I read the book, I thought it was a shame that the Kikuyu did not have some sort of accommodation ceremony that would have redefined the young girl and a young boy and thus made her studies acceptable. Such accommodations exist in some cultures, but apparently not the Kikuyu. As I say, it was a shame as I expected Koriba to perform such a ceremony and then take her on as a mundumugu in training.

Indeed, in this book happy endings are few and far between; even the ones that go well turn out to be at the cost of grave damage to the people, but the final straw for Koriba comes when the other stop fearing him and his “magic” and start asking Maintenance to heal their injuries and fix other problems. The issue here is that, according to Koriba, they had come to this world to live a distinctly and historically accurate Kikuyu way of life. However, along the way we learn that they never really have (for example, before European contact, indeed, before the Maumau Uprising, the Kikuyu had not lived in villages – that villages were the “Europeans’ way of dealing with them after the troubles).

Eventually Koriba decides that he too must leave Kirinyaga as it is no longer the Utopia he had sought to establish there and he returns disillusioned by what has happened to Kenya on Earth. This hardly ends his personal problems, but you can read the epilogue for yourselves. But I will say that I would have expected that man as well-educated as Koriba was should have realized that no culture is stagnant so long as it is still alive. Even in isolation, and Kirinyaga’s isolation was far from perfect, things will change, people will find new ways of doing things. They might go long time between changes but changes will come nonetheless.

Koriba had a picture in his mind as to what a perfect Kikuyu world might look like but it was one that was stagnated in a fictional “Anthropological Present.” For those who have not had an anthropology class, we generally learn from various studies and ethnographies which, in turn are snapshots of individual cultures at a specific time. When discussing those cultures we frequently do so in the present tense as though nothing has changed there since the people were studied. In truth these cultures almost always demonstrate changes over time, sometimes slowly but frequently very rapidly, but unless a follow up study is done we will still discuss them as we found them in the ethnographies. We know things have changed since then, but the point is to understand such cultures as they were at the time of the study. If a follow-up is done we will study that too and compare the results, but sometimes all we have is the initial study which is still a valid picture of a people at a specific point in time… just don’t depend on it as you might a tourist brochure should you happen to be in that part of the world anytime these days.

Koriba, therefore was trying to impress his own anthropological present on the people of his world. I found myself wondering toward the end where these mostly illiterate people had come from. All the original settlers had arrived at the same time Koriba had and while some had, indeed, died since then, it seemed to me that there were still quite a few who remembered living on Earth in Kenya, and yet none of them, except for Koriba, seems to ever say anything indicating they remember why they left. The next generation were still very young when thy left and the even younger people had never known life elsewhere, but there were still enough who should have remembered and compared what they had here to what they had on Earth.

Sure, anyone who was dissatisfied could leave Kirinyaga whenever they liked, but I got the impression that we saw the few who did in the various stories. Oh well, it is fiction after all, and maybe we’re only hearing about some of Koriba’s problems.

So, is it a good book? I have read the reviews of others and seen both raves and complaints. Most o the complaints were that Mike Resnick was too in love with all things African. However, while I took great exception to Koriba and many of his decisions as to how to handle the various issues he faced, I fully understood why he behaved the way he did and that he truly believed the world of Kirinyaga could be the Kikuyu Utopia. My complaints, therefore, are not about Resnick’s writing which, I think, is pretty good, but with Koriba and his faulty belief that he and he alone knew what would make his people the happiest and his indomitable inflexibility in how that might be achieved.

I think Resnick accurately showed that the concept of Utopia is fleeting at best and one which is bound to evolve and change even as the people living in such a system do as well.

The Audiobook:

I am not sure how I acquired this edition. It is no longer available on the Blackstone Audio website, but I think I prefer the way Paul Michael Garcia reads it to the recording by Janis Ian available from Audible. Not that I am criticizing Ian’s reading. I have not listened to all of it. I just like Garcia’s way to reading to what I have heard of Ian’s. He just sounds more like an old man with a high-level education, trying to act like a shaman.

So, the book had it’s highs, but I felt more lows as I went from siding, at first, with Koriba to understanding while not agreeing with his decisions to seeing he was complete wrong and all too out of touch with the reality he was living in. I do not mean he was insane, not by a long shot, but in total denial of any mistakes he made and just irrational enough to think he could impress his lifestyle on everyone else, whether on Kirinyaga or back in Kenya. I did enjoy the reading of it, however.

Next: Time to start reading the Murderbot Diaries in All Systems Red by Martha Wells

An Audio-Book Review: Waiting For the Next Generation

In the King’s Service

Book One of the Childe Morgan Trilogy

By Katherine Kurtz

Published by Audible Studios

Read by Nick Sullivan

The Book:

Oops, yet again. I meant to post this two weeks ago. Otoh, that means I’m good for another three week streak now. Sorry about the undue delay!

There are a lot of Deryni stories now (no complaints!) and this trilogy acts as a direct prequel to the original Deryni Trilogy which I think I reviewed half a lifetime ago (yeah, okay, maybe only three or so years ago, but it feels like a long time).

I have to admit this was not quite the story I had been expecting. Oh, from the name of the series I figured it might open up with Alaric Morgan playing in his parents’ garden or something… before something really dark happened, but instead it opens up before he was even conceived and leads up to his conception.

We do see young Prince Brian with his playmates and a lot of scheming by his royal father, King Donal, and, yes, typical of the Deryni series in that way, but the difference is by now we aren’t dealing with the nobles of Gwynedd trying to keep the king as their pawn (as we did in the Heirs of Saint Camber series) although now the Camberian Council is doing their scheming and planning instead, so I imagine allt hat will come into play in the rest of the series.

All told, though, it was an interesting story, but I have to admit I was sorely tired of Donal himself by the end of the book and all he would do to his loyal friends to stoke his own ego. So, I have to admit I do not think much of him as a person, not that he was a tower of noble behavior from the start. The book is filled with back-and-forth intrigue and politics, but at least there are some nice people who refuse to be victims involved too.

The Audiobook:

In the “Heirs of Saint Camber” series I was highly annoyed by John Barrows’ constant mispronunciation of the Name “Cinhal.” This time Nick Sullivan has done the same to me with his mispronunciation of Sief (a name which I had never heard before and yet sounded so wrong to me, I had to look it up because I was so on edge hearing about some guy known as “C.F.” FTR, it’s pronounced more like “Seef.” I don’t claim to be an expert on names, especially Welsh ones, so if I’m catching it, it has to be wrong.)

Other than that, however, he read the story very well and I really did enjoy his style.

So, a great start to a new series (or a subseries depending on how you count them) and a very good reading of it as well.

Next: I have issues with the mundumugu of Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick.

An Audio-Book Review: Zero Chance of Rain

Children of Dune

By Frank Herbert

Published by Macmillan Audio

Read by Scott Brick and Simon Vance

The Book:

It feel like a thousand years ago, but when I first reviewed Dune I mentioned how a good friend of mine had a long-winded riff on the series (which at the time only included four or five books although I agree that the situation has not change with the introductions of the prequels, sequel and “Middle of the tale-quels.”) in which he ended his description of each book with “Dune. It’s a good book. You should read it.” The point, of course, being that the rest of the series fails to hold up to the quality of that first volume. Definitely, that applies to this volume which, if I recall accurately, his pocket review was, “Think about reading it. Now put it down and go back and read Dune (It’s a good book. You should read it.)

The original Dune was a magnificent and masterful blend of complex court intrigue and human stories of many sorts with a large and varied cast of characters. Leaving aside, for now, the attempts by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson to write in this same universe (some of which work better than others and are not really bad stories, although none of them quite approach the standard set by Dune…. In my opinion), the next book was Dune Messiah which when I read it impressed me as a blatant attempt to cash in on the success of the first book, but was too simplistic a story to really stand up against the original it followed. Children of Dune seems, to me to be an attempt to correct that and in doing so got way too complex with far too many characters and a lot of new ones, none of whom really stand out. The series just is not consistent.

My other main complain is that it is full of “new facts” about the empire and about the planet, Dune, itself, some of which feels a lot like full-scale retconning. The worst example is Sietch Jacurutu (aka Fondak) which has a very important place in Fremen memory as a place to be avoided, as place where bad things happen, where the people had been exterminated and so forth. And yet we’ve never heard of it. Frank Herbert wrote two previous Dune books and never once does a Fremen swear by (or against) Jacurutu, threaten to send someone there, accuse someone to have been inspired by the tale of the place or any such sort of thing such an important legend ought to have inspired. Now all of a sudden, several characters talk about the place, possibly seeking it out or warning not to do so. The place is on nearly everyone’s mind and something this important ought to have been at least hinted at before now even had we been given no explanation as to what it was.

When we learn about the place, we find out that about six (maybe 7?) generations earlier (in the time of Stillgar’s great-great-grandfather and he is a grandfather to Leto II and his sister Ghanima) the members of the sietch had hunted down other Fremen to kill them and stealthier water and therefore the other Fremen banded together to wipe them out and justifiably so, but even the prequels (written long after this book) make no mention of Jacurutu and one might think it would have been a nice touch to may talk about the founding of the place, but no.

SO, the book was, to me, too complex to follow easily with too many side plots and new information that really should have at least been hinted at earlier leading me to recommend…

Dune, it’s a good book. You should read it.

The Audiobook:

I might not have enjoyed the story (either on my first reading or this listening… and I really hoped my opinion would have changed after all this time), but it was read well by both Scott Brick and Simon Vance. I have to admit that until I went back to look at the credits I had not realized that there had been two different readers. They worked together very well.

So, if you did like reading this book, I think you ought to enjoy this reading of it.

Next: We start again, again with Childe Morgan by Katherine Kurtz

An Audio-Book Review: Not a Typical Teenager

Zoe’s Tale

Old Man’s War #4

By John Scalzi

Published by Macmillan Audio

Read by Tavia Gilbert

The Book:

Here’s one I’ve been trying to listen to for months. I kept putting it in my queue btu it would not play. After three rounds of that I took another look and discovered the format was not compatible with the player in my car. Since I usually only listen to audiobooks while driving that was a bit of a show-stopper, but fortunately there are quite a few free on-line conversion services for this sort of thing. All I had to do was find one that would not leave scads of “malicious software” (Malwarebytes calls them P.U.P.s for “Potentially Unwanted Programs…” Doesn’t that sound nice and friendly? PUP? Like a cuddly pet you have to feed and clean up after, take for walks in all kinds of weather, pay for vet visits, worry about intensely when they get ill, mourn when they pass on… Hmm… Maybe PUP is an apt acronym after all?) all over my hard drive. Once that was done I converted a few other files I had in my library and was ready to listen.

Zoe is the adopted teenaged daughter of John and Jane from the previous books in this series and this time the story is being told in her first-person voice, which I found interesting. She has had an unusual life so far, which might explain for her sophistication beyond her years. I think I’ll go with that since the more obvious explanation was that the author occasionally forgot she was only 17 years old and had her considering some few things as a 35 year old might… but maybe not. I’ve met teens who were wise beyond their years… not all that many but some. Actually, to be honest, I think Mister Scalzi did a fairly good job of writing in Zoe’s voice and possibly slipped a bit less often than I might have had I tried the same thing.

In any case, Zoe and her adoptive parents find themselves moving to a brand new colony world which, for the first time is not being colonized directly by people from Earth but by people from the worlds of the Colonial Union. Apparently, this is a move that is opposed by The Conclave a fair-sized group of various aliens who also colonize other worlds and are, therefore, in competition with Earthly colonizers. And… I think that may be as much as I can spill without tossing out too many spoilers.

Naturally, there are complications on a number of levels and in many ways the story is episodic although it holds together as a single storyline quite well. I have to admit I found myself siding with the Conclave on a number of issues. The Colonial Union seemed a bit too ruthless and authoritarian to my tastes and while the Conclave was ruthless in their own way as well, they did give their targets the chance to stand done without harm and accept either transport away or membership in the Conclave. Of course, it still involved conquest of someone else’s colony and they still resorted to military means when their offers were not accepted so they aren’t any more perfect than we silly humans are (no surprises!).

Toward the end of the book, I felt that maybe more (story-wise) was being dumped on Zoe than was fair (Life is not fair, but…). By that I mean that she was being portrayed as just a normal teenaged young woman and yet she was accomplishing a heck of a lot more than I found completely believable, given her character. Sure she has had a very abnormal life up to the start of the book, but there is no clue that such an extraordinary life was anything more than circumstantial, no explanation to suggest why her hunches always turned out to be the exactly right thing to do in every situation. I suppose you might say she was too foolish to avoid getting into dangerous situations, but bright enough to think her way out of them, but I thought she was just a little too good every time and perhaps making a few more mistakes and learning from them along the way would have helped.

Other than that, though I did really enjoy this story and find myself looking forward to the next in this series.

The Audiobook:

I’m a little bit mixed on my reaction to Tavia Gilbert’s reading of the story. Make no mistake, I thought she did an excellent job, but in my last review I mention how a lot of readers these days don’t just read but act out all the characters. Ms Gilbert is one of those readers. To some extent, it forces me to see the characters as she does, which is not always a bad thing, but I prefer to form my own mental images of them, using the author’s words as a guide and to do it for myself. Is that fair to the reader (or the author)? Probably not, but I never said I was perfect and I’ll admit that maybe I’m wrong about that.

Tavia Gilbert odes an excellent job of voicing a perky and highly intelligent teenager, and also of intelligent and sarky teenagers (amazing how none of the main or important supporting characters were just average folks, but maybe normal would not have attracted Zoe into friendships with them?), but once in a while I just wanted to hear the story. Maybe some of that is the fault of the author though, since I cannot really point to anything in the reading that was just wrong.

In spite of my notes, however, I enjoyed Tavia Gilbert’s reading as much as I did the story itself.

Next: Children (and Pets?) of Dune by Frank Herbert

An Audio-Book Review: Up, Up and Away!

Dragonflight  

Dragonriders of Pern #1

By Anne McCaffrey

Published by Brilliance Audio

Read by Dick Hill

The Book:

I think I first read this book back in college when the Science Fiction Book Club first published it as part of a three-in-one volume along with Dragonquest and The White Dragon. A few years later I read this one again, but in a German edition, which helped me pass a foreign language equivalency requirement for my Master’s degree. Trust me, reading this in German is a bit of a kick when you are trying to learn the language. For the record, I never did learn how to speak German, but I did manage to learn to read it well enough to pass a required test.

Anyway, this is the story of Lessa, the daughter of the deceased Lord of Ruatha Hold who had been killed when the lord of a neighboring hold decided to create an empire by conquering all the holds in his region of the world of Pern. He might well have succeeded save for the events in this book, but this is not really his story.

When Ruatha Hold was attacked, Lessa had fled to a safe location inside the hold and thereafter pretended to be one of the servants, all the while waiting for her chance to take back her rightful holding.

Meanwhile, a flight of dragonriders, under the command of a Bronze-rider named F’lar arrives in search of a woman who might be paired with a soon-to-be-hatched Gold Dragon… and if you have not read the story, all this may sound confusing, right? It makes perfect sense when you actually read it since the author takes to the time to introduce you into this world even while telling the story. Anyway, in the course of events, Lessa does not become the Lady Holder of Ruatha, but travels with the dragonriders to their Weyr where it turns out life is not what she thought it might be on a  number of levels.

It turns out that the Weyr is the last remaining home of dragonriders, because all the others are mysteriously empty which is somewhat alarming as they are needed to protect Pern from “Thread,” a destructive organism that arrives on Pern every two hundred years with the passing the “Red Star,” another planet with an eccentric orbit. Now Lessa must not only raise her newly hatched Gold dragon, but learn the duties of a Weyrwoman, contend with the Lords of Pern who do not believe that Thread will return, figure out what happened to the missing dragonriders and save her world from the return of Thread.

How? I suggest reading the book, I’ve probably already dropped too many spoilers. Anne McCaffrey created a very rich and complex world when she came up with Pern which explains why she (along with her son Todd and, more recently, her daughter Gigi) wrote so many books in the series. There’s a lot to tell about that world.

This first story feels a bit like a fantasy novel at first, probably because of the dragons and a culture that seems to be Medieval in nature, but it really is science fiction, taking place in the far future and on another world. In the course of this first book we get glimpses of forgotten history and technology which gets fleshed out between in subsequent novels, but this really is the best place to start when reading stories on Pern.

All told it is a fun read and entices one to jump right into the next volume and the next.

The Audiobook:

I enjoyed listening to this one. First of all, it has been a long time since I read Dragonflight, or any of the books in this series (although I did got through a phase some years back when I was slightly active in Pern fandom) and secondly I think this was an older recording from back when the readers were reading the books rather than acting them out. Dick Hill modulates his voice a bit as he reads this, but he does so fairly subtly and does not try to upstage the actual story as some narrators will tend to do. I really very much prefer the authors words to be the real stars of a book with all due respect for them from the actual reader.

So, I found this to be a pleasant step back to a familiar old book and very much enjoyed listening to the reader.

Next: A different aspect of Old Man’s War in Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

An Audio-Book Review: Znidd Suddabit!

Uller Uprising

By H. Beam Piper

Published by Librivox.org

Read by Ralph Snelson, Morgan Saletta, Acacia Wood, Sean O’Hara and Anthony Wilson

The Book:

Apparently, I am hardly the first person to entitle a review of Uller Uprising, “Znidd Suddabit.” Well, I’m glad to be in such good company. I only found out after making my choice and then making sure I had spelled it correctly. For the record, “Znidd Suddabit” is Ullerese (Ulleran?) for “Die Terran!” just in case you have yet to read this story.

This was one of Piper’s earlier novels (a relatively short novel, but unlike a later draft that was published in one of the SF magazines of the time, of novel length. The shortened version was probably to fit the magazine’s format. In any case, I think it may have been the first story set in what became Piper’s Terro-Human future history and has some hallmarks of being an early work although one that long-time Piper fans frequently mentioned in articles when it was out of print for far too long. Consequently, I never got to read it for myself until the Ace edition was released in 1983. And to put that in context, by then I had managed to stumble across a first edition of The Other Human Race for a whopping 25 cents in a used bookstore before that, but Uller Uprising eluded me until Ace re-released it.

Many of Piper’s science fiction is based on actual historic events or situations and this is no exception, having been based on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 against the British East India Company. That is probably why I have not reread the story in years; when I do my overall thought is, “No wonder indigenous peoples hate colonizers!” Not that I did not already know, but whether that was Piper’s point of the story or not (and I suspect not since the protagonists here are colonizers) it does seem to show quite clearly in the ways the people of the Uller Company treat the natives both in nomenclature (most tribes are called “Geeks”) and in how they are put to work on the mining planet Nifflheim[JF1] .

In later Terro-Human history books by Piper, the name Nifflheim became a swear word and in Four Day Planet (not exactly a paradise either) we are treated to the song lyrics;

“Come all ye hardy spacemen, and harken while I tell
 Of fluorine-tainted Nifflheim, the Planetary Hell.“

(Obviously to the tune of Blow Ye Winds)

Unlike Humans, Ullerans can tolerate the harsh conditions (like flowing rivers of hydrofluoric acid) for brief amounts of time and are used there until they actually start changing color from the exposure to fluorides. The Uller company people say the limit of time an Ulleran can stay there is safe, but I wonder if there are no long-term damages to the employed Ullerans. Long term effects as such were not really known back when Piper write this story, but were he writing it now, I am sure he would include bits like shortened lifespans and mutations to children of those who had worked on Nifflheim. That might be the only change the story needs to be brought up to date.

All told, though, it is a thought-provoking story on many levels so while it may not be as light and happy at the end as, say, Little Fuzzy, Four Day Planet or even The Cosmic Computer, it has a lot to say about humans and hopefully will stand as a warning if we ever take to the stars and look for colonial worlds of our own.

The Audiobook:

Like a fair number of other offerings by Librivox.org, this one has a collection of readers taking turn reading various chapters of the story. Sometimes it kind of reminds me of a group of friends sitting around a campfire, each taking a turn at reading a chapter to the rest. This time over half the chapters were read by a lady using the name, Acacia Wood, so while she did not start the story, she did read most of it. As sometimes happens in Librivox audiobooks, the readers were a mixed bag, but none of them were so bad that I could not stand them nor were any so inconsistent that I could not get used to their reading styles. Most Librivox readers are just that, readers. They are not trying to act out the stories they read, just read them in a manner showing respect to the work. So, if sometimes they seem like the Amateur Hour, well, why not? Some are professionals, but all are volunteers, reading these public domain stories for the rest of us to enjoy and I, for one, appreciate it!

Next: We take to the air (and go in Between) in Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

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An Audio-Book Review: Romanes Eunt Domus!

Always Look On the Bright Side of Life

A SortaBiography

By Eric Idle

Published by Books on Tape

Read by Eric Idle

The Book:

When I first stumbled across this book, I thought, “This should be fun.” I was right. It is fun, but as always, I do have notes (but not particularly serious ones).

Eric Idle wrote an amazingly entertaining story of his life in show business centered around Monty Python and what came afterward, using his hit song “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life” as the theme. He mentions how he is sometimes surprised at how popular that particular song has become, especially at British funerals as it seems to have been a quick knock off when he and the guys were trying to figure out how to finish off The Life of Brian. Typical, really. It is often the unexpected piece that somehow gains popularity, but it should not be much of a surprise. It has a catchy little tune that really gets stuck in your head. It may not be the original earworm (it is not, Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story about one) but it certainly is the poster child for earworms in the present day. So, of course it is a popular song.

Eric Idle starts out with his young life in a typical British school (sounded dire!!!) and his gradual move toward comedy and how the Pythons eventually met and started working together. Occasionally, he wanders off track a bit and has to go back to pick up on stuff he skipped over, but it adds to the charm of the story, I think and makes it more like he is sitting in your room and talking at length. Indeed, sometimes it sounds like he is talking to fill the silence (as some will do) but this IS his story after all. If he happened to pause and talk about something really off-topic, like Boris Johnson’s election to Prime Minister it simply would not have worked.

If I have any real “notes” it is Idle’s tendency to name-drop about how he would hang out with other celebrities, but it seems fair enough that he should do so. He really did know such notables as George Harrison, Mick Jagger, Robin Williams and many more on a personal level. And when you think about it, who but another celebrity (or their spouse) would understand what another celebrity is going through. Most of us just plain folks will have a tendency to gush over a person of note whose work we admire and that really can be stressful to the celebrity of our choice. Sure, they might find a non-famous person who understands and can let them just be themselves, but they are more likely to find such a person in another celebrity just trying to relax.

So, in all, it was quite an enjoyable book. Even with the sad parts when various friends died, Idle found a way to talk about them in a way that both entertained and fully explained how it devastated him as well. As auto-biographies go, I think this may be the one I have enjoyed the most.

The Audiobook:

Who else could read this book but Eric Idle himself. Anyone else would have found themselves trying to imitate his way of speaking and singing and could never have done the job half as well. Even his fellow Pythons could not have done him as well as he did himself. So the book was not just a “Sortabiography” (which I suppose implies that many more volumes might have been filled but probably not so entertainingly) but a performance and one I am superbly glad I did not miss.

Next: We witness the Uller Uprising by H. Beam Piper

An Audio-Book Review: European Arabian Nights?

The Dragon and the Djinn

The Dragon Knight #6

By Gordon R. Dickson

Published by Audible

Read by Paul Boehmer

The Book:

I have to be honest and admit that my favorite book of this series so far was the very first, The Dragon and the George. It was a fun adventure about the 20^th Century guy who suddenly found himself in the body of a dragon in an alternative fantasy world. It had a nice blend of adventure and humor and turned some standard fantasy tropes on their heads. Somehow it was even used as the basis of the story of the animated film “Flight of Dragons” that somehow gave the credit to Peter Dickinson because he wrote the book of that same name. Maybe there were some of his ideas in the film, but really the story was that of Dickson’s.

The rest of the series, however, is pretty much the standard sort of medieval fantasy that even today fills the market. I admit I am not particularly enamored of Medieval Fantasy, perhaps because for a while all fantasy was either medieval or modern but with nothing in between. So, by the time I started writing my own novels, I tried writing fantasy stories set in worlds based on other time periods, like the later 19^th Century and early 20^th Century or the 18^th Century, which got me some nice personal rejection letters trying to explain that coffee and tobacco were not medieval (I know! That’s why I included such touches…) Oh well, that is the nature of the publishing business – take as few financial risks as you can and publish more of what is currently selling. Some of that has changed since then what with such new sub-genres as Steampunk and other forays into different historical periods. Was I ahead of my time? Maybe my stuff just was not good enough to take a chance on… and I apologize for that tangent, One really should not blame publishers for going for a sure thing rather than taking uncertain risks.

In any case, the first book put us in a fairly standard fantasy world, but one which had a lot of fun with the concept. It seemed a bit like Arthurian England what with wizards and knights and so forth, but it was not specifically England, but in the subsequent volumes the stories demonstrate we are, indeed not only in England, but all we can imagine in 14^th Century Scotland, France, and so forth is out there too, making this a far more standard version of Medieval fantasy. I felt the humor levels dropped quite a bit as well, making the stories far more serious. It just was not as much fun.

I think Dickson tried to keep the fun element in the stories, but setting them in a fantasy version of the real 14^th Century (by that I mean they are on an alternative timeline of the real Earth, just one in which magic works) took, for me, a lot of the fun out of the stories, so Jim Eckert is still stumbling his way from one situation to the next, but somehow the flavor of the original story is much fainter. It’s good writing, just not the same style as the original story.

This volume is pretty much the same. This time Jim (with others) is on his way to the Middle East where the father of Sir Brian’s fiancé was last seen, but he needs the approval of her father for them to finally be wed. Along the way, Jim meets a djinni who at first seems to have been introduced only to give the book a title. Later on, that meeting becomes far more significant. In any case, this is like the second through fifth books of the series in nature; good solid stories, just not what got me into the series in the first place.

The Audiobook:

I have listened to Paul Boehmer’s narrations quite a few times now and he never fails to deliver a worthwhile performance. This is no exception. Yes, I often finding myself wondering is a certain word is being pronounced correctly or if I have been wrong about it all my life (some words have more than one correct pronunciation, though) but nothing that really bothered me and, in all, I very much enjoyed listening to him.

So, while not entirely to my personal taste, this is a well-written book and equally well-read.

Next: We Always Look On the Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle

An Audio-Book Review: Sometimes Finding the Truth is Sad

Last Seen In Massilia

Roma Sub Rosa #8

By Steven Saylor

Published by Blackstone Audiobooks

Read by Ralph Cosham

The Book:

Here is another one I have reviewed before, but I wanted to listen to it again, partially because I enjoyed it the first time around and partially because I did not remember many of the details.

Obviously, this is yet another of Steven Saylor’s books featuring Gordianus the Finder, a detective of sort in Ancient Rome during the Later Republic. This is a period during which, in hindsight, we can see the best days of the Republic are in the past and Rome, despite the on-going conquests of Pompei and Caesar, which expand the territory Rome controls, is in and out of turmoil especially within the city itself.

The series starts out during the Dictatorship of Sulla following his victory over the forces of Marius, a period particularly corrupt with the friends of Sulla getting fabulously wealthy and his enemies getting dead. From that point onward (and yes, somewhat before) Rome’s politics seem to have been split between what Cicero called the “Optimates” or best People and the Populists, those who appealed to the lesser, but greater in number common people of Rome. Not that the leaders were commoners (or Plebians). They were often Patricians catering to the “mob,” so to speak. Men like Marius, Catalina, Publius Clodius Pulcher (who went so far as to change the spelling of his name and giving up his Patrician rank (but probably not his wealth) to run for a Plebian office and even Julius Caesar. On the other side we find Sulla, Pompei and Cicero, to name the most successful. Others of both sides are mentioned throughout the series.

While this series is far from over at this point, Gordianus is now an older man and mostly retired from his former work as a private detective (mostly for Patrician lawyers who needed evidence) and, for the sake of the stories, he is usually investigating the deaths of various people… well, these are mostly murder mysteries… someone has to die, right? Side note: well, you could probably write a murder mystery in which it turned out no one had actually died (I do not read enough to know for certain, but I would not be surprised there are some), but I do not suppose the genre would be very popular if it always turned out that “Nobody Dunnit” although this one come close.

As I said, Gordianus is now retired. His adopted son, Echo is now working as a Finder and his other adopted son Meto is Caesar’s adjutant. (Also, his daughter, Diana, has married the former slave and bodyguard, Davos, who also acts as Gordianus’ guard) However, one fine (r not-so-fine) day Gordianus received an anonymous message informing him that Meto had died in Massilia but that he had remained loyal to Caesar in spite of being in Massilia. Since Gordianus had no idea there was the possibility of a split between Meto and Caesar, not that Meto had fled to Massilia, just ahead of Caesar’s army, Gordianus immediately packs his bag and sets off with Davos to investigate.

Massilia (modern-day Marseilles) was a favorite place for disgraced Romans to flea to during the late republic rather than facing death sentences for staying in Rome and we eventually meet a number of characters from previous books. The city when Gordianus arrives, however, is under siege by Caesar’s army so his first job is to find a way inside. I do not want to spoil it for anyone, but he manages that trick in a somewhat improbable manner and eventually manages to start his search for Meto who he refuses to believe is really dead.

For the rest of the plot, I suggest reading the book. However, on second reading (or listening) I found this was not my favorite of the series. I felt that Gordianus had no logical reason for going to Massilia to investigate Meto’s death (although emotionally, as his father, it makes some sense) or maybe what bothered me was his insistence that Meto was not dead. It seemed to go beyond the normal disbelief one might feel in such a circumstance. He also should have been making constant sacrifices to the Goddess of Good Luck (Fortuna) because he really should have died a few times himself along the way, not to mention that he fell into the good graces of the one person who had enough food in the besieged city to share with him and Davos (and also offered these two foreign strangers the hospitality of his home), Okay, sure, this one man only had the hospitality to offer because  he too would soon be sacrificed to save the city, but these was just too much fortunate coincidence going on throughout the story for my tastes.

I was not particularly satisfied with the ending. It had the feeling of true life and not a neatly written story, but I think these really was room in this circumstance for both qualities and without  a sort of “To be continued” feeling as well.

The Audiobook:

I also did not recall Ralph Cosham’s reading of this book, but actually I have no complaints in that quarter. He gave it a good solid reading. If I had any of my usual complaints (mispronounced words, odd voices, etc.) I do not recall them now. Like I say, it was a good solid narration.

So, I found the story not quite up to my expectations from previous volumes in the series, but if you have not yet read this one and liked the others, you should not skip this one. It adds much to the on-going story of Gordianus and his family and, in spite of my complaints above, is not a bad story, just not as fine as some of the others. Hey… Sometimes you find a nicely polished zircon among the diamonds.

Next: We fly with The Dragon and the Djinn by Gordon R. Dickson