Mystery of the Universe

The song "Dead Man's Party" has a lyric that goes

Everybody's coming
leave your body at the door
leave your body and soul at the door.

Doesn't that mean don't go inside at all?

New Arrivals at the Benton Library

Come on in and check them out!

• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
• Star Wars Republic Commando: True Colors by Karen Traviss
• Mainspring by Jay Lake
  

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

If you don't get it, good for you. Enjoy your normal life.

City of the Beasts

Couldn't get into the story, as the translation was awkward and I don't like Alex, the main character. But check out this description of a character:

... he turned out to be a short, thin, nervous fifty-year-old man with a permanent expression of either scorn or cruelty on his lips, and the squinty little eyes of a mouse.

Way to sum up a guy in just a few lines.

Mainspring

Most peculiar story.

Remember how you learned about deism in your AP European History class? A bunch of French philosophers thought they would be clever and decided that God had created the universe, wound it up like an enormous watch, and left it to run its course. What would happen if the universe really was a huge watch? What would happen if a talented short story writer tried to build a novel around this central conceit?

The result is ... interesting. This is a world a lot like your usual steampunk Earth, you know, Great Britain never lost the American Colonies and airships are floating around everywhere. And everybody can see the brass gears in the sky that define Earth's orbit. The universe, or the solar system at least, runs on clockwork.

The clockwork that powers the Earth is running down, and only our hero, Hethor, can rewind it. Why the angel Gabriel chooses Hethor for this mission is never made clear, but it might have to do with the fact that he has a magical ability to tell time. Unfortunately, for the first half of the book, Hethor's kind of a twit. For the second half of the book he reminds me of Dune Messiah. It's an improvement, but ... still.

And now for some quibbles. Earth is anchored to its orbital gearing by a miles-high toothed wall around the equator. The airship's crew says that the air should be bad if it weren't for the blanket of air that magically coats the top of the wall, so let's say the wall extends to the top of the troposphere. That's about 6 miles. (And that's a conservative estimate; it could be much taller.) During northern hemisphere winter, this thing is going to cast a shadow of 6 * tan 23.5º or 2.6 miles long*. Wouldn't this have some pretty weird effects on global climate? You've got a narrow strip of tropical land that gets six months of night just like at the poles. And that's not to mention the fact that the Equatorial Wall prevents the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere oceans from mixing.

But Lake spares no time for such plotholes. He'd rather explore what happens to people in a world where evidence of God's creation is, well, pretty obvious. There are freaking gears in the sky! And yet, astonishingly, there is a group who calls themselves the Rational Humanists. I don't quite understand their philosophy, but they seem to believe that mysterious beings called clockmakers built the universe, not God. That doesn't seem to make sense. Isn't it the Rational Humanist thing to do to seek a natural explanation for the gears in the sky? What does it accomplish to transfer the responsibility from God to a bunch of magical Keebler elves?

I'm probably trying to approach this story like too much of a Rational Humanist myself; I should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Despite the protagonist, there's a lot to like. There's lots of airships and plenty of action scenes. One of the ships seems to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which is cool. There's a strong implication that one of the characters is a cyborg. Then again, this happened at the end of the book, at which point I would not have been too surprised if Elvis had walked on stage. Oh, whatever. I'm over-analyzing. Go check it out.





* I'm assuming Earth's a flat surface. At a scale of 2.6 miles, it's not going to matter much.

Costa Rica

Here, as promised, are some photos of Costa Rica:

















And yes, I had just as much fun as it looks like I did.

Ode to the Dollar Coin

Due to a recent horrific travel experience involving bad weather, missed connections, and fellow passengers who turned out to have bad visas, I was forced to buy a granola bar from a vending machine with a $5 bill. When I scooped the change out of the return slot, I discovered four fat little president dollar coins. These dollar coins are the most adorable money ever. They look a lot like tokens for the San Francisco trolley. They're heavy, large, and golden colored, with a satisfyingly thick ridge around the edge.

I love these little guys because they hearken back to the Olden Days when you could actually buy stuff with coins. One of these days I'm going to walk into a drug store and buy a stick of gum, and when the cashier asks for my money, I will say, "Oh, yeah, I've got this" and plonk that sucker down on the counter. I don't even like gum. And they're gold-colored, which money hasn't been for quite some time now.

I also discovered that they don't fit inside the coin slot in airport pay phones.

So, clunky, cute, and of somewhat limited usefulness. Kind of like: