Charles Stross: Halting State

Review of the novel Halting State by Charles Stross.

Halting State by Charles Stross
Halting State

Charles Stross’ novels have wandered all over the speculative fiction map, from fantasy/adventure to space opera to really-high-tech space opera, and now to the near future in Halting State. The book takes place in 2018, mostly in Scotland which has seceded from the United Kingdom but is still part of the European Union. The book opens with a theft at a Hayek Associates, but it’s not an ordinary theft: Hayek runs central banks for several MMORPGs, storing virtual equipment and loot securely for their virtual owners who are off adventuring elsewhere. Someone has managed to attack the company through the game and make off with a large volume of virtual assets, essentially corrupting the live database Hayek keeps in trust for its clients, and thus putting its reputation and market value at risk. The marketing director at Hayek panics and calls the local constabulary, which is how Sue, one of the three protagonists in Halting State, gets involved, as the officer who takes the call.

Hayek’s insurance company learns of the crime, and worries not only about its liability, but about its own reputation. It sends a cadre of officers to Hayek to find out what happened (and cover their asses), including the second protagonist, Elaine, who fears that she’s being positioned to provide cover for her bosses. As part of the outing, her company hires an outside programmer to help them get oriented to Hayek’s business from a technical side, and they end up with Jack, who’s recently unemployed and had a run-in with the law while on vacation in Holland, but who really knows networked computer games.

The catch is that the theft at Hayek is actually a blind for several other things going on, one of them much larger and indicative of how espionage games might be played between the major powers ten or thirty years from now, and our heroes get caught in the middle of it – along with a whole bunch of other people.

Halting State starts slow and takes a while to get moving, although once it does there are lots of little clever bits: Ways gamers put their skills to use in a world where the virtual and the actual can be blurred, as well as the disconnect between people who only deal with the “real world” and the stakes in a virtual game where virtual assets and reputations have real value. Stross has clearly thought about these issues pretty carefully, and is familiar with both the techies and the non-techies so he can portray both types of people believably.

The book’s biggest flaw is that a lot of it feels superfluous. Sue’s presence seems like a side-issue, as she rarely interacts with Elaine or Jack, and she only seems to be there to witness a couple of key scenes in the book. She doesn’t really add much value, herself. Mostly the book is Elaine’s and Jack’s, and it seems like Stross is maneuvering them to be a “team” in the same way that Rachel and Martin are a team in Stross’ earlier novels Singularity Sky and its sequel, which makes me wonder if he has sequels to Halting State in mind. (Honestly, I’d rather read more novels in the higher-tech and more interesting Singularity Sky universe.) There’s also a lot of running around, especially the big event that Sue witnesses when the EU equivalent of the Men in Black show up to try to solve the case, which effort ends in chaos but to little effect on the story. Basically, the story feels padded.

It’s also told in the second person, which at first seems like a silly little conceit, but eventually I realized that it’s evoking the feel of the text adventure games of my own youth, which are often told in this voice (“You’re standing on a road. It’s a sunny day.” “Go north”, types the player. “You’re standing at the entrance to a castle.”). The voice wears thin after a while in any event, so I still found it to be a silly little conceit. Stross likes to play with style and structure, which I usually appreciate, but he casts his net so wide that I often find his experiments to be very hit-or-miss.

I’m not generally a big fan of near-future SF, usually because I don’t find the tech level to be fantastic enough to really thrill me. Stross does his level best in Halting State to wow the reader with network security concerns, cutting-edge computer hardware, shifting geopolitical strategies, and novel ways to use resources on the network (such as the humans who are logged into it), but the story ends up being merely okay, and the climax felt like a letdown. I think too much finesse left the story feeling a little ethereal, especially since a few of the scenes of maximum excitement seemed like they didn’t move the story forward (although it’s entirely possible that I’m just not seeing a piece of the big picture).

It’s a nice try, though.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 4 January 2008.

  • Countdown to Final Crisis #17 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Keith Giffen & Ron Lim (DC)
  • Countdown to Mystery #4 of 8, by Matthew Sturges & Stephen Jorge Segovia, and Steve Gerber, Justiniano & Walden Wong (DC)
  • Metal Men #5 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
  • Annihilation Conquest #3 of 6, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Tom Raney & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
  • Powers: Secret Identity TPB vol 11, by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming (Marvel/Icon)
  • The End League #1, by Rick Remender, Mat Broome & Sean Parsons (Dark Horse)
  • Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #5 of 5, by Mike Mignola & Jason Armstrong (Dark Horse)
The End League #1 The premise of The End League is that in 1962 a catastrophe devastated the Earth, but also bestowed super-powers upon 1 in 1000 people. But unlike in ordinary comic books, very few people felt driven to use their abilities altruistically, rather they used them for personal wealth and power, effectively becoming super-villains. 45 years later, the wars among these villains have turned the world into armed camps where shelter and food are the most prized possessions. The miraculous Astonishman was the superhero who was tricked into causing the catastrophe, and he’s devoted his life since then to assembling heroes to restore order and justice to the world. And the heroes are losing, badly. This series may well be the final story of these heroes, The End League.

Writer Rick Remender – whose name I’ve heard, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything he’s written – masterminds this series, which I guess is an ongoing one, although how long such a grim premise can be milked I don’t know. His script is appropriately downbeat, narrated by Astonishman, who is depressed and fatalistic, and who blames himself for everything that’s happened. I’m a little less impressed with the cast of heroes, who are archetypes based on heroes from various eras of superhero comics history, and honestly I get a little tired of the same old archetypes being used for these independent stories. Still, other than Astonishman there’s not enough characterization here to draw any conclusions, so there’s plenty of space for it to end up with fleshed-out characters rather than archetypes. (Ultimately this was a big part of what made Alan Moore’s Watchmen successful: Although loosely based on the Charlton Comics heroes, the characters were all individual and not archetypal.)

The art by Mat Broome and Sean Parsons is similarly dark, evocative of Jae Lee’s art on the Sentry series of a decade or so ago at Marvel, with intricate colors by Wendy Broome adding to the gloomy atmosphere, It’s perfectly appropriate for the story at hand, and in particular Broome seems to have the artistic fundamentals to make the book look right – he’s not some warmed-over Image Comics artist, the likes of which would make this book look really silly.

The 90s and 2000s have seen a few different books trying to tell “the last superhero story”. Remender says The End League is inspired by The Lord of the Rings and The Dark Knight Returns. The exact flip side of The End League is Bill Willingham’s Pantheon, about what happens after the good guys win. It was pretty good, and also supported by fine artwork (and can now be downloaded for free). I don’t think anyone’s yet told the definitive story of this sort, probably because once the superhero cat is out of the bag it’s pretty hard to put it back in. As Dr. Manhattan said in Watchmen, “Nothing ever ends.”

By that light, The End League might be a story with only one possible conclusion. Remender’s task is to either make the conclusion satisfying, or to find some other way to thread this particular needle. It’s a daunting challenge, to be sure. This first issue is all set-up, with a single mission which goes (of course) horribly wrong, ending on a cliffhanger. To really work, I think the book’s going to have the break out of the routine of a group of heroes underground against overwhelming oppressive forces (since we’ve all read that story many times before) and do something unexpected.

I’ll be back next month to see what direction the book’s headed in.

Stormy Weather

Northern California is being hit by a serious of major storms, the first of which rolled in on Thursday night. Tens of thousands of people are without power – especially along the coast – and freeways and bridges have been shut down at times, in part thanks to fierce winds blowing over some semi trucks.

And us here in the south bay? It’s not been so bad, actually. Debbi went to work on Friday (I took the week off) and seemed to avoid the worst of the traffic snarls (which all seemed to be in the north bay), except for hitting one backup at the very end of her drive home. I was worried that our back yard might flood at times, but it turned out that the rain was just coming down slightly faster than it could be absorbed into the ground, but it never got any higher than when I first got concerned. It helps that we haven’t had much rain recently, so the ground is able to suck up a lot of water. Palo Alto’s Creek Monitor shows that the creeks are far from full, too.

It got windy enough to blow down some small branches (or large branches, in bbum’s case) and a sales sign at a nearby condo complex, but that’s about it. We had a couple of power outages Friday morning, the first before I got up, and the second while I was out and about, both of which I noticed only because clocks were flashing when I got back.

Really, the worst we’ve suffered is that our cable TV is out today. I called Comcast, got put on hold for 25 minutes, and gave up. If it persists, I’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a bit of a bummer to be missing the football playoffs, but you can’t have everything in a rainstorm.

And the rain didn’t stop me from being productive the last two days: I sold a whole bunch of CDs to Rasputin Music, and a box of books to BookBuyers. We took down and put away our Christmas lights from outside today, too. And of course I made my weekly comic book run. Tomorrow we might drop some stuff off in our storage unit.

It sounds like it’s going to keep raining through Wednesday or later, which probably means no frisbee on Monday. But if yesterday was the worst of it, then it should be okay.

Especially if our TV comes back on.

Dens of Probability

“Subrata’s Den of Probability” was what my friend Lee once called Subrata‘s Wednesday gaming night. I still chuckle about that.

As if New Year’s Eve wasn’t enough gaming, yesterday was another day full of games. I took the rest of this week off to finish resting up from my busy fall, and I’ve been glad that I did. It’s hard to believe my vacation is almost over, though!

After having lunch with Debbi yesterday I went over to Lucky Chances and played in a 3/6 Hold ‘Em game. The first hour I was getting slowly bleeded off with mostly-crappy cards. Other than QJo, most of my best hands were things like K4 and A3 (and more of the former than the latter). I won one small pot in my big blind, but that was about it. Having whittled my $100 buy-in down to about $30 I bought another rack of chips, since I didn’t want to leave after only an hour.

My day turned around, though. I drew pocket Queens and raised to see a T-9-3 flop. I kept betting as the turn and river were both 3s and I won the pot against a guy with a 9. Later on I played QT and hit top pair and got called down to the river – by two people both playing Q9, so my kicker won it for me. I had a repeat of this pot later on when I flopped 2 pair with JT, and beat a player who had 2 pair with J9. I also managed to river my flush with AKs (in a pot that was big enough for me to keep chasing). Overall I won back my buy-in and won a last pot before I left to finish up $65.

Overall I’m slowly crawling back to even for my poker-playing “career”. But since my total losses at my lowest point were less than the cost of a Playstation 3, it’s not like I’m betting the farm here. Mostly it feels good to think that I’m at least figuring out low-limit Hold ‘Em. (I could still stand to be more aggressive, though.)

I also spent some time watching a 7-Card Stud table while waiting for a seat, and I’m curious about learning how to play that variety of poker. But maybe I should stay away. 🙂

In the evening it was off to the Den of Probability where I played a game of Russian Rails against Subrata and Susan. My game stalled out mid-way through thanks to a horrifying run of being hit by disasters, and Subrata ended up crushing the both of us. But that’s the way it goes. I suspect RR is better with 4 or more people – not uncommon for the Empire Builder series of games.

We had a large number of people there last night, and the rest of the folks played Munchkin and then a logic game called Zendo. Zendo seemed pretty neat at first glance, but as it went on it seemed that it was too easy to come up with puzzles which were very difficult to solve. Arguably some of us perhaps outsmarted ourselves by trying to come up with solutions that were more clever than what the puzzlemaster intended. So the jury’s still out on that one. It is a pretty simple and clever game, though.

I’m feeling a little gamed out now, though, and will probably skip a friendly poker game being suggested for tonight. Plus, I feel like I’m coming down with a cold. So taking it a little easy is probably for the best.

Ringing In

As we usually do, we spent last night at Mark and Yvette’s for their annual New Year’s Eve Drunken Scrabble Party. They’ve recently moved, so this was also a housewarming party for them, which meant house tours for the rest of us. They’re renting an interesting house whose first floor was built in the 1930s (or so), and a second floor was added in the 1980s. Since they’re on a hill, this means the house has a large number of staircases, including a staircase down from the second floor to the guest bedroom/office. It reminds me of some of the interesting organic architecture you sometimes find in New England homes. Anyway, they seem pretty happy with it, and they’re still trying to figure out where everything will go in any event.

Gaming was pretty successful for me (and fun too). We played two games of Apples to Apples and I won one. Then we played two games of Blokus and I won one (and came in second in the other; Debbi ended up using all of her tiles – a good feat – and won that one), and then I played a game of Scrabble with Mark, Subrata and Susan and won that one by 2 points over Susan. Debbi helped a little when I got stuck with all vowels and a blank since I’m not very familiar with the esoteric “Q” words, but I also managed to play “blitz” for the first word of the game, which was 52 points, so I was happy about that. I’m not a very good Scrabble player, compared to Mark and Subrata, at least.

Susan got in one of the best lines of the night, playing “queer” for a big score just after midnight, and observing “2008 has been a much better Scrabble year than 2007 so far!”

We drank plenty of champagne, but were pretty well dried out by the time we left (after 1 am) and made our way home through the relatively busy streets.

This morning we slept in, finally getting up after 10 am. I’ve become hooked on scone mixes from Iveta, so Debbi had some scones in the oven while I was brewing coffee and she was in the shower – when the power went out. It flickered briefly and then went out again, so I knew it wasn’t because of a circuit breaker tripping, and a call to a neighbor confirmed that. Happy New Year – now sit in the dark and cold! I have no idea what happened (I couldn’t find any info about outages on PG&E‘s web site, and their phone number just told me that they were aware of the outage, but not the cause), but the power came on a little under an hour later, which to be fair is a pretty good response time for a utility failure. So at least things are back to normal.

Now to figure out what we’ll be up to for the rest of the day. Plenty of time – it’s only 1 pm, right?

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 28 December 2007.

This week’s entry revolves around a trio of writers, all of whom have been in the industry for more than 30 years.

  • Action Comics #860, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC)
  • The Brave and the Bold #9, by Mark Waid, George Pérez, Bob Wiacek & Scott Koblish (DC)
  • Countdown to Final Crisis #18 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen & Scott Kolins (DC)
  • Countdown to Adventure #5 of 8, by Adam Beechen, Allan Goldman & Julio Ferreira and Justin Gray, Fabrizio Fiorentino & Adam DeKraker (DC)
  • The Death of the New Gods #4 of 8, by Jim Starlin & Art Thibert (DC)
  • Legion of Super-Heroes #37, by Jim Shooter, Francis Manapul & Livesay (DC)
  • Thor #5, by J. Michael Straczynski, Oliver Coipel & Mark Morales (Marvel)
  • Atom Eve #1 of 2, by Benito Cereno & Nate Bellegarde (Image)
Countdown to Final Crisis #18 Countdown to Final Crisis has maybe its best issue yet, as the whereabouts of Ray Palmer (the original Atom) are revealed, including the backstory of what he’s been up to, an explanation of why the Atom – of all people – is important to the well-being of the multiverse (hint: he’s a scientist) and even ending on a surprising cliffhanger. I guess you can read this issue in one of two ways: Either that it’s sad that it took 35 issues for something to actually get resolved, such that the reader wonders why all the fuss was necessary, or else it’s an indication of Keith Giffen‘s influence as “story consultant” telling head writer Paul Dini and the editors to get on with it already. I’m not always Giffen’s biggest fan (I don’t have much good to say about his run on Legion of Super-Heroes with Paul Levitz in the 80s, for instance), but if nothing else he has a traditional approach to storytelling: Start off with a big event and keep the story moving from there. And that’s what’s really been missing from Countdown, which started slowly and then nothing happened for half the series.

It may be too little, too late to save this series, but at least there are signs of life.

The Death of the New Gods #4 Jim Starlin is another guy who even when he’s not at the top of his game can usually be counted on to get the fundamentals of storytelling, and he’s coming through in The Death of the New Gods. I expressed my reservations about the whole New Gods thing when the series started, but it’s actually turning out to be entertaining, and I think it’s because it’s not a New Gods story, it’s a Jim Starlin story.

Starlin often likes to have a big mystery in his stories, and here it’s the big question: Who’s killing the New Gods? Metron comes face-to-face with what is presumably either a giant clue, or the answer itself, but my lack-of-caring about the New Gods means that it means nothing to me. That could be the series’ fatal flaw as far as I’m concerned, but with 4 issues left, no doubt Starlin has a lot more up his sleeve.

The other interesting development is that while the story so far has focused on Mister Miracle, Starlin is setting it up to end up as a Superman story, which makes sense if the series lives up to its title: Superman might be the only one left to witness the death of these powerful beings. Starlin doesn’t often play around with structure in his stories, so I’m curious to see where he takes this angle.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol 5 #37 After 30 years, Jim Shooter returns to write Legion of Super-Heroes. His last issue was Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #224 back in 1977, since when he done little things like be Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics during the 1980s. The word on the street is that there was tremendous opposition to Shooter getting this writing gig – he’s reportedly made a lot of enemies in the comics biz – but as a fan I say “Good for him!”

Greg Burgas has a pretty good review of the issue as a reader who (unlike me) isn’t much of a Legion fan: Shooter introduces the characters along with some of their personalities, and starts setting up a large storyline about aliens invading the solar system, only no one knows who they are, and the Legion is both in disarray thanks to having an unexperienced leader (Lightning Lad, who’s filling the shoes of Cosmic Boy and Supergirl, both of whom have left the team) and a strained relationship with the United Planets. Joe McCulloch makes some good points too regarding the awkward dialogue in the story, with the supposedly-teenaged characters coming across as if they ought to seem “hip” or “futuristic”, but instead just seem silly.

I say “supposedly-teenaged” because there’s always been a bit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-wink about teenaged superheroes, especially the Legion and the X-Men, who always seem smarter, wiser and more responsible than the vast majority of people their age. Very few writers ever make even a passing attempt to either explain this peculiarity or run with it as a story point. Anyway, I bring all this up because new artist Francis Manapul gives the characters some beefed-up physiques (see cover at left), making it even harder to take them seriously as anything younger than young adults.

Despite these kvetches, this is a pretty good start: There’s nothing here that can’t be seen as a writer trying to get a feel for the characters in his first issue, while setting up an ambitious story. Seeing Lightning Lad get overwhelmed so quickly, without someone right there to help him keep things under control is really my biggest beef with the story. Manapul’s pencils are pretty good, although Livesay’s inks might work better if they pulled the pencils in a more classic, rather than Image-esque, direction – someone with a heavier line to provide more depth and delineation.

As Burgas says, the issue feels like Shooter is basically throwing a whole bunch of stuff in the air and we’ll have to see where it lands. However, signalling that this is going to be an ambitious story arc is a great way to make the reader reserve judgment on the inaugural issue. I’m definitely interested in seeing what Shooter’s got planned, and I certainly hope that he’s given every opportunity to get his bearing and produce a decent run on Legion. And if the Legion is the sort of comic that interests you, then you might want to check it out.

Joan D. Vinge: Dreamfall

Review of the novel Dreamfall by Joan D. Vinge.

Dreamfall by Joan D. Vinge
Dreamfall

Dreamfall is the third in Vinge’s series about the telepath, Cat. It’s the last one written so far, though it’s not intended to be a trilogy (as far as I know); rather, Vinge has been unable to write until recently due to a car accident several years ago, as explained in her Wikipedia entry.

Dreamfall feels like a counterpoint to the second novel, Catspaw, in many ways: Catspaw explores the tension between Cat’s place among the lower class and the upper class, while Dreamfall explores the tension between his human heritage and his Hydran (alien) heritage. Also, Catspaw shows Cat trying to make use of his damaged telepathic abilities, while Dreamfall shows him struggling with trying to be a professional scholar/scientist in a difficult scenario. And, Catspaw takes place on Earth while Dreamfall takes place on an alien world.

Cat is part of a team which has been summoned to the planet Refuge, where his friend Kissindre Perrymeade’s family – Tau – heads a congomerate which is exploiting the resources of the planet. The team is there to study the cloud-whales, large gaseous beings which drift across the planet and whose thoughts crystallize and form large reefs in the oceans which exhibit strange properties. However, Refuge is also one of the worlds formerly controlled by the Hydrans, and the Hydran population has been marginalized and mostly restricted to a ghetto near the main human city. As this is Cat’s first opportunity to voluntarily contact Hydrans, one evening he heads into the Hydran town, where he immediately gets wrapped up in an ongoing Hydran resistance to the human occupation of the planet, placing him at odds with the Tau security chief of the planet, Borosage, as well as outing him as a human/Hydran hybrid.

The Hydran resistance has kidnapped a young human child and may be using him as leverage against the humans, escalating tensions and forcing Cat into becoming a negotiator between the two sides. Of course, there are more than two sides: Some humans are more hard-line than others, while the official Hydran government are not affiliated with the resistance. Many humans are of course frightened by the Hydrans, who have powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, among others, but the humans also have far superior technology. Moreover, Cat is torn both between his feelings for Kissindre, and similar feelings for a Hydran woman whom he meets.

With all of these conflicting and contrasting elements, you’d think Dreamfall would be a cracking book full of adventure and emotion, but I found it to be quite slow and not very exciting. In another contrast with the previous book, Catspaw shows Cat reasoning and acting and having a profound effect on the people around him, while in Dreamfall he seems so at odds with himself that he’s far more reactive than active, struggling with his own emotions and unable to make decisions unless he’s forced into them.

For example, he gets linked to the resistance accidentally when he runs into the woman kidnapping the human child. As a result of this, Borosage’s superior forces Cat to be a negotiator with the Hydrans. Although the Hydrans are initially repulsed by this telepath whose abilities are turned off, he wins the trust of one of them, Miya, and finds himself conflicted between his feelings for her and for Kissindre. But he doesn’t really choose (or even fail to choose) between them; rather it seems like he gets railroaded by circumstance into picking one instead of the other, along with some pseudo-mystical argument about how Hydrans can tell when they’ve met the person they’re meant to be with. Through it all Cat seems bewildered and passive, which makes him a boring main character.

The first half of the book is all about building the tensions between the humans and the Hydrans, and it all comes to a head in the second half, which is more lively but only a little more satisfying. Dreamfall seems more focused on trying to craft a setting and evoke a mood (of lost causes and dying cultures). As in Catspaw the book climaxes with Cat ending up in an extremely dangerous situation, but rather than taking a big risk for a good reason, it seems like he made a few choices without really examining what he was doing which led him to a bad place. Vinge tries her utmost to convey the weight of the choices that Cat does make (he does eventually have to make the ultimate choice between being part of human society or Hydran society), but I was never convinced that he was making these decisions for good reasons, or that he was even particular aware of what he was choosing or why. The story is one of some fairly subtle shifts in Cat’s outlook and behavior, and I don’t think it managed to thread the needle of believability. The book does have a reasonable conclusion to its main conflicts (complete with a satisfying fate for one of the main heavies), but it doesn’t feel as meaningful as the ending of Catspaw.

Overall I don’t think Dreamfall either works well on its own, or deepens or broadens our understanding of Cat beyond what we saw in Catspaw. It seems to be trying to evoke more of a sense of wonder than Catspaw did, but the most wondrous elements – the cloud-whales – are mostly relegated to the background. Even the psionic elements are less interesting here than in the previous books, since Cat’s own telepathy is rarely active.

I found the book to be hard going, and not very rewarding for the effort. It’s a big step down from Catspaw, which is easily the best of the series to date.

Joan D. Vinge: Catspaw

Review of the novel Catspaw by Joan D. Vinge.

Catspaw by Joan D. Vinge
Catspaw

Catspaw is the sequel to Psion, following Vinge’s telepathic hero Cat on a new adventure. Cat became quite wealthy after his adventures in Psion, and used his wealth to see the galaxy and join a travelling school for the rich. While at the planet Monument, he’s kidnapped by the taMing family, who want to hire him as a telepath to protect one of their own, Lady Elnear, who’s been the subject of two assassination attempts. Since his money is running out, and the head of security, Braedee, says he can provide drugs to activate Cat’s dormant telepathy, he agrees. He travels to Earth and is inserted into high-class taMing culture, which makes neither him nor Elnear comfortable.

As the drugs slowly shake loose Cat’s telepathy, he realizes that he’s been placed in a very difficult position, not least because telepaths are hated and/or feared by most of humanity. Elnear is running for the Federation Council, the only body in humanspace with the power to act against the powerful shipping clans. The taMings themselves head Centauri Transport, one of the most powerful clans. Cat is mistrusted by most of the taMing family as soon as he arrives, despite his cover story as Elnear’s aide and surgery to alter his cat’s eyes and thus his abilities. He also learns that the taMing family has another psion in it besides Jule, but he doesn’t know who it is. And that’s just for starters.

Catspaw is a much better novel than Psion was: Rich and textured, with complex and believable characters. Cat is immediately much more interesting and sympathetic just because he became more mature and introspective in the time between the two novels. It’s an unfortunate commentary on Psion that what happened to Cat off-stage after it was more satisfying than what happened to him in it.

The book is filled with nifty characters, even the ones who don’t get a lot of screen time: Braedee starts off as a cyber-enhanced security chief but he ends up being notably reasonable and distinctive without being infallable, and he and Cat have an uneasy relationship. Daric taMing and his wife Argentyne are two of the major players, being somewhat at the fringe of the taMing family socially as well as owners of an avant-garde nightclub, which gives them feet in more than one world and thus natural allies for Cat, although ones he has a somewhat messy relationship with. Other taMing characters – Lord Charon and his wife Lazuli, and their children Jiro and Talitha – help add texture (and some drama) to the story. Really the most disappointing figure is Lady Elnear, who comes across as sort of a messiah figure and doesn’t really have a lot of depth to her. Protecting her is Cat’s main and original goal, and she opens doors for him among the classes he’s frequently with the taMings, but she doesn’t have a lot of character of her own. She’s mainly a foil and tool for Cat’s story.

Catspaw also has a nifty and complicated plot around which it’s built, and Cat’s relationship with the taMing family is woven into that plot. Lady Elnear’s life is indeed in danger, but the threat isn’t the simple one which Braedee originally explains it as. Cat is also put into a position to both improve the lot of telepaths in humanspace, and improve the lot of people bonded to Contract Labor, thanks to meeting the right people through Elnear. But of course his opportunity to do all this is threatened by the book’s main villain, who is far more adept at working in high society than Cat is, which forces Cat to make some difficult decisions and take a tremendous risk to defeat his foe.

Vinge doles out enough new-and-interesting ideas content over the course of the novel to make it feel more science fictional than just a society drama. The reader really feels Cat’s internal tension of being just sophisticated (and clueful) enough to survive in high society, while having the understanding of the underclass to have some resources that others in the taMing household don’t. He also learns something about his telepathy which lets him make some headway that no one else could have, setting up the book’s resolution. There are lots of details about the technological capabilities of Earth in Cat’s universe, too, of varying interest. By the standards of today’s science fiction it doesn’t feel quite as high-tech as it probably did when it was published, but seeing Vinge pull all the pieces together in a single novel is impressive.

The Cat novels sometimes seem to revel in the brutality Cat is subjected too, but Catspaw has the best balance of Cat being an active agent versus being a target of other peoples’ hatred, as well as a satisfying conclusion in which it feels like Cat really accomplishes something to make it all worthwhile. It’s certainly the best of the three books in the series (so far), and arguably worth reading even without first reading Psion.

Why We Live Here

(Second in an occasional series.)

The leaves didn’t finish falling from the trees until late this month. (A few trees still haven’t finished, but the ones around my yard have.)

Yesterday afternoon I sucked them up with my leaf blower.

(That would be yesterday, the day after Christmas.)

It took me a little over an hour, but then, I have a small yard. All I was really waiting for was for the leaves to dry off from the last rainfall so that most of them wouldn’t be sticking to the ground.

Snow? What’s that?

It has been a little chilly, though – highs in the low 50s. We’ve built a few fires this week. But it’s supposed to hit 60 over the weekend.

The jobs and culture are nice and all, but I maintain that the climate is the fundamental reason people live in the Bay Area in the first place.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and all that to you and yours. I hope if nothing else you’ve been doing the sorts of things that we’ve been doing today, which is to say, not a whole lot, and what we have done has been fun.

We got up a little early and opened presents. The big present was that I bought Debbi a MacBook, replacing the old Powerbook G4 she inherited from me when I bought my MacBook Pro a year ago. It’s been having battery problems, and of course it’s a heckuva lot slower, so this is a nice upgrade. Yes, I bought her the black one.

She bought me a couple of games I wanted (I hadn’t realized until recently that Mayfair Games has released two new variants of Empire Builder: Russian Rails and China Rails). She also bought me a giant stuffed turtle, as you can see here (the turtle is the one on the left).

Plus she bought me a small box of marzipan chocolates from See’s Candy – they’re among my favorites. Mmmmm.

After going by to take care of our friends’ cat Missy in the afternoon, we came home and made dinner. And boy-oh-boy did it turn out well. A 12-pound turkey which was cooked just about perfectly, plus stuffing, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, plus gravy. I roasted the turkey while Debbi made most of the rest (with a little help from me on assembling the materials) Everything came out on time (which might be a first for me cooking a turkey) and it was tremendously yummy, and we have plenty of leftovers, too.

We also talked to our families during the day, and otherwise relaxed and watched TV and surfed the net.

On top of that, last night we drove around to look at Christmas lights and saw quite a few good ones, including one cul-de-sac which put out those candles-in-bags (no, I have no idea what they’re called) all along the edge of the whole street, both sides. Very pretty! We smiled to see our own light display out front when we came home, too.

A very nice Christmas. How was yours?