Foundation Failure

 

Well, I failed in my third attempt to make it through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

 

The book is regarded as a classic; though, to be honest, I am not entirely sure why. But it isn’t the first “classic” I haven’t been able to read. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad comes immediately to mind. Read it twice – once way back in high school and again around 2011 or 2012. Neither time did I “get it”, neither time was I bowled over in the presence of a masterpiece. It did absolutely nothing to me or for me, much to my displeasure.

 

There are lesser books that I wouldn’t label as “classic” which I tried to read several times but just couldn’t complete. Books that may not mean anything to you, but at one point or another (probably when first taking it off a bookstore shelf and walking to the cashier) I considered it a potentially intriguing or perhaps life-changing read. Books such as The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and My Big TOE by Thomas Campbell. By the way, TOE is an acronym for ‘Theory of Everything,’ and in this book it involves everything from mediation to reality to physics to transcendence.

 

Speaking of physics, I’ve tried Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics a couple of times. Despite an intuition that Penrose might hold the key to what everything is made of (in light of the relative failure of string theory), I have never made it more than 80 or so pages in until brain ache occurs. This silly topic of the building blocks of matter fascinated me to no end since a young lad. I went so far as three semesters in Seton Hall in a quest to find such answers for myself many, many years ago. Ergo, the book still sits on my bookshelf (actually, in my closet for some reason, along with that marked-up Einstein biography). It will be cracked open again at some point.

 

Surprisingly, Dickens has given me a hard time with, well, er, Hard Times. Also, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Both books I’ve tried and both books I’ve failed. Dunno. Like the Penrose physics books, I will conquer them in the near future.

 

So why did my third go-round with Foundation fall through? It wasn’t the old “everyone in the future talks like a 1940s Brooklyn Jew” that nagged me in my other Asimovian re-reads. I think it was simply that I found the story … forgive me … dull and boring. There were no stakes. There were no compelling characters. The futuristic science of “psycho-history” was not adequately explained, even with Star Trek: The Next Generation mumbo jumbo. And while I am by no means a literary feminist, the fact that the only female character in the first 120 pages was a secretary with no lines just didn’t sit well.

 

It’s sad to me that a great hero of my youth did not translate to my later adulthood. I loved Asimov as a kid. That Christmas gift five-paperback pack I write about often – The Bicentennial Man, Nine Tomorrows, The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and The Gods Themselves – along with I, Robot to help sooth a young boy with a broken arm, and Fantastic Voyage the same young boy bought in the Bookmobile, these books formed me and gave me hours of reading pleasure, moreso than any author in my youth. Will I read any more Asimov in this lifetime? Probably not. But I will enjoy those fond, nostalgic memories.

 

Used Book Archaeology

 

So I am finally getting to Asimov’s classic 1951 Foundation paperback that I picked up a few weeks ago. Throughout my early childhood I read at least seven of his works.* He was easily my main introduction to science fiction. Didn’t get to Foundation until sometime in the late 80s, and got about a quarter of the way through it before more pressing concerns took my attention (my band, night school, girlfriend, alcohol, etc.). I tried it again during the Wu Flu but only made it a few chapters. Not sure why; but again, more pressing concerns were on my mind at that time.

 

Anyway, I opened the book and this fell out:

 

A receipt from November 15, 1975! Half a century old!

 

It appears to have originated from a place called the Sierra Book Shop in South Lake Tahoe, California. I googled for a few minutes and the place (or a place with the exact same name) could still be in business. I also found that someone who possibly owned it retired in 1980 (maybe sold the business?) so perhaps it since exists under new management. My purpose of the all this was to find a picture of the place to post here, but couldn’t find anything definitive online.

 

The forever mysterious customer bought four books – one for $7.00 and three for $1.25. The Foundation novel has a price on the front cover of $1.25 – which converts to $7.55 in 2025 dollars. Sounds about right. I also see that the tax on the $10.75 purchase was $0.65, or six percent. Now google tells me the sales tax in Lake Tahoe is 8.75 percent, a 46 percent increase over 50 years. Honestly, I thought it’d be more.

 

I truly wonder what the other three books bought were, especially that $7.00 one. That bad boy would sell for $42 today.

 

* Those seven Asimov paperbacks were: The Bicentennial Man, Nine Tomorrows, The Gods Themselves, Pebble in the Sky, The Caves of Steel, I Robot, and the novelization of the movie Fantastic Voyage. I read them all several times between 10 and 12 and loved every minute of it.

Book Review: Pirates of Venus

 

© 1934 by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

This was a completely random find perusing a new semi-local bookstore two weeks back. More importantly, this book has a little history with me. I vividly remember reading this in paperback form in the late 70s. My father was a high school football defensive coordinator, and young nerd me was devouring this olden-time story one fall in the late 70s on the practice field, on the sidelines, in the school weight room, under the bleachers. Fond memories from long ago.

 

Now, I did not remember the plot at all. Being an Edgar Rice Burroughs story (1875-1950, author of numerous series of novels starring Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, hollow-earth Pellucidar, among others), the story is a basic rags-to-riches jungle adventure that could take place anywhere in the Solar System of Burrough’s mind (and time). This one featured an Earthling hero named Carson Napier and unfolds on Venus, with warring tribes, naval battles, piracy, giant monsters, princesses, and swashbuckling swordplay taking center stage.

 

But this is not why I remembered Pirates of Venus. This must have been the first story – having read it way before Tolkien – where a new language is a prominent feature. Well, not exactly prominent per se as one finds it in The Lord of the Rings, but Napier drops some Venusian vocabulary and grammar rules here and there, and it’s these that stuck with me over 45 years:

 

As we battled futilely to disengage ourselves, the klangan settled to the ground, each pair upon opposite sides of the victim they had snared. Thus they held us so that we were helpless, as two cowboys hold a roped steer, while the fifth angan approached us with drawn sword and disarmed us. (Perhaps I should explain that angan is singular, klangan plural, plurals of Amtorian words being formed by prefixing kloo to words commencing with a consonant and kl to those commencing with a vowel.)

   (page 92 of my Ace science fiction paperback

 

There is so much in a name. I had liked the name of the Sofal from the first. Perhaps it was the psychology of that name that suggested the career upon which I was now launched. It means killer. The verb meaning kill is fal. The prefix so has the same value of the suffix er in English; so sofal means killer. Vong is the Amtorian word for defend; therefore, Sovong, the name of our first prize, means defender; but the Sovong had not lived up to her name.

   (page 135 of my Ace science fiction paperback)

 

And tidbits such as these are what called out to me over half a century; this tree trunk appendage of neurons and neurolinguistic programming remained in place all that time for me to recall it and overwhelm me with a cascade of sublime nostalgia.

 

Overall, I ‘grade’ Pirates of Venus a B-minus. Probably thought it was an A back when I was a young’n, but time is too short to spend on such tales as an adult. A smorgasbord of ERB should definitely be fed to tween boys in perpetuity; and a whole rash of newly-hatched science fiction authors will emerge …

 

Notes:

1) “Amtor” is the name the Venusian give to Venus. Napier fights for the nation of “Vepajan” in the novel.

2) I found a different Amtor novel about 13 or 14 years ago and started to read it, but the damn thing disappeared on me, vanished without a trace, and thus permanently remained unread. To this day, I still think a toddler living in the house with me named Patch had something to do with the theft. 

Book Review: In the Ocean of Night

 

© 1972 / 1987 by Gregory Benford

 

Here’s a little short reaction to the Gregory Benford science fiction novel In the Ocean of Night. Benford is a legitimate PhD’d astrophysicist who’s been putting out science fiction novels and short stories for over a half a century. He’s been nominated for a couple of Hugo Awards and won a Nebula (the Oscars of science fiction literature). He specializes in speculative hard science fiction. Science fiction that one could plausibly consider reality in a couple of decades.

 

Now you might think this author would be a gold mine for a passionate reader with a physics background like me. But, truth is, I only read one other of his novels, If the Stars are Gods, a collaboration with Gordon Eklund, and that was nearly a quarter-century ago. Benford has written or collaborated on something like 30 or 35 novels and has produced something like twice that in terms of short stories and novellas. Why I haven’t explored his works in depth I will get to in a moment.

 

I picked up In the Ocean of Night during my Halloween haul specifically because it was written by Benford. The summary on the back cover is quite vague. It describes the futuristic world of 2018 in shades of triumph and tragedy: technological wonders such as lunar colonies and cybernetic advancements and despair in the forms of pollution and famine. Then – “far beyond the shores of space, there comes a mystery as vast as the limitless sea of stars, as beckoning as the unending depths of space.” You need to buy the book if you want to find out more, which I did on both counts.

 

It was a good read. Didn’t like the main character, a rock-the-boat English astronaut, but enjoyed the reveal: not one, not two, but three alien space probes which enter the solar system and which our protagonist makes contact with. Some involved, some haphazard, some monumental, some hushed up by the government. The science was quite intriguing and well done and made up for any shortcomings in the characterizations and the liberal authorial bias that crept through here and there. Oh, and best of all, an infamous north American cryptid makes a cameo at the end.

 

There’s stuff in the book I really liked. The ingredients were all there, and the dish I wound up eating was satisfactory, but I’m not sure if I’d leave a 5-star Yelp review. I don’t regret reading it; I savored my journey through its 321 pages. I fact, I plan on exploring more of Benford’s work. I kinda remember similar feelings after reading If the Stars are Gods back in 2001. Perhaps I’ll check out his award-winning novel or, better yet, another of his collaborations.

 

Grade: Solid B.

Book Review: The Jupiter Plague

 

 

© 1982 by Harry Harrison

Minor spoilers for this 43-year-old SF thriller …

 

This is the second of my four-book haul this Halloween, a haul designed for some quick, distractionary reading as a counterpoint to The Three Musketeers and other epics I put away this year. It clocked in at 283 pages, a bit long but the typeface was slightly larger than normal. It was probably of a similar wordcount to my prior read, The Other Side of Time.

 

I picked it up more for the author than for the story (though the story did intrigue me) – Harry Harrison, a science fiction master whose pedigree stretches from 1951 to 2010. And like the author of my prior read, Keith Laumer, the centennial of his birth passed too earlier this year.

 

Never read much of Harrison. I do recall as a youngster seeing his name adorn many a hardcover spine whilst perusing the library’s science fiction shelves. The “Stainless Steel Rat” and “Bill the Galactic Hero” were names I did not know then but now know them as the typical Harrisonian protagonist – unlikely, anti-traditional, satirical, a middle-finger to Joseph Campbell and all those heroes on their heroic journeys – but most of all, comedic. Before I leave physical existence on this sphere I’d like to read the origin novels of the Rat and Bill; they go on my bucket list immediately.

 

However, I did read a trio of his works 10-15 years ago: Planet of the Damned, Deathworld, and its numerical sequel, Deathworld 2. Good reads but overall unremarkable; I think I ‘graded’ them all B’s, which – spoiler alert – I also ‘graded’ The Jupiter Plague.

 

But what of this Plague? I hear your exclamatory inquiries. That’s the word that tickled my ear. Since we’re all victims to a greater or lesser extent of a recent – ahem – plague, I wondered if it was too soon to read a science fiction tale about a deadly contagion. Truth be told, it wasn’t, for this one descends upon mankind not from the laboratory of a foreign competitor but from another world: Jupiter.

 

Published in 1982 but based on an earlier 1965 story, the setting appears to be the New York tri-state area around the year 2000. A weird blend of the area I grew up with rockets and spacepads thrown in. A lot of action takes place in my old stomping grounds – just across the Hudson River in New Jersey along Route 9. Most of the story, though, is centered in New York City, between the two poles of Kennedy Airport and Bellevue Hospital.

 

A mission to Jupiter returns after a long absence crashing into a runway at JFK. Our hero, Dr. Sam Bertolli, is the first on scene and helps the sole survivor out the hatch before the man seals the metal door behind him and dies. Sam is an ex-soldier turned medic, still technically an intern despite his age. The man he rescues, however temporarily, was the commander of the mission and his face is covered with bursting read pustules.

 

Sam, along with a beautiful bacteriologist who arrives shortly after, are placed in quarantine, but the disease – named Rand-alpha – soon escapes. It’s a fast-acting bug, killing victims within twelve hours of contact. Sam and the beautiful doctor, Nita, remain uninfected due to medical precaution, but the disease spreads through the population. In fact, it soon mutates into Rand-beta, affecting birds, and Rand-gamma, affecting canines. The army shows up to enforce a containment perimeter, and as society trapped within the 100-mile circle breaks down the race is on for Sam and Nita to find a cure before the tri-state area is nuked.

 

All this was by-the-book for me, but I didn’t see where the novel was heading. Ask yourself: why did the commander seal the ship shut? Hmm. Answer: because the cure is inside the ship, along with something that could make the plague a hundred times worse. And what this is … is, a real, live, breathing Jupiterian. How they found it, where they found it, and why the plague is unleashed is the subject of the final quarter of the novel, and made it worthwhile. In a sentence, the Jupiterians live on a giant ice rock in the planet’s upper atmosphere and harness energy like moray eels – bioelectric – but a failure in the communication of the two species leads to the unleashing of the plague as a sort of defense mechanism.

 

Bottom line, it was a quick, neat read. Like my prior read, no earths were shattered of paradigms shifted. But it beat watching a four-hour TV series on Netflix.

 

Grade: solid B.

 

N.B. Two other fun facts regarding Harry Harrison: 1) his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! supplied the general plot for the Charlton Heston 1973 SF movie Soylent Green, and 2) the man taught himself Esperanto while bored by his duties as an Army Air Force officer in World War II and often incorporated it in his novels.

Book Review: The Other Side of Time

  

© 1965 by Keith Laumer

Minor spoilers for a sixty-year-old pulpy SF paperback …

 

Bought this at Halloween mostly for its short page length – 171 pages. And true to this objective, I did finish it in four hours, albeit over the course of five days. Anyway, a blessed relief from the long slogs I’ve been doing this reading year. The quick and fun distraction. I likened it to watching a two-part made-for-TV show.

 

Though I never read Laumer before, the experience hearkened back to my golden age SF reading (that is, the devotion I showed the field as a tween). The gnarled yellowed pages, the campy 70s cover, the pleasant finely-aged aroma of the binding. All that was missing was a library check-out card on the inside of the back cover. Best of all, though not earth-shattering or life-changing, it took my mind off my troubles for a few hours. Oh the joy of reading a 60-year-old SF paperback!

 

First, who was Keith Laumer? We just passed the centennial of his birth back in June. Part of the Greatest Generation, he served his country in the Army Air Force in World War II, went to college, and re-enlisted and later worked in the diplomatic corps. In fact, his enduring character Retief, his “James Bond” character, was a galactic diplomat and the protagonist of more than a handful of short story collections and stand-alone novels. Back in the day when I fancied myself an up-and-coming SF author, I did pickup his 1963 Envoy to New Worlds and may have read a short story or two; unfortunately they have slipped the bonds of my memory.

 

Dog not too happy to have his nap interrupted to become 

an unwilling participant in this book review

The Other Side of Time takes place in an alternate reality universe where technology exists to move between differing worldlines forward or back through the threadstream of time. Our hero is also a diplomat (and possibly a secret agent) but is not Retief; this character is a man name of Colonel Brion Bayard of similar aristocratic bent. Our protagonist narrates the tale of being taken in to HQ for a possible mission and – after an explosion of sorts and spotting a fiery man coming toward him – awakens to find his city of Stockholm completely devoid of inhabitants.

 

Thus into the timestream to unravel the mystery. He encounters invading cannibalistic ape creatures, is captured, befriends and escapes with a more intelligent ape name of Dzok who is also, coincidentally, a diplomat and possibly a secret agent. The two form an uneasy alliance to discover and later trick the nefarious genocidal baddies behind Earth’s potential demise and set things right.

 

The best thing about the novel, though, the one that will probably keep it from fading into obscurity for me, is the ending. I love a Big Reveal at an ending. And it is simply this: the final word of the novel reveals the identity of these cannibalistic ape-like creatures, called the Hagroon, who are bent on eliminating mankind. They are tricked in the final chapter and are exiled unwittingly, without their technology, dozens of thousands of years deep back into Earth’s prehistory. Speculating whatever became of these lost-to-history villains, the scientist tells our hero that “they were safely marooned there in the age of mammoths and ice. And there they left their bones, which our modern archaeologists have found and called Neanderthal …”

 

Grade: Solid B.

Book Review: Run Silent, Run Deep

 

© 1955 by Commander Edward L. Beach

 

Contains spoilers for a 70-year-old novel …

 

I bought this on a whim a half-dozen years ago – and it spent a half-dozen long unearned years in the On-Deck Circle, surviving the Great Book Triage of 2021 before the move down to Texas. And good thing, too, because I finally got around to reading it – also on a whim – and must say I enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

During the early phases of the Wu Flu, when uncertainty was running rampant and the grocery store shelves lay in a state of depletion I never experienced in my fifty years, when fear descended upon the land and it felt like the worst might come true, during that period I needed to take my mind off it all. I wanted to dive headfirst into something completely unrelated to Daily Life in March 2020. Something meaty, something that could consume me, something challenging but also something that ultimately had a good ending. I needed a good ending in March of 2020. Since I enjoyed my previous dives into military history, I decided a deep dive into World War II could take my mind off the current End of the World. After all, WW2 was a legitimate end of the world for large swaths of the globe, especially Europe. And most survived, because the human spirit rose to the occasion.

 

So in addition to buying all sort of “bird’s-eye” and “ground level” books on World War II, I also bought fiction written about the time period. Over time I picked up The Winds of War, The Thin Red Line, and The Naked and the Dead. I also purchased Run Silent, Run Deep. But, for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I never did read World War II fiction during this time period.

 

Regardless, that’s how it came into my possession, and just now I read and enjoyed it. The cover boasts a quote line from the Dallas News: “THE BEST SUBMARINE YARN EVER WRITTEN.” I admit this intrigued me. Having just re-read Tom Clancy, and all his “submarine yarns” a year ago, I wanted to see how it added up. So much of Clancy’s books contain scenes in and about submarines I felt like a vicarious brevet submariner. I opened this book and couldn’t put it down; I read its 337 dense pages in eight days … maybe six hours of reading spread out around Halloween.

 

The main characters are Rich, a sub captain, and Jim, his executive officer. In the days just before Pearl Harbor Jim is on a test mission to earn his captain stripes, but overreacts and Rich has to flunk him, causing quite a bit of friction. Then the Japanese sneak attack, then missions right up to the waters off the coast of Tokyo. There’s a Japanese destroyer nicknamed “Bungo Pete” that sunk Rich’s prior boat and nearly sends our heroes to their doom. Some more action and Rich gets his leg broken and must recuperate back at Hawaii, while Jim – facing a shortage of sub commanders, is promoted and actually does a fine job hunting and sinking Japanese ships.

 

Rich is put to work on solving a realistic problem early in the war: the ineffectiveness of American torpedoes. Then, Jim’s sub – Rich’s old command – goes missing and is presumed sunk. Rich gets a new command and sets out to end “Bungo Pete” and get vengeance for his old friend and his old crew.

 

The summary does not do the novel justice. There are many mini-vignettes that show life about a sub in both normal and stress situations. It’s very Clancy-like in conveying how blind subs are and the need to rely on sonar, timing, mathematical equations to get the torpedo to the enemy before he gets one to you, and the imperative to get into your opponent’s mind. How “Bungo Pete” knows the names of the vessels he sinks (bags of garbage the subs release when surfacing are later retrieved by Japanese fishing boats who bring them to the destroyer where the trash is sifted through for intelligence), how he knows what a US sub captain will do with uncanny perception (Pete’s an ex-Japanese sub commander himself, too old to command but old enough to serve Imperial Japan’s defense), how Jim will finally get his vengeance; all factor into this well-told tale.

 

The novel has all the other requisites this old dog likes. Written in the 1950s, there is no post-modern claptrap, no deconstruction, no multiculturalism, no kumbaya. The Japanese are referred to on a handle of occasions with slurs common at the time. This was an existential crises, and the Imperial Japanese forces were just as cruel as the Nazis. Though Commander Beach writes interpersonal dialogue well enough (about just as good as Clancy did), the woman do seem a little shallow and stereotypical, but one does not pick up Run Silent, Run Deep for the romantic shore leave episodes.

 

A random piece of trivia I learned is this:

This geologic formation is known as Lot’s Wife. It stands 325 feet above the surface of the northwest Pacific waters and was discovered in 1788 by an English merchant vessel. In World War II the giant crag was used to indicate the start of Japanese waters and to calibrate instrumentation. For if you follow Lot’s Wife directly north (slightly off by a degree or two) for 5,700 miles you wind up in Tokyo Bay.

 

Anyway, how does Rich resolve the “Bungo Pete” challenge? Knowing he’s up against an old sub vet, he tricks and gets the drop on him, resulting in the destroyer’s sinking. But that’s a temporary solution. He sees three lifeboats, each with two dozen men, and … war being hell, realizes he has no choice but to ride down each lifeboat, for the old sub vet could be in any one of them, and if the old man lives, more American lives will be lost down the road. It was brutal, and it takes it’s toll on Rich. However, our hero gets some redemption in a fourth act rescue of some downed US pilots, and is able to live with himself and his actions.

 

Overall, I give it a solid A. Good book for historical aficionados, good book for Tom Clancy fans. Jack Ryan would’ve read this book in high school.

 

Hopper's Day Out

 

At the beginning of the month I still had seven days of PTO left. These are of a “use or lose” variety, so I requested some random Wednesdays and Fridays. Today was the first. And since I was all by myself (well, the dog shadowed me all morning while I did my laundry), I decided to jump in the car and drive the 40 minutes northwest to Denton, Texas. We’d been there last four years ago touring the University of North Texas with Little One, and while there, after a late lunch, we spotted a huge used bookstore where I was able to browse and pick up a few things of interest.

 

It was time to return.

Downtown Denton

 

So I motored on out and spent an hour in the store. A vast quantity and quality of used books, CDs, DVDs, records, games, video games, and other collectible memorabilia. Heaven, in other words. Here’s what I scored:

 

Three records –

 

Florida Suite / Dance Rhapsody No. 2 / Over the Hills and Far Away – composed by Frederick Delius and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

 

Holiday Symphony – composed by Charles Ives and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

 

Der Freischutz – an opera composed by Carl Maria von Weber and conducted by Rudolf Kempe.

 

Florida Suite is a lovely piece of melody sublime in its beauty, its conciseness, its power to evoke nature untouched by man. Loved it for over two decades and have possibly a different version of it on CD somewhere. Holiday Symphony features the discordant work of Charles Ives (I did a short post on this highly eccentric composer in the early days of this blog). My favorite piece is “Thanksgiving.” Finally, I bought the opera Der Freischutz due to having fond memories listening to it as a newlywed when we first returned to New Jersey after our 18-month stint in Maryland. Good stuff, all.

 

Then I spotted stacked double against a long wall an uncountable amount of science fiction paperbacks – must’ve been about 750 I would guess – and all priced for $1.00 each! How can you go wrong with a bargain like that? Unfortunately, they were not organized alphabetically, so I spent a good twenty minutes with my head tilted reading spine after spine. I picked out three, each one for a specific reason.

 

Space Skimmer is a book I read in Binghamton, NY, visiting my paternal grandparents right after my parents divorced, probably in the winter of 1981. It was a comforting read. Pirates of Venus was a book I may have read even earlier. But I do remember picking it up again in early 2009 and starting a re-read, when my toddler Patch disappeared the book for me. Never found it again. So I have unfinished business with this one. Finally, Asimov’s Foundation. Ah, Asimov’s Foundation! If ever a book was an Achille’s heel to my reading life, it was this one. Universally lauded as one of the all-time SF greats, I never read it as a kid, and the two or three times I tried as an adult it just never gained traction. Maybe this time will be the charm.

 

I got some Italian food on the way back, brought it home and ate while the dog tracked every piece going from my plate to my mouth, drool pooling around his anxious paws. And now he’s staring at me typing this. Will work on my two current reads later this afternoon and tonight will throw one of the new discs on the turntable.

 

All in all, a great PTO day.

 

PS – I have outlined reviews of three books recently read. Just need to compose them into some medium-length posts. Hopefully I can get one out every three days going in to Thanksgiving.

Now Playing

 

Halloween Haul

 

So here’s my dilemma: I finished The Three Musketeers about a week ago and was planning to end the year with John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold followed by Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. But something just didn’t sit right. Was I intimidated? Was I worn down? The thrill of the hunt, which was there, was there no longer. What happened?

 

I felt like a World Series power hitter who, after coming so close to victory but falling short, decided rest and recuperation were in order. Retooling, recalibration. My reading had been in such high gear over the past, well, year, I suppose, that perhaps I just craved a break. To return to baseball analogy, it seemed a couple of days at the batting cages would be the best medicine.

 

During my two-day vacation at the end of October I decided to drive to my local used bookstore and see what might leap off the shelves at me. It had to be science fiction, I decided. Where I got my start oh so many decades ago as a sprightly bright-eyed lad. I’d only read seven sci fi novels in the past two years.(*) A return was needed.

 

So last Thursday I dropped in to my store around lunchtime and left 45 minutes later with four SF paperbacks, all for the price of a chimichanga at a high-end taco store. My only criteria – they must appear interesting and must be quick reads.

 

Here they are:

 

The Other Side of Time (1965) by Keith Laumer, 172 pages.

I last read Laumer 20 years ago when visions of being a science fiction author danced before my eyes. This is the most “fantastical” of my quartet of books. The back cover describes hulking, cannibalistic ape men called “Hagroon,” an educated monkey named “Dzok,” a place called “Xonijeel,” and an alternate universe ruled by Napoleon the Fifth. It gave me Lin Carter vibes. It was also the shortest of my picks; looking to read it over three or four days.

 

The Jupiter Plague (1965) by Harry Harrison, 274 pages.

Never got into Harrison, but did read his “Planet of Death” novellas. This seems like a 70s-ish bad fashion low-budget SF flick, something that Rock Hudson might have starred in, about a space probe that crashes back to earth at an airport, unleashing a deadly virus. It’s been long enough since the Wu Flu that I can read books about deadly viruses and take them at face value.

 

In the Ocean of Night (1972) by Gregory Benford, 321 pages.

The most mysterious paperback of the haul. The back cover is very generic, almost to the point where I can’t tell if this is hard SF or fantasy or a melding of the two. But Benford is a legitimate physicist, and I haven’t read anything by him since If the Stars are Gods back in 2002 when I lived in Maryland with the Mrs. as newlyweds, so that novel, barely remembered, has fond memories for me nevertheless.

 

The Reality Dysfunction (1996) by Peter F. Hamilton, 1,225 pages (!)

Okay, I went off the deep end with this. Almost as long as The Three Musketeers was combined with how long Nicholas Nickleby will be, in terms of page length. But – I liked the heft of the book (it felt good in my hands) and, this is a first – I like the font. It’s easy on the eyes. I haven’t felt this way about a font since I was a much more discriminating science fiction reader in my late tweens. Looks like it could be a great example of Universe-building.

 

Anyway, since each novel cost me an average of $3.25, if I get 20 or 50 pages in and it’s just not doing it for me, I can set it down and move on to the next.

 

Looking to start The Other Side of Time at the end of the week.

Happy reading!!

 

(*) = Going backwards, Leviathans of Jupiter by Bova, A Matter for Men by Gerrold, The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut, Revelation Space by Reynolds, Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and Nexus by Naam.

 

Happy Halloween!

 

Phrases I Hate II

 

“You guys’s”

 

Pronounced, yoo guy ziz.

 

Example: A cop at a traffic stop, addressing several people in car: “All right, I’m going to need to see all you guys’s driver licenses.”

 

Forgive a little pedantry to explain myself. I’ll be succinct. It boils down to a slight confusion in the English language on how to pronounce the possessive of a plural noun.

 

Take, for instance, the plural noun cats. There are a dozen cats at the animal shelter, and it’s time to, I don’t know, wash their blankets. The “cats’ blankets” is pronounced as “the cats blankets.” The apostrophe is when it’s written, but it’s pronounced no different as if it was a singular cat with multiple blankets.

 

You don’t say, the cats’s blankets, “the cats-iz blankets.” That just sounds stupid. That’s just the way it is.

 

The confusion comes, I believe, with proper nouns – names – that end with an “s”. For example, “Thomas.” If Thomas has a couple muffins, you would write Thomas’s muffins and pronounce it as “Thomas-iz muffins.”

 

Guys’s, pronounced guy-ziz, just sounds stupid.

 

To be honest, I don’t hear it a fraction as often as I hear “Does that make sense?” – but I hear it enough for it to register in the old ear/brain/mind. I watch about two dozen YouTube videos a day (hey, it makes the spreadsheets reconcile to the billing faster), and I probably catch a “guys’s” every other day.

 

Now, this may just be a momentary anomaly. Or it could be one of hundreds of examples of the English language being dumbed down. Maybe it’s a typical eddy in the stream of linguistic evolution. Not sure. Though I am no scholar of the English language, I do recognize that slang contributed to the growth of the mother tongue. Think of how “dude” and “hippie” came into existence, grew to acceptance, then faded after overuse. More recently, think of all the goofy words the Internet has given us: blog, phishing, Google, Goop, dox, and such. And maybe it’s now hip to be dumb – or at least hide one’s intelligence. I read somewhere that we are entering the post-literate age, and I fear that may be true.

 

Or maybe I’m just beginning to outlive my time. My youngest daughter at 17 speaks a lingo with her friends completely alien to me. I dunno.

 

What do you guys’s’s’s think?

 

Phrases I Hate

 

A long, long time ago I did a series of posts here at the Recovering Hopper entitled “Words I Hate.”

 

These were (and still are) linguistical objects that, for some reason I’d try to explain, somehow would hurl out a harpoon into the thick adipose tissue of my eardrum. And once snagged, would wiggle back and forth, hooking deeper and deeper with accelerating and accumulating levels of annoyance. So much so that I’d lose focus of the original thought the writer or speaker was trying to impart. An earworm, albeit of the nastiest, parasitical kind.

 

Well, since I’ve been watching a lot of videos on the YouTube and listen to all sorts of Zoom and Teams calls second hand, my attention has been called to a number of Phrases I Hate.

 

Here’s the first, and probably the most prolific one I’ve noticed:

 

After a number of explanatory sentences, the speaker utters an apologetic, “Does this make sense?” often in a faux self-deprecating manner, as a kind of Final Boss grammatical period at the paragraph’s conclusion.

 

Does this make sense?

 

Ugh, forgive me, but that’s an illustration of the heinous phrase in action.

 

Anyway, I utterly hate this lazy phrase. I encourage you to surgically incise it from your verbal lexicon immediately and with brutal efficiency.

 

Boiled down to its logical skeleton, the phrase Does this make sense? can literally mean one of two things:

 

1) I am such a poor communicator that I need to periodically confirm, several times in a conversation, whether I am getting my point across to you, no matter how simple it may be.

 

or

 

2) You are a retard and can’t be trusted to understand possibly very simple ideas.

 

Both explanations assume a lowest-common-denominator, dumbed-down approach to communicating. If 1, why be so hard on yourself? If you truly are a poor communicator, for God’s sake man take some lessons or hone your skills with a speaking coach. Or if 2, then please stop communicating until you learn to treat the person you are in dialogue with respect.

 

So I beg of any users of this dopy phrase: Do better. Please, for the sake of Hopper’s poor thick adipose tissued ear drums.

 

Grrrr.

 

(This message brought to you after a well-meaning podcaster – I assume, since I give the speaker the benefit of the doubt – just used the phrase twice in the span of three minutes giving his for-the-everyman interpretation of a speech given by a Catholic bishop.)

 

The Worst Feeling in the World

 

Is when you excitedly crack open a book newly purchased …

 

… and discover that the prior owner has graffiti’d it all up with either a highlighter, a heavy-handed black pen, or both. It’s even worse if the highlit chunks are pink.

 

I’ve been an avid reader all my life, and I’ve probably bought somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred books over the past 25 years. The vast majority have been used books, since I only buy new for the best and the keepers. When I consider a used book I do give it a thorough examination, checking the spine, the brittleness or lack thereof of the pages, the smell (can’t have a moldy book, mind you), dog-earedness and, most importantly, if it’s been marked up.

 

Three times I’ve failed this most important of tests.

 

The first was a thick but flexible introductory book on the Revolutionary War. I found it at a library book sale and scooped it up for a few bucks. It felt good in my hands. This was in the first phase of my military history interest, sometime around 2012 or 2013. I anticipated learning about the main players, the battles, the tactics and the strategies that enabled the United States to secure its independence from Great Britain. It sat on a shelf for a little while as I finished up my current reads and then I cracked it open … to that pink highlighter! Some high school or college kid marked up the early chapters which somehow didn’t reveal itself to me in my initial scan. I was crushed. I simply could not read it. I think I donated it to Goodwill.

 

The second was purchased at a thrift store on Hilton Head where my mother-in-law volunteered. This place has an enormous selection of books of all sizes, shapes, genres and age levels – several aisles’ worth. The family always scored there when we’d visit. I found a thick paperback biography of Albert Einstein, which instantly leapt off the shelf and into my hands. Excited, I paid the few dollars and, opening it to page one on the ride home, discovered some dude both yellow highlighted and black pen underlined most of the opening chapters (about 70 pages) covering Einstein’s youth and his scientific thought. I was crushed and again could not read it. However, it sits to this day in my closet atop my dresser. Not sure why, but I haven’t given up on it. Though I probably won’t read it.

 

The last was a book I ordered online. Don’t remember the title, but it was a one-volume history of the Catholic Church that was fairly well received. I ordered it from a local used book store (most likely right here in Dallas) and only because the condition was marked as GOOD on the website. Well, I supposed “good” is now a loosely subjective term. When it arrived in the mail I hurriedly opened it, only to observe that some prior reader had underlined sentences and whole paragraphs throughout the entire book in pencil. An irrational thought popped into my head: I could just erase it! Sure, it wouldn’t leave any indentations and wouldn’t take any longer than six or seven hours – but I’d still have a potentially awesome read ahead of me – then I slapped myself hard and yelled “STOP IT!” The book is a lost cause, man, put it down. And slowly I did.

 

So on that last book I was sorta deceived, and don’t count it against me.

 

It’s not the money – I think I’m out maybe $20 thanks to these three charlatans. It’s the smothering blanket of disappointment that envelops you, tamping down joy and hope and the promise of adventure and discovery.

 Sample page from my Einstein paperback biography, taken in my closet where the book resides for some reason. How can one deface a work of art such as this?

So … don’t mark up a book, unless you intend to keep it forever.

 

This public service message provided by Hopper, Lifelong Reader.

 

Fishing

 

Okay, here’s something a little unexpected and unusual.

 

I’ve never been an outdoorsman. Had I lived in medieval times I’d probably have been a cleric enclosed in a monastery or a hermit in a Carthusian cell. Or I’d be an apprentice to a merchant, stocking shelves by day and reading scrolls by candlelight at night in my tiny attic room. What I would not have been would be: farmer or a hunter. I have no natural affinity for the Great Outdoors, for Mother Nature, roaming the great plains or the tundra or lush forests or sailing the deep seas. I am not an outdoorsman. Don’t have the genes.

 

Like home repair and auto mechanics, that gene has passed me by. In fact, whatever genetic propensity I might have had for that particular love skipped me and was passed on to my younger brother, who has it in spades. I mean, he’s currently an automotive technician, and as a teen was an amateur taxidermist and considered a career as a forest ranger.

 

It was not for lack of trying – on my father’s part. Yes, I did have a shotgun license, thanks to my dad. But I enjoyed the clay pigeons about as much as I hated tromping through the bushes hunting rabbits, pheasants, and grouse. And fishing – forget that! I would much rather read the Merriam-Webster dictionary than cast a line off a bridge waiting for a bite. (That is not an exaggeration – I once purchased a 25-pound M-W at a book fair and I was enraptured.) True story: I read chapters 4 through 8 of The Fellowship of the Ring in a rowboat in the middle of the lake while my father and brother fished for sunnies.

 

All right, now we come to the unexpected and unusual part: I’ve been binge watching fish and wildlife law enforcement videos. 

Now … hear me out.

 

It’s more law enforcement than fish and wildlife. Basically, Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) officers pull aside boaters and bust them for all sorts of violations. From poaching to catching over the limit to not carrying registrations and licenses or having the requisite number and type of safety jackets, fire extinguishers and even horns. Mix in the occasional boating while intoxicated or smoking by a fuel pump at a dock, and you have a recipe for some quite interesting videos.

 

Most of the perps are contrite and, well, a little embarrassed and taken aback at the seriousness of which the FWC regards these infractions. After all, who thinks taking an extra four or five fish helps deplete the coastal population? But some go crazy, some get irate, and once in a while one gets arrested.

 

Yes, it’s a current fad because I’m bored with everything else on YouTube and am sick of the death and destruction filtered into my head from the news media. But my accounting job requires the analysis of spreadsheet after spreadsheet, and most of us at work listen to some form of music or videos on headphones to make the clock hands move quicker. This week for me it’s FWC enforcement videos. Next week, who knows?

 

But, rest assured, you won’t find me perusing fishing rods and reels at the sporting goods store. The closest I’ll come to a fish is my next reading of Moby Dick or Jaws.

 

Note: As a non-outdoorsman and non-fisherman, I am not responsible for the accuracy of any outdoors- or fishing-relating content in this post. Thanks!