needs more demons? worked fine for me, despite being not particularly demon-y

Zahn is clearly aware of the sources he’s riffing on — at one point Compton and his maybe ally/maybe femme fatale actually watch Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes — but two attributes of the novel save it from sinking into parody. The first is Compton’s narrative voice, which seems to be modeled on Hammett’s Continental Op. He’s quietly competent, eschewing the misogyny and personal demons of Chandler’s Marlowe, and Compton always takes his own situation seriously, even when Zahn’s tongue slips into his cheek. The second is that the unraveling mystery works fairly well in science fiction terms. (There’s a point where the seasoned SF reader may find a conclusion obvious well before light dawns on Compton, but on the other hand Zahn finds more-or-less credible explanations for some of the flimsier tropes of detective/espionage fiction that he borrows.)

Night Train to Rigel wraps up with a lump of exposition before a pair of predictable (if emotionally satisfying) set-pieces, a minor flaw in a novel that seems tailor-made for the description “ripping yarn.” There are two more novels in the series (although this one is complete in itself) and I look forward to reading them once I dig out of my soon-to-be-overdue library book pile.

needs more demons? no.

Standage with opens Herschel’s discovery of Uranus by way of background, pays some attention to the contention-fraught business of planet naming, discusses “Bode’s law” and the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter, and goes beyond Neptune to Pluto and other similar objects that were never called planets — and even beyond that to extrasolar planets, which take the radical idea to its ultimate conclusion: since planets around other stars are too distant to observe directly with an optical telescope, the only way to find them is through the pertuberances of orbits. (Strictly speaking, the planets of the solar system don’t actually orbit the sun; the sun and the planets orbit their mutual center of gravity. Since the sun is far more massive than the sum of the planets, this basically means the sun wobbles a little bit, and through similar wobbles the presence of planets around other stars can be detected.)

The previous two books of Standage’s that I read, The Victorian Internet and The Turk were so lively and well-written that I recommended them to pretty much anyone, not just those with an interest in history. The Neptune File perhaps has less sizzle. I wouldn’t push it on someone with no interest whatsoever in astronomy, or someone with no tolerance for history. But if the phrase “astronomical history” makes your eyes light up a little (instead of glaze over…) this is a definite must-read.

needs more demons? no.

Stewart’s novel is set after the cataclysmic return of magic to the world — the Dream — ended civilization as we know it. City centers became inimical and largely uninhabitable. Technology mutated into new forms or simply ceased to function. Humanity survived, but in isolated pockets.

Near the end of the 21st century, Edmonton’s South Side and Vancouver’s Chinatown are entering an uneasy alliance. Vancouver has problems with monsters on its borders; Edmonton is trying to build a market for its cyberpunkish mercenary services. But although there is a dash of military-sf style action, Stewart’s story is primarily about character and family. The tangled relationship between the Southside’s leader, Winter, and his granddaughter Emily (at the novel’s outset, Emily has just been jailed by her grandfather) is both reflected and contrasted by the complex dynamic of Chinatown’s enigmatic “Minister of Borders” Water Spider, and his father. An estranged marriage between a Southsider and a Vancouverite is less symbolic than emblematic of the cultural clashes between the two communities.

Within a few chapters, I thought I had a handle on how most of the major plot elements would develop and resolve themselves. I was correct on some points, but dead wrong on several others. The Night Watch is perhaps less emotionally satisfying than if it had gone as I expected — it’s not a novel for anyone who insists on unalloyed happy endings* — but much more intellectually satisfying.

Also, it has some of the best writing about painting that I’ve encountered in recent memory.

I thought Resurrection Man could have used a touch more expository background; I think The Night Watch overcompensated just a touch. The Night Watch also has a fairly large cast of characters and while the principals were also clear, I was occasionally confused by some of the minor players (Stewart for instance refers to Chinatowns ministers variously by their full names, nicknames, titles, and by their symbols of office — which lent things a nicely realistic feel, but made me wish once or twice for a crib sheet).

Overall, though, I very much enjoyed The Night Watch.

needs more demons? no.

* If you require novels with unalloyed happy endings, this is almost certainly the wrong site to read

North by Northanger evades most of my specific criticisms of the previous novel: it’s much more credible and takes fewer (and, I think, more justifiable) liberties with Austen’s characters. Even better, its less bound by genre conventions than either of its predecessors. North by Northanger doesn’t work as a whodunnit — the attentive reader will likely pick up on several obvious clues well before the Darcys — but nonetheless effectively creates dramatic tension, leavened, as always, with humor. It’s possibly my favorite of the series so far, and certainly much more sure-footed than Suspense and Sensibility.

needs more demons? nope.

The Nymphos of Rocky Flats is easily the worst book I’ve read in years. The characters are one-dimensional at-best. The plot is too ludicrous to work any way but played-for-laughs — in Christopher Moore’s hands the same plot skeleton could have made for much hilarity — but Acevedo strives for a hard-boiled tone. Unfortunately, his first-person narrator Felix Gomez is both sexist enough for the description of every female character to include breast size, and dull enough to use adjectives like “large” and “small” for said descriptions; Acevedo might be aiming for vampire Chandler, but he doesn’t even achieve vampire Parker. And for a book with “nymphos” in the title? Really not providing much of what we used to call “socially redeeming value.”

Needs More Demons?
I need the hours I spent on this book back.