In the weakest stories, Maliszewksi’s formalism verges on gimmickry: almost none of his people have given names; most are referred to only as “the man,” “the wife,” “the husband,” “the boy,” and so on. Maliszewki’s titles almost all take the form of “Parable of . . .” or “Prayer for . . .”; the reader is initially perhaps led to believe that the “prayers” are more naturalistic and the “parables” are more symbolic/fabulist or, well, parable-y, but Maliszewksi quickly subverts that convention.

Although I thought Prayer and Parable was uneven, its high points were more than enough to keep Maliszewski on the list of writers I’m eager to see more from.

Inconsistent tone continues to bother me a bit. At its extremes, Prospero in Hell incorporates both (brief) moments of gross-out horror and (not quite so brief) dreamy, catalog-of-wonders interludes that place the plot on hold (Millhauser’s From the Realm of Morpheus came to mind when the book slipped into this mode).

My biggest gripe, again, is structural. Prospero in Hell is a novel when judged by word count, but very clearly the second act of a three-act play; it ends with an almost literal cliffhanger. It’s been nearly two years since I read Prospero Lost, and I struggled to recall relevant details despite a generous sprinkling of “remember when this happened” moments. If Lamplighter wraps up her story satisfyingly we’ll have three good fantasy novels in our universe — but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a single, slightly leaner and even better novel in some alternate universe where publishing dictates are a little different.

However, there’s no chance I’ll wait two years to read Prospero Regained. Prospero in Hell was a lot of fun, incorporating some nifty variations on the classic texts it references, an impressive array of (mostly but not exclusively European) mythic and folkloric elements, some big plot twists (including two that caught me unawares), more satisfying character development than the first book, and clever applications and extrapolations of magical powers.

needs more demons? on balance, no.

Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule, and happily, Predator’s Gold is one of them. Surviving characters from the first novel continue to grow and evolve (I’ll eschew specific spoilers, but if Reeve is perhaps not as cruel to his protagonists as, say, Joss Whedon, he’s assuredly not the sort of novelist from whom all sympathetic characters escape unscathed), and Reeve introduces new characters who also go through significant changes — there’s none of the stagnant quality to character dynamics that sometimes afflicts sequels. Some of Reeve’s people make appallingly bad choices in this novel, but that didn’t lessen my emotional involvement.

Reeve introduces a few nifty wrinkles to his world-building, and more importantly, deepens the moral complexity of the story; what was shaping up to be a a mostly-good versus mostly-evil conflict in the first novel becomes substantially more nuanced, nicely mirroring the good-people-doing-bad-things aspect of the plot. Speaking of the plot, it’s satisfyingly twisty and suspenseful. And once again I found Reeve’s language, coinages, and nomenclature delightful. I laughed aloud several times, and inflicted read-aloud passages on my patient wife.

needs more demons? no, no, and again, no.

The Peace War wasn’t much to my taste. It posits a rather magical technology which a regime exploits to prevent global thermonuclear war, at the cost of halting technological advancement except within its inner circle. (In both of these novels I found the implicit politics intermittently hard to stomach). It has some interesting characters (and a few tiresome stock figures) and an action-oriented plot that might translate well to film. But fundamentally it relies on a gambit I’ve always thought a bit unfair: the reader spends the first chunk of the novel working out what the characters already know about the “magic” technology, and then Vinge changes the rules abruptly.

Marooned in Realtime was more my speed. In it a small group of humans from the near future find themselves in the far distant future, apparently after the rest of humanity is extinct. There are conflicts between factions that want to rekindle human civilization, and some with other objectives. Vinge sets up an intriguing variation on the locked room mystery, again involving extrapolations of his “magic” technological innovation. The primary viewpoint character is a 21st-century ex-police officer struggling to solve the murder, which requires trying to comprehend the motivations and motives of people whose subjective lifespans have been hundreds or even thousands of times longer than his. Vinge doesn’t play completely fair by whodunnit rules, but changes the game in mid-stream less than The Peace War; there are some feints toward some rather hoary resolutions that Vinge thankfully doesn’t follow through on. A curious mix of pessimism and optimism marks Marooned in RealtIme; Vinge suggests that our capacity for self-destruction is likely to stay with us; I found his nearly-empty future Earth distinctly depressing. But the human spirit and survival drive offer a glimmer of hope, if not as steadfastly and rosily as they do in, say, the Star Trek universe. I’m certainly not sorry I read these books.

needs more demons? adequately equipped with demons.

Proof by Seduction did eventually win me over. The tension in romance novels is never about who gets paired off, it’s about how the emotionally correct pairing is legitimized in the eyes of society. In the Austen model that (I would argue) is the ur-template from which these novels derive, the economically appropriate pairing must be proven unsuitable, and vice versa, generally by a literal reversal of fortune. Milan injects some novelty into the tried & true structure; Proof by Seduction actually surprised me more than once. And it’s pretty overtly feminist for a novel in which heterosexual pairings are the expected “happy ending.”

Milan’s novel is set in London at the very dawn of the Victorian Era. Her portrayal has a bit more grit to it than Heyer’s Regency (or Austen’s), although I still found it hard to credit a description of the smells of London that omitted the obvious in favor of more pleasant and genteel odors. But in general it felt pretty well researched, at least enough to fool me. I thought the word “shag” might be anachronistic, but I looked it up, and Milan’s well within her rights to have her characters use it.

I also thought Milan did a nice job of balancing accessibility to modern readers with a little old-fashioned flavor in dialogue. I liked, for instance, Jenny’s description of the limits of her education: “I was drilled in my accent and taught just enough conversational French to start a good argument, but not so much that I would be able to do anything so gauche as to win it.”

There’s a sequel, and I’m looking forward to it.

needs more demons? no.

(I owe Joe Hill’s short story “Best New Horror” for obliquely introducing me to Gallagher by mentioning him in the same sentence as Kelly Link.)

needs more demons? no.

Porter’s key concept is that you can examine any decision in cost/benefit terms, and you can almost always find a way to quantify the cost and benefit in monetary terms (whether it’s explicitly transactional or not). For instance, here’s how Porter analyzes why the 55-mph national speed limit didn’t work: A 70 mile trip takes 16 minutes more at 55mph than at 70mph. At $4.30/hr (the average wage of “production workers in 1974″), that represents $1.15. At the time gas cost $0.53/gal, so to break even, the average driver would have needed to save 2.17 gallons for every 70 mile trip — substantially more than the fuel efficiency of 1974 cars would provide.

Porter doesn’t suggest that most production workers worked out this equation and made a rational, informed decision to disobey the speed limit — I infer that he thinks people made gut-decisions perhaps based on a subconscious sense of time-value lost at lower speeds. But I would argue (albeit without stacks of research to back me up, whereas Porter’s book is meticulously footnoted) that the psychological dimension was significant outside of economics; the 55-mph limit was an assault on macho cowboy car culture. (Consider: if economics were that much of a factor in velocity determinations, you’d see a lot fewer jack-rabbit start and sudden stops with current fuel prices, especially in sub/urban commuting, where it avails the driver almost nothing.)

Porter’s framing of the problem also ignores that travel at 70mph for sustained periods of time is a comparative rarity for most drivers. (With long-haul trucking one notable exception, and, other than cowboy culture, one reason always advanced for the trucker/cop cb/radar conflicts of the mid-late seventies was that the truckers’ work schedules required violating posted speed limits.)

Porter also ignores other factors which might reasonably be considered part of the valuation: reduced loss of life, reduced emissions, reduced engine wear, et cetera. (Although I think it’s fair to assert that many drivers would likely ignore these factors as well.)

Although Porter’s analysis of what to do about greenhouse emissions ultimately concludes that given the uncertainty of the models, voters might as well follow their guts, his analysis of the issue omits a very important factor. (It’s also quite different from traditional risk valuations.) He suggests thinking of the problem as balancing lives positively impacted now and in the future, the economic cost of curbing emissions now and in the future, and the potential impact of climate change on the economy. (I infer that he doesn’t discount “there is no more economy” as an outcome, but thinks it fairly unlikely.) It’s easy to tweak the model to suggest taking only limited action in the short, in effect “investing” funds needed to address the problem in the future: spending money on policies that promote economic development so there are increased financial resources to address global warming later on. But he ignores the opportunity cost of not taking action now. I think of it as the “toothache problem” — the longer you put off the dentist visit, the bigger the bill is likely to be.

However, I should probably admit that phrases like, “the standard family deal, in which women exchanged the service of their uterus, child care, and household chores for their husband’s wage,” get me spoiling for an intellectual tussle with their author, irrespective of how historically accurate they might be and what the author’s personal attitudes are. And if I sometimes found the book infuriating, it certainly challenged some of my attitudes and preconceptions, and made me think.

Aside: Porter is kinda in the Chicken Little camp as far as the future of paying for intellectual content goes, and seems to think more/stronger DRM may be part of a solution. So maybe this is relevant, not just petty: A glowing review called The Price of Everything to my attention, and if it had been priced like other e-books I’ve bought recently, I probably would’ve bought it on the spot. These days my determination of whether and how to read a book includes among other factors, the cost of physical storage, the ease of library access, my estimate of re-read/reference value, and whether an electronic version is DRM-encumbered. Half-again the maximum price I typically pay for DRM-trapped content? Not a winning strategy for publishers who want revenue from me.

needs more demons? I might’ve found the content I disliked easier to swallow if I thought the extrapolation had been a bit more rigorous throughout.

Packing for Mars devotes a chapter apiece to several aspects of the ticklish business of getting human beings off of Earth and back to it relatively undamaged. Topics range from earthbound research, like psychological evaluations of crew dynamics and people paid to lie in bed all day while their muscles and bones waste away, to discussion of just how gross it is to wear a spacesuit (answer: very) and pondering the question of whether anyone has yet joined the 286-Mile-High Club.

As in previous Roach’s previous books, particularly the cadaveriffic Stiff, she doesn’t shy away from gruesome or unsavory topics. (The chapter on crash survivability research was actually the most wince-inducing for me.) She approaches her topics with a lively, mordant humor, which often pops up in gleefully grim footnotes. And she’s clearly a gifted interviewer — she gets actual astronauts and researchers to say things you wouldn’t necessarily expect in an on-record interview.

But some of Roach’s footnotes deploy more-or-less random factoids, not at all related to space research. After a while I got a “hey,here’s another weird crazy thing!” vibe from these — entertaining, but not elucidating. And Roach devotes — maybe even wastes — several pages to debunking the claims of an adult DVD producer that one of its videos featured the world’s first zero-gravity, er, “money shot.” (The video was allegedly shot in an airplane flying a parabolic pattern to induce brief weightlessness, not actually in orbit.) There’s no science involved; it seems to be more about Roach establishing herself as an “edgy” journalist. Which, after Stiff, Spook, Bonk and the rest of Packing for Mars, seems to be something already well established.

needs more demons? Despite a few misgivings, no.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

needs more demons? Literally, perhaps. Metaphorically, no way.