Cycler ended so abruptly and with so little resolution that I expected (Re)cycler to be basically the second half of a novel too long for one volume. I thought it was going to include an “origin story” for Jill (who turns, physically, into her male alter-ego Jack for 4 days a month). I thought, for example, that it might be revealed that Jill’s mom, who has a more-or-less normal relationship with her daughter but real trouble dealing with her “son,” had conducted some sort of awful gene-splicing experiment on Jill/Jack.

Jill and Jack both self-identify as heterosexual but (slight spoiler here for the first novel) they both wind up involved in relationships where their partner’s bisexuality is either stated explicitly or strongly hinted at. Along with a twist on lycanthropy and/or the Jekyll/Hyde paradigm, one potential reading for Jill/Jack’s hermaphroditic nature would be an attempt to resolve feelings of attraction to both sexes by compartmentalizing them, and I thought one, or even both, of Jill/Jack’s love triangles might resolve themselves with a partner who has a relationship with both Jill and Jack.

But (Re)cycler avoids concretely realizing any of those speculations (although it leaves the door open for some of them to be explored in the future). Instead it introduces several new characters, opens up a lot of other possibilities, and leaves many of them unresolved, too. Maybe it’s book two in a projected long-running series, but maybe McLaughlin is just not that big on closure.

Not wanting to wrap everything up neatly is certainly a valid artistic choice, and part of me likes this book a lot for defying my expectations so thoroughly. McLaughlin certainly had me flipping pages at a breakneck pace. But it still leaves me a bit unsatisfied, partly because I still crave answers to all the questions Cycler and (Re)cycler leave unanswered, but mostly because this book is in many respects much tamer, lacking the dark undercurrent that made the first volume so striking.

needs more demons? maybe.

Lewis continues to exploit the devices that distinguished his first novel: twin first-person vampire anti-hero narrators: Eric and his sometime-girlfriend Tabitha. Eric is a reluctantly unreliable narrator to boot; he has a capricious memory. (I like this notion; it seems very logical that storing centuries of memories in a human-like brain would get problematic — although Eric isn’t actually particularly old.)

On the plus side, Lewis (and Eric) don’t seem to take themselves as seriously as Hamilton (and Blake) do. Eric introduces himself by explaining that

In ice cream terms, vampires come in three flavors: chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. I’m grape sherbet — hard to come by and much more likely to give you brain freeze.

and utters lines like:

“My magic ice sword! I left it in the closet. If some damn fireman stole my magic sword, I’m going to be so fucking pissed off!”

And those aren’t the silliest things in Revamped.

If I’m comparing Revamped to Hamilton’s Blake novels, it’s only fair to specify that it resembles the earlier books, where the plot is more substantial than thin connective tissue between fight and/or sex scenes.

On the minus side, the the entrenched sexism of Revamped was hard for me to overlook. Somehow it’s a little easier for me to swallow female characters who act like players in a stereotypical male fantasy when the author is female. I suppose it also might help to envision most of the characters in the book as participants on a VH1 reality show.

needs more demons? just not my cup of tea

• 1 part coming-of-age novel (protracted)
• 1 part feminist subtext
• 1 part formalized presentation (every chapter has an “I Confess…” header; text incorporates ordered lists and the occasional chart)
• 1/2 part not utterly reliable narrator
• 1 1/2 parts pseudo-credible gossip/speculation about Skull & Bones
• 1 1/2 parts mystery/suspense
• 5 parts college-age soap opera

I don’t mean the breakdown to be dismissive; if it were straight college soap I wouldn’t be along for the ride, and, as with any cocktail, the trick is in blending the various flavors of the constituents into a cohesive, pleasing whole.

I was way ahead of “confessor” Amy Haskell on most of the plot reveals this time around, but I’m not at all sure that’s not Peterfreund’s intent. It didn’t interfere much with my enjoyment of the novel and I’m looking forward to the concluding volume.

needs more demons? no

Suspending my disbelief in Mansfield’s reactions to the modern world took some effort. I think, for instance, that an LED display reading “808″ would first be interpreted as an abstract geometric pattern rather than as numbers. I’m inclined to think (although this may be partly my own prejudice) that when confronted with technology such as cars, iPods, cell phones, etc., that a 19th-century person might not be easily convinced that the technology is natural and human, rather than unnatural and infernal. But of course, if Mansfield were completely unable to engage with the modern world, Rigler wouldn’t have much of a book. So I’m willing to make allowances, and Rigler certainly establishes that Mansfield is strong-willed, intelligent, and unconventional — like most of Austen’s heroines; like Austen herself.

Rigler makes a more-or-less credible attempt to describe the modern world as a Regency-era person might see it. Even at its silliest, the novel often displays Rigler’s 19th-century knowledge, as when Mansfield explores Stone’s refrigerator:

…At last I have discovered a larder, bare though it may be.

Ah. There is an upper door as well. Frigid air issues from the interior, refreshing upon my skin. A giant, frosty bottle of something called Absolut. A jar, pliable as paper, of something called Cherry Garcia. I open it, dip in a finger and taste. It is a delightful variety of ices, sweet with chewy cherries and bits of what tastes like chocolate except that it is solid and much sweeter. Must find a spoon.

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is none too deep a book, so perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but it could perhaps be considered an extended metaphor bridging the gap between Austen and her present-day readers.

I’ve spent enough time reading Austen’s fiction and biographies of the authoress to have formed a one-way emotional connection. But I’m keenly aware that if some time anomaly afforded me an opportunity to meet her, that she would find me dreadfully uncouth and unfit for conversation. Despite all the pleasure her words have afforded me, I’m certain she would find my paltry scribblings deeply appalling.

To a limited degree we can put ourselves in Austen’s shoes: reading her work, histories, even watching PBS’s Regency House Party. Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, with a character who shares many characteristics with Austen and her protagonists, and whose name blends Austen’s given name with the title of one of her novels, attempts the reverse. It suggests that, among other allowances, Austen could conceivably conclude that, at least in the climate of southern California, it might be appropriate for ladies to be seen bare-limbed.

I thought it was charming, and although mostly fluffy, not without a few insightful moments. I’d recommend it to anyone who finds the basic premise intriguing and isn’t completely allergic to anything that could be filed under “romance.”

Since Peterfreund’s unicorns are fierce predators inclined to maim and/or devour any but a maiden pure, she posits a secret society of unicorn slayers. For a little while it seemed like Rampant was going to be more-or-less a rip off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Seasons 7 and 8* in particular, with narrator Astrid as the Buffy-figure helping to train a cadre of young warrior women to combat unicorns instead of vampires ). I would have been fine with that; the sheer novelty of fierce and deadly unicorns was sweeping me along.

But ultimately, Rampant, to its credit, has a lot more going on. It deals with feminist issues a little more explicitly than Buffy, and it’s angrier. I can imagine that if some teenage boys could bring themselves to read a (dark, gory) book about (fighting) unicorns they could possibly have their consciousnesses raised in ways that might prevent some real-world damage to human beings.

I was a little worried as the remaining page-count dwindled that Rampant was going to be one of those “novels” that turned out to be first-in-series and not a complete story. I was pleasantly surprised that while Rampant doesn’t exactly preclude a sequel, it certainly doesn’t require one. I thought the dénouement was a little rushed, but that may have been partly because I was turning the pages so fast.

Peeve: “hissed” as the verb describing the utterance of several sibilant-free bits of dialogue. Multiple times, yet.

*yes, Season 8. It’s currently unspooling in comic book form.

needs more demons? nope.

The first-person narrator is herself a vampire, and Jinks exploits this to build intrigue and suspense: when Nina wakes up at sundown, she has to figure out what happened during the daylight hours. It was an effective plot device and I’m surprised more authors don’t take advantage of it. Nina’s sardonic narrative voice is also terrific and her wry outlook provided several laugh aloud moments.

On the minus side, the major plot arc plays with some of my less favorite tropes of the modern vampire novels, and it felt just a bit mechanical. For the most part characters act believably as situations evolve, and react as you might expect, so the novel is relatively low on big surprises.

But mostly I found The Reformed Vampire Support Group fresh, funny, and engaging. Also unusual and commendable: it’s a real honest-to-goodness standalone novel that doesn’t demand a sequel. I’ll read more by Jinks for sure.

needs more demons? no.

I’m glad I waited to read Resurrection Man, partly because it isn’t quite as good (it’s one of Stewart’s earliest novels) but also because both are fundamentally guy-forced-to-grow-up-and-confront-stuff novels where the force originates at least partly from the guy’s supernatural abilities. In Resurrection Man a good chunk of what Dante has to confront is mortality, quite literally represented in the opening chapters in which he dissects what appears to be his own corpse.

It’s very rare that I think a novel has too little exposition, but Resurrection Man is perhaps an example, mostly because Stewart’s characters use fairly common words (angel, minotaur) with quite different meanings. It’s quickly apparent that Resurrection Man is set in a world significantly different from ours, but even the alert reader may not figure out the differences in the first several chapters. In some ways this is a good thing, as it places the focus on the characters and their interactions, but Stewart is also parsimonious in dealing out Dante’s family’s backstory. Several characters know important things that they allude to vaguely but don’t spell out for a while (or ever), and the result was initially a bit confusing.

I thought Stewart leaned a little heavily on arthropod imagery for shock value. It works — bugs! ew, gross! — but it’s a bit of a blunt instrument.

These defects are balanced by some vivid writing, sharp dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And as magic-returns-to-the-modern-world stories go, this one is remarkably original in significant respects. If I didn’t find it completely satisfying, I still found it well worth reading.

needs more demons? nah.

But these innocuous openings give little away. In what era is the story set? Does it take place in world like ours, or somewhere quite other? Are the protagonists human? Alive or dead? Answers to questions like these differ between these ten tales.

Lanagan isn’t one for big dumps of exposition. She demands a willingness to read a few pages before you’re quite sure what’s going on, and perhaps to re-read as your understanding grows. Her prose and structure are fiercely economical. I’ve enjoyed several of William Sleator’s books, but it struck me that if Sleator had written the opening “Baby Jane,” (which employs some of Sleator’s frequent tropes) it probably would’ve been a short novel, rather than a short story.

“Winkie” and “Under Hell, Over Heaven” by themselves would be enough to ensure that I’ll read more from Lanagan.

needs more demons? no.

• Hall’s prose and dialogue are uncommonly vivid and lively. Even if I didn’t love what this book is about (and I do), I would admire the craft with which it’s written.
• Although it starts in distinctly Memento-ish territory, it doesn’t stay there very long
• The Raw Shark Texts is one of the most strikingly original things I’ve read in ages, but it did still remind me in fits and starts of Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Carroll, William Browning Spencer, Tim Powers, Charlie Kaufman, Neal Stephenson, and George Saunders — or, in other words, a whole passel of my favorite writers. And I’d recommended it unhesitatingly to anyone iwith a fondness for any of the above.

needs more demons? Absolutely not.

Mostly, though, Roving Mars is a book about project management. Squyres often speaks, somewhat disconcertingly, about “doing science” as if science is merely a product of having assets correctly positioned, in the same way that a movie’s revenue is the product of having copies of the film in theatres. He admits that, from his perspective, one of the critical goals of the Spirit and Opportunity missions was to justify more Mars missions, in the same way a succesful product generates more demand in the marketplace.

Much of the ground Squyres covers will be familiar to anyone who’s manged a difficult project (perhaps especially a software development effort). He covers intial brainstorming; marketing and proposal development; forming strategic alliances with competitors; the struggle for budgetary, schedule, and manpower resources; risk mitigation strategies; motivational techniques; benefits and drawbacks of delegation and outsourcing; troubleshooting and quality assurance; and aproaches to consensus-building and fostering effective decision-making. It’s a fast and engaging read. Several chapters are written in the form of Squyres’ journal entries, which gives it a “you are there,” sort of immediacy. For a book about project management, it’s often surprisingly suspenseful and moving, and Squyres’ “boldly go where no one has gone before”-style enthusiasm is palpable.

Throughout he makes a solid case for his own talents as a manager (despite his penchant for tantrums). And throughout he reinforces my growing sense that there is something fundamentally and systemically wrong with the current best-practice management of complex engineering development efforts.

The Mars rover project is repeatedly stymied by mistakes that simply shouldn’t be made: instruments designed to work sideways but not upright, confusion between English and metric units, pieces that are fabricated to the wrong size. It’s perhaps especially disheartening to compare these errors to the highly-publicized mistakes NASA has made in recent history, from grinding the Hubble’s mirror to the wrong spec to the material science failures that cost the lives of space shuttle astronauts.

Also disturbing — but eerily familiar to me — was the degree to which the developers of the Mars rover software were unable to predict its behavior. I was shocked by how frequently the rover team was faced by problems I’ve faced with notoriously buggy commercial software. Computer that crashes as soon as it boots up? Been there, fixed that. Corrupted flash memory? Ate my second cellphone alive.

I’m convinced that the issue isn’t stupidity or incompetence on the part of the team, not just because these folks have high-falutin’ degrees in their fields, but also because every smart team I’ve had a chance to observe or directly work with — including some folks who made me feel positively dim — has made similarly obvious mistakes on sufficiently complex projects. On the biggest projects I’ve been associated with, it was sometimes painfully obvious that no single person understood the whole requirements document. I once saw a data entity diagram that covered a large conference room wall from floor to ceiling. I saw team members literally start sobbing when it became evident that fundamental assumptions underlying that diagram — which represented over a year of work and several million dollars — had never been valid.

I’ve begun to think of it as a big picture/little picture problem. When teams are stovepiped, each group can do its “little-picture” work and check and resolve its internal errors. On small, well-characterized projects, group leaders can grasp the “big picture” at a level of detail that permits identification and resolution of problems that cross group lines. But on projects that are bigger and more uncertain, it becomes impossible for anyone to grasp the gestalt of the project at a sufficient level of detail. Things start to slip through the cracks.

Since Malcolm Gladwell’s books — particularly The Tipping Point — have had more influence on my thinking than any others in a decade or so, I’m inclined to wonder if large engineering projects are being constrained by the fundamental limits of human cognition. I’m even tempted to wonder if Gladwell’s “magic number” 150 might crop up somewhere in a calculation of maximum manageable size.

I don’t think the problem is insoluble, but I think it calls for new techniques for asserting correctness. There are mathematical methods for “proving” the correctness of software. They’re seldom applied in the real world, partly because they’re cumbersome and expensive, but also, I think, because they rely on not changing requirements during development. I argue that since no one ever understands the requirements for complex projects, it’s almost inevitable that the requirements will change when one or more deficencies are identified midstream. My anecdotal experience suggests strongly that many serious engineering errors arise from failure to understand the consequences of a requirements change during the development cycle.

The engineering development process of the future should attack this problem from three angles:

• The requirements definition phase must systemically address the inability of humans to fully characterize the behavior of extremely complex systems.
• Throughout the development cycle it must embody consistency checks that prevent errors of the English/metric variety
• Throughout the development cycle it must explicitly maintain the constraints on its own behavior, so that flaws resulting from requirements changes are immediately evident.
  (Software often has implicit constraints, e.g., it only works if only one document is open. Currently, information about these constraints may only exist in the mind of a single developer.)

Two other takeaways from Roving Mars:

• Good golly, rocket scientists drink more than I would have guessed.
• Wow, a lot of Mars probes have just flat out disappeared. Some enterprising sci-fi writer ought to be able to get at least a short story out of the conceit that the Martians shoot down any probe that gets too close to their cities, and play games keeping just out of camera range of the ones they allow to land.

Needs More Demons? No, Squyres’ project is plenty bedevilled.