“The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device” encapsulates what I liked least about this book. It’s structured as a “choose your own adventure” story that has the scope of a rather ordinary Saturday afternoon in an unnamed city, after the second-person, present-tense viewpoint character has just experienced a seizure-like event. It perhaps poses questions about the inevitability of certain types of outcomes, and about how subjective mundaneness is or isn’t, but it does so with obvious artifice. In several of these stories, the inclusion of fantastic or magical realist elements seems almost a cop out, as if the story wouldn’t be interesting enough without something showily weird. Don’t the dizzying non sequiturs of the title story communicate the main character’s isolation effectively enough without the inclusion of an encounter with some alien/angelic entity? The finely observed “Andrea is Changing Her Name” interrupts itself to announce, “There is no form to this story because it is true, or at least as close to true as I have been able to make it,” which seemed both needlessly post-modern and too obvious to be worth stating.

In point of fact, it was one of the most naturalistic and conventional narratives that won me over. In “Home Videos,” a man working for a thinly-fictionalized America’s Funniest Home Videos finds himself increasingly intrigued by the un-airable submissions from one woman. It sounds like the setup for a terrible, formulaic romantic comedy, but throughout the story, Brockmeier flirts with the easy and expected outcomes, then does something subtly different.

More than the intrusion of strangeness, what makes this volume cohere is how profoundly alienated virtually all of Brockmeier’s characters are. The self-proclaimed fables interspersed throughout are almost Kafakaesque sketches about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of communication. “A Fable Containing a Reflection the Size of a Match Head in Its Pupil” is perhaps the bluntest of these. It opens, “Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye,” but I have the impression that very few of the people in this book would be truly comfortable meeting another’s gaze.

needs more demons? No.

Basically, I loved The Turk so much I’m going to read everything by Standage I can get my hands on. This book explores the meteoric rise (and precipitous decline) of the telegraph from the historical perspective. pretty much, of Web 1.0 (the copyright date is 1998).

Standage’s capable hands bring to life the colorful personalities of the architects of the “Victorian Internet” — not only Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison, but also Claude Chappe, one of the developers of the pre-electric telegraphs; William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, the rivalry-locked British counterparts of Morse, and the hapless Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, who played a ill-starred role in the struggle to lay transatlantic cables.

Along the way, Standage provides ample evidence to support his titular conceit: that the impact of the telegraph on the late 19th century was remarkably like the impact of the Internet on the late 20th century. He provides numerous examples of how technological change caused social change in ways that will seem familiar to modern readers: increasing the pace of business, advancing egalitarianism, online dating, online scamming, government attempts to regulate cryptography with limited success, and so forth.

Standage’s balance of human interest with history and science is, for my taste, just about perfect. He provides enough technical perspective on the electricity that makes the telegraph possible that the book doesn’t feel glib or lightweight, but the narrative is fast-paced and engaging throughout.

needs more demons? Nope.

Ventus‘ action-packed plot certainly held my attention, but I found it less than completely successful (it’s Schroeder’s first novel, so the flaws are certainly forgivable). Several minor things bugged me. Schroeder very unambiguously establishes some concrete religious symbolism, but doesn’t really do anything with it (unless he was just sowing seeds for a sequel…). The limitations under which the high-tech society operates didn’t feel internally consistent; at times the reasons for “why can they do that, but not do this?” seemed driven more by plot expediency than anything else. When the Big Bad arrives, it’s disappointingly cartoonish. The resolution is thematically satisfying but awkwardly and hurriedly reached; the pacing in the book’s final third is choppy (I often felt that Schroeder was juggling just a few too many balls).

Schroeder is clearly more concerned with his characters’ emotional lives than many hard SF writers, but his limited omniscient third-person viewpoint kept them at some remove. Nonetheless, “Mad Queen Galas,” the deposed ruler of one of the feudal states, is a remarkably vivid creation.

needs more demons? Just a few. I’ll read more Schroeder for sure.

Everything I said about Silver Pigs applies to Venus in Copper, and then some (I enjoyed Shadows in Bronze, too, although it didn’t impress me quite as strongly). The characters are wonderfully realized. Falco’s narrative voice is assured and incisive, and his helpmeet [trying to skirt spoilers...] is more than a match for him. The setting is so vividly drawn that I’ve had fanciful thoughts about a time machine in Davis’s closet with its coordinates set to Imperial Rome. Heck, I almost feel as if I’ve visited Imperial Rome. The plot elements are quite satisfyingly twisty (although once again, a Big Clue in the open seemed far more obvious to me than to the protagonist).

Moreover, while the tone isn’t broadly comic, it made me laugh out loud several times, and the mouth-watering descriptions of certain Roman sweetmeats instilled a craving that I’m still trying to figure out how best to satisfy. Finally, it’s more satisfying on a literary level than a great many mysteries, what with the foreshadowing, the symbolism, the external conflict mirroring internal conflict, and so forth.

Needs More Demons? No.