It’s just that this particular book had all the standard elements. Religion, freaked out family, kinda-sorta-accepting family, high school drama club complete with theatre production, car crash, dog, non-explicit sex, formal/prom. Even now I’m having trouble not confusing it with ‘that one where it’s the school newspaper and one of them is a photographer’, which is um.. The Year They Banned the Books by Nancy Garden.

I suppose it’s a little unfair of me to say it’s just like all the other books, when it’s from 1997 and set in New Zealand. To some extent, the other books are like it.

The New Zealand setting didn’t affect things much. Just some of the terms were different, and my edition had a handy glossary in the front. Not everything was in there, but I was pleased to see “goolies” made the cut. No censorship in the glossary.

I notice on Amazon that Kirkus is quoted as saying “[a] steamy, brilliant girl-on-girl romance”. Either they’re operating from a different definition of “steamy” than I am, they’re counting the hot tub scene as full of steam, or my edition really was edited!

I like the size of the book. Smallish and thin both, with a photo depiction of each of the girls on one side.

The book was readable, but I was rolling my eyes a few times. It got heavily teen angsty in one or two spots. Or was it three or four?

And early on there’s this scene where the girls are working in a fast food place and the guy in charge is sexually harassing like every girl who works for him. And though most of them don’t like it, no one does anything productive about it! Like, tell, ANYONE. Like, threaten him with a LAWSUIT. Like, QUIT! So the book has left a skeevy vibe behind all because of this one guy who isn’t even terribly relevant to the rest of the plot.

The priest’s reaction is refreshing, but I have to say not terribly convincing and believable to me. Fast food guy can sexually harass his employees without consequences, but Catholic priest can say whatever he likes about homosexuality?

At least.. I assumed he was Catholic. Or remembered him as Catholic. Is that the only Christian religion where they’re called priests and they’re celibate? Well, anyway… don’t tell the Pope what he’s been saying in 1997.

So, in sum, enough is enough. Next angsty gay teen romance I read had better at least have some zombies in it. And I hate zombies.

Which is perhaps a damning criticism because the book was just one giant mystery made up of little mysteries. And I just didn’t care.

The main character is either a kid in the contemporary real world who goes to school, etc, or he’s a kid with a bunch of other kids flying a spaceship in the future. He’s ‘prexing’, a word which I never did figure out, and just falling into this hallucinatory state where he believes he’s living out the life of a 20th-21st century Earth kid. Or he’s actually that kid.

On the ship, it’s a group of I dunno maybe half a dozen kids, who don’t really know what they’re doing or where they’re going. And there’s like creatures and jel and dangerous random things they have to fight off, and I don’t even know why. And two of the kids are plotting, but not secretively or very well, to get voice control over the computer. But whatever.

So the mysteries are, like, what’s this prexing thing about, why are these kids on the ship, because they don’t really know themselves, what is this ship and why was it built, where are they going, etc, etc. And why is it called Deepwater anyway?

Well, you won’t get answers to all of those questions by reading the book. (And darned if I’m going to read any more in the series to try to find them either.) And the answers that are provided are full of crap science that I’d love to pick apart, but would be major spoilers. Because what’s the point at all of reading this book if I tell you what’s going on in it? None. But it fails biology and it fails astronomy. It probably also fails physics generally. Maybe ecology.

There certainly is potential in the overarching idea, and enough hand-waving would’ve made me fine with the poor science. However, it would’ve had to have done a lot more with the characters. I couldn’t see most of them even 2-dimensionally, let alone 3. One of them had the annoying tendency to learn things and then not want to tell anyone else. And she was pretty much the most developed of all the characters.

My recommendation has to be to give this one a pass. If you want kids alone on a spaceship, try Marion Zimmer Bradley or Dom Testa.

I believe the American title is Jellicoe Road and the original title is On the Jellicoe Road. This cover is the most unappealing cover to me. I’m not big on flowers as design elements and orange flowers are the absolute worst. Especially on book covers. It did not make a good first impression.

When I finished the book I was mad at it.

The non-spoily summary is: Taylor Markham is a teenager living in a boarding school after her mother abandoned her. And there’s a ‘war’ going on between the students, the locals, and a group of cadets who come for several weeks every year. And she finds out who she is and makes friends and blahdeblahblah.

This review is going to get increasingly spoiler-filled, so feel free to stop when you feel like you’ve been spoiled just the right amount.

There are two narratives running through the story. Taylor’s first person story and snippets from a manuscript her guardian is writing. At first I felt detached. The very first thing we get is a car crash with dead people, but it’s in the manuscript, so it doesn’t count? Then Taylor seems to do things without really knowing why she’s doing them or even how she’s feeling. At least that’s how it comes across to me as a reader. She’s in charge of her House now, even though she seems bad at it. And there’s a decided lack of adults around. Hannah, the woman who’s nominally her guardian and unofficially in charge of her House isn’t actually officially attached to the school. So when she disappears, it’s not like things are much different? And no adult comes in to fill her place. The kids seem oddly on their own a whole lot of the time. Especially considering these are Hogwarts-age kids we’re talking about. And they even have to do their own cooking!

So there’s this war between the students, the Townies, and the Cadets over territory. And the rules are convoluted. But mostly I was just confused. Why is there this war? Why do the adults not care? Taylor seems oddly surprised when some of the boys start physically fighting. What kind of war is it that that’s not part of the point of it? It’s just weird.

Meanwhile we have this whole other set of characters we’re supposed to keep track of, in this manuscript Hannah has been writing for over a decade. They’re all full of angst.

I can sort of see this book is well-crafted, in that we learn more about Taylor’s past bit by bit, as she learns it too. It’s a tough thing to pull off, authorially. (Although I do have some time/number quibbles. Suddenly a 17-hour drive is only 7 hours. And there’s a date thing that’s screwed up after that.)

But by the end, I was mad. Mad mad mad.

(Major spoilers now.)

Dead people everywhere and suicides and bleh bleh blecch. And adults that WON’T TELL HER THINGS. It’s sort of the worst combination of things in kid’s books. Those things show up everywhere and are hella annoying each and every time. I mean in kid’s books in general, but also in this book in particular!

And this phrase keeps running around in my mind when I think about this book, so I’ll go ahead and type it: I felt manipulated.

So I can see how some people might think it’s Teh Awesome. But I have a lot of trouble appreciating its craft when it annoyed the heck out of me and made me outright mad by the end.

I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads the moment I finished reading it. Though I was hesitant even then. I may yet go back and change it to 2.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Man Plus by Frederik Pohl. Beware if youâ€re worried about such things.

Facing mutual self-destruction, the major governmental powers on Earth race into space. One solution: to create a cyborg capable of living and working on Mars without a suit. When the first test subject dies, Roger Torraway becomes the man of the hour. Or the man plus of the hour. As his body is gradually converted into a “Martian”, his mind has to cope with no longer being human while he angsts about his love for his cheating wife.

J: So.. Man Plus wasn’t a promising title. I didn’t know what to expect going into it. Except that you started it first and said it was horrible. And you were right. And not only did it not get better, it GOT WORSE. But, at least it was short.

K: Man Plus is a very ambiguous title, though it becomes clear enough as soon as you begin reading: Man+, new and improved man, etc. It’s certainly not double-plus good. I can’t, however, agree with you that it got worse: the first part of the book was definitely the lowest point for me. It didn’t improve, really, but the parts where Pohl abandoned his efforts at characterization and concentrated just on his science fiction were considerably better.

J: The first chapter was a straight infodump. So it’s true that it improved on hitting the second chapter, with actual action and dialog. And yes, it did get more interesting. But the treatment of the female characters got increasingly worse. With a little rise and sharp dip at the end. So it was just painful all the way through.

K: Maybe I just got numb to it. I don’t know. So, let’s first take a look at the basic premise: Earth is an environmental and political disaster area, and rather than figure out a way to fix this, instead, based on opinion polling, the Americans have decided to adapt a human so that he can live on Mars without a space suit. Which is sadly, totally believable.

J: Except I didn’t quite understand the point of it. Because it turns out they were going to send astronauts in suits along as well. And they haven’t built in any way for this man+ to reproduce once he’s on Mars. So if Earth continues to go to crap, there aren’t going to be any more Man Martians.

K: Exactly. It made no sense at all. But no doubt it made everyone feel good, even if it solved nothing at all and left them with pretty much the exact same problems as they had before, just less time to solve them in.

K: Considering they obviously had a way to create livable areas on the surface (the traditional ‘domes’), and the Man+ required considerable computer support and was able to be felled just by not buttoning closed a flap, it didn’t seem to me like this was a viable or reasonable long term OR short term solution.

J: Add to that that at least one other astronaut was there almost solely as tech support for him and you’ve wasted two slots you could’ve used for engineers or Mars experts. Or was it three? What was the priest there for?

K: He was an ‘aerologist’ or something like that. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was. It sounded like he was hoping to be an exobiologist if any exobioorganisms could be found. And then they needed an actual pilot who seemingly needed no additional skills, since he wasn’t going to be able to land regardless. But the strangest part was that the addition of ‘Brad’ to the team was apparently as last minute decision made practically on a whim! Considering how very many issues they had with Man+ just lauching into space what would they have done if they hadn’t sent him along?

J: He wasn’t the only whim they had either. But let me back up to explain the plot a bit more. However well I might manage it. Our main character is Roger Torraway and he’s an astronaut, though it’s been years since he was in space. He now works on a project to produce this Mars-adapted man. A friend and former colleague is the guinea pig. But things go horribly wrong and he dies. As guinea pigs are wont to do. And Torraway’s the new man for the job. And so we get to go through all these procedures and surgeries and tests with him, while he angsts about his wife having an affair. And, spoilers, they eventually do get to Mars.

K: It does seem to me to be the worst sort of stupidity to have put all your eggs in one basket. Why on Earth would they only have one prototype Marsman? Even though they act like it’s not a big deal that they must essentially start from scratch building Roger, it surely has to have delayed everything at least a bit!

J: And neither of them seems very keen on doing it either. Which has to make me wonder why they agreed! Surely ‘duty’ only goes so far. When they signed up to be astronauts, they didn’t sign up to be surgical modification guinea pigs. It’s not something I would want to do, or most people would want to do, but surely someone out there would be willing and eager. Since even the prior astronaut training seemed to be not essential. And yea, why wouldn’t you test these individual things on other people before slapping them into your one prototype? And to have your head eye guy NOT THERE when you’re installing the key piece of eye thing seems reckless. I have to say the humans in this story don’t come off looking good at all. Any of them.

K: The decisionmaking process of all of these people seemed extremely random and without any thought to potential consequences. Or at least, if they were aware of consequences, they didn’t take any steps to minimize risk. BUT it’s not just the humans who come off as idiots in the end, in my opinion.

J: I cannot disagree with that. And this is a major spoiler, I suppose. But we do warn about spoilers! Was the ‘twist’ ending any sort of surprise to you? I have to say I noticed the ‘we’ pretty early on and that was one of my guesses as to who ‘we’ was. Very high on the list.

K: It wasn’t a surprise exactly. I didn’t get the impression that the ‘we’ was intended to be subtle or easily missed, and it was very clear that the ‘we’ weren’t humans. I can’t say I guessed what the ‘we’ would be but then I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it either.

J: To me it read like a shift from third person omniscient to first person plural that was supposed to start out subtle. I don’t think you were supposed to notice right away. But it was easy to doubt it was an AI because the computers were so big and clunky and seemingly stupid. You know, early 1970s computers. I think punch cards are even referenced. At times, aliens seemed more likely.

K: I don’t remember the reference to punch cards. But it was interesting to me to see what Pohl felt would be the limitations of the computer intelligence. I’m not sure it was well thought out. For instance: the computers have been manipulating the US Government into doing this Mars mission and, more importantly, putting a big computer into orbit around Mars with a nice generator. But they simultaneously concluded that it would be impossible for them to get someone to build an end-of-the-world bunker on some isolated island somewhere. To me, these seem like they require similar levels of manipulation. Surely the computers could easily pretend to be a corporation and trick some humans into doing the work for them. It doesn’t seem especially far-fetched given the set of parameters we have.

J: Or send robots to Mars rather than a cyborg. Just seems so much easier. Or a number of other scenarios. I mean, they don’t even need to be on Mars. Just a bunch of computerized spaceships would be good for a start. What bothered me was the machine intelligence was sexist too! Why are they all ‘brothers’? They don’t have a sex, why should they need a gender? What was so wrong with the word ‘sibling’ or ‘cousin’ or something? Siiigh.

K: Yeah, that was odd. I guess on that note we may as well talk about the issues with the female characters in this book. Of which there were many — issues, not female characters. Starting with Roger’s wife, Dorrie. Who apparently has her own thoughts and needs (good), and works because she wants to (good), but is running a store with no actual effort made to be profitable (bad), because her husband wants to support her ‘hobby’ (bad). And she’s kind of a bitch (neutral).

J: The first time we see a female character, she’s being patronized by the President of the United States. How the pretty little things had to put up with having their nails soaked to remove poisons, lest they scratch him. Actually reading those security measures was interesting, because they weren’t much more, to see the President, than they would be today to, go to Ohio.

K: And his interaction is given as evidence of how personable he is. It struck me more as something straight out of Mad Men, and certainly not something for the mid-70s, when feminism as a movement was really quite far underway. Except Pohl then later proceeds to treat us to a weird scene where Dorrie, now famous as Roger’s spouse, is interviewed by a feminist magazine. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make the feminists look ridiculous by portraying them as fringe, or being inclusive and just kind of clueless about how to do it.

J: Yea, the feminist character was even worse than his portrayal of the other women. She resents having to do the interview at all, because the magazine isn’t interested in Dorrie for Dorrie’s sake, but just because she’s this famous astronaut’s wife. So right from the start she has this bad rapport with the person she’s supposed to be interviewing. Not that she cares. And says some pretty horrible things to her that aren’t feminist at all. ‘What sort of example are you going to set young womanhood? Turning yourself into a dried-up old maid?’ Calling marriage a ‘ridiculous farce’. Though I liked that her interview crew seemed to be all women. Though I don’t know whether the ‘prop boys’ were or not. It was interesting he said ‘lightperson’, ‘soundperson’, ‘cameraperson’, because those terms were so fine I didn’t even notice they were gender neutral. Until he surprised me by making them women. Up to now the only women had been wives and nurses. So I was definitely assuming anyone else was a man.

K: It was wiser to make that assumption, though we did find that one of the ‘nurses’ was actually a psychologist in disguise, and there did seem to be a woman involved in the testing phase of Roger’s abilities who didn’t seem to be a nurse? I don’t quite remember what her actual position was, though.

J: It wasn’t clear if he was trying to realistically portray a feminist and doing it badly, or making fun of them. But yea, not only is she a psychologist, but a major and an astronaut. At least by training even if she hadn’t gotten into space before. But even she doesn’t get off lightly. Because for some reason it’s thought if she pretends to be a nurse and looks like his wife, that this’ll help him adapt to his wife not being there for him. Or something? So she’s a surrogate love interest first, and psychologist only second.

K: Yeah, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on there. Certainly Roger’s stalkery obsession with his wife should have caused him to fail some kind of psychological tests required to become an astronaut, let alone their prize cyborg?

J: You’d think. What was even more strange was that they apparently had an open marriage anyway. So it wasn’t that she was having sex with this other guy, or even that it was another guy he knew, but that it was happening while they were living together, rather than in different parts of the world? Or something? She wasn’t doing it in the right way, basically. Oh and they built in his fail-safe warning procedure to hallucinate her. Whose brilliant idea was that?

K: The priest even admits later he realizes now that was a huge mistake. But apparently the 12-year-old boy ethos continues to reign supreme even at future NASA. I bet they digitally enhanced her boobs too.

J: *laugh* Yea, I don’t know why they didn’t change it when they realized it would be a problem. Women are definitely sex objects in this book. As in, objects to have sex with. The psychologist astronaut? She goes up in space in a different ship, with one guy. And they have sex. Even though the all-male crew of the other ship seemed to be fine with spending months not getting any. The wife of the first guinea pig, she comes down to have a look at what he looks like now. Then she expresses concern that he’s not getting any, and offers. Only to be told he doesn’t have the equipment. So.. she leaves. Without talking to him or seeing him, or kissing him or touching him or anything. Like, well, if I can’t have sex, then my role as wife is moot. Even the nun the priest is dating could have sex if they filled out the right paperwork!

K: The part with the first man’s wife was very odd. The whole book was definitely written from a male perspective, and was weirdly progressive in certain places and weirdly regressive in others. In that sense, it made me think of Forever War and its odd treatment of the female soldiers.

J: A male perspective is extra odd considering the narrator is this machine intelligence. Oh, and seemingly out of nowhere, near the end of the book, the psychologist/astronaut is called a ‘girl’. Just, for no reason, and it wasn’t something I’d seen used earlier. Though it might’ve been and I just didn’t notice then.

K: I don’t know. The reference didn’t spring out at me, so it must not have been that egregious. The male characters (aside from Roger, who as I mentioned before I felt was rather unstable) seemed all right. No super deep characterizations, but they were all types that have shown up in other books and didn’t really strain credulity there.

J: Yea, they were okay. I didn’t like any of them particularly, but they didn’t make me want to throw the book across the room.

K: And the cyborg idea was pretty interesting. I just wish it felt more logical in the end to have even done it. The whole musing on how it would be necessary to cut down on the inputs because his brain just couldn’t handle the information overload struck me as a fresh idea.

J: Although the example that young adults who’d been blind all their lives and were given sight then killed themselves because their brains couldn’t adapt? Was that a real thing that happened?

K: Extensive research in wikipedia suggests… sort of. Though I didn’t get the impression that in the book he was talking about real cases, but about the use of artificial eyes a la Geordi La Forge.

J: I got the impression he was referring to a real thing, or what seemed to be a real thing. But maybe, yea. Anyway, the whole cyborg thing. Well, it’s odd to even think of him as a cyborg, because it.. well, maybe it’s just what I’ve seen in sf/f lately. Steampunk often delves into biomedical stuff. All Men of Genius with surgeries and Westerfeld’s Leviathan series with genetic manipulation. So it was just I guess hard for me to think of it as a cyborg, even though yea, it was all machine and electronic bits and not organic bits. So even though it was a cyborg and I can’t argue with that, it still felt to me like ‘old-school’ steampunk or Cold War surgeries. Like, hey, let’s give him two heads. Even though that wasn’t it. And apparently cyborgs are awesome guitar players. That was random.

K: That was very random. I wasn’t sure if it was trying to restore his manliness after he was castrated or what. But anyway, not being a connoisseur of steampunk or clockwork or anything, what it reminded me of the most was the Borg (the original Borg, not how they ended up). Except the Borg started their adaptations as babies — perhaps to overcome the sensory overload issues. And of course this predates almost all of that.

J: Does it predate cybermen?

K: Inasmuch as the Cybermen appeared in 1966, no.

J: But they didn’t have wings.

J: One other thing I wanted to be sure to mention is his term ‘sinonaut’. Presumably this is referring to the Asian astronauts. Asia seems to be this large.. faction, coalition? It seemed an odd term, so I Googled it. It literally means something like ‘traveler to China’. So it makes absolutely no sense to use it, and is possibly not very PC either. Since astro- and cosmo- refer to you know, space. And cosmonaut is just an Englished-up version of the Russian word. Wikipedia is helpful again here. The proper term to use for Chinese astronauts, if you’re not going to just call them astronauts, and aren’t very good with Chinese, is taikonauts. Which is taking part of a term used in Chinese and referring to, you know, space, and not traveling to China, and then slapping the -naut on there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut Although it seems some people do use ‘sinonaut’. I wonder if Pohl invented it, or if other science fiction writers did. I’m not sure when the Chinese space program really started.Or if people sort of re-invent it. And it’s just wrong every time.

K: Interesting. But yes, it does seem a bit odd — like Frenchonaut or something. The only other thing which I felt I must mention is how much it weirded me out to have a Dorrie in this book. I wasn’t expecting it, and it just took me by surprise.

J: It was odd to me too. Though I’m sure odder for you. I was hoping she wouldn’t do anything too cringe-worthy! Like, I didn’t want to hate the character. Fortunately she came off fairly well.

K: I suspect only because she had so little screentime, but yeah, she didn’t do anything very objectionable at all.

J: So that’s Man Plus. I hope he didn’t do a sequel Man++ that we have to read later. Although we do have to read another Pohl next, because he won two years in a row. Lesigh.

K: There is a sequel, but it was apparently written with someone else, 20 years later, and it has very bad reviews on amazon. I think I’ll pass.

Back when I was originally supposed to do this review, I had chosen a book called The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt. I tried reading this book. Then a long time later, I tried again. Then I just had such a block against even trying that I let it sit around and sit around. Finally about a month ago, I thought I’d look up what my other options are. There are surprisingly few books all about Turing. And no children’s books I could find. I borrowed two through interlibrary loan. One was a hefty textbook-looking thing. I didn’t even crack that one open. The other was Alan Turing: The Architect of the Computer Age by Ted Gottfried and written for a YA audience.

Finally, a book I could get through!

The problem with the Leavitt book was it was too dry and full of footnotes. Of course I’ve read dry things with footnotes before, and it’s fine if the subject is interesting enough, as Alan Turing certainly should’ve been. But it also suffered from a lot of time-jumping that was driving me up the wall. It was pretending to be chronological, but the author kept inserting comments about how this and that and the other thing would happen later. I just wanted a nice story about his childhood and time in school and everything that follows after that.

The YA book gave me that. There are a few spots where there’s a comment inserted. Like, spoiler alert, he’s going to get into running eventually, with Olympic potential. But it happened much less frequently.

I wouldn’t call this book eminently readable; I have read much better, more enjoyable nonfiction. In fact at first it was reminding me of school history books and I was thinking ‘no wonder I found history boring’. But once I got used to the style, it was fine. Plus the subject matter was very interesting.

I had watched, years ago, (even before this review was originally due), the docudrama, “Breaking the Code”, about Alan Turing. It’s great and I highly recommend watching it. In fact I intend to watch it again before the weekend is out.

What I failed to get a sense of from the movie that I got from the book was just how geeky a kid he was. In a time and place where it was not very nice at all to be a geeky boy (there are many times and places like that, of course). It also surprised me to learn just how absent his parents were. It’s not that they dumped him at boarding school, which you sort of expect, but they weren’t even in the country for large portions of his childhood. He’s still a toddler and they’ve both gone back to India. And not even left him with grandparents or aunts and uncles. Even when his father’s job in India is over, the two of them move to France! It’s just so bizarre to me.

The book does a pretty good job of explaining Turing’s accomplishments in mathematics, biology, and of course computer science in a way that’s understandable to me, and probably understandable to most high school students. It also doesn’t shy away from talking about his evolving identity as a gay man and his relationships with other boys and men, and one woman. I didn’t feel like the book was leaving things out to protect the Impressionable Youth ™.

Several times Gottfried referenced the biography by Andrew Hodges. K read and reviewed that book, if you’d like to read her review.

Halfway through the book, I stumbled upon photos. I hadn’t realized there were photo pages in the middle. I never like photo pages being in the middle of the book. I might like to see a picture of Turing as a child, while I’m still reading about his time in school. And then I get to the photos and start looking at them, and then there’s spoilers! It happened with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book too. So I refrained from looking and went back later, after finishing the book.

The author describes the adult Turing as ‘unhandsome’, but I don’t see that. Maybe it’s the 50’s hairstyle that makes him look like the typical handsome dark-haired man. Or maybe I don’t know what ‘handsome’ means. In a group photo, I can see a little more what the author’s talking about. But I still don’t see him as looking geeky or mad scientist-like. The author a couple of times refers to his appearance or laugh as like a mad scientist.

I paused in the descriptions of a Turing machine to play a second time with today’s Google Doodle. I don’t know if either helped me understand the other more, but it was a nice break from reading.

Turing’s birthday anniversary is only today, but Gay Pride Month lasts until June 30th. So take the opportunity to read or watch more about Alan Turing. He’s an important part of science history and an important part of gay history.

Published in 1987, this novel recounts the fictional story of one young New Zealand swimmer as she tries to win a spot on the 1960 Olympic team.

I’m going to save the spoilers for the end, so you can stop reading when you get to them if you don’t want to be spoiled.

When I first picked up the book, I was expecting a quick, easy read. But then it turned out to be one of those publications from the 1980s where the print is tiny and cramped and so the book wasn’t as short as I thought. I went ‘ugh’ and put it aside for later. Once I finally did pick it up again and start reading, it was easier than expected. Overall, I’d say I liked the book. It was an interesting read.

I wouldn’t classify myself as someone who likes sports books and reading about jocks, which is what this book is, so I’d say I liked it despite of that rather than because of it. The main character is likeable, even if I want to just shake her plenty of times. We hear about her rivalry with a swimmer who usually beats her, her family which sacrifices for her, her friends and her school life.

What probably interested me the most was the gender stuff. And the book opens right away with that, with Alex reacting an article written in a women’s section of a paper. How despite training hard, she and her rival also have “feminine” interests and things like that.

It was a little odd to be reading a book that was ~25 years old written about a time nearly 30 years before that. In a way, it felt very much like an 80s book, even though it was written about the late 50s. There were times where I felt it was being a little too obvious about “the 50s were a different time, especially for girls”, and a little preachy about drinking and driving. One character asks rhetorically and hyperbolically whether he should’ve taken his drunk friend’s keys away from him. The 80’s audience is meant to think “Yes, yes, you should’ve!!”

At some point, I started questioning the author’s research. I was stopped by wondering how a girl swims with her period, and had to do some Googling. I had a vague notion that pads were way different and weird in the 50s. Turns out it’s not an easy thing to Google, probably because Wikipedia is written mostly by men. But I did discover that tampons have been around longer than I thought. Not that I’d want to be a 14 year old in the 50s wearing them in a swimming pool. Especially since one of the pools is described as a warm soup of chlorinated salt water. YUCK!

It’s not until nearly the end of the book that it was confirmed for me that tampons were involved.

Yes, dear readers, it’s a book about periods! Well, not really, but it didn’t shy away from it. Even though it was coy about the tampons until the end.

So when Julie Andrews’ voice is mentioned, I had to stop and Google that too. This is before Sound of Music, so how did kids in New Zealand not only know about her, but hear her voice? Well, she was on Broadway in the mid-50s and made a TV appearance just about the time this book takes place. So I gave the author a pass, on the theory that theatre geeks would have records of her Broadway singing. Maybe.

Oh yes, I neglected to mention that Alex is a theatre geek. And a hockey player. And a piano player. And good in school. And into ballet. And I feel like I’m forgetting at least one other activity. She’s doing so many things at once that thinking about it, I just want to lie right down on the floor and take a nap. Most kids would consider being in a theatre production and one other activity plenty. Or, you know, maybe training for the Olympics is enough! She even practices piano for an hour a day. At least we finally learn she’s not so good at school as we were led to believe. At least judging by the grades she got.

A lot of the book is about how she’s doing too many things at once, but she keeps doing them! And nobody forces her to stop. Not her parents, not her coach, not anyone at school.

In the end, I had to trust the author got things right. Or at least more right than I could’ve. Her bio says she was a swimmer in the 50s in New Zealand. So, yea, I don’t have a leg to stand on with my Googling.

Alex’s relationship with her boyfriend is what bothered me the most. She’s 14 and he’s 17. Which, all right. Though her parents and his seem completely fine with this! Her father even arranges a beach trip for her and her boyfriend and gives them alone time to do like, whatever. :} When they do make out, the first time, and subsequent times, her reaction to it is completely unbelievable to me.

Alex is tall and plays the men’s roles in plays in the all-girl school she attends. And there have been comments hinting she might be a lesbian. So she’s a little insecure about her femininity, though mostly she doesn’t let it bother her.

So here’s her first time making out with her older boyfriend.

“I’m also regarded by some as a second best specimen of femininity around the place — except that Andy not only kissed me so many times I lost count on that day of the bridge walk, but also, later in the car, very gently traced the outline of my breast with his fingers, deliciously reassuring me of my femininity…”

The thoughts of a 14 year old? I didn’t buy it.

Throughout the book, she kept seeming to me to be about 16. It was really hard to remember she was 14 and barely 15 by the end of the book.

I’m a big believer that kids are smarter and know and see more things than authors usually give them credit for. But that doesn’t mean they’re emotionally mature.

Okay, I’m going to venture into spoiler territory now. So be warned!

*** Spoilers ***

Remember the drunk driver I mentioned before? Well, Alex and her boyfriend do get out of the car. And then it gets into a wreck, justifying their actions. But the driver and his girlfriend, despite her being thrown completely out of the car, only have minor injuries. If you’re going to try to teach us not to drink and drive, especially without seatbelts, maybe you should give them believable injuries, huh?

But this was just foreshadowing.

About halfway through the book, I had a sneaking suspicion something was going to happen to her boyfriend. And lo and behold I was right. Don’t drink and drive, kids, but that doesn’t matter, because a drunk driver will kill you anyway. The only surprise was that this death meant her ailing grandmother who was “fading away” didn’t have to die.

Sigh. I haven’t read as many Newbery books as K has, but I’ve still read enough books like this to be fed up with the trope. The only thing that would’ve made it more trope-y was if her boyfriend was gay.

And then she’s all.. I have to go to the Olympics for him. And having some weird telepathic conversation with his ghost while she’s racing. Like, not just talking to him in her head, but he’s actually feeding her information she shouldn’t be able to know. Um, all right.

So I liked the book, but liked it much less by the end of it.

I’ll end this review not with a bang, but with a siiiiiiiiigh.

Fortunately it got more interesting than that. The dragon is more like an eccentric grandfather than say an intellectual military dragon like Temeraire or a more beast-like military dragon a la Pern or a fighting pit dragon in Jane Yolen’s awesome series. Wait, I’m sensing a fighting trend here. Well, what I mean to say is the dragon is different from some of the more popular dragons out there today (and yesterday). He can even appear to change form, which you don’t see very often.

Ping, the orphan, is okay as a character. She’s a girl, so that’s nice. She’s not dumb, but.. she’s really dumb about this one thing, and that’s the dragon stone. You all know what it is, right? As should anyone who’s ever encountered a dragon in a book before. And since there are dragons in several Harry Potter books, well, then who hasn’t? Yet she’s smart enough to figure out how to barter, though she’s never had money before or been to a market before.

There are some twists and turns and I can’t say I really knew where the story was going at any given moment. So all in all it was a fun read.

At the end is a glossary and a pronunciation guide. Glossaries I don’t mind missing, because I’d rather figure words out from context while reading. However, I would’ve liked the pronunciation guide at the front of the book. I was saying some of the names wrong in my head, and now they’ll always be wrong, because I won’t retain what I learned by reading the guide afterward. I got no practice at think-saying them right.

This book was also a nice change to the previous books, because while it was written by an Australian author, it wasn’t set in Australia. I suppose reading 12 books set in Australia or New Zealand shouldn’t really seem boring. Logically it shouldn’t. I read books set in America all the time. It wouldn’t be too surprising if I had a streak of books set in the UK going on. A lot of Triple Take books are set there. I’d read several manga set in Japan back-to-back without batting an eye. And it’s not like Triple Take books are all I read, so it wouldn’t be 12 books in a row, but.. still it does seem like it’d be monotonous. Too much novelty because I haven’t read many books set in Australia or New Zealand like.. at all, ever?

So, yea, ancient China, I can dig it. It’s a fantasy China, of course, what with the dragons and all.

Likeable characters, unpredictable story, fairly entertaining read, and as a bonus.. dragons!

Oh, and there’s also a rat. If you like that sort of thing. Rats, I mean.

Even though I probably won’t be putting it in my top ten list for books read in 2012, I’d still recommend this book without hesitation.

Ah… but this makes me sad. It would’ve been so good as a stand-alone novel. But we can’t have that these days, can we? Sadly, it’s a series. I see four books listed on her website. I’m not sure if I want to read them or not. The book was nice as it was. Then again, it could be interesting to watch Ping grow up.

Maybe I’ll see if my fellow Triple Takers are interested in reading them or not before I decide.

The story is essentially about three kids in New Zealand. Tane, his best friend since forever, Rebecca, and his older brother, called Fatboy. Tane and Rebecca are chatting about time travel and hit on the idea that all you really need is a receiver and you could get any messages that people from the future were sending back. So as you may guess, it doesn’t take them long to find these messages. Takes them a little longer to decode them.

At this point in the story, it’s okay. I like time travel stories and who doesn’t like a book with some good codes and cryptic messages in them? The style of the writing was what I’d characterize as very YA-y. By that I mean it tries to be a little clever, while treating the reader as a bit of an idiot. It’s hard to pick out a specific example, but this sort of captures it:

That may not have sounded like much, but it wasn’t very often that Rebecca thought that Tane had an interesting idea, so it was kind of an important day, if only for that reason.

Although, in hindsight, it was actually an important day for much bigger reasons than that.

I like my foreshadowing to be more subtle than that, but actually this quote illustrates another thing that started to bug me pretty quickly. Tane is a spineless, weak-willed jellyfish. (Which is ironic, considering what they end up fighting later.) ((See what I did there?)) Rebecca is super-smart when it comes to science and technical things. Supposedly. So when they start talking about time travel, she says things he doesn’t understand. He pretends he does. Not to boost his own ego or save face, but just so he doesn’t disrupt her flow of conversation and thought processes.

Apparently Rebecca is also a bit of an activist and goes on protest marches a lot. Tane goes with her. Not because he cares two whits about the protest. He doesn’t even take the time to learn what they’re protesting about. Just because she wants him to go. Look, there’s being supportive of a friend and doing things because they like to do them, and then there’s… being a spineless jellyfish. It’s not that he’s a martyr, because he doesn’t mope about saying how he doesn’t want to be there. He pretends he does. So that’s two cases of him lying to her and deceiving her just to… be friends with her? How has this friendship lasted since birth?

When his older brother asks her out and the two start dating, you can only cheer for them. It’s not like she should be going out with Tane! How much worse would he get about this all if he were actually her boyfriend? Ugh.

I thought, maybe, maybe, the author is just being a bit heavyhanded and this is a lesson Tane is supposed to learn by the end of the book. He’s supposed to grow and change and turn into his own person and not be pushed around by Rebecca (who doesn’t even realize she’s pushing him around, since he goes along with it so easily). This does not happen. Tane does get less annoying, but mostly because the story stops focusing so much on their relationship, not because he’s actually grown into a less annoying person.

So I’m digging on the codes for a little while. Rebecca whips up this program to analyze signals and whatnot. It’s reminding me a bit of that series of choose your own adventure type books that were all about programming in BASIC. It had the programs and you had to put them into your computer, and usually debug them or alter them in some way to fit the story. You were a secret agent who was also a kid and a computer whiz. Anyway, they were awesome. So a book that reminds me of those in some small way gets a little boost to my opinion of it.

That didn’t last long. Most of the codes are cryptic in a way the reader couldn’t ever figure out. Heck, most of them are cryptic in a way the characters couldn’t figure out. Which is just bad cryptozizing skills! These messages are meant for Tane and Rebecca, so they ought to be written so they can figure them out. Of course it doesn’t help that they are idiots.

What do you think this means?

202.27.216.195,GUEST,COMPTON1.

Yea, she’s writing a program in one chapter and completely stumped by this a little later. It’s Tane who eventually (eventually) figures it out, by harkening back to something they learned in school. LEARNED IN SCHOOL!!

This book was written in 2008, btw.

And that’s the most legible of messages, to the reader. The rest you can only figure out as the story progresses. Because they’re crap. If you’re going to shorten the word ‘bitmap’, why would you not use BMP? Why would you use BTMP? The theory in this book is that the messages have to be written to save as much bandwidth as possible. (They don’t call it bandwidth, but yea, essentially.) Why add a letter there? And not add a letter where it would make more sense to? On top of that, yea, there’s an actual bitmap sent through. If you’ve got the space to be sending an image, you’ve got the space to write a few complete words. Kthnx.

So now that the book has annoyed me on several fronts, and I was seriously thinking Forever War a more interesting read (until that ticked me off so so hard, but more on that in a later Nebula Project discussion), the book takes a 90-degree turn.

‘Book 2’ of the book, which is to say the next section of the book, shifted in tone. Suddenly things weren’t about time travel and codes and Tane being jealous of Fatboy without ever telling anyone, but about this bioterror threat and almost-dead 4-year olds. It got pretty serious and rather dark awfully fast.

There’s more action in the back half of the book. Boring action. I was skimming it, because I hate action scenes without any character or emotion really pushing it and backing it. It also wasn’t written very well, but that was par for the book. Not that it was bad writing. It was competent writing. It just didn’t read easily to me. It didn’t flow.

The action also stops centering around the three kids. There are suddenly a lot of scenes with adults as POV characters. Adults who weren’t even in the first part. Until the end we’re jumping between all sorts of different people, fighting battles, and just.. blah. I was glad when I finally finished it.

Not that the end didn’t suck.

Okay, now I need to talk about the spoilery bit. It’s two paragraphs in white font below. Highlight it to read it, if you don’t mind me ruining the Big Surprise. Otherwise skip down to the second set of –‘s.

—

So there’s this Chimaera Project, which is playing with viruses and trying to cure the common cold, essentially. But things go wrong. Very very wrong. It’s not a mutant virus getting out and killing everyone though, oh no. It’s the planet taking the opportunity to create ginormous antibodies and macrophages to seek out humans and destroy them. Oh, and they look like jellyfish and snowman. Because, of course they would. This is the perfect opportunity for a Maori lesson on treating the Earth respectfully and whatnot. And the soldiers get all upset at being told this, because they’re offended at being considered germs. Oookay.

Yea, no. Been there, read that. It wasn’t very well-executed in the book I read it in either. (I resist naming names, because it might be a spoiler for that book.) Plus however many movies and TV episodes involve being shrunk and injected into somebody’s body.

—

Now for some final, non-spoilery thoughts.

Tane was remarkably self-aware and sensitive to other people’s thoughts and emotions. Granted, mostly Rebecca’s. It struck me as ungenuine for a 14-year old boy. However, the author is male, so I’m not sure if I have a better grasp on what teen boys are capable of than he does. It’s like.. he knows he’s jealous and why. And even he even knows that his brother knows that he’s jealous. He knows all these things, he’s aware of all these things, and he still doesn’t say anything or act on them at all!! In contrast, Rebecca must be mostly oblivious, since she doesn’t seem to know (or perhaps to care?) that he’s not into protesting or that he doesn’t like her dating his brother.

In another situation, I might like Tane for that and think the book is a breath of fresh air. But Tane was that spineless jellyfish, so his insight just made that trait all the worse.

Some of the chapters have song snippets at the head of them, and near the end, the soldiers start singing a song. I felt like all the songs were ridiculous and out of place. Yellow submarine? Really? I feel like if you’re going to use quotes like this, they should be there for a good reason. Not because the song popped into your head while you were writing that chapter.

So, yea, redeeming qualities of the book are a smart girl character, the unusual (to me) setting of New Zealand, and the glimpses of Maori culture. If that’s a combination you’re looking for, go for it.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Beware if youâ€re worried about such things.

Physicist Shevek leaves his homeworld to join physicist colleagues on the planet his people abandoned generations ago. The Urrastian’s aggressively capitalistic and gender-segregated society is quite a change from the anarchism/non-authoritarian communism practiced on Annares, his home. At home, no one owns anything, people live in dorms, and share in either prosperity or lack. Though some are starting to wonder if they really are as free as they believe. Shevek is determined to share his breakthroughs with the known universe, and he’s not sure either Annares or Urras will permit him to do it.

K: This time our Nebula winner is The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, who by 1974 had won the Nebula for best novel twice — and was the only woman to have yet won it at all.

J: Don’t worry. The book is still about a guy. It’s not full of girl cooties.

K: At least there are women. Well, sort of. But we’ll get to that in a bit. The Dispossessed takes place in the same universe as Left Hand of Darkness, though it tells a story from an earlier time period and from a different planet.

J: Sort of the same theme though. We learn about two different societies. One of them from an outsider’s point of view, though the other from an insider’s point of view.

K: Right. Quite a lot of these early Nebula winners have been more what I would deem ‘thought experiments’ than books with a real plot. The author has an idea and works up some characters in order to better describe their idea. Sometimes the characters suck (Ringworld) sometimes they’re bland (Rendezvous with Rama) and sometimes they’re okay. I found that The Dispossessed‘s characters fell into the realm of okay.

J: This is at least my third time reading the book. It was popular in my college classes for some reason. I wouldn’t say a lot of the details.. well, any of the details really stuck with me. Or the characters. I had a vague memory of the main character and that’s it. I like this book okay, but I wouldn’t put it in my top five favorite Le Guin books. Sometimes I found it interesting and sometimes I found it dull. Never a hard slog, but I wasn’t breathless waiting to read more of it.

K: I definitely preferred it to Left Hand which is the only other LeGuin I have to compare to. Maybe because the situation was just slightly more believable? It was still stretching the bounds of my suspension of disbelief, but it worked better for me than the whole develop a gender thing.

J: I’ve already forgotten his name.. was it Shevek? Did you feel his society, his world, and all was kind of.. blah? Sort of like, there was no tension, no drama. It didn’t feel real or human.

K: I didn’t feel like there was no tension exactly. I felt like they were all fooling themselves (something which they came to realize themselves, at least Shevek and his compatriots). But it was all too polite. It was like they were brainwashed. I just can’t imagine a society where uniformly there seems to be -no- one who flips out that their significant other is sent away from them on pretty flimsy context. But I guess that was kind of the point, to imagine a society where somehow that was true. But it doesn’t make it particularly realistic to me.

J: Maybe it just seemed like all their emotions were muted, yea. People got.. annoyed, or depressed. But not much else.

K: Yeah. They never seemed to get mad. How is that even possible? People get angry. All the time! It’s like Vulcans except they aren’t particularly logical.

J: And I wonder if they’re supposed to care about the children at all. That scene when Shevek was a toddler, he and the other kid both had full diapers. Like they’d been neglected, even though there was someone watching them. Was that supposed to show that society doesn’t care about individuals, just itself?

K: I’m not sure. Obviously part of the… indoctrination… is to remove the children from their parents to weaken the attachment there. And then to make everyone think it’s their own idea and for the best. I don’t think there was any intent to suggest they were physically neglected. It might have just been a detail.

J: I dunno. It just struck me that it was both of them and not just one. There was much to the society to recommend it. I’d love to work on whatever I wanted. Even if it meant doing some of the grunt work sometimes. Although I wonder if I would’ve turned into one of the hermits. Dunno if I could take living in a dorm all the time.

K: It certainly struck me as a society that on its surface seems like a haven for introverts, in reality would probably suck for them a lot. To not really be able to have a space to call your -own-… ugh. Nightmare.

J: And nobody complained about the food! The whole point of a cafeteria is to complain about the food! Actually I was a little surprised they had art in any form. Considering Rite of Passage, where they couldn’t make art anymore. The establishment had a stranglehold on what type of art, and you couldn’t do a lot of personal, individual type art, but art still existed and was still being made. By that I include plays, music, etc, of course.

K: It did sound like art for art’s sake was discouraged – not ‘functional’ exactly, even if it did feed an emotional need. Part of the problem was the subsistence nature of life on Anarres. Would they have been able to keep up the facade of their communist living if there was more time for leisure and less hardship? I’m thinking the cracks would have shown sooner — LeGuin did give the society a great deal of thought, really. She probably came closest to the circumstances in which anything like that could actually work.

J: She definitely does seem to fit the environment to the society. Like in Left Hand. Or rather fit the society to the environment. What I was rather surprised by was how much physics was in the book. I hadn’t remembered that at all.

K: Except there was no physics in the book, of course. I did like the idea that this other society came at physics from such a completely different mindset that they discovered and described the universe in a way totally unrecognizable to Terrans — and yet equally valid.

J: Well, to someone who never studied physics, it sounded like physics. Even if it was technically more a.. philosophy of physics? With a little Terran history of physics thrown in. I did find it interesting that this book is the creation of the ansible. I didn’t remember that.

K: I didn’t know LeGuin had coined the term, but we all know how lacking my background in classic sf is, so it’s hardly surprising. I did like that we saw the creation of such an important device — and that it really wasn’t telegraphed at the beginning that that’s what was going to happen.

J: Yea. I just assumed it already existed, if it was going to be mentioned at all.

K: It does help to place this book in the timeline of the other Hainish series. Since LeGuin hasn’t done anything as helpful (at least from my perspective) as include a timeline or stardates or anything to otherwise indicate the internal chronology. It does help justify the book — certainly in a way that Left Hand was not justified — as important to the series as a whole rather than just another standaloneish book in the same universe.

J: I think trying to turn it into a ‘series’ or construct a timeline would drive you crazy. Since it wasn’t designed that way and I don’t even know if there’s much or any character crossover. Which at least reassures me, because it means I don’t have to worry about reading them in any sort of order. I just checked and she doesn’t have any more Hainish books on the Nebula list, so my next point about not having to read everything when we get to that is kind of nonexistent. But in /theory/ it would’ve been nice not to have to read the whole series to read her next winning book. Too bad her next winning book is Earthsea like 4 or 5 and those are in order, afaik.

K: Well, if a series is good, then it shouldn’t be a problem to read it all, right? But as I think we’ve already discovered, the Nebula does not necessarily reward ‘good’ as in ‘readable’ (supposedly that’s the Hugo but I have my doubts about THAT too). It rewards some other quality. In some cases that seems to have been imagination/vision/forward-thinkingness, but not universally. Which may make for award-winning science fiction of the sort you can easily pick apart in an academic setting, but isn’t always fun to read. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course.

K: Anyway, my opinion is the Hainish books are a series, since they take place in the same universe. But no, the fact that I read this one after Left Hand didn’t really affect things, because what I learned from that book did not inform me of anything in particular (beyond the mere existence of this loose alliance) that allowed me to have a deeper/better understanding of this book.

J: My reading of the Hainish books is scattershot. I’ve read a couple others, I think. And a bunch of short stories/novellas. I like them best when they’re dealing with gender stuff and family structures other than traditional American nuclear family. Which this one only sort of does. And not in a unique way. I feel like kids raised in dorms is seen in other places. Brave New World maybe? And others.

K: Kids raised in dorms isn’t especially unique at all, no. Rite of Passage has kids that move in and out of dorms, and parents that don’t necessarily live together for long stretches of time. In fact, the gender and family issues in this book were just barely formed to the point where they weren’t much more than stereotypes and assertions. There was no insight provided. The closest we came was the very very brief scene toward the end of the book (chronologically the middle of the story) where Shevek encounters his mother and some of the other characters realize that a good part of her antagonism toward them is rooted in her guilt for essentially abandoning him and his father when he was a toddler. She’s uneasy with her decision and must therefore defend the customs that allowed/required her to make the choice, or else it makes her confront the consequences of her actions.

J: Wow. That’s deep. I didn’t get that at all. I think I just read it as her being annoyed he wouldn’t let her reconnect with him as an adult. I did notice, and it bugged me, that for all Shevek said men and women could and would do any job, though might have a better affinity for something over another, both midwives mentioned were women. And Shevek is a ‘hard’ scientist while his non-wife is a ‘soft’ scientist. While Le Guin managed to put women in some positions of authority, the equality didn’t seem to permeate everywhere.

K: Getting back to your first point, I think that’s exactly what happened back when she visited him in the infirmary while he was sick. It was after that that she kind of needed this elaborate justification in her head.

K: I also totally agree with you on the women in science issue. I felt like even LeGuin noticed what she was doing and as a result threw in randomly that old lady physicist/mentor for Shevek. G-something. But then she undermined even that by having her be kind of useless and almost Alzheimer-y.

J: Yea. I mean in general it’s miles ahead of most of the other books we’ve been reading. But it just didn’t seem like it went far enough.

K: It didn’t, but I guess I’m feeling like it may be a case of a book can’t be all things at once. Unlike with Left Hand, the construction of gender did not seem to be a main theme in this book, so its poor showing could just be a result of her focus being elsewhere. Except. Except for the fact that pretty much the lone female Urrasti was so clearly meant as a contrast to the women on Anarres.

J: I’d forgotten her. She has this one line where she says if the Anarres women would just come on over and have a spa day, they’d love it. And when she mentioned shaving, I didn’t think about it until afterwards that she meant everywhere, since they shave their heads.

K: Yeah. I wasn’t quite sure what we were supposed to take away from the shaving. Or from her. We weren’t really given any other female Urrasti to compare her to — except, I guess, for Odo, whose rise as a political activist seems all the more surprising given how little visibility women seemed to have in their society. Unfortunately for LeGuin, as soon as we found out the women were bald, I started mentally trying to compare the Urrasti with the Centauri and since it was actually not a bad fit overall, I now don’t have a very clear view of them as presented in the book.

J: *laugh* You’ve been watching too much Babylon 5. As for me, I still have not gotten over the name Odo. I can’t blame Le Guin for it, but it was difficult to remember it was a woman. Not that I didn’t have that trouble with some of the other names, but those were because it was intentionally ambiguous.

J: But as for Shevek and that woman, I still don’t know what that attempted rape was all about. Yes, he was drunk. Yes, there was a culture clash. Yes, she was exuding sex and flirting with him. But, she said no. Several times. Women never said no to him before?

K: That baffled me too. In a culture where individual autonomy is supposed to be the last and only word, what was his confusion? She. Said. No. You can’t get any more clear than that. Are we supposed to take away from this that women on Anarres never say no? Just because sex is free and open doesn’t mean everyone wants to have it all the time and with anyone who asks!

J: Yea, exactly. And I hate to tell you, Shevek, but just because you prefer women doesn’t make you a confirmed heterosexual when you’ll hook up with guys just to reconfirm a friendship, or whatever! And I do get sick of gay characters who only get to have sex with the self-identified straight guys, but that’s another topic altogether.

K: Another section that baffled me! Shevek… didn’t really want to have sex with him, but he let him have a pity lay? How is that good for anyone?! But it’s clear that LeGuin was still working out some views on sexuality. We know that she later realized her statement in Left Hand that rape was impossible in that society was completely ridiculous. I have no evidence, but it could be that these would be things to ‘fix’ if the book were written now.

J: Maybe.. maybe. I wonder if she ever returned to these particular worlds. I’ll have to look that up.

K: So the one thing we haven’t really talked about is the structure of the book. The way it’s published is in alternating chapters — Chapter 2 chronologically begins the story, while Chapter 1 sort of picks up at a point in the middle (after the events of chapter 12). Once I realized that, I admit I -was- tempted to read it in the timeline order, but I resisted. I wonder if she wrote it the way it’s read, or if she wrote it straight through and then reorganized it. Do you have any idea?

J: Huh. No idea. It didn’t occur to me to even really think about it as a broken up timeline. I saw it clearly as odd chapters were one planet (well, or moon) and even chapters were the other. So that I guess I was reading the opposing chapters as all flashbacks from ‘now’.

K: I thought at first it was just a flashback, but when it continued and it was clear that chapter 4 followed chapter 2 and chapter 6 came after 4 — the typical flashback situation isn’t chronological, because it’s more like memory, meaning that something reminds you of when you were ten, and then later something reminds you of when you were eight, and then still later you remember college, etc. It was too organized, in other words.

J: For a novel, maybe. But if you take an episode of Highlander, for example, each flashback is telling a story of its own. So it’s not jumping around in time, well, at least not backwards. But in a way I was also reading it as alternating points of view, I think. They were both still Shevek.. well, except it was more omniscient at times.. but one was Shevek at home and one was Shevek out of his element.

K: Well, that’s true too, but clearly the Even Chapters were developing ‘Why Shevek Went to Urras’ and the Odd Chapters were showing ‘What Happened to Shevek on Urras’, so if you did read the Evens first and then the Odd, you’d get the whole story in order.

J: I wasn’t arguing against that. That’s just not how I saw it.

K: That’s fine.

J: So, no more Le Guin for another 15 years. I am glad we’re finally into years where I was actually alive though. It no longer feels so much like ancient history.

K: Speak for yourself! I’m still not born yet. Almost there, though.

Ellie and her friends live in a smallish town with a large rural area, so that she and a lot of her friends are ranchers. At least I think they’re ranchers. They’re on holiday, so they organize a camping trip into the bush. This being Australia. Seven of them, roughly evenly divided by gender. They’re missing Commemoration Day (also called Commem Day by the narrator) and the local Show (which sounds like the equivalent of a county fair around here). On that day, while they’re out camping, they hear and see lots of jets flying overhead. Weird, right? They linger a few more days, then head back. To find everyone gone. Utoh. From the title of the book, you might guess a war of some sort has ‘began’, huh?

I was going to start this review by saying it was fitting to be reading it in February, since most of the action takes place then. Only when I tried to look up the exact date for Commemoration Day, I got stumped! Thwarted! The closest I came to any such holiday was one celebrated by the University of Sydney. According to Wikipedia, Australia Day has a lot of different names, and would fit the timeframe (the narrator says at one point that it’s several weeks past Christmas), but Commem or Commemoration Day isn’t one of them! Have I come up with an anachronism? This book was written in 1993. Well, that’s not that old… older than Wikipedia, sure, but..

The author’s note at the end equates some of the settings to real world locations, but the author is generally making up the location itself. Did he also invent a holiday? Weird. Sure, this is science fiction, in that there was no such war in Australia, but otherwise it reads like a contemporary novel. Why invent a holiday? This reviewer is also puzzled by it.

But moving on…

The group discovers that their town has been invaded. Though I thought it funny they came to that conclusion. If I saw a bunch of soldiers who’d set up camp and were holding prisoners, foreign soldiers would not be my first thought. Could I tell American ones from non-American ones, at a distance? There are so many different types of American military uniform, that I don’t think I could. Not unless I could see a US flag patch on them. Or more likely, a US flag flying nearby. But this group assumes they’re foreign before they ever hear them speak. Which is another puzzlement, because the girl who knows six languages can’t identify it. What? You mean, not at all? I can take a good guess at most languages. A general guess, I mean. And we never hear what the soldiers look like. We hear they’re young, and middle-aged, and male and female. But not if they look Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese. How many nearby countries don’t speak English and yet look enough like Australians that it doesn’t merit a mention?

I admit, before we learned they don’t speak English, I thought America had invaded Australia. It’s just.. something we’d be likely to do.

One of the kids even identifies some jets as Australian and some as not. Boy, for me to recognize jets, they’d have to be flying really low. And, again, have a US flag on them. Southwest jets, sure, I can identify those!

So anyway, the kids try to find out what’s up with their families, and try not to get killed or captured along the way. And guerrilla hijinks ensue. So that by the end it was reminding me of Hogan’s Heroes or other shows and movies I’ve seen that featured The Resistance.

I liked that the group was roughly evenly distributed, and eventually does end up 4 girls and 4 guys, and that the narrator was a girl. She also does a lot of the action and dirty work. She’s their best driver, especially when it comes to driving bulldozers and trucks. Which is why I was particularly dismayed when one of the girls has some sort of seizure brought on by trauma. Followed by another girl just fainting, for no particular reason. And then the narrator herself has a nervous breakdown or goes into catatonia or something I’m not qualified to medically diagnose. Though considering she’d been bleeding copiously from a head wound just a few pages ago, you’d think people would’ve been worried about a head injury and not assuming it was all psychological! None of the boys goes through any of this. Grr.

Then they all start flinging around the L word (love, not lesbian) like it’s going out of fashion.

In general, though, I liked the book okay. It was interesting to see Australia, even if it’s a fictional bit of it, and to learn a few new words. I’d had no clue what a chook was until it was mentioned that they lay eggs. At that point, I gave up and Googled it. No such luck they’re ostriches or emus or some weird Australian bird. Chooks are just chickens.

The cover art on the copy I read makes no sense until you’ve read nearly the whole book. I think I would’ve gone for some shot of the Australian terrain with some jets flying overhead. The cover we had up here on Triple Take in our Upcoming section does make more sense, with the jets flying over the ferris wheel at the Show.

Read it if you’d like to read some Australian sf, but don’t read it if you’re looking for answers to mysteries. We never do learn who invaded Australia or why.

Except when I was adding the cover images just now, I saw that the newer cover mentions this is part 1 of a series. The book itself felt complete enough, in a ‘this is our life now’ sort of way, that it never occurred to me there could be more books which might explain what this war is all about. Now, do I read the sequel? Do I watch the movie? Do I watch the movie sequel which is apparently coming out this year? Decisions, decisions.