This is another SM Stirling post-apocalyptic novel set in an alternate timeline (the action in the current novel takes place around this same decade) of the United States (mostly in the Pacific Northwest). This is a timeline in which all things technological have, for some reason, stopped working. And people are left to cope as best they can in a world without electricity, gunpowder, or internal combustion engines.

This is the fifth book in Stirling's Emberverse, an ongoing series that I've really enjoyed (there are five books thus far: Dies the Fire, The Protector's War, A Meeting at Corvallis, The Sunrise Lands, and The Scourge of God). I like the honesty of what life wold be like without technology - there's no Conan in these stories easily dominating all his enemies. No character is untouchable, no matter how integral to the story he or she seems to be. In this cold, harsh world everybody dies. And usually violently. The characters aren't all so perfectly good or perfectly evil that they become caricatures of themselves. Nothing is ever easy, even for the heroes of the stories. And there's plenty of well-written action, which is something I enjoy in a novel.

Here's a scene that I found noteworthy. It's an interaction between a Catholic priest, Ignatius, and Rudy, the book's main hero, as they are traveling together on a quest to find what may prove to be the cause of the Change. It's an interesting discussion of both the origins of legends and maybe even a little foreshadowing for what's to come at the end of their "quest."

"I have been thinking of what this quest means," he said, with the scholarly precision that he used for serious matters. "Have you noticed that you seem to be...collecting people? Of a particular type?"

Rudi chuckled. "Sure, and I so seem to have an attraction for disinheirited princes," he said.

"That is because you are a hero, I think."

Rudi frowned at him. "Well, thank you--"

The priest shook his head. "No, I'm using the word in a...technical sense. I suspect, my son, that you are a hero in the sense that Sigurd or Beowulf or Roland was. Heroes accrete heroes around them - heroes and great evils. I thought that was true only in ancient story, but apparently the archetype holds true in our lives as well."

"Ah," Rudi said softly. Was that a goose that just walked across my grave?

"Well, for my sake, I hope you're wrong, Father," he said. "I love the old stories, but sure and I'd rather listen to them than live them out."

"I too. Human beings live by their legends; but if what I suspect is true, then we are living in one." A wry smile. "But even Out Lord was refused when he asked that the cup pass from him."

"Something my mother said once...that my birth father had walked into a myth without knowing it. I hadn't expected the same to happen to me." He shivered slightly. "Does it make it better or worse that I know?"

"Perhaps we should have expected it," Ignatius said soberly. "We children of the change. It took the technology of our parents from us - but that is not all. Other things are...moving into the vacated spaces. It is as if time were moving backwards in some fundamental way."

"Back to the time of legends," Rudi said.

"Into the time of myths," Ignatius agreed.

"I wonder what will happen if we go back too far?" Rudi said.

Ignatius looked up at the stars. "We find God. Or God finds us."

The clash of Religions is a common theme in these books, as is the noting of the similarity of many religions. Later in the story, Rudy is talking about death and war with a Buddhist monk, Dorje.

"I was raised to be a warrior, but I've seen enough of war lately that it disgusts me, so. Not so much the fighting, but the...waste of it, the things that are broken that should not be."

"You have chosen a hard path, my son," the monk said. "One that will test your courage; and the risk of pain to yourself and the death of your body are the least of its trials. But be sure, if you have courage it shall certainly be tested; because no quality in this universe goes unused. Walk the Way you have chosen in its fullness; when you have reached its end, you will find that it is the beginning of another path."

"You don't think killing is the worst of sins, then?" he said, curiously.

Dorje sighed, "No, but considered rightly, it is...foolish. It is easy to kill. It is equally easy to destroy glass windows. Any fool can do either. Why is it only the wise who perceive that it is wisdom to let live, when even lunatics can sometimes understand that it is better to open a window than to smash the glass? But this world is mired in illusion, which is folly. As followers of the Way, we deplore the taking of life..."

Then he chuckled, slapping his knees. "Including our own! And more important, we deplore greedy or evil men taking the lives of those who look to us for instruction. There are few surviving pacifists in the world twenty-two years after the Change. A desire for peace does not imply submission to those who chose to be violent as their first resort."

Taking a cue from Tolkien, Sterling ends his books with cliffhangers that keep the reader hanging in suspense. He's a cruel, cruel author.

I also just discovered that Stirling has written another series of books, the Nantucket series (which may or may not be ongoing, I'm not sure), that are related to these novels (though instead of being set in an alternate Changed future version of our world, they send people from out time back about 800 years) and they may possibly help to explain what's going on. I'm reluctant to read these other books on the chance that they may ruin the ending of their sister-series, but I'm sure I'll get to them eventually. So much to read, so little time...


When You are Engulfed in Flames

This is another autobiographical peek into David Sedaris's life (as was Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy and Me Talk Pretty Someday (the other two Sedaris books I've read). I was laughing out loud constantly as I read this book, it's so filled with humor.

I suppose the irony is that Davis Sedaris is openly homosexual and doesn't make any attempt to disguise this fact in his books (there's no graphic depiction of sexual acts or anything like that in the books - they're not that kind of books). And I have definite anti-homosexual leanings (not the "go out and beat them up" kind, just the "resenting the 'you must accept our self-identification as a minority group!'" kind). Yet I love this book and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good laugh - anyone who can stomach some pretty hard profanity, anyway. Sedaris himself isn't foul-mouthed, but many of the people he recalls experiences with were very foul indeed.

I'll refrain from sharing any of the excessively profane comments made by people Sedaris has known, but here's an exchange that made me laugh. He's talking about a horrible, abrasive old woman who lived in the apartment across his hall.

It was a stranger who brought us back together. In the ten or so years before she retired, Helen cleaned house for a group of priests in Murray Hill. "They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting."

In her opinion, a person who hired a housekeeper was a person who thought himself better than everyone else. She loved a story in which a snob got his comeuppance, but the people I worked for were generally pretty thoughtful. I felt like a bore, telling her how unobtrusive and generous everyone was, and so it came as a pleasant surprise when I was sent to clean an an apartment near the Museum of Modern Art. The woman who lived there was in her late sixties and had hair the color of a newly hatched chick. Mrs. Oakley, I'll say her name was. She wore a denim skirt with a matching blouse and had knotted a red bandana around her throat. With some people this might be it, their look, but on her it seemed like a costume, like she was going to a party with a cattle-rustling theme.

Most often a homeowner would take my jacket, or direct me toward the closet. Mrs. Oakley did neither, and when I made for the brass rack that she herself clearly used, she said, "Not there," her voice a bark. "You can put your things in the guest bathroom. Not on the countertop, but on the toilet." She pointed to a door at one end of the foyer. "Put the lid down first," she told me. "Then put your coat and scarf on top of the lid."

I wondered who would be stupid enough not to have understood that, and I imagined a simpleton with a puzzled expression on his face. "Hey," he might say. "How come my jacket's all wet? And while we're at it, who put this turd in my pocket?!"

"Something amuses you, does it?" Mrs. Oakley asked.

I said, "No. Not at all." Then I jotted down the time in my portable notebook.

She saw me writing and put her hands on her hips. "I am not paying you to practice your English," she told me.

"Excuse me?"

She pointed to my notebook. "This is not a language institute. You are here to work, not to learn new words."

It went on for a while longer, but those were most of the parts that made me laugh the hardest.

Later, while he's in Japan to try to quit smoking, he makes several funny observations (including the origin of the book's title) that made me laugh. A lot.

In the end, we settled on Tokyo, a place we had gone the previous summer. The city has any number of things to recommend it, but what first hooked me was the dentistry. People looked as if they'd been chewing on rusty bolts. If a tooth was whole, it most likely protruded, or was wired to a crazy-looking bridge. In America I smile with my mouth shut. Even in France and England I'm self-conscious, but in Tokyo, for the first time in years, I felt normal.
....

A booklet in our hotel room includes a section on safety awkwardly titled [i]Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You[/i]. What follows are three paragraphs, each written beneath a separate, boldfaced heading: "When you check in the hotel room," "When you Find a fire," and, my favorite, "When you are engulfed in flames."

Further weird English from our trip:
On an apron picturing a dog asleep in a basket: "I'm glad I caught you today. Enjoy mama."
On decorative paper bags a person might put a gift in: "When I think about the life in my own way I need gentle conversations."
On another gift bag: "Today is a special day for you. I have considered what article of present is nice to make you happy. Come to open now, OK?"
On yet another gift bag: "Only imflowing you don't flowing imflowing." (This last one actually gave me a headache.)

And one last funy passage, for good measure, about his fish-like swimming abilities (as a nice little tie-in to the religious aspects of quoted The Scourge of God passages).

At the pool I currently go to, one of the regulars is a woman with Down syndrome. She's fairly heavy and wears an old-fashioned swimsuit, the sort with a ruffled skirt. Then there's this bathing cap that straps beneath her chin and is decorated with rubber flowers. Odd is the great satisfaction I take whenever I beat her from one end to the other. "I won three out of four," I told Hugh the first time she and I swam together. "I mean I really creamed her. "

"Let me get this straight," he said. "She's obese. She's as old as you are. And she has Down syndrome?"

"Yes, and I beat her. Isn't that great!"

"Did she even know you were having a race?"

I hate it when he gets like this. Anything to burst my bubble.

I no longer tell him about the old people I defeat. Older than I am, I mean - women in their late seventies and eighties. Then there are the children. I was in Washington State, at a small-town YMCA, when a boy wandered into the lap lane and popped his head, seal-like, out of the water. I would later learn that he was nine, but at the time he was just this kid, slightly pudgy, with a stern haircut. It's like he went to a barbershop with a picture of Hitler, that's how severe it was. We got to talking, and when I told him I wasn't a very good swimmer, he challenged me to a race. I think he assumed that, like most adults, I'd slow down and intentionally let him win, but he didn't know who he was dealing with. I need all the confidence I can get, and one victory is just as good as any other. Thus I swam for my very life and beat the pants off him. I thought this was it - he'd accept his defeat and move on with his life - but five minutes later he stopped me again and asked if I believed in God.

"No," I told him.

"Why?"

I thought for a second. "Because I have hair on my back, and a lot of other people, people who kill and rob and make life miserable, don't. A real God wouldn't let that happen."

I was happy to leave it at that, but before I could resume he blocked my path. "It was God who let you win that race," he said. "He touched you on the leg and made you go faster, and that's how come you beat me."

He really looked like Hitler then, eyes blazing like two little coals.

"If God knows that I don't believe in him, why would he go out of his way to help me?" I asked. "Maybe instead of making me win, God reached down and made you lose. Did you ever think of that?"

I continued my swimming but was stopped once again at the end of the next lap. "You're going to go to hell," the boy said.

"Is this still about me winning that race?"

"No," he told me. "It's about God, and if you don't believe in Him you're going to burn for the rest of eternity."

I thanked him for the tip and then I went back to my laps, grateful that at the church I had attended, the service was entirely in Greek. My sisters and I had no idea what the priest was saying, and when you're young that's probably for the best. L'il Hitler was only in the third grade, and already he was planning for his afterlife. Even worse, he was planning for mine. While changing out of my suit, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't have contradicted him. It's insane to discuss religion with a child. Especially at the Y. What bugged me was his insistence that I'd had unfair help, that God had stepped in and pushed me over the finish line. I mean, really. Can I not beat a nine-year-old on my own?

Don't think that I've shared all the funniest parts of the book and now there's no reason to read it. There are so many laugh-out-loud moments that I'd have to post 80% of the book to share them all. If you like to laugh (and you're not too easily offended), read this book.



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I finished reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road a few weeks ago.

I have no idea why this book is considered a classic. It is kind of interesting from an "anthropological" stand point (as a window into America in the 1940s), but other than that...it left me cold.

In the beginning, I did think the protagonist, Sal, sounded an awful lot like what Holden Caulfield would have grown up to become. I found myself thinking that this was an almost perfect sequel for Catcher in the Rye. But it wasn't long before I saw that Sal was nothing (or very little) like Holden at all.

Most of the book is weird hippy nonsense (long before there were hippies) and misbehavior that you might expect from adolescents, but the characters in this book are older and should know better. Although their ages aren't really ever specified so they could be younger than I imagined them to be. Probably not, though. Sal is a veteran, has already been married and divorced and is attending college at various times throughout the story...so I suspect they're at least in their mid to late twenties.

So much of the book sounds like JD Salinger could have penned it.

I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.

My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it when I walked her home, on the way back I stretched out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made me want to get back on that road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer - by for a dime. They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.

Major and I sat sadly talking in the midnight hours. "Have you ever read Green Hills of Africa? It's Hemingway's best." We wished each other luck. We would meet in Frisco. I saw Rawlins under a dark tree in the street. "Good-by, Ray. When do we meet again?" I went to look for Carlo and Dean - nowhere to be found. Tim Gray shot his hand up in the air and said, "So you're leaving, Yo." We called each other Yo. "Yep," I said. The next few days I wandered around Denver. It seemed to me every bum on Larimer Street maybe was Dean Moriarty's lather; Old Dean Moriarty they called him, the Tinsmith. I went in the Windsor Hotel, where lather and son had lived and where one night Dean was frightfully waked up by the legless man on the rollerboard who shared the room with them; he came thundering across the floor on his terrible wheels to touch the boy. I saw the little midget newspaper-selling woman with the short legs, on the corner of Curtis and 15th. I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlors.

But the writing is just less...focused. It may be intentional (since Sal seemed to be mentally all over the place most of the time) but it just lacks something for me. And Sal's unswerving loyalty to Dean, no matter how shabbily he was treated, annoyed was irritating.

I couldn't meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make? I told Dean and Marylou about Lucille. Marylou wanted to know all about Lucille, she wanted to meet her. We zoomed through Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, and up to Philadelphia on a winding country road and talked. "I want to marry a girl," I told them, "so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can't go on all the time - all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something?

"Ah now, man," said Dean, "I've been digging you for years about the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things about your soul." It was a sad night; it was also a merry night. In Philadelphia we went into a lunchcart and ate hamburgers with our last food dollar. The counterman - it was three A.M. - heard us talk about money and offered to give us the hamburgers free, plus more coffee, if we all pitched in and washed dishes in the back because his regular man hadn't shown up. We jumped to it. Ed Dunkel said he was an old pearldiver from way back and pitched his long arms into the dishes. Dean stood googing around with a towel, so did Marylou. Finally they started necking among the pots and pans; they withdrew to a dark corner in the pantry The counterman was satisfied as long as Ed and I did the dishes. We finished them in fifteen minutes. When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.

"Oh damn, I wish I could find Hassel. Everybody look sharp, see if they can find him." We all scoured the sidewalks. "Good old gone Hassel. Oh you should have seen him in Texas."

I saw two other Kerouac book in the new releases section at Barnes & Noble a while back. I wasn't the least bit tempted to get either one. I will admit that it was interesting to see that weirdo beatniks have been around since at least the 40's. The bold section in the quote above shows some eerie prescience. How did Kerouac know Arabs were plotting to blow up New York all that time? Scary.

It's funny - I've recently read several books that I enjoyed much more than On the Road, but I haven't mentioned many of them here. Not yet, anyway. It could still happen.



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I was doing so well updating this thing...and then life intervened. I've started posts about books I've read, comic books I've found interesting, TV shows I'm watching, a movie or two that I've seen, funny videos I've stumbled across on the internet, a fun new free MMORPG I'm playing, the new season of Flight of the Conchords, and even recent headaches with the car and computer, but none of them have quite reached fruition. They all languish in a half-finished state.

Oh well.

I've also been meaning to post some pictures of my lovely fish tank and talk about the recent population changes (not the good kind) for a couple of months, but just havent ever gotten around to it. Sadly, my dear reader, the day to expound on my fish tank's current state has arrived.

Around the first week of December, our beloved betta fish, Buddy, stopped being the peppy, active fish we'd known and loved. He just kind of sank to the bottom of the tank and sat listlessly, the working of his gills giving the only indication that he was still alive. We watched him for a few days, hoping he would recover from whatever was happening to him (I suspected that Butthead, the chinese algae eater in the tank, was stressing him out by occasionally chasing him around the tank). When he just seemed to get worse, I decided to take him out of the tank and put him in a glass of tank water to isolate him from Butthead and also keep anything he might be carrying from spreading to the other fish. When we checked on him the next morning, he was dead. We buried him next to the other 2 named fish in the backyard (Beavis and Mr Fish), but didn't replace him in the tank for fear that there might be something dangerous to fish happening.

The two neon tetras, 2 glow-light tetras, chinese algae eater, 3 amano shrimp, and the host of tiny mystery snails continued to live a happy, healthy existence. The live plants in the tanks that were flourishing so well have become victims of the shrimps' ravenous appetite and one of the three larger plants was eaten down to nothing. The other similar plant has been eaten down to a shadow of its former leafy glory and the third is hanging in there, but is not as full as it once was. We've added a few plants that have been sprouting, but I suspect it's only a matter of time before the shrimp devour those too.

So a couple of weeks later, we went to the pet shop to look at fish. I thought about replacing Buddy with a new betta fish, but in the end decided to try a new fish in the tank: a pair of kissing_gourami. I suspect that was the beginning of even bigger problems in the tank.

The kissing fish did really well in the tank for about a week. And then they (and all four tetras) began showing very obvious signs of ich. Within a few days of the white spots popping up all over their bodies, the first of the two neon tetras had died. A few days later, the first kissing fish followed.

I took the dead kissing fish back to the pet shop for a refund (they provide a 20 day guarantee on all fish provided a water sample from the tank shows the water was healthy). A quick test of my water showed a slightly elevated pH balance due to the water hardness, but nitrates, ammonia and all the other fish hazards were perfect (or nonexistent). I noted that the tank of kissing fish was now quarantined for some reason (no one at the pet shop seemed to know why) - so I suspect my fish all died because of an infestation introduced with the kissing fish. Bummer.

Since my pH level was high, the pet shop employee suggested I add some pH neutralizer to bring it back to fish-comfortable levels. Being the responsible tank-keeper that I am, I picked some up and added it to the tank immediately. I had also been adding some chemical water-treatment to help strengthen the fishes' immune systems and it appeared to be working because the ich had all but cleared up on the surviving fish.

The water clouded up immediately (the directions had warned me that a day or two of cloudiness was to be expected), but the remaining fish didn't seem too bothered by it. But a couple of days later (this past Saturday evening), the second kissing fish was found dead. Two of the last three teras were found dead on Sunday morning. So not a good turn of events for the fish tank.

Butthead, the algae eater, seems to be weathering the tanks cataclysmic events pretty much unscathed. He hasn't shown any signs of an ich infestation, but he's not zipping around today like he used to (when he wasn't stuck to the side of the tank). He's just sittin on the bottom of the tank listlesly since I've been home. The last surviving tetra died today. Though the ich seemed to have cleared up, he was acting kind of twitchy and didn't look as healthy as he once did (and I doubt he liked being all alone much either).

Looks like I'll have a snail and shrimp tank soon (assuming Butthead eventually succumbs to whatever killed the other fish off). So sad.



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