The first of the Lensman novels by E.E. Smith, aka, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Triplanetary never mentions Lensmen and you might not even know that it’s a series, except that the masterful, manly, monogamous, and magnificently named hero (Conway Costigan) is begging for more appearances.

Clearly the product of serialization, you can see where each installment began and ended. Pirates attack a space liner/cruise ship, but Costigan and Captain Bradley escape and lead a counterattack against the evil pirates. Then aliens appear and wipe out everyone but Bradley, Costigan, and a love interest. (Cliffhanger!) The escape from the aliens and send super technology info to Triplanetary, a space super spy/military agency, who finally and fully defeat the space pirates – but the aliens are back! (Cliffhanger!) Manly men in awesome space ships fight the aliens to a draw and peace is achieved.

The end.

Smith tries really hard to make his science believable by the standards of the day (he first wrote it in the thirties) and I’ll probably read more of these.

I had to read this via ebook. Not only did the library not have a hard copy, I couldn’t find hard copies on the Barnes & Noble website.

I don’t mind reading via ebook. I do it a lot. When I fly to Thailand next month, you can bet I’m bringing my nook e-reader.

But I remember browsing the genre shelves at B. Dalton and Waldenbooks and the books in this series were ever present. It feels strange that people don’t read them anymore, at least not like they used to. They have, I supposed, been supplanted by newer authors. People don’t listen as much to Suzanne Vega, the Pixies, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult anymore, either. Times change. People get older and the newer people feel much younger. The way of the world.

Neither here nor there.

The series has been growing on me. There are two more trilogies; one that follows and one that takes place long before the events of High Deryni. Will I read them? Maybe. I’m more likely to than I was when I finished the first book.

But even as the books win me over, they also always disappoint me. The ending is an anticlimactic deus ex machina that makes a decent portion of the final fifty pages seem pointless. And while fantasy can often be criticized for its portrayals (or lack thereof) of women, I would have hoped that a woman writer could have given us one strong and well-developed female character, but no. And the one romance is SO sentimental and cheesy. Ugh.

A battle of wills and stratagems betwixt Ru, the cunning and enslaving fungal sentience from Mars and Zaro, the last man not conditioned to avoid violence and war. And a secret tribe of Anarctican survivialists. And three or four deus ex machinas.

But you know what? It’s a brisk, snappily paced read, pleasantly and constantly propelled forward.

Also, these awesome ads at the end.

http://amzn.to/2xORJpl

I might not have read this book at all, had I not finished all the books I brought with me for a day outside and had the nearest library not had this sequel to a novel I read maybe a year or two ago. Read more

This has been on my ‘to read’ list since it was translated in English a couple of years ago. It got great reviews and was deemed interesting, beyond its qualities as literature, for insight into a lesser known aspect of contemporary Chinese culture, which is to say, its science fiction.

The Three Body Problem is ‘hard’ science fiction, more or less. My friend Ryan gave a succinct definition of hard science fiction as being sci fi that depends on one thing being true that is not currently true. That could be a change to the laws of physics or it could be something like a technology not currently available. But the idea is to keep everything more or less the same, except for that one thing, but incorporating the projected, cascading effects of the change.

In this case, it is that contact was made with alien civilization living in the three star solar system of Alpha Centauri (the book’s title comes from the difficulty of determining orbital patterns when there is the gravitational effect of three stars on an object; the question, I gather, is whether it is possible to determine or whether the complex factors involved make it impossible and also whether it is a repeating pattern or not).

Something I see in Chinese movies, too (I watch a lot of Chinese actions movies – from the heyday or the Shaw Brothers to the latest one on Netflix), where the current government is not only not criticized, but more or less praised. There may be local corruption, but the theory is sound, as it were. That said, it was pretty darn critical of the Cultural Revolution.

It also implied that environmentalism is an alien plot to stop science. That felt a little weird, not in the least because China is now taking climate change and environmental degradation seriously.

Over all, it’s a surprisingly tense book, especially since we don’t really encounter the aliens (yet), but instead it’s a journey through scientific concepts and Umberto Eco-level conspiracies.

This week is the eightieth anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit and so I’ll add my two cents to the celebrations.

I can still recite the opening several sentences of  the novel from memory (‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.’). Read more