Reviews

What do you get when you combine an interesting magic system, a lot of influence from video games, a competent but emotionally distant author, a dash of gender ambiguity, a token pinch of political preaching, and yet another book about a child who goes to magic school? Apparently, you get a pretty good stew of a book that’s enjoyable to read, intellectually interesting, and only rarely makes me want to throw it against the wall for brief periods.

Many years ago, when I was a young man, or perhaps a boy in the process of becoming a young man, I walked into a bookstore and bought a book that would change my life. I bought the book on the basis of the cover, because the cover was the coolest thing I had ever seen: a man wearing sunglasses drives a car in a futuristic city.

You understand, I say he drives the car because that is what one does with a car. But the car driven by the man in the sunglasses is a Chandler MetalSmith, and with the autocomp left off (as all autocomps were left off, until the driver requested otherwise, until the law required otherwise) the man may be driving the MetalSmith, but the proper word for what the MetalSmith is doing is flying.

There’s not much to say about Adapt and Overcome (The Maxwell Saga), the third book in Peter David’s series about a young man who joins the space navy and comes of age amongst a series of increasingly improbable coincidences. It’s fast, reasonably fun, and the infinite improbability drive is set to just a notch below winning the lottery without buying a ticket. The author’s complete failure to grasp his readers’ comments about his main character’s plot invincibility in prior books is a charming mirror of his main character’s casual stroll through explosions, firefights and love affairs that never seem to leave a scratch on him.

The one-line review is that Interstellar is the movie that 2001 should have been. It has a mysterious anomaly orbiting Saturn, a realistic depiction of a space mission to investigate and explore. But it also has so much more: incredible, moving performances from the leading actors and actresses, an emotional investment on both the personal and the species level, strange and wonderful and terrible things to find, and a powerful human drama that plays out across that background.

In case you are ever hit by the supernatural version of a meteor strike out of a blue sky and magically bound to a succubus and an angel, there are a number of steps that really should be followed as soon as practically possible:

• Have a lot of sex with the succubus. Duh.
• Convince the angel to join in.
• Move out of your mom’s basement

That last step can get tricky when a werewolf wants to mate with you – as forcefully as required, two witches are worried they are getting left out of the fun, heaven is threatening to demote your angel, and the vampires have an all-points-bulletin out on your ass.

*The Edge of Tomorrow is a Tom Cruise military sci-fi vehicle, and it’s a bundle of contradictions that actually work out to a pretty good movie. Let me start by hitting you with what is obvious from the trailer: alien invasion, near-future powered armor. Those aspects are mostly handled well. The power armor is much more realistic than, say, Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor; it’s basically strength-enhancing and load-carrying with some token “armor” and a few mounted weapons. Cruise even gets a chance to lampshade the fact that he isn’t wearing a helmet. (The real reason is that he is getting paid millions for his face to be visible, of course). The aliens are alien aliens and not very comprehensible to humanity.

Knights Magi, the fourth book in the Spellmonger series, focuses on the adventures of Tyndal and Rondal as they grow into their roles as Knights Magi. At over 600 pages, there’s a lot of material to cover, but the content is perhaps best described as an adolescent romp. It’s not serious enough to qualify as a coming-of-age tale (though probably the author intended it as such), nor explicit enough to qualify as soft porn. As the main characters are themselves adolescents in that awkward phase of life, it is perhaps not surprising that (in addition to the usual magic, intrigue, and goblins) the nature of femininity and how to obtain access to a woman’s virtue without being tied down by it occupies a major part of the book.

Good Intentions is somewhere between male adolescent wish-fulfillment, soft-core erotica, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy. The plot revolves around a pretty ordinary guy, still living in his mom’s basement, who decides to sneak into the local graveyard to get a few atmospheric pictures. He’s hoping to use the pictures to impress a pair of cute goth chicks in his photography course, lacking the gumption to simply approach them without a prop.

Why are ebooks from traditional publishers priced so high?

That’s the question . Though the situation has improved a bit since this was written around 2011, there’s still a large price gap between traditionally published ebooks and independent authors. And it’s not because the independent authors suck. (Some do, sure, but that’s not why there’s a price difference).

If you watch the prices over time, the independents usually have lower prices, often just a dollar or two. Traditional published books tend to hover around $10-$15 when first released, and may get down to $5-$7 eventually, but rarely go below that. And readers often complain about those perceived high prices, reasoning that there’s no physical book, no additional cost per copy beyond a bit of electricity to send it to the buyer (which isn’t even paid by the publisher), so why isn’t it free? Or at least a minimal cost, like the independents?

Over at the Mad Genius Club, Amanda finds a publisher talking about ebooks as a “service” and charging more for them than printed books because they are convenient for the reader. Both sides have valid points, but the discussion hook is Amanda’s conclusion :

But to say an e-book should cost considerably more than a print book because it is more convenient is ludicrous. It is especially so when the publisher refuses to admit that a reader buys the book instead of just licensing the right to read the book. As for Luby, well, he needs to quit drinking the kool-aid and realize that the reading public isn’t quite as naive or foolish as he seems to think it is. As for the publishers and bean counters still doing their song and dance of joy over what he had to say, they need to adapt t changing times and demands or be left behind. As the song says, the times, they are a-changing.