A Bunch of Mini Reviews!

Hello All! I subscribed to my own blog on Google Reader a few days ago and was shocked, SHOCKED I say, to discover that it already had 4 subscribers. 1 of those, I know, is my wife. Another, I assume, is my college roommate. But the other two? Mysteries within mysteries.

Anyway, since I have such a rapidly expanding fan-base I have decided to re-un-give up on this blog. Just cause I haven't been updating doesn't mean I haven't been reading crappy books. This post will cover the stuff I have been reading in the interval period.

Mini-Review #1

Ill Wind:


I will go ahead and admit that I didn't make it all the way through "Ill Wind." The premise was pretty interesting and the first about 100 pages were great, then nothing happened for the next about 150 pages so I put it down and started reading something else. I might finish it one day.

The idea behind Ill Wind is that, after an oil spill (topical!) an oil company tried to use a genetically engineered bacteria to clean up the spill. The bacteria mutates like all good sci-fi bacteria should and becomes airborne. long story short all petroleum and petroleum derivatives (gasoline, plastic, etc.) get eaten up by bacteria and human kind is thrown into a new dark age with no plastic TV dinner trays.

Cool idea and based at least kinda on real science. Too bad the book hit such a major slowdown halfway through.

Also of note in this book is the authors weird aversion to cursing. One of the characters was supposed to be a major criminal who was in and out of jail his whole life and he walked around calling people butt-head. This just struck me as odd.

On to the next review!

Mini Review #2

The Einstein Intersection.


Normally in these Reviews I try to avoid spoilers, but to fully explain my feelings about this book I am going to have to pretty much spoil everything about it. In addition to that, the image above is different from the copy I read. My copy had a picture of the main character fighting a more regular looking bull (less minotaur-like) on the cover.

First off let me say that I have a great respect for Samuel R. Delany. He is a really awesome African American sci-fi and fantasy author known for writing really trippy, mind expanding type stuff. This book is no exception from his usual absolutely crazy-pants writing style. If you don't want to read the spoilers my one sentence review is: "The Einstein Intersection is a really good and incredibly odd book. if you like very weird sci-fi or fantasy, you will probably like this book."

(WARNING: SPOILERS START NOW!!)

The Einstein Intersection is a book about Orpheus, the Greek (or African in some myths) story teller and singer who went to Hades to find his lost girlfriend. Except the Einstein Intersection takes place several hundreds of thousands of years in the future.... after humans have gone extinct... and the Earth is inhabited by alien ghosts.... some of which are suffering from horrible mutations... and who are controlled by computers... and forced to reenact the myths of Earth. if that sounds awesome to you (it does to me) then this is a pretty good read. If you know the story of Orpheus then the ending will not really surprise you... except for the part where you realize he was an alien ghost controlled by a computer the whole time...that part would have surprised you.

(END OF SPOILERS)

Mini Review #3

Riverworld


Riverworld is a neat little peace of what I call "Setting Sci-fi." Setting Sci-fi is any book or movie where I consider the setting to be as important or as interesting as the characters and story. Other examples would be: Ring World, Dune, The Matrix and probably those Rama books (I haven't gotten around to reading them yet). The premise of Riverworld is that every human being that has ever lived and will ever live awakens on a strange new planet that's primary physical characteristic is a billion mile long river that snakes across its surface. Other than humans, fish and earthworms there are no other animals on the planet. Everybody wakes up on the planet at the same time in a perfectly healthy 25 year old body, even people that were sick, crippled or deformed on Earth. If you are killed on this planet you wake up 24 hours later in a new body somewhere else on the planet.

There are 5 Riverworld novels total and a handful of short stories as well. All of the Riverworld novels are pretty short (this one is only about 75 pages!). One interesting note is that "Riverworld" the novel is actually the 5th Riverworld book. I didn't realize this before I read it but I didnt have any trouble at all keeping up with the story. It looks like each of the Riverworld Books are pretty self sufficient.

This entry into the Riverworld series dealt a lot with the concept of religion and how it would change if there was no afterlife and everybody just kept waking up a day after they die. It was a neat little book but the big "plot twist" at the end was kinda obvious. I enjoyed Riverworld though and its short enough that you can read it in one or rides on the DC metro though. It comes with my recommendation.

If you really like Riverworld and role playing games, you might want to check out "GURPS Riverworld" I do not own GURPS Riverworld but I think its really cool that such a thing exists. I am a bit of a role player myself and I will probably be checking out the Riverworld source book one of these days when I am not super broke. When that day comes I will try to remember to put a full review up on this blarrrrgh.

First Post (of hopefully many)

Hello all, My "Blogger" name is Wachapreague Warrior. This blog that I write is really more for my own amusement than for any other reason. I suspect that it will not be read by many( if any) people. The basic premise of my blog is to go out to find the books with the most ridiculous covers, read them and post a review for both the cover of the book, and the content. This will be done hopefully about once a week and will test that old adage that you can't judge a book by its cover.

I suppose that a few of you reading this may be interested in my personal life. I will now satiate your interest. If you are not interested (understandable, for I am not very interesting) you can skip this paragraph. I lived most of my life in the south eastern United States. I attended college in South Carolina. (please do not hold me up as an example of the writing prowess of other S.C. college graduates, I am aware of how awful my spelling and grammar are.) I graduated with a B.S. in Biology and worked on a farm for a while. I currently am working on my Environmental Science M.S. at a University in Virginia.

I got the idea for this blog when I was visiting a local used book store and noticing how ridiculous the covers of old science fiction and fantasy novels are. I am not the fastest reader in the world so I will really try to focus on shorter works, I am aiming for things between 150 and 350 pages. This will insure that I can post about once a week. I know that some of the "Songs of Fire and Ice" novels had pretty ridiculous covers back in the day but I just can not take on an 800 page novel and keep the schedule I have laid out for this blog. I hope this blog is pretty entertaining, but the real reason for me writing it is to kinda force myself to read more, and therefore play video games, watch TV, and generally vegetate less. Well any way, lets get down to the first entry!

Tuf Voyaging: by George R. R. Martin

The Cover:

As you can see the cover of this work is a masterpiece of the science fiction novel covers world. The bald man seems to stare directly at the viewer while he idly strokes the cat in his lap. Other cats dance around him in what I assume to be zero or low gravity. Outside the window of his space ship (or space station perhaps?) you observe a large planet that seems to be made entirely of lava lamp material. The block letters of the title call to mind the works of Roy Lichtenstein or perhaps the pop art of Andy Warhol.

The Content:

The Bald Man on the cover of the novel is named 'Haviland Tuf.' In the novel he is described as kinda fat, bald, and pretty much harmless looking. On the cover of the novel he looks pretty... well... tough, so I don't think the artist really did a good job there. The character does have a love for cats though and he does travel around in a space ship, so I guess those elements of the cover are accurate.

Tuf Voyaging is a collection of short stories all centered around the main character of Haviland Tuf. In the first story Tuf ends up in control of a seedship called the Ark. The Ark is the last remaining seedship in the Galaxy and has been drifting through space derelict for several hundreds of years. Seedships were designed long ago as a sort of powerful bioweapons platform that, through the use of bioengineering and time distortion effects, can in a matter of minutes clone pretty much any creature you can imagine in its adult from. Haviland decides he wants to use the power of the seedship for good instead of destruction so he begins traveling around the galaxy looking for planets with ecological troubles and using his seedship to correct them. The problems he encounters are varied and interesting and his solutions to them are usually pretty clever. (although I have to say as an environmental scientist in training, I don't like that almost every one of his solutions involves introducing some new invasive species to the environment). Haviland uses the power at his disposal to solve all different sorts of problems from a planet who's population is growing faster than its resources will allow, to an ocean planet that is plagued with sea monsters. Over the course of the novel the seedship is shown to be a source of almost absolute power, and as we all know (and are reminded by one of the characters in the novel) absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the start of the novel Haviland seems to be incorruptible and in fact seems like one of the few honest men left in the galaxy. By the end of the novel, you start doubting Tuf's incorruptibility though as the choices he makes to solve the problems of one particular planet become more and more ethically nebulous.

So, how was the content of the novel compared to its cover? Well to say that the novel was not ridiculous would be untrue. The concept of a starship captain flying around the galaxy cloning T rexes to solve the ecological problems of poorly terraformed planets is inherently wacky. But in my opinion it is just the right kind of wacky to make for a really fun read. I enjoyed the book and feel that it does the awesomeness of its cover justice. And its nice for once to read a Sci fi book where the main conflict is environmental issues and the problems all can't be solved with well placed photon torpedoes. I should also mention that if you do an image search for this title there is an alternate cover that I think is even more ridiculous that the one I posted, but my copy of the book has the above cover.

Next Weeks Title:
Of Godlike Power!