Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey--Book Review

Hachette Books Group/Orbit, ISBN 9780316129084, June 2011

Leviathan Wakes is a wonderfully satisfying space opera, set in the asteroid belt a few centuries from now. Earth is old, wealthy, powerful, but maybe not so energetic and innovative anymore. Mars is younger, poorer, but more vigorous, innovative, and on the rise. The Belt--it's a very working class area, mostly owned by Earth-based or Mars-based corporations, but with its own emerging culture. They make do, waste nothing, live inside converted asteroids, and call their homes holes. Ceres, Eros, Tycho, and the ships we see are all very lived-in, well-used by people who mostly have never lived anywhere that air can be taken for granted. The beginnings of an independence movement, the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA, exists, but the dangers of disrupting the status quo are obvious to Belters, so there's a somewhat tense and uneasy balance. There's no interstellar travel, but the first generation colony ship is preparing to leave within the next couple of years.

Our two viewpoint characters are Joe Miller, a police officer on Ceres, and Jim Holden, an Earth man serving as the XO of a Belter ice miner, the Canterbury. They have very different worldviews and values, and we get their stories in alternating chapters.

It's against this background that Miller gets a extra assignment: find Julie Mao, daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder on Luna, and ship her back to her parents--involuntarily, because she's not going willingly. Meanwhile,  XO Jim Holden leads the boarding party to investigate a derelict ship called Scopuli. It's abandoned, and while there's evidence of a struggle, the motive clearly wasn't robbery. Scopuli's own distress signal had been disabled, and the signal Canterbury picked up was added by whoever boarded, and is powered by a Martian battery.

Scopuli is bait in a trap, and with terrifying speed, Jim Holden finds himself the captain of Canterbury's shuttle Knight, and of the few surviving crew. And shortly after that, having broadcast events and what they think they know about them to the entire listening solar system, they're prisoners aboard a Martian military ship.

After that, things start to get complicated and disturbing.

Julie Mao, the missing Earth woman Miller has been assigned to find, kidnap, and send home, was part of the crew of Scopuli. They'd stumbled onto someone's very nasty plan to set up a little experiment. As the political situation in the Belt gets rapidly more dangerous, Miller is first pulled off the search for Julie Mao, then fired, then takes off on his own to track her down. The Martian ship is attacked, and destroyed, by heavily armed stealthed ships, and the last thing the Martian commander does is send a couple of officers to get Holden, his crew, and the evidence out and away.

Miller and Holden each separately follow the evidence they have to Eros, and become uneasy allies in the face of a truly evil plot involving a very dangerous, very alien piece of biotechnology. And while Earth, Mars, and the Belt blame each other for the growing incidence of disappeared or destroyed ships and the system rushes headlong toward war, Miller and Holden discover another hand at work, engineering the war as a distraction from what they're really up to.

Attempting to say any more risks far too many spoilers. I'll just add that the politics of the solar system feel real and complex, with no improbably good Good Guys, and legitimate interests and natural greed on all sides.

Leviathan Wakes has all the Good Parts of space opera of the forties and fifties, a lived-in universe, adventure, intrigue, and sense of wonder. At the same time, James S. A. Corey, or rather, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, whose pen name this is, didn't grow up in that era, and write smart, tough, capable female characters with no more apparent conscious effort than when they do the same with male characters. It's apparently the first of a series, The Expanse, but while the set-up for the rest of the series is there, and quite obvious, this particular story is satisfyingly complete in itself. With or without the later volumes, this one is worth reading, and is a lot of fun if you like good space opera.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Killer Pancake (Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery, Book 5), by Diane Mott Davidson--Review

New Millennium, 2003 [1995], Audio CD, ISBN 9781590074398

Goldy Schultz, owner of Goldilocks Catering, has with some reservations, agreed to cater a low-cal lunch banquet for Mignon Cosmetics. It could open up a new market, and her assistant, Julian, is dating one of the Mignon sales associates, Claire Satterfield. And it's only one afternoon. How bad can it be?

Her doubts come rushing back when she has to run a gauntlet of animal rights activists calling themselves Spare the Hares, who even have dead rabbits to wave around. Then Claire Satterfield is killed in the mall parking garage by a hit-and-run driver before they even have all the food inside. Goldy calls 911, and she and her homicide detective husband Tom have to break the news to Julian.

Even more disturbingly, Goldy discovers the police don't think it was an accident.

This is an intricate story involving illicit affairs, commercial espionage, cutthroat competition and fraud between Mignon sales staff, and an old, well-buried scandal of terrible injuries caused by cosmetics testing. Goldy learns more about her neighbors and potential clients than she really wanted to know--and all while there's drama enough in her own family and household. It's not just Julian losing Claire. Marla, Goldy's best friend and the other ex-wife of her abusive ex-husband John Richard Korman, has had a heart attack. Do I need to say that John Richard is not staying away, and that Goldy has some difficulty letting the fancy security system Tom has installed do its thing? No?

This is a fun, fast-paced mystery with the main secondary characters just developed enough to make an engaging story.

Recommended.

No free galley to declare on this one; I borrowed it from the library.

Bed of Roses (Brides Quartet #2) by Nora Roberts--Review

Berkley, ISBN 9780425230077, 358 pp., October 2009

MacKensie, Emma, Laurel, and Parker spent many childhood moments playing Wedding Day, and as adults have built a business around providing perfect wedding days for others. Now, one by one, they're finding their own mates.

In Bed of Roses, it's the turn of Emmaline Grant, the talented and dedicated florist for Vows. Emma loves romance, loves men, and has an active social life, but she's never met that one man who could give her the true, lifetime romance she dreams of. Or rather, she has, but she hasn't allowed herself to realize it. Jack Cooke is too determined not to repeat his divorced parents' mistake of getting married, to ever commit to the lifelong relationship she wants, and too close to all four of the friends to risk the messiness of a relationship that might end badly.

Then circumstances throw them together repeatedly, and they find themselves embarking on a relationship they both regard with trepidation. Mirroring Mac & Carter's relationship, it's Emma that has the faith and confidence to trust to love, and Jack who resists, denies, panics as he realizes what's happening. As usual, Roberts does a wonderful job in developing the characters and letting their relationship unfold, progress, and build to a crisis.

Recommended.

No review copy this time; I borrowed this book from the local library.

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, by Guy Kawasaki--Review

Penguin, March 2011, ISBN 9781591843795, 224 pp.

This is a business book for people who really want practical advice on how to become a better, more successful, happier business person.

Unlike many business books, it's neither a relentlessly detailed case study that wears you out trying to absorb lots of detail that may or may not be relevant to your industry and organization, nor a light'n'fluffy "how I inspire everyone around me with platitudes" book. Instead, Guy Kawasaki focuses on practical advice on how to sell your "cause" and how to be someone people want to do business with--how to be "enchanting" to customers, investors, employees. He's a former jeweler who joined Apple in 1983, when he got an early demo of the first Macintosh and was, in his chosen word, enchanted. He uses his own experience and well-chosen anecdotes from others to flesh out his message and illustrate the practical application of his advice.

The ten-cent version of that advice, after "have a product, service, or cause that's really worthwhile," can be summed up as: 1. Be likable. 2. Be trustworthy. 3. Be a mensch. Some of the specifics: Smile--a real smile, that moves the eye muscles and not just your lips. Approach people you meet with a goal of helping them first. Tell the truth. Don't shade it to downplay perceived weakness of your position. Instead, address those weaknesses and find a way to meet the real needs of the person you're dealing with. Do that, and you can make a loyal customer for life, not just one sale. Deliver bad news first--because the people you want to work for or do business with want to know the bad news so they can deal with it effectively. Someone who only wants good news is someone to be avoided, in business and in life.

Much of this book is applicable to almost any setting, including, as he points out in a few comments, marriage and parenting. The last third of the book is focused more specifically on working inside a corporate or organizational structure, on how to  be a good employee and how to be a good boss. There's a short and helpful section dealing particularly with managing volunteers in a non-profit setting.

All of which covers the basics of the book, but doesn't capture the experience of reading it. Enchantment really is enchanting to read, enjoyable, enlightening, surprisingly practical, and a book you won't want to put aside until you're finished.

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of Enchantment for review, from the author.

Invasion (C.H.A.O.S. #1) by Jon S. Lewis--Review

Thomas Nelson, ISBN 9781595547538, January 2011

Sixteen-year-old Colt McAlister is living the dream in San Diego, surfing by day and playing guitar with his friends by night, when his parents are killed in a freak car accident. The youngest of eight, several of his older brothers offer him a home, but recognizing the demands they face with their own young families, he chooses instead to join his Grandpa McAlister in Phoenix, AZ. The only person he knows at his new high school is Danielle Salazar, a childhood friend, but he quickly meets and becomes friends with Oz Romero--whom he's sure he's never met before but who seems oddly familiar.

This is a fast-paced and mostly tightly plotted novel, so it's not long before we know there's something fishy about the accident that killed Colt's parents--and about Trident, the company that his investigative journalist mother was investigating. We also learn that Colt's grandpa has a fascinating history of his own: A World War II veteran, he's believed to be the basis of the comic book superhero the Phantom Flyer, who played a key role in defeating the Nazis' alien reptilian allies...did I forget to mention that? Yes, it seems there are gateways between our world and others, and some pretty startling beings have come through them, including the reptilian Thule, who want to wipe us out and take Earth for themselves.

So when Colt overhears his grandpa and Sen. Bishop discussing the fact that his parents' accident wasn't exactly an accident, and he and his friends decide to investigate, it doesn't take long before they're in very hot water. Trident is controlled by the Thule, the reptilian invaders behind the Nazis, and is the major threat that the secret government agency, the Central Headquarters Against the Occult and Supernatural, a.k.a. CHAOS, exists to fight. Colt, Dani, and Oz quickly find out just how much of a beating they can take and keep on ticking, and how tough, smart, and resourceful they can be when their own and the world's survival depends on it.

I really did enjoy this book. It's a solid young adult science fiction novel, firmly in the camp of the "Heinlein juveniles" of cherished memory (and still available in your local library and bookstore, by the way.) It does have a couple of oddities and weaknesses, though. One is that, although the female characters are in fact presented as tough, smart, and resourceful, it certainly appears that there are no female CHAOS agents. This seems terribly unlikely, and maybe the next novel in the sequence will reveal that that appearance is not correct. The other problem is an annoying plot hole. We're told that the biochips that make it possible for Trident to control unwitting sleeper agents, and which cause their eyes to glow red when the chip is activated, were invented in the past few years by a minor character whom we do meet. Unfortunately, we're also told that the Thule and Nazis were using the same control technology during WWII. Can't have it both ways!

But those are minor issues, and this is a solid, enjoyable YA science fiction novel.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

The Return of Captain John Emmett, by Elizabeth Speller--Review

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISBN 9780547511696, 384pp., July 5, 2011

Laurence Bartram is a veteran of the Great War. He's emotionally wounded not just by his war experiences, but even more, by the death of his wife and child in childbirth, at the very moment he was caught up in the worst of the battles he survived. He's living in London, ostensibly working on a book about London's churches, but in reality merely existing.

Then he receives a letter from Mary Emmett, the sister of a school friend. The friend, John Emmett, had returned home more mentally and emotionally wounded by his war than Laurence had, and while being treated in what is for the time a very modern mental hospital, he escaped and committed suicide. John did not leave a note, and Mary wants to understand why he died. Laurence wasn't as close to John as Mary had hoped, but he agrees--partly because Mary herself strikes the first spark of interest and life that he's felt since he learned of his wife's death--to look into John's war and post-war experiences, and see if he can find an answer for her. The problem catches the interest of his friend Charles Carfax, also--and if truth be told Charles, who is a great reader of mystery and detective novels, fears Laurence may not quite know how to go on with an investigation on his own.

Together, they gather the pieces of John's war.  Some unexplained bequests to apparent strangers in his will lead them to a tragic, and botched, execution of a young officer for desertion; a trench collapse which John is only barely rescued alive by a soldier he thinks is guilty of rape and murder; the time he spent being treated for injuries and illness by a nurse who is now married to one of the men who helped get him out of the collapsed trench. Speller skillfully and delicately paints us a picture of a courageous, moral, kind man who was killed by the war as surely as any of the battlefield casualties. At the same time, we get to know Laurence and Mary as they come back to life, as well as other survivors of the war. As we get closer and closer to the hidden cause of John's death, we care more and more, and at the same time, find compassion for nearly everyone involved.

This is a thoughtful and moving study of the aftermath of the Great War for those who survived it and had to learn to live with the consequences.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

E-Books, Libraries, and HarperCollins' Anti-Library Announcement

Today the word spread through the library community that HarperCollins has declared war on library lending of e-books. Initially librarians had a letter from Overdrive, cast in relentlessly positive terms, that nevertheless contained the shocking information that "some publishers" had demanded a new restriction on e-book lending: In addition to treating each e-book as a single physical copy, that can be loaned to only one person at a time, e-books will now also "wear out"; after twenty-six loans, the copy goes poof, and if the library wishes to continue to lend that book, they must buy it again.

Physical copies don't wear out and fall apart after only twenty-six lendings. When they do start to wear out, libraries can repair them. When the library does decide to deaccession those books, they can put them in the book sale. And libraries normally purchase physical copies at a small discount, or they pay extra for library binding, which means the book will be more physically durable.

Libraries don't get that discount on e-books. They pay more for them than the individual buyer does. And when they decide they no longer need a particular title, they can't resell it in the library book sale. The one advantage is that it's not going to wear out, that it can keep circulating, without repair, for as long as the library needs it to.

Now HarperCollins is saying no, that e-book is going to "wear out" faster and more catastrophically than any normal physical copy. It's no longer selling e-books to libraries; it's renting them, and it's a very expensive rental. One has to wonder what the Powers That Be at HarperCollins think about all those physical copies circulating for as long as they physically last, or used book stores, buying and selling physical copies after the original purchaser no longer wants them.

I believe that the fundamental problem here is that the publishing industry has largely been swallowed up by the entertainment industry. Publishing has never had the profit margins that the movies and television consider normal, and the entertainment conglomerates are frustrated by this. They're also deeply committed to achieving, as far as possible, a pay-per-view world. Everyone expects to pay to see a movie every time they go to the theater to see it, even if they do that a hundred times. You can't legally record it for your own use. TV is still mostly free-to-watch; even if you pay for cable, you mostly don't pay extra for each show--but that's because the advertisers are paying for it. And with pay-per-view movies and specials, you do pay for one or a limited number of viewings or a limited time period of access; you don't get to "keep" that show forever, for the most part. Movies and television bitterly resisted the VCR; they've made their peace with it and its descendants now, but remember they get a kickback for each blank media you purchase.

The entertainment conglomerates now own most of the publishing industry, and they're attempting to impose this model on publishing. In this frame, libraries look like an outrage. The experiences of publishers (as different as National Academies Press and Baen Books) that free or cheap access to e-books actually boosts the sales of print copies is irrelevant, in fact incomprehensible to them.

Libraries, as they always have, are moving forward with the new technology, attempting to make all kinds and formats of information and reading material available to the users despite terrible budget crunches. HarperCollins, with the rest of the publishing industry likely following close behind, is choosing to make that harder, and cripple libraries' ability to serve the needs of their users. But libraries are where young readers and new readers, who don't yet have the money and the commitment to reading to go out and buy their books, develop that taste and that need. Write off the young readers and the new readers, and the publishers will lose them not for a few years, but forever, as they take themselves off to other kinds of entertainment.

This unfortunate development is going to affect my willingness to review or purchase HarperCollins titles. I hope and trust it will also affect the willingness of libraries to purchase HarperCollins titles. This is an anti-library and anti-reader stance, and it deserves to be punished in the marketplace.

Update: A message from OverDrive on HarperCollins' new eBook licensing terms

Some links for further reading on the subject:
HarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations
Publishing Industry Forces OverDrive and Other Library eBook Vendors to Take a Giant Step Back
The Publisher of Tolkien Has Taken a Business Lesson From Sauron
Let's Play Rent-A-Book!
Friday Alert: HarperCollins in cagematch with Macmillan to see who can alienate readers better

Diagnosis Death, by Richard L. Mabry, M.D.--Review

  Abingdon Press/United Methodist Publishing House, ISBN 9781426710216, 288 pp., April 2011

Elena Gardner is a young doctor, just finishing her residency in a distinguished Dallas hospital. She's also a young widow, whose husband Mark suffered an aneurysm that caused brain death. After struggling with the decision for weeks, Elena violates protocol by writing a Do Not Resuscitate order on his chart herself--and shortly thereafter, someone turns off Mark's respirator.

Elena thinks she may have done it herself, but she doesn't remember doing so. This is merely a private grief and mystery, however, until another patient, whose care she was involved in, dies in remarkably similar circumstances. Hospital officials conclude that, since both patients were brain-dead, what happened was possibly unethical but not a crime. With her residency just a few weeks from its end, though, and a senior hospital official up for a promotion, they're suddenly eager to have her out of Dallas so that, if an embarrassing pattern is developing, it won't be associated with their institution.

And so Elena finds herself signing on as the temporary, and hopefully permanent, associate of Dr. Cathy Sewell, in the alarmingly named city of Dainger, Texas. Dr. Sewell's pregnancy is near term, and whose practice is growing enough to support a second doctor even after she returns to work. Elena quickly finds she has not left her troubles behind her. The troubling weekly midnight phone calls that started after her husband's death continue. She gets anonymous notes that appear to be from the same source. She's making new friends and new enemies, and it's by no means clear who is who. Sheriff's deputy Frank Perrin seems friendly, pleasant, and helpful--but Cathy doesn't like him, and he seems almost disturbingly persistent. Dr. Marcus Bell is also a widower, and is interested in more than just friendship. A senior nurse at the local hospital has something painful in common with Elena: her husband is brain-dead and being kept alive on a respirator. The hospital administrator, Dr. Norman Godwin, is arrogant, abrupt, focused on the bottom line--and unexpectedly hostile.

Then another patient with brain damage, less severe and seemingly on the slow road to recovery, dies in frighteningly familiar circumstances. Elena has to sort out friend from foe, find out how her husband and the other patient in Dallas really died, and whether she really has killed three patients--or whether she has a dangerous enemy who has followed her from Dallas.

Elena and the other major characters are very nicely developed, interesting, and worth spending the time with. Some of the lesser but still important characters are a bit more two-dimensional, but not enough to detract from a well-plotted and solid mystery. It's also worth mentioning that the publisher bills this as Christian fiction. The Christian faith and beliefs of the characters flow naturally from who they are as people, and should be satisfying to those for whom this is a plus, and not intrusive or grafted on in a way that would be off-putting to those simply looking for a good mystery to engage the brain and the heart, and while away a few enjoyable hours.

Recommended.

I receive a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Outside In, by Maria V. Snyder--Review

Harlequin TEEN, ISBN 9780373210114, Publication Date 2/22/2011

This is the second book in a series, and so I had to pick up clues to the backstory  while reading this one. There was enough there that it wasn't a serious problem.

The setting is a generational colony ship headed from parts unknown to parts unknown. The original, or at least the previous, governing structure had been overthrown generations earlier, and the population of the ship divided into Uppers and Scrubs. The tensions in that society came to a head in the previous book, Inside Out, the ruling class dominated by the Trava family was overthrown, and a new government and social structure, intended to be more egalitarian, was created.

As the new book opens, the rebels against the previous regime are finding out that sometimes governing is harder than it looks, and overthrowing a bad government doesn't automatically mean that the new system will work. Trella, the seventeen-year-old leader of the Force of Sheep that spear-headed the rebellion, thinks she's too young and inexperienced to take a leading role in the new government, and insists on deferring to older and presumably wiser heads. She has accepted only an advisory seat on the ruling Committee, and then resigns even that, since she thinks she's more useful exploring the world they now know is a ship, and much larger than they previously thought.

But some of her fellow Scrubs resent the fact that the Uppers still mostly do the relatively soft jobs, while Scrubs still do the heavy, filthy, and sometimes dangerous work. The Trava family is mostly locked up in the brig, and wants out--and they have the greatest technical knowledge of the ship, including knowledge of the Transmission, the ship's drive and power plant.

And then some party identifying itself simply as the Controllers starts taking control of various critical ship's systems. Trella and some of her friends and allies think it's the Travas. Some of the Scrubs, the ones who have kept working but are not happy with the new system, think it's, in essence, the ancestors, the forces that are supposed to be the ultimate governing force in their world, which have been ignored by both the Committee and the Travas before them. And they start cooperating with the Controllers.

Trella finds herself unwillingly drawn back into politics, espionage, and eventually rebellion again, trying to figure out who are her allies and who are her enemies--and then finding out that she has to cooperate with her enemies, as they all confront the alarming fact that, if their world is a spaceship, then there are people outside the ship.

This is an exciting, entertaining story with lots of plot twists to keep you guessing what will happen on the next page, and engaging characters to help you care.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book via NetGalley.

The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek--Book Review

Mariner Books, ISBN 9780547577579, 288 pp., Pub. Date 11/1/2011

This a highly readable history of the transformation of cosmology from metaphysics to physics, from philosophy and speculation to hard science, and in the process, the discovery of most of the universe.

Historically, astronomy and physics didn't have a great deal to do with each other. Astronomers studied the stars by observation, very patient and detailed observation and record-keeping. Theoretical physicists theorized and calculated, and experimental physicists experimented, and they fed each other's work, very occasionally coming up with something, most notably gravity, that made a real difference to astronomy. Then Einstein gave us general relativity, and began a century of ever-deeper entanglement of physics and astronomy, and the transformation of cosmology--the study of the nature and origins of the entire universe--from something utterly beyond the scope of physics into its core. The questions of how big the universe is, whether it is eternal in space and time or had a beginning and might have an end, became real questions.

Edwin Hubble, early in the century, discovered that the universe is expanding, but also that there are other galaxies beyond our own, and that they're all moving away from us. This was a major, exciting, and initially controversial change in our conception of the universe. In the 1960s, Vera Rubin, looking for a research project she could do within the constraints of raising two young children, studied other astronomers' observations and discovered that the galaxies were rotating as well as moving away from us. Also in the mid-1960s, Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles, and a small group of theoretical physicists had a prediction for which they had no supporting data: If the Big Bang theory of the history of the universe were correct, there should be low-level cosmic microwave radiation, at a temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin. Then two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, had data for which they had no explanation: While trying to calibrate the Bell Labs' Crawford Hill antenna to study radio waves from the fringes of the Milky Way, they found they had a tiny background hiss which no amount of calibration would eliminate. They'd found the background cosmic radiation, echo of the Big Bang.

That's one small step along the way, from Einstein to the discovery that most of our universe is invisible. As the back and forth played out between the theoretical physicists and the experimental and observational scientists, increasingly astronomers, each theoretical question drew forth an observation, a find, a discovery that answered that question, and raised another. The most startling of these was the discovery that visible, directly detectable matter is just over 4% of the total make-up of a universe far larger and more complex than ever suspected at the start of the 20th century. If what we see were all there were, the galaxies would not be, could not be, relatively compact, stable spirals (or their other shapes), but should be torn apart by the speed of their rotation. Outside, among, around, the visible matter of the galaxies was dark matter.

Dark matter was soon joined by the even more mysterious dark energy.

The largest part of Panek's book is devoted to the research to detect and identify dark matter and dark energy,  He takes us through not only the science, fascinating enough in itself, but also the human drama as two teams, one primarily physicists and the other primarily astronomers, raced against each other to gather enough observations of sufficiently distant (and therefore ancient) supernovae to answer essential questions about the conditions of the early universe. In the answers to those questions, and questions about changes since that early time, would lie the answers to the reality of dark energy, dark matter, and maybe the ultimate fate of the universe.

Highly recommended.

The hardcover edition of this book is available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. A paperback edition will be released in November 2011.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.