The Prefect (audiobook) by Alastair Reynolds

19 hours, 34 minutes

Read by John Lee
Published by Tantor Audio

Unabridged.

Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect is a hard-boiled detective novel set in a future in which mankind has moved to new worlds far away from Earth and created any number of new technologies. But, people still find themselves confronted by age-old problems that come from within humanity itself. In the end, despite the all of the glitz of spaceships and high tech weaponry, this is really a book about freedom vs. tyranny, redemption, revenge, justice, revenge and honor.

Set in the year 2427, The Prefect is the fifth novel in the Revelation Space series. Chronologically, it is the first novel (there are short stories and novellas in the series as well) and it can be read as a stand-alone novel. The Prefect takes place in the Glitter Band, a group of 10,000 space stations (called habitats) with a total population of 100 million all in orbit around a planet called Yellowstone about 10 light years from Earth. The Glitter Band is ruled by a single government but internally each space station is independent from the other ones and offer many radically different lifestyles. The Glitter Band is highly democratic – every citizen gets to vote on numerous policy items every day using internal implants and an advanced form of the Internet called Abstraction.

Alastair Reynolds

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, an agent of Panoply, a group tasked with protecting the external security of the Glitter Band the voting rights of all of its citizens and protecting the right of every citizen to have access to Abstraction. Drefyus is like many officers in police procedurals – adhering to his own personal rigid code, scarred from a hidden past, leading a team of talented rejects. The other two members of his team are Sparver, a genetically modified pig (known as hyperpigs) who bears the brunt of racial taunts and assumptions with much dignity and Thalia NG, the daughter of a Panoply agent turned traitor who feels the need to redeem her family name.

Dreyfus and his team are sent to investigate the complete destruction of Ruskin-Sartorius, a relatively small habitat. 960 people are dead and all evidence points to an attack by the Ultras, a group of humans that live outside of the mainstream human society of the Glitter Band and specialize in modifying their bodies in a series of human/mechanical physical blends. The Glitter Band and the Ultras have an uneasy truce and clearly do not understand one another’s cultures or technology. Rising tension between the Ultras and the Glitter Band threatens to become open war.

Dreyfus suspects that the Ultras are not guilty but instead they were framed by a very clever entity that may be attempting to take advantage of the chaos and destruction of a war to seize control of the entire Glitter Band. Dreyfus bucks the system and follows his own hunch. Soon, he and his team find more trouble than they had bargained for.  For Dreyfus, this includes a frightening look into that hidden part of himself that makes him the tough detective that he is. 

At first, The Prefect is a difficult book. For the first two hours I found myself on a mental roller coaster, alternating between outright confusion and fascination with the vivid mental pictures Reynolds creates in his little universe of the Glitter Band. Reynolds does little to overtly explain the technology or the politics in this book. He assumes (correctly) that, eventually, the reader will catch on to what is going on in the story. Like I said, it took me about two hours to start catching on. By the end, I was well versed and navigating through Glitter Band technology and politics like an old pro.

John Lee, a winner of the AudioFile Golden Voice Award, does an expert job of not just reading a text with a staggering number of characters and accents but also delivering those voices with an overlay of emotion that does nothing but enhance the story. 

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Prefect.

Reviewed on April 21, 2011.

The Civil War: Strange and Fascinating Facts by Burke Davis

Fun to read, but be warned...

Published in 1982.

...you had better be up on your Civil War basics before attempting to read this book. It assumes that the reader is well aware of the main battles, campaigns, personalities and relative strengths and weaknesses of both the North and the South.

Union General
William Tecumseh Sherman
(1820-1891)

As the title suggests, the book is primarily a collection of facts and oddball "did you know?" type of stories that are not really intended to re-tell the story of the Civil War but are mostly aimed at  people who know the story fairly well and are looking for some new stories (in my case, these are new stories I can use to bore my wife in new and different ways with the Civil War).

There's bound to be something new in here for everyone but the hardest of the hard core Civil War aficionados. Well-written, breezy, although oftentimes disjointed and random.

This book is also published under the titles Our Incredible Civil War and The Incredible Civil War by the same author.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Civil War: Strange and Fascinating Facts by Burke Davis.

Reviewed December 2, 2005.

A Heartbeat Away (audiobook) by Michael Palmer

A political thriller for people that don't know much about politics

Read by Robert Petkoff
11 hours, 42 minutes.

The premise behind A Heartbeat Away is simple and brilliant:  What if terrorists released a biological weapon into the House chamber during the President's State of the Union Address - the one time when just about everybody who is anybody in the Federal government is all in one room together?

The follow through, however, is not so hot.

Palmer's characterization of how a President would deal with this sort of problem shows that Palmer does not understand the one thing that all presidents are - they are politicians. They know how to collaborate, get things done, work with people they cannot stand to get their programs enacted. Even the most difficult President can schmooze and get people to work with them. 

The president in A Heartbeat Away, James Allaire is the most politically tone deaf character I have ever seen. He manages to make the whole thing look like an attempted coup (although most of the Congressmen and women  are placid, like a herd of sheep - I had to wonder if Palmer had ever watched Meet the Press even one time. Those people live to argue. They all think they are the expert of almost everything and just about everything is some sort of scheme)

Anyway, the entire government of the United States is present except for the Designated Survivor - the cabinet member who stays away just in case there is a terrorist act and becomes president. You may remember the many references to Dick Cheney being in an "undisclosed location" during the Bush 43 administration and you then know that Cheney was the Designated Survivor.

A State of the Union address

They are all exposed to WRX3883, a bio-weapon created by the order of the president (who is a "man of the people" despite his dictatorial ways - we see no evidence of this in the book but the author tell us that he is so I guess he is. Oh, he is also a medical doctor - I guess he did not take that Hippocratic Oath thing too seriously, huh? Do no harm unless you're creating a bio-weapon...) and the President does not cede power to the Designated Survivor. Instead, because he is an expert on everything, he goes about working on a secret plan to try to get a cure made, while he lies to everyone and says it is just the flu and everyone is on lockdown on the penalty of death. And - they need to sit down in their assigned seats. Now! Then, a beat down by the Secret Service starts, including a pistol whipping of someone in the upstairs gallery.

The president brings an epidemiologist out of prison where he had been held without trial for 9 months to find the cure in exchange for a pardon. Throw in a number of simplistic characters including a crusading journalist, an evil priest, evil corporate bad guys, an overly-ambitious politician with religiously-tinged political views and a whole lot of talk about the evils of animal testing and you get the idea. This is politics if Michael Savage and Michael Moore ran the two parties.

As I was listening to the audiobook I was wondering where the first family was. They were exposed to the virus in the first pages of the book while sitting in the gallery. They must have taken the order to sit down in their assigned seats very seriously because they don't show up again until the end of the book. Where are they while the president is worrying if his exposure to the bio-weapon is affecting his judgment? Where are they when gunfire erupts, when people start to die of the disease? No where to be found.

This book had all the hallmarks of a contract-filler. There are parts that are actually quite entertaining, but the political story at the center of it all is clumsy, unrealistic and frustrating.

I rate this audiobook 1 star out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer.

Reviewed on April 29, 2011.

Time for the Stars (audiobook) by Robert A. Heinlein

Originally published in 1956.
Published by Blackstone Audio in 2012.
Duration: 6 hours, 36 minutes

Narrated by Barrett Whitener
Unabridged

Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars is a true bit of science fiction history and, in a way, embodies all of the “cool” stuff that made me such a fan – a bit of physics, adventure, young people off to explore unseen worlds, and some newfangled technology.

Heinlein (1907-1988) first published Time for the Stars in 1956, during a time period when he had a contract with Scribner’s to produce books that were young people friendly. They were aimed at young adults, although I enjoyed it as well. It is the memoir of the space travels of Tom Bartlett, who is also one half of a very talented set of twins.

The premise of the book is simple enough. The Earth is too crowded and a research corporation called the Long Range Foundation has invested in several ships to seek out new planets that humans can inhabit. There are already colonies throughout the solar system but they are too expensive and can only hold a limited number of colonists. The Long Range Foundation’s specialty is making investments in things that no corporation or government will invest in because the pay-off will be too long in coming to justify the investment. In this case, these spaceships will explore for decades and may not find anything useful.

Robert A. Heinlein 
(1907-1988)

The trick with all of these ships will be communication. The ships and their radio waves will travel slower than the speed of light and the process of finding a new planet, describing its location and the requirements to colonize it will take entirely too long. Instead, the Long Range Foundation has found that some very few people, especially twins, are actually telepathic and can be trained to speak to one another with their minds. They have also discovered that this telepathy is instantaneous – it is faster than the speed of light and the communication problem has been solved.

Pat and Tom Bartlett have this telepathic ability and are chosen to participate. One twin gets to go and one has to stay behind to relay the messages to the Long Range Foundation here on Earth. Several ships, all named for famous explorers, are outfitted with crews of about 200, including several telepaths. Tom Bartlett’s ship is the Lewis and Clark.  What happens is the classic physics discussion question in which one twin travels at near light speed while the other remains on Earth. Time travels much for slowly for the twin in the spaceship (in this case, the ratio can get as extreme as 250 days on Earth is equal to one day on board the space ship).

Of course, as the twin on Earth ages technology and culture on earth keeps on changing. One of the best things about the book is Tom Bartlett’s growing frustration with the change of language on Earth, especially slang, as he travels. The book itself is 55 years old. The language and style of Heinlein was probably very current, but now it is, in and of itself, a bit of a time traveler. This actually helps the storyline because Tom sounds a bit anachronistic with his banter and his conversational style, his ideas about fashion and his attitudes towards the proper roles of women – it reinforces the fact that at the end of the story, Tom Bartlett has indeed become a man outside of his own time.

There is plenty of low complexity discussion of physics, adventure, the nature of duty, danger, an acknowledgement of the value of scientific research for the sake of research and a fact that no amount of research will replace the actual men and women who have and will continue to put themselves at risk for the sake of exploration.

Veteran narrator Barrett Whitener does a great job of creating a voice for Tom Bartlett – a young, naïve-sounding voice that captures Bartlett’s enthusiasm, lack of self-confidence and wonder. There are a variety of accents involved in the story and they are handled well. Most interestingly, Whitener is able to make the identical voices of the identical twins sound just a bit different by changing their attitudes and pacing.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Time for the Stars.

Reviewed on March 23, 2011.

Atlantis and Other Places: Stories of Alternate History (audiobook) by Harry Turtledove

Published in 2010 by Tantor audio

Read by Todd McLaren

Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

Called a “Master of Alternate History” by Publishers Weekly, Harry Turtledove continues on that track in Atlantis and Other Places with a set of 12 short stories. Topics and eras range from pre-history to the Peloponnesian War to the Byzantine Empire to World War II and two stories set in modern times. All of these stories have appeared in other publications.

This collection begins and ends with two stories about Atlantis, a topic he has explored more deeply in a trilogy. “Audubon in Atlantis” is the first story that Turtledove published about Atlantis. The famed 19^th century naturalist John James Audubon has traveled to Atlantis to catalog some of its unique wildlife. Turtledove introduces his alternate world, including basics of the history of Atlantis and he introduces the House of Universal Devotion, a religion that is most analogous to the Mormon Church in regular history. Turtledove’s focus on laying down the ground rules for makes the first half of the story a bit tiresome. It does pick up once Audubon is in the field.

Harry Turtledove

The last story, “The Scarlet Band” is chronologically Turtledove’s last story about Atlantis. In the story, Athelstan Helms and Dr. James Walton, the world famous detective duo (modeled after Holmes and Watson), are summoned to Atlantis to investigate a series of murders of prominent citizens who have been openly critical of the House of Universal Devotion. It is a fine ending to the collection, even if the murder is a bit too easily solved.

As in any collection, the quality varies. “Bedfellows” is a tiresome story once the gimmick is understood in the first minute, but it goes on for another 10 minutes. “News From the Front” is an alternate history of World War II told through headlines and snippets of editorials.  Roosevelt is savaged in the press for failing to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s will to fight sags so low that it ends up suing for peace, much like the Japanese Empire had hoped in their original plans for the war in our timeline. The premise is interesting, but the headline/editorial format loses its punch and it tends to drag.

On the other hand, “Catcher in the Rhine” and “Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy” are both quite fun. “Catcher” is a play on J.D. Salinger’s famed character Holden Caulfield. Caulfield is visiting Germany and he gets caught up in a bit of magical time travel. Turtledove captures Caulfield’s voice perfectly. “Throne Rooms” is a pure comic bit of science fiction (and the only story in the collection that is not alternate history – it is set in the future). A giant sentient hamster is sent by the Star Patrol to investigate a series of thefts of throne rooms (and their accompanying antechambers) providing plenty of laugh out loud moments.

“Farmers’ Law” and “The Genetics Lecture” are middle of the road stories. The former is a straightforward murder mystery set in a rural village in the Byzantine Empire and the latter is a Twilight Zone-esque very short story (about 6 minutes long) that, unfortunately, telegraphed its punch line.

“Uncle Alf” is set in France in 1929. But, in this world, the German Empire has won World War I and a 40-year-old Hitler is part of the German army occupying France. He is dedicated to rooting out socialism and in seducing his 21-year-old half-niece through a series of letters. The story is told through those letters. Although the incestual seduction aspect of the story is based on strong historical supposition, that fact does nothing to ease the creepy feeling that pervades the whole story.

Sokrates

The three strongest stories are all quite different from one another. “The Daimon” is set in the Peloponnesian War and the only difference is that Sokrates decides to participate in the invasion of Syracuse. In history, this campaign turned into a disaster, but Sokrates is able to offer advice to Alkibiades, the mercurial fair-haired young general who led the invasion. This advice causes Athens to win the entire war and, in the process lose their democracy to a tyrannical Alkibiades. Sokrates lives long enough to regret his advice as Alkibiades consolidates the Greek city states under his power in order to launch an invasion of Persia like Alexander the Great did nearly a century later. Those who are familiar with the Peloponnesian War will especially appreciate the ironic comments and situations that arise in this story.

“The Horse of Bronze” is a simple story of centaurs discovering men, but it is so much more. If you are a fan of Aristotle or enjoy thinking about the concepts behind his “Theory of Forms” (Turtledove introduces the theory in the earlier story “Daimon”) you will enjoy this story of the arrival of men in a world filled with Centaurs, Nuggies, Satyrs, Sirens and Sphinxes.

“Occupation Duty” is set in modern day Gaza. The story is about troops going on patrol in an armored personnel carrier in a hostile, conquered territory.  However, this is not about Israel and the Palestinians. Instead it is the “Philistinians” and the Moabites. In this history, Goliath beat David and Israel is nothing but a distant, ancient memory. The fight scenes are first rate and the irony of the same fighting going on in the same territory for the same reasons with different nations is quite good. Throw in a solid description of a world with no monotheistic religions and a tantalizing peek at this new world’s politics and I found myself wishing he had fleshed this story out into a novel.

Todd McLaren’s narration of these stories was exceptional. He delivers a variety of voices and tones – everything from American southern accents to a variety of British accents to Hitler’s German accent. He even catches Alkibiades’ famed lisp and you can hear the treachery in his voice as he crushes his opponents. Very impressive and enjoyable work throughout.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Atlantis and Other Places.

Reviewed March 21, 2011.

The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (audiobook) by Armand M. Nicholi

Fantastic. A most interesting book.

Published by Blackstone Publishing in 2002.

Read by Robert Whitfield.
Duration: 7 hours, 58 minutes.
Unabridged.

The Question of God is a fascinating book. I heard it is an audiobook. I listen to audiobooks as an interesting diversion during my commute to work and I found this book to fit the bill perfectly. It is narrated wonderfully by Robert Whitfield.

Fans of Freud have complained about the book because they think that Lewis comes out of these debates much stronger than Freud. I agree. But, I do not think Freud was disparaged or misrepresented in these "debates."

Large, generous quotes from both men are the main feature. Both men speak for themselves with Nicholi adding relevant supporting information with occasional discussion of his own research. The arguments flow naturally and I cannot recall a time when the discussion seemed forced.

Lots of biographical material is included as well. The reader (or, in my case, the listener) does not need to be an expert on either Lewis or Freud to enjoy the experience.

The audio version lasts about 7 hours, 58 minutes.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Question of God.
 
Reviewed on March 14, 2009.

Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All by Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell

While not perfect, it is thought-provoking and a quick read

Published in 2009.

Sunny Schwartz is a Chicago-born lawyer who has worked in the San Francisco jail system for 30+ years. Dreams from the Monster Factory is a combination of a personal biography and professional recommendations for our nations overworked, overcrowded and floundering jail and prison systems.

Schwartz is not a hand-holding, excuse-making prisoner advocate. She notes several times that she wants criminals to be punished. She notes: "I completely understand the objections and utter impatience people have with criminals. They have hurt us, our pocketbooks, our souls." (p. 197)

However, practical experience does offer some hard-won wisdom and Schwartz does have some things to suggest that might very well improve the behavior of our prisoners (remember most will become ex-prisoners some day and it would be nice if they were more in step with the rest of us). She focuses on an anti-violence program that is based on Restorative Justice, a program that's been bandied about for more than a decade. However, the team in the San Francisco jail system seem to have found something that works for some of the men and makes them less likely to return to jail due to violent crime.



This book is a quick read because it does not go into any great detail. Rather it is a general introduction to their program and how they decided to go to it. It is interesting, informative and a great place to start any serious discussion of jail and prison reform.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Dreams from the Monster Factory.

Reviewed on March 17, 2009.