Author: Brian J. Noggle

I picked up this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale a year ago, and I regret not macroing out the spelling of Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale because, gentle reader, I do not touch-type, and typing the name of that particular affair takes a lot out of me. Pardon me while I go nap to recuperate.

Ah, that’s better. Now, about this volume.

As you might recall, I read John Varley’s Millennium three years ago and liked it better than the Kris Kristofferson film.

This book is Varley’s first, and like much speculative fiction of the era (and maybe this era, too, but I get the sense a lot of stuff these days is either urban fantasy influenced or space marines stuff, mostly because I’ve read some of the latter and read blogs from Marko Kloos and Larry Correia–I dunno what contemporary science fiction is like outside of that). This book deals with a genetic scientist who is put into prison and sentenced to death for working on the human genome and cloning. It’s told in the milleiu of invaders who have driven humans from earth to outposts in the solar system because they, the invaders, favor intelligences like that of dolphins an whales. Similar creatures exist on Jupiter, and the invaders ignore humans who do not bother the invaders and the like intelligences. A technologically advanced transmission has erupted from somewhere near Ophiuchi (O-fee-you-key) 70 and helps humanity advance, including genetic technology (which has gone ignored by humanity but a few outlaw scientists).

Anywho, a politcal heavyweight on the moon rescues the scientist by presenting an illegal clone to take her place for the execution. He copies her memories and then trains her to work for him, killing her when she tries to escape and replacing her with a clone. After some number of tries, she goes to a moon of Jupiter and encounters a teacher clone and they plot an escape. And another clone goes to Pluto to try to find a way to Ophiuchi after the transmitters demand payment of hundreds of years of scientific knowledge. And allies of the scientist revive a clone she herself left in place.

For a while, it gets a little confusing remembering which clone team is doing what and why, especially as I had to put the book down sometimes for a couple of nights.

And then the book comes to a resolution, very abruptly, in an unsatisfying fashion.

It’s kind of how Lost ended. Remember that television show? Remember all the plot lines and questions, and how they ended it by setting up a final set of questions they could almost answer, and they did so in an unsatisfying fashion? This book has a lot of compelling things going on, some early questions about the nature of self and whether clones are you, machinations of a politician playing games several steps ahead of the characters, and this all gets abandoned for an abrupt ending that does not answer many of the questions.

It’s an interesting read for the speculative nature, but ultimately left me a little disappointed. But if I find another John Varley out there, I’ll pick it up and hope for better.

Books mentioned in this review:

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

This tome is one of the 1000+ page books I’ve been going on about reading for the last year or so. It actually took me over a year–something like a year and three months–to read this book. Short stories will do that–offer you the ability to stop after only five or ten pages in a night, where a longer work with longer chapters will at the very worst compel you to read maybe a dozen, and then maybe another chapter.

Then there is “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. I’m not a fan of the Dreamlands portion of Lovecraft; I know he sometimes liked to dabble in the very fantastic, but part of the grounding in his stories is that the bizarre and dangerous happens to people in the real world. When we get into the Dreamlands stuff, where Randolph Carter goes through a series of adventures in his dreams, where the weird does not have the grounding in every day life or reality, I sort of lose caring. So when it came time to read “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”–which I had never read before–I had to slog. For weeks or months.

At any rate, if you’re a fan of Lovecraft, this book will please you (your Dreamlands mileage may vary). It includes all the fiction, including the longer pieces such as “At the Mountains of Madness” and whatnot. In college, I read a number of shorter paperbacks of Lovecraft’s work, each based on one of the cornerstone stories (“The Lurker on the Threshold and Other Stories”, “The Colour Out Of Space and Other Stories”, and so on). So many of the pieces were familiar to me, but many of the shorter, lesser stores either I had not remembered or had not read.

So all in all, it’s a great collection if you’re in the mood for Lovecraft. And sometimes I really, really was, and sometimes I was not. His archaic style sets a certain gaslight feel to the stories that you cannot get elsewhere, and the language will teach you many neat words. In my twenties, I learned the words “foetor” and “eldritch” from Lovecraft, and I started keeping a list of words I wanted to drop into conversation. However, I misplaced that notebook eight months ago, so I don’t know what words I wanted to learn, and I didn’t learn them very well before that. Ah, well.

In addition to his fiction, the book includes some short stories he wrote as a kid and draft portions of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s nonfiction essay “The Supernatural in Literature” which explores the history of what he calls the “weird” in literature up until his present day (the 1930s). He name-checks a lot of authors throughout history and identifies works he likes. It’s a fifty page treatise, and it at turns made me want to read some historical Gothic fiction and bored me. He lavishes praise on Algernon Blackwood, though, and the complete tales of Blackwood is one of the few books I’ve actually put down with the intention of not picking back up, so I will probably avoid the authors he mentions except Lord Dunsay and maybe Machen. Or not.

This is less of a book report than marking my achievement. Sorry.

Books mentioned in this review:

I did not come to this book with an open mind. As many of you might recall (and given the readership of this blog in its 10th year, I mean ‘Gimlet and Charles’), I was a big fan of the Weber and Dolan radio program back in the olden days. I used to listen to them, first when I worked in the testing lab at Data Research Associates and shared a dark closet with a gruff fellow who was not much for conversation–as if I am one for conversation. Then I listened to them whenever technology and legality allowed them to stream it on the Internet and I had an operating system that allowed it.

How much of a fan was I? I asked my brother to go get me some of their autographed coffee mugs from the station back when he lived in Milwaukee and I did not, and he did it.

As you can see, I still have them proudly displayed in my office.

So I’m a homer as far as the author goes. I forget where I saw that he had a book, but when I saw that, I had to have it.

At any rate, the book.

As you might guess, Bob Dolan’s brother Tim has become the Cardinal of New York, the head of the American church. Bob tells stories about growing up with Tim and their relationship to shed insight into his brother’s character and into life itself. Some of the conversations are a little too exact, which means either they were recreated or, more likely, that Bob recorded them when he thought about writing the book. Some of them do have an interview flavor after all.

I really enjoyed the book. Bob pokes fun at himself, and much of the book is as much about Bob and his travels with his brother as his brother ascends the Church heirarchy. There are a bunch of Catholic themes in the book and some good Christian messaging, but it’s not overwhelming or proselytizing. Mostly, it’s musing, remembering, and humanizing a powerful figure in a way only a brother can. However, the book is more about Bob learning about himself and life with his brother’s occasional counsel as it is a bio of Timothy Dolan. Which is what I related to anyway.

You want to know what kind of man Bob Dolan is? When his brother was in Rome for something or another and Bob’s family was there to celebrate it, Tim gets a couple passes to meet the Pope, wherein he goes up to the Pope at the head of the church and the people with him get to speak to the Pope and maybe get a blessing. Tim offers one of the passes to Bob, and Bob lets his wife go instead. There’s as much for us to learn about life and love from Bob Dolan as his older brother, maybe.

Books mentioned in this review: