Harry Potter and the

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Warning: this review contains substantial spoilers
A few years ago, when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won the Hugo award, a number of people were upset at what they considered a light-weight book winning the award. I admit that I, too, was a tad annoyed. But I hadn’t yet read the book, and when I did I was much less upset. Rowling’s books improved over the years. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s [or Philosopher’s] Stone was a well-done, fun kid’s book. But by the time she reached Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the books were becoming deeper and more serious. Since then, each book has been far more serious and deeper, and the characters have had to face real challenges. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the latest in the series, continues this trend. It’s another good book from Rowling. It, like all of her books, has its flaws (more on this later in the review), but overall the interesting story, good characters, and wealth of interesting detail makes up for this.
At the end of the previous book (Order of the Phoenix), the wizard world came to accept that Lord Voldemort had returned. In Half-Blood Prince, the war in the wizard world expands, to the point that some of it is noticed in the non-magical (muggle) world. Harry returns to Hogwarts, but a Hogwarts that is under tight security. The rest of the book really has two major threads: Harry knows that Draco Malfoy is up to something, and that Professor Snape is involved. He tries to figure out what Malfoy is doing. At the same time, Dumbledore enlists Harry’s help to track down Voldemort’s Horcruxes, which are objects in which Voldemort has stored part of his soul (and thus the source of his immortality). Rowling also uses this as an opportunity to fill in parts of Voldemort’s history, something she also did a bit of in the last book. In the end, the two pieces come together in spectacular fashion and result in the biggest shock in the series so far: the death of Dumbledore. (I warned you above that there would be substantial spoilers. If you are still reading, don’t complain.)
Dumbledore’s death is in fact not only spectacular but leaves some major points to be cleared up in the next book. Dumbledore, returning with Harry from a mission in which he has been substantially weakened (perhaps fatally, and that’s one of the questions), is cornered by Malfoy, whose mission it turns out was to kill him. Yet Dumbledore is unafraid, and in fact tells Malfoy that he is not a killer. Malfoy, in tears since Voldemort has threatened to kill his family, begins to stand down when Snape and several death eaters arrive. (Harry, meanwhile, is invisible and frozen by Dumbledore.) Dumbledore turns to Snape and begins pleading, and Snape kills him.
But the real question remains – has Snape gone over to Voldemort. Or was Dumbledore’s pleading with Snape for Snape to kill him. (The words he uses aren’t specific.) It would certainly solve several problems. It saves Malfoy, who either had to kill Dumbledore and thus be beyond redemption or be himself killed by Voldemort. And it saves Snape, who had made an unbreakable oath to protect and help Malfoy. Moreover, there is also the possibility that Dumbledore has absorbed the Horcrux and that his death (which may have been inevitable) destroys part of Voldemort. What, if any, of this speculation is true must wait for the next book to be revealed.
But this brings me to a complaint about the characters in the series. At times, characters don’t tell one another things that could have changed how things turn out. After Dumbledore’s death, Harry vows to kill Snape. He’s hated Snape all along, and now all of his suspicions, he thinks, have been confirmed. And other key wizards agree. But part of this is because Dumbledore, who has always trusted Snape, has never actually told anyone why he trusts him so implicitly. If he did, the characters may at least have raised some of the questions I did above. But this sort of thing has been true in other Rowling books also. Some character (often Harry) knows something that, if he were to tell the write person, would make the situation better. There are even other instances of it in this book, such as Harry not revealing it immediately when he finds out where Malfoy has been hiding or Harry not telling Dumbledore about the writings he has found of the “Half-Blood Prince.” Perhaps some of this is realistic (though I don’t think that Dumbledore being so closed mouthed about Snape, even with Harry to whom he has revealed just about everything else is), but it still can be irritating.
One other flaw that this book shares with some of the earlier books in the series is that it’s somewhat overwritten. Rowling could cut about ten percent of most of her books, and the books would be better for it. This tends to be especially true in transition, where she’ll ramble along with minor transitional material (the characters walking down the stairs discussing their school books or whatever) that could simply have been cut. I don’t think this is a major flaw, and it’s one shared by other good writers, from Dickens to King (though their ways of overwriting are different – and in Dickens’s case, more central to the effect he’s creating), but I do at times wish she’s edit herself a bit more.
Overall, though, this is a very good book. It won’t be on my Hugo nominating ballot, though that’s in large part because this has been a very good year for SF and fantasy, and there are a lot of good books out there this year. It might have been on my ballot in a year that didn’t have quite so many great books, and it’s certainly on my list of the 20 best books of the year.
(As a side note, I will have one Harry Potter piece on my Hugo nominating ballot: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire will be one of my nominations for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form.

Nine Hundred Grandmo

Nine Hundred Grandmothers by R.A. Lafferty
Most science fiction writers – like most other writers – have been influenced by and in turn (if they are good writers) have influenced others, both inside the field and outside of the field. You can see, for example, the influence of Campbell’s golden age writers – Heinlein, Sturgeon, van Vogt, et. al. – in many places. But in all of this, I can point to two writers who stand outside, who don’t write like anyone before them, and whom nobody has really tried to write like since: Cordwainer Smith and R.A. Lafferty. And of the two, Lafferty is the more sui generis. In Smith’s case, you can see how Chinese story telling techniques influenced him; and you can see occasional stories influenced by him (such as Silverberg’s great short work, “Nightwings”). But I can’t think of anyone who even tries to write in a style similar to Lafferty’s.

It’s hard to pin down a description of Lafferty’s style. In some ways, it seems dreamlike and a bit out of control: but look closely, and you’ll see that Lafferty has tight control over what he is doing. The stories can be surreal, though again that’s often not quite right; in many cases, they are a few steps beyond that. Lafferty’s work can’t be nailed down to any genre or technique. And there are phrases that stay with you, either for their strangeness, their humor, or (usually) both:

“Hi, Robert,” Homer said, “what’s new today?”
“Nothing, Papa. Nothing ever happens here. Oh, yeah, there’s a monster in the house. He looks kind of like you. He’s killing Mama and eating her up.”
from “The Hole in the Corner”

Lafferty’s approach to the universe was somewhat skewed and very much his own. He looked at things in a new, fresh way, and caused his readers to do the same (and often walk away scratching their heads). And this isn’t only true of his fiction. (If you can find it, read his The Fall of Rome which is a history (though history very much in Lafferty’s voice and style.) But perhaps the best way to both be fully immersed in Lafferty and to get a view of all that he can do is to pick up a collection of his short stories. Nine Hundred Grandmothers, his first collection of short stories, was originally released as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1970. It remains a major and highly entertaining work of SF today.

The collection features 21 stories, on various subjects, in various modes – all unmistakably Lafferty, some more or less surreal, absurd, or strange than others (though all certainly strange to some extent). All are enjoyable, and several are major works. There are too many stories for me to mention all of them, but I’ll at least mention several of my favorites.

“Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” is one of several stories that involve Epikt the Ktistec machine (though I defy anyone to try to fit those stories into any kind of consistent story, since that was not something that concerned Lafferty). The group of scientists who work with Epikt have decided to change the past, such that Charlemagne will form a close friendship with Islam and science and literature will flower centuries earlier than it did. Meanwhile, the scientists, who know what the world around them is like, will watch for the changes. They don’t see any changes, feel frustrated, and try again. But each time, even though they can’t see it, the universe changes. It’s both an amusing and insightful look into the historical process and into alternate history.

“Slow Tuesday Night” involves a future world where everyone lives at a breakneck pace. Fortunes are made and lost many times within a few hours. People meet, get married, and are divorced within the hour. Lafferty eases us into it, but once there he sweeps us along at breakneck pace. It’s all unrealistic, of course, but it’s such a fun ride while you’re on it.
“The Six Fingers of Time” is a more serious story than many. A man wakes up with time moving much faster for him. Those around him seem to almost be standing still, and he’s able to finish days worth of work before the others arrive. He learns to control it, and, after tiring of practical jokes (the story does indeed have some humor), he begins to use his abilities to learn. But there is a real force of evil in the world, one that tries to recruit him, which is what really gives the story its more serious focus.

Two stories involve the Cameroi, a planet full of people where laws can be made by any subgroup, the world president is chosen by lot, and no formal organizations exist. The reactions of human researches on the planet are both amusing and interesting reflections on our own way of looking at the world.

Many of the stories feature strange inventions, often made out of the strangest (or silliest) thing or able to do bizarre things. In “Seven Day Terror” a young boy build a “disappearer” out of a beer can and two pieces of red cardboard. In “Hog-Belly Honey,” a man builds a machine capable of causing things that are not needed to disappear (and does things like make a man’s beard vanish). Epikt the Ktistec machine is back in “Through Other Eyes” where a machine allows a scientist to view the world through other people’s perspective, finding out just how different those perspectives are. (How many of us, as kids, wondered if when we looked at something and saw that it was red, if we indeed perceived this “red” the same as someone else looking at the same object. Or did they see what we’d call “blue” but use the name “red” since that’s what they’d been taught as the name. Lafferty starts there, but goes much farther.)

I could go on. As I look down the titles in the table of contents and come across story names, I find things I could say about each. In many cases, I could get very enthusiastic (“that was the great one where … !”). But I won’t. Instead, I’ll just recommend that you go out, if you haven’t discovered him already, discover the joys and wonders of R.A. Lafferty.

The Beers of the Season

The Beers of the Season
One of the things I like most about the Christmas season is the beer. Many of the best brewers brew special beers for the winter/holiday season, and I like to sample a number of them. I don’t drink as many different beers as I did a few years ago – we have wine with most big dinners – but I still try a number of my favorites over the holiday season.
Winter/holiday beers tend to fall into one of two broad categories:

• Spiced beers


• Beers that are one or more of darker, stronger, or hoppier

These days, the latter tend be more common. I like both sorts, though I do with there were a few more spiced beers about. I like both sorts of beers, and must confess that yet one more reason that I really prefer fall and winter to mid-summer is that I much prefer the great winter beers to the lighter beers that many brewers feature in the summer.
I don’t pretend this review is complete. I don’t even pretend to cover all the holiday beers I’ve tried this year.  I just want to note a few of my favorites. I may follow this review with more, since I hope to make to the better beer bars in Pittsburgh over Christmas break.  We have some good ones (though none quite to the level of the Sunset Grill in Boston, which we visited over Thanksgiving break).
As I noted, there aren’t as many spiced beers as there of other types of holiday beers. However, one of the best holiday beers – Anchor’s Special Ale (aka Anchor Christmas) is as always one of the treats of the season. Every year, I look forward to the batch, and every year it’s a bit different. It’s always a dark beer, but flavored often with some sort of pine as well as other spices. This year seemed a bit subtler and less sharp than last year, but it was still a fine beer. It’s not an everyday drinking beer (which can be a problem in Pennsylvania where it’s expensive to buy beer in less than cases), since the spices make it something you want to drink on its own, not with food of any sort. But if you like spiced beers at all, this is one to try.
Anderson Valley also had a winter beer this year.  It’s called Winter Solstice, and the main spice is vanilla. Since vanilla is one of my favorite flavors, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The body is lighter than the Anchor, but that matches well with the vanilla. I had it alone, but for those looking for food pairings, I’d imagine that this one would go well with deserts of various sorts.
Great Lakes Brewing is another of America’s great brewers (and has one of America’s great brew pubs). Their Christmas beer is, like Anderson Valley, comparatively light in body, but with nice hints of ginger and cinnamon. This isn’t their best beer (try their Burning River Pale Ale), but it’s another good spiced holiday beer.
On the hoppy side of the spectrum, we have another of the world’s great beers: Sierra Nevada Celebration. Every Christmas season, I look for two beers – Anchor, as noted above, and Sierra Nevada Celebration. It’s a very hoppy India pale ale, but with substantial body to balance the hops. If you like hops, it’s a beer not to miss.
Victory’s Hop Wallop is even hoppier than their Victory Hop Devil. It’s good, but (and as a hop head, I hate to admit this), maybe even over the top with the hops. (Hop Devil, on the other hand, is extremely hoppy, but I’d list it as one of the dozen best American beers). It does have good body, but for a hoppy holiday beer, I’ll stick with Celebration.
Some of the dark beers I’ve tried also probably deserve to be reviewed, and perhaps I’ll get to them in the next few days.  As I said, I also plan to try a few more in the next week or so, and I’ll let you know if I find any particularly interesting ones.

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
I first read Anderson’s Tau Zero when I was in my late teens or early twenties – not long after it was released in paperback. In those days, I wasn’t as fond of Anderson as I am now. I was reading in a different way, more looking for a combination of ideas and adventure from SF books, and not as much for style or deep character development. Thus, while I enjoyed Tau Zero – it certainly contains some great SF ideas – I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did when I reread it for the first time in thirty years. It’s a marvelous book, well written, with some great hard SF ideas, but at the same time it’s a good exploration of character, of how people cut off from everything in a near hopeless situation act.
The Leonora Christine is a starship that, powered by a Bussard ramjet, travels at speeds that get closer and closer to the speed of light. Her crew is to colonize a nearby star, and the speeds they reach will effectively cut their journey time – from the crew’s perspective – to less than half of what it would have without relativistic effects. But something goes wrong; the ship passes through a small nebula, and its ability to decelerate is destroyed. For, at close to the speed of the light, the crew cannot simply switch off the Bussard and go outside and repair the deceleration engine. At such high speeds, the Bussard serves not only as an engine but as a shield, picking up the stray atoms before the can hit the ship at near-light speed. The only solution for the crew is to keep accelerating and head for the space between galactic clusters where there is less matter. They can do this since, although from the stars’ (or the earth’s) point of view, the voyage will take hundreds of thousands of years, from the crew’s perspective it will take months.
Anderson faces squarely what the crew must go through, knowing that, by the time they finish their journey, everyone they know – and in fact their whole civilization – will be gone. The crew responds in various ways. The main character, Charles Reymont, a very private man who is also the ship’s chief of security, believes that firm rules have to be established; he realizes sooner than others how some will react to this. But he also uses some subtle psychology, both allowing dislike to focus on him, but at the same time building up the support structures of the ship. In the end, he succeeds in holding things together, despite even greater stresses than they thought.
For it turns out that the inter-cluster area still has too much matter for them to stop deceleration. The only solution is to accelerate more, to get outside of the super-cluster. They do repair the decelerator, but by that time they are moving at such a speed that it’s not easy to find a galaxy that they can slow down enough to rendezvous with. And it gets worse. Soon, they notice the universe changing. The universe is no longer expanding; it’s contracting, heading back toward the big crunch that happens before another big bang. (Today’s cosmology finds this unlikely, but it was in line with what we knew in 1970.)
The only part of the book that bothers me a bit from a hard science perspective is the end. Oh, earlier on Anderson waves his hands a bit about how the ship can accelerate at thee Gs while the crew only feels one; but in that case, I sort of wrote it off as his simply not explaining what was going on clearly enough. Perhaps his physics was OK. But in the end he falls into the fundamental misunderstanding of space and the big bang that’s rather common; he, as a physics major, should have known better (though in his defense, he’d been out of school for a while at that point, and in 1970 there weren’t nearly as many good popular science books by physicists as there are now). In the end, the ship stays outside of the big crunch, circling the mass of material, until the new big bang, then becomes part of the new universe. The fallacy here is that somehow space exists independently of matter, that the big bang explodes into empty space (and, for that matter, that time exists on its own). This isn’t the case, as “space” is not an absolute, but comes into existence in the big bang. (Other cosmological theories, including brane theory, allow for a “bigger space” that our universe is part of, but the universe there is even stranger, and again rules out what the ship’s crew in Tau Zero do.) But this is a minor quibble, one that I would have ignored in a book that wasn’t otherwise more strict with its science throughout.
Tau Zero was certainly worth re-reading. I’m glad that I did.
Highly Recommended

Peter Jackson's King Kong

Peter Jackson’s King Kong
After his success with The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson took on another ambitions project – a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong. The original Kong is a masterpiece in its own right. Tightly edited, with a compelling story line and, for it’s time, state-of-the-art effects, it remains a very watchable film. Jackson has long been fascinated with this film, and says that he always wanted to remake it. His previous successes gave him the clout (and budget – in Jackson’s hands, the new Kong may well be the most expensive film ever made) to take on this remake.
So, how did he do? Overall, pretty well. The film is full of marvelous moments, the characters (including Kong himself) are compelling, and much of the action astonishing. Yet, there are times when Jackson just went too far over the top. I shudder to hear myself say this, but at times there were too many dinosaurs. In fact, there were too many of everything at some points. Jackson seemed to be one (or more than one) upping the original. The original Kong fought a tyrannosaur; the new one fights three at once, in a much longer fight. The original Kong fought a pterodactyl; the new one fights a swarm of what look like giant vampire bats (why not pterodactyls?). The original Kong had a now lost sequence where a group of survivors must fight against giant spiders; in the new film, the survivors fight an over-the-top gathering of giant bugs of all sorts. And even where the original Kong grabs, then discards, one blonde in New York who he mistakes for Ann Darrow, the new Kong must discard multiple blondes.
But don’t let the above give you the wrong impression. This is still a good film (though one that could have been better if Jackson just reined himself in in a few places). It’s also very much of a movie fans film, with a number of references to the original film. Carl Denham (Jack Black) is, like in the original film, making a movie within the movie. In one scene, he actually films a scene from the original. When Kong is brought to New York and put, in chains, on stage, the act around him is a re-enactment of the native scene in the original, complete with the Max Steiner music. It’s a lot of fun.
But the films greatest achievement is the characterization of Kong. The original Kong was mostly a giant monster; we know he liked Ann, but there was no real tenderness there. The poor 1976 remake tried to humanize the ape a bit, but clumsily, and in the midst of bad dialog and effects. The new film succeeds, and in doing so succeeds in making both the character of Ann Darrow and the audience sympathize with him. Jackson takes an interesting twist to accomplish this. After Kong captures Darrow and brings her to his mountain home, he bellows at her. Her response – she’s a vaudeville performer as well as an actress – is to strut and perform back at him. He’s amused when she tumbles, and she begins to play on this, to gain his trust. When he takes it too far – he begins knocking her over, since he has found it funny to watch her fall down – she bellows back at him. He walks off, sulking, but the relationship has been established. He saves her, and the relationship is cemented. Because of this, we relate to Ann’s fear when Kong carries her up the Empire State Building: she doesn’t fear for herself. She knows that Kong is going to his death.
The film is also quite exciting in parts, though the excitement is diminished in a few places by the fact that Jackson takes it just a bit too far. Both the sauropod stampede and Kong’s fights with the tyrannosaurs would have been even more exciting had they actually been shorter. But the New York scenes are riveting, as are a number of the scenes on Skull Island.
Jackson puts a bit of a different spin on his characters than the original Kong did. The difference with Ann Darrow is pretty obvious. She reacts to Kong with more than fear and does more than scream. But Carl Denham is also played differently. Both Denham’s are showmen, both are trying to outrace their creditors to create a movie. But the original Denham had an underlying integrity that Jack Black’s Denham does not. When Robert Armstrong’s Denham in the 1933 film calls Ann the “bravest girl he’s ever known,” we take him at his word. He is serious, and while he may be many things, he is not a liar. For the new Denham, the line is simply part of the show. And while the original Denham knew that Ann would draw Kong back to the village, he would never deliberately put Ann and Jack in harm’s way in the manner Jack Black’s Denham does. What it really boils down to is that the Armstrong Denham was an adventurer who also shot movies, while the Black Denham is a businessman who also shoots movies.
In the end this is a fine film, but one that could have been even better had Jackson just trimmed a bit and not gone quite so overboard in a few places. .

The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston

For several years now, some SF critics have been talking about “the new weird,” a term for SF and fantasy that, as best I can tell, is defined by pointing at China Miéville. In fact, China and maybe M. John Harrison were the only people whose works everyone could agree were new weird. The new weird seems in part seems to be defined by the strangeness of the works (or perhaps more accurately the way the strange interacts with the familiar), though I think there is also something about character attitude, political stance, and maybe a bit of nastiness that also fits in. (Some have also defined it as a British movement, rejecting authors from other countries, but that’s a different issue.)

Until now, I was never able to point to any books other than those by China Miéville. Now I also have Steph Swainston’s Year of Our War, a very good, very inventive, very strange fantasy novel that definitely fits in with the new weird. It’s a wonderful first novel, set in a well constructed, believable, but quite strange fantasy world, populated by well drawn characters. It’s reminiscent of China Miéville’s works in some ways, but quite different in its own ways. Like Miéville’s novels also, it contains memorable scenes that stick with you long after some of the particulars of the plot begin to fade from memory.

The novel is set in the Fourlands, a world in which the three sentient species – humans and winged humanoids – have been at war against the insects – human-size insects which have by and large, as the novel starts, been confined to the Paperlands of the north. The world is overseen (ruled would be too strong a word) by a group of 50 immortals under the control of the Emperor. The Emperor has granted immortality to these fifty for their special skills – one is the world’s greatest warrior, another the world’s best archer, another the best sailor, and so on. The narrator, Jant Comet, is immortal because of his speed. He is a mixed breed, can fly, and is the fastest person in the world. He serves as the messenger for the immortals as they oversee the war between humans and insects. The immortals – who are much harder to hurt or kill than humans – serve as leaders in the war.

But Jant is also a drug addict, addicted to a heroin-like drug called cat. When Jant takes cat at near-overdose levels, he finds himself in a hallucinatory world called the Shift, people by even stranger and nastier characters than the Fourlands. It is also inhabited by a few people Jant knew in life, who died of overdoses. The Shift is nightmare like, and many of creatures populating it – creatures whose names and make-up seem to come from plays-on-words – give it an air of unreality. Yet, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the Shift hold the key to the war.

For early on in the novel, the Insect problem accelerates and the Insects swarm over much of the Fourlands. Sqabbles amongst the rulers – both immortals and immortals – make things worse. But the key to all of this lies within the Shift.

Jant is a well drawn and in the end a character the readers like. Despite his childhood of juvenile crime and his drug addiction, he has a strong moral base. He wants to do the best thing for his world and its people, he loves his wife, and has strong ties to several others in the world. There is a great scene where he has to overcome his own worst fears and his instincts to save a shipwrecked young girl.

Jant, as narrator, also helps structure the novel. It’s a fast paced novel, filled with incidents that come one after the other. Jant, as the messenger who flies rapidly from one area to the next, is thus the ideal focal character, in that he has to be everywhere, and he has to get there quickly, passing over the intermediate landscape to get to the next important narration point for the novel.

This is a wonderful first novel. It ends in such a way that while on the one hand it comes to a satisfactory conclusion to the major stream of events in the novel (unlike, say, Dan Simmons’s Ilium which just stops), though there is more to say here. I look forward to her next novel.