Skyrim

I have been playing far too much Skyrim in the last week and a half and to actually review it at this point is a bit absurd. We can all agree that the game is great and move on. Still there are a few points in the game that I would like to address specifically.

Dragon Claw Keys

I can see the value in these. They are likely hard to replicate and even if you did you wouldn’t know the combination. The issue I have is that they put the combination on the bottom of the key. These doors are seriously over engineered with huge turning stones that had to have taken workmen months or years to build. During all of this time someone must have asked the foreman why they were doing all the extra work if anyone who had the key would know how to open the door immediately. Perhaps it was simply a recession in Skyrim and they were so glad to have work that no one was willing to admit that it was pointless work.

Alter Puzzles

I have run into a lot of these puzzles in a lot of forms, but in general you have a pillar you have to turn or levers you have to pull in a specific order. The odd thing is that in almost every case the solution to these puzzles is on the wall of the room.  Since I assume anyone in Skyrim would figure out these puzzles my thoughts are that these puzzles are the Nord’s way of taunting the Falmer who, being blind, would  be unable to solve these puzzles. For everyone else it simply slows them down.

The Way Out

I can understand the value of having a quick way out of a tomb. After all if you’re one of the workmen building these giant tombs you don’t want to have to walk through the entire crypt to get home at the end of the day.  The problem is that after having walked through enough of these giant crypts to discover that there was a path that would have taken a tenth the time I begin to wonder that not one of these people left the back door open. Just once I would like to go into a tomb discover that the back way was opened, bypass the hoard of undead grab the one thing I need and leave without incident.

Why don’t these people know me?

I understand that there are a lot of people running around Skyrim and there is no reason for anyone who doesn’t know me to know why I am, but there are times when it can be a bit insulting. I’m the archmage of the college you live in, we fought a dragon together a few days ago and yesterday I spent five thousand gold buying things from you, but now that I show up with someone else you don’t know me.  I get it, you’re too good for me. You’ve got to impress people after all and I need you for now, but don’t think I’m going to forget this. When the great purge comes, and it will come, you will be among those who are to suffer and not simply be removed.   



Hugo Book Review: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh

Downbelow Station by C J Cherryh is the type of book that I began to read the Hugos to find. An epic science fiction story which tells the story of Pell’s World which has fought itself caught between two empires.  This is the first world which was found to be habitable and while generally unimportant still serves as a jumping off point for other colonization.

At some point later faster than light travel has been created and the control earth has over the colonies is largely breaking down with only a fleet of fifty ships allowing them any real control, a control which is breaking down as those ships are defeated and largely unsupported in the war so that they are losing to a more advanced and growing fleet.

The story begins near the end of that war. One of the earth ships arrives at Pell filled with refugees that put a strain on the bases both because of the cost of resources and because they fear that there are spies among them. Much of the rest of the story deals with these people as well as the captain of the earth ship who is forced to defend them.

While I did enjoy Downbelow Station I never really felt as if there were a protagonist I could like. The ship captain begins the story by doing something more or less evil and it never really feels to me as if she cares about what she is doing. Earth isn’t particularly good as they are both out of touch and trying to hold back humanity, but the others are worse.  This is probably more realistic than those books that have a clear good and evil, but not as satisfying.

I can certainly understand why Downbelow Station won the Hugo Award. It is a very smart book with a lot going on and it takes risks that many science fiction books don’t. The aliens are both different from humans and yet not bizarre and the conflicts are smart. In the end though much of this felt as if it didn’t really need to be science fiction and the story became a bit slow at times. So I can recommend this book to those who have the patience to enjoy a book that is a bit slow, but not for everyone.

Hugo Book Review: The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge tells the story of a world in an empire that has collapsed. The story is set on a world that has a medicine which effectively allows immortality. Very rare it is used primarily by the royalty of this world, but they do not hold that position forever and the world takes place as that is about to change, something the queen doesn’t want.

It is hard for me to read The Snow Queen because separating out the difficulties in reading it is going to be almost impossible from the book itself. I enjoyed the beginnings of this book well enough, but I had technical difficulties twice the second time my Kindle broke and it took days for me to get a new one and then I couldn’t find the exact location I was previously at in the book. Still, I didn’t feel any great desire to return to this story while I was waiting.

The major character of this story is Moon. She is a sibyl which means that she has access to a huge database of knowledge in a strange almost computer like way. This along with the fact that she has a connection to the queen drive the story along with a great deal of politics. This covers ideas like fear of death, the nature of intelligence, the nature of power and even nature vs. nurture.

While there are a lot of great ideas here, but the truth is that I never really cared about any of the characters or entirely bought into the ideas of this story. They just felt shallow and not all that interesting in general.

I want to give this another chance at some point because there are a lot of great ideas in this story, but I never really felt like the plot drew me in and I didn’t care about any of the characters. Still, I can understand why this won a Hugo because the questions and ideas that this sets up are important and not easy to answer and that makes it worth reading even if it isn’t great.  



Hugo Book Review: Gateway by Frederik Pohl

Gateway by Frederik Pohl is one of the Hugo award winning novels that I have most enjoyed. This is a story that isn’t entirely about what you expect it to be about and that is part of the reason I enjoy it so much. The Gateway is an ancient space station that has been found by humans who barely understand how any of it work, but know that the technology is far ahead of them and potentially useful and so are exploring that technology.

The primary way that technology is being explored is by sending people out in the ships that they have found. There are three types of ships at this station. One hold one person, one holds three and another hold five. Though no one really understands why the three person ships seem the most safe and this idea of them guessing about what is safe makes up much of the ship as the main character is trying to find ways to improve his odds of not only surviving a trip on a strange alien ship, some of which never return, but also to find technology of true value so he can become wealthy.

What makes this book different than you might expect is how little the alien technology is really explored. This is about the man and the pain that he feels as well as guilt he feels. The reason for this guilt is one of the few of the major mysteries of this story that is really answered. But even though you don’t find explanations for the technology or solve every problem there is a lot to like about this story because it feels far more real. The technology doesn’t simply make sense because we want it too and the world isn’t a single solution to be found.  

In some ways this story could be considered slow. There is a lot of time where very little actually happening besides character development, but the quality of the story telling and the way it is told helped to keep me hooked.

Having moved on to the next of the Hugo novels I did not read farther in the Heechee saga of books so I don’t know how much more is explained, but in truth I liked many of the questions that this story left as well as the fact that the life of the character isn’t perfect or even all that good simply because he has solved some scientific problem. So, if you like good hard science fiction with real character development then this is a good choice.



The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the masters of hard science fiction. His ability to write stories that examine plausible or possible technology makes for stories that are impressive and in The Foundations of Paradise he writes about one of the most interesting and innovative pieces of science fiction technology ever, the space elevator and the introduction of that idea to the masses is almost certainly the major reason that this story won the Hugo because beyond that idea the major story here is a conflict between ancient and modern culture because the only real place that the space elevator in this story can be placed also has a temple that has  been there for centuries.

The truth is that while the conflict in this story helps the real story is the space elevator and the difficulties and importance of that technology. What is impressive about this is that many of the ideas that came so early. I don’t know the history of the technologies well enough to know how advanced the ideas were but talking about using carbon wires is impressive because people who talk about the idea of the space elevator now still talk about carbon fibers.

Most of the story is the difficulty not only of the engineering but the politics of creating the most massive engineering feat of all time. This examination of this in the story is vital because of the importance of the idea. This is because the understanding that being able to get easily off the ground of earth opens up the solar system to humans in a way rockets never can. This means that even though it would be difficult and even dangerous to build this the far more dangerous thing is to leave humans trapped on earth.

The truth is that I didn’t care all that much for this story. I didn’t really care about the characters all that much and the story fell flat. That doesn’t matter a lot though because it is the technology that rules this story in my opinion.  It is explored in a number of ways from the drawing board, on mars and even in failure and each of them make the idea seem more real and more interesting so if the exploration of technology is what you look for in science fiction this is a great novel, but if story and character are king this isn’t a story you’re going to love.



Hugo Book Review: Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

Perhaps I am too quick to judge books because Dreamsnake is another of the Hugo nominated books that I did not enjoy much at all at the beginning but soon found myself really enjoying, and while there were still parts of it where it felt as if things went on a bit too long overall and at times I really wanted to just put it down I can understand why this got attention though like some of the others I feel as if it is trying too hard to be important and not hard enough to be interesting.

The basic story is in a post apocalyptic world, but what I like about this world is that it hasn’t simply forgotten everything. People didn’t just suddenly become useless and forget how to do everything and the only real reason you know the world was destroyed is because of radioactive craters and other signs, but by and large people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, they have better things to do. This is something that a lot of other books could stand to remember.

The main character is Snake, a healer who has had her dreamsnake killed and is trying to decide what should be done next since that dreamsnake is one of the primary tools that she uses in her healing. This leads her on a long trip to a city where she believes she may be able to convince people to help her create more dreamsnakes. As she goes she uses her ability to heal people to survive. This is important to the story because it lets you see the fears and strengths of each group of people and gets her immediately involved in their lives. And really that is a large part of the book, as Snake becomes involved in each of these villages making things a bit better for them by performing generally pretty simple medicine such as inoculations, while other times she does very complex things.

I didn’t love this story and it wouldn’t be high on my list of recommendations, but that is more because it isn’t the type of story that I care for than anything about the quality of the story, so if you’re more interested in character than plot and want a lot of descriptions you’ll likely enjoy this far more than I did,  yet there is a fair amount of plot here as well, it’s just how it moves forward that is not the way I prefer stories.



Review: The Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft

Mountains of Madness is H. P. Lovecrafts longest story, and at times as you read the story it certainly feels as if it is the longest, though there are a few others that were much harder to read. This is in fact a very interesting story most of the time, though I could have done with a little less detail in a few points and a good editor could probably make this into a fantastic story.

The basic story is that there is a expedition to the Antarctic by a group from Miscitonic university. This group of professors and grad students plans to check the ice for fossils and other points. Since they are from Arkham this can hardly be expected to go right. After all this is the university that requires every professor to read the Necronomicon before they are allowed to begin teaching.

Things go well at first and then a small group of the men decide to fly over the south pole. This is important because at the time they really were exploring and people didn’t know what was there like someone with a satellite image might. Anyway, they discover mountains which are thousands of feet taller than Everest and begin to explore.

Inside these mountains they find huge numbers of fossils including some very strange and well descried fossils which appear to be a sort of mix between plants, starfish and a amphibious flying creature. Basically imagine everything mixed together into a weird fossil.

From this point on things do not really go well. The main group is getting wireless communications from those exploring and they discover more and more until finally another group is sent after them as this has become the find of the century. (though the writer of the story is writing it to convince people not to ever go there again.)

From here they find huge amounts of H. P. Lovecraft mythos including the old ones, information about many of the gods, wars and other creatures who have been to earth and a giant city. There are even things that the Necronomicon seemed to assume were not ever on earth and almost all of them either dangerous to humans or at least not all that friendly.

It is hard to really explain this book because the truth is that it is really more about exploring the strange H. P. Lovecraft world than anything else, but the key phrase to me was the idea that humanity wasn’t evolved or created by a loving God, but creating by powerful beings either as an accident or a joke.  Either way it probably isn’t good for us. This isn’t really a belief that I hold to, but as an idea for world building it is so different from the general assumptions that it finds huge gulfs of open story ideas that no one else has touched on, and in large part I think that is what makes H. P. Lovecraft so interesting, he isn’t the best writing, and certainly not the best human being, but he has a world view, at least in his fiction that is different from so much else.

I don’t know that I would recommend this to many people who are wanting to jump into Lovecraft mostly because its length means that if they don’t like it a lot they are far less likely to finish, but for anyone who has enjoyed anything of H. P. Lovecraft and wants to know more about the world that he wrote about, or for fans of John Carpenters the thing, the Mountains of Madness is a great story to read.



Medusa's Coil by H. P. Lovecraft

One of the interesting parts of reading through H. P. Lovecraft’s stories in chronological order is that you never know what you’re likely to get. One story will be great and then there will be several that are not as good. Medusa’s Coil is a story that I had heard was not good, yet when I began to read it I was actually enjoying it. The story has a B movie feel to it through a fair amount of the story, but I don’t mind that, in fact I like a good B horror movie.  The problem is that the end goes so far off the rails that it makes you wonder if it was done intentionally.

The story begins with a man driving a roadster down a lonely country road. He is trying to find a town in Missouri, Cape Gerardo, which I have been to. This adds something to the story though not enough to overcome the end. Anyway, he finds an old run down home and goes into it to ask for directions, but the directions that the old man in the house gives him are complex and it is getting dark so he asks instead if he can stay there.

The man is surprised because no one would want to stay there, but agrees and begins to tell him the story of his son, who married a woman who among other odd things had coiled strange hair that seemed to move on its own when you were not looking at it. That is right, the story of Medusa’s Coil actually has a character in it who might be Medusa.

The story continues telling a lot of history of the man and the house, but also of a good friend of his sons who is an artist. The artist comes and eventually asks to paint the woman, but won’t let anyone see the paining. He spends months and while he is there the boy she is married to leaves.

This leads into the B movie horror aspects of the story, which are spoilers so if you don’t want them you might want to stop.

So the son returns without warning, sends away the servants, sees the picture goes insane and kills his wife and cuts off her hair. Except that the hair seems to be alive and crawls up the stairs to where the artist is and attacks him. The old man then arrives to see the two dead people and his son insists he burn the paining and the bodies.

Instead, the man buries the bodies and looks at the paining. This is clearly a mistake, but it seems that the hair is actually alive in the painting as well and the man knows that burying it had not stopped it.

The story then cuts back to the present time as the old man asks the visitor if he would like to see the paining. Naturally the man says yes and they go up to it. When the man sees it he is so upset that he pulls out a gun(which had never been mentioned in the story until now) and shoots the painting. This destroys the painting and seems to free the woman and hair.

They flee from the house knocking over a candle as they go and the house begins to burn as the man runs away. This is when you get to the second of the escalating levels of absurdity, moving up from the hair that is crawling across the floor attacking people.  The man jumps in his car and rushes down the road talks to a man and discovers that… the house burnt down five years ago.

I have no idea why this was necessary and you may assume that this is as absurd as the story could possibly get, but you still have the greatest horror, at least to H.P. Lovecraft. This one is so completely stupid that you have to read the story because if you understand how awful the final point is and are prepared then it actually has the potential to reach the so bad its hilarious level of writing.

If you can get over the idea of the main villain of this story being hair or if you simply enjoy the absurdity of this then this is a story that is actually fun to read, but if you’re offended by something that someone who has been dead for most of a century wrote then this is a good story to avoid.



Book Review: Grendel's Shadow by Andrew Mayne

I have been wanting to try to read more independent science fiction books and so when I heard the ads for Grendel's Shadow on a podcast that I regularly listen to I knew it was a great place to start. I knew Andrew Mayne was an interesting person who can tell a good story and combining that with a cover price of only 99 cents the risk was very minor. I am glad I tried this because it was a lot of fun.

The story feels in many ways more like classic than modern science fiction. It is quick paced with a hero that feels like a character out of the pulp fiction tales. A biologist and the universes’ greatest hunter he travels to worlds to hunt dangerous animals.  What makes this feels like those pulp fiction tales is that this is a world which has chosen to live at a lower level of technology. This means that they can’t use any of the very high level technology which would otherwise exist. Instead they are stuck with riverboats and muskets.  This allows the singularity level technology to exist outside of the story so that it doesn’t overwhelm everything as it often does (both for good and bad) in modern science fiction.

Since this is a hunting story much of the science fiction is based on the ecosystem of this world. And in many ways the stories feel similar to those I grew up hearing in Montana from the men I knew who would bow hunt or track bears. That feeling that you are hunting a predator which has every advantage except that of intelligence comes through in the story.

The Grendel's Shadow is a well paced, smart book that is short not because the author couldn’t have done far more in this world, but because it was the perfect length for the story that he wanted to tell so that by the end you’re happy to have reached the conclusion while at the same time a bit disappointed that there isn’t more to read and by the end I had largely forgotten that this was an author who was new to writing fiction and was simply enjoying myself.  So, if you have a kindle, or don’t mind reading a book on  a tablet, smart phone or computer I strongly suggest spending the .99 cents at amazon to download this and read it, or if you’re unable to do that then check out the Grendel's shadow podcast which is the audio version of the book.



Review: The Mound by H. P. Lovecraft

Sitting in the dark with nothing but a few candles I felt the desire to read. There is nothing quite like reading a story by candlelight and no genre better suited to it than horror. So I started in on H.P. Lovecraft and The Mound. A story that appears to be a ghost story not set all that far away from where I live.

The story of the mound takes place in Oklahoma and is about ancient and unnatural mound. Likely created by someone in the distant past there are two ghosts which are seen almost constantly. During the day there is an Indian man, though he doesn’t have the typical features of an Indian. At night there is a woman, headless with a strange blue light. 

From there you learn that when people approach the mound during the day(no one goes at night) the Indian disappears so that no one ever sees him up close. But on occasion when people go there they disappear. If they do return there are either things wrong with them, such as the organs on the wrong side and their hair white or they are simply insane.

All of this feels like a great setup to a Lovecraft story, and if it stopped there it would almost certainly be better because in this story Lovecraft does the one thing he should not do with his strange stories. He goes on to explain everything.  These explanations turn the story from what appeared to be excellent horror to moderate to bad science fiction with a lot of names that don’t mean anything.

That isn’t to say that this is a really bad story as such. The beginning is very interesting, and there are ideas here which are very interesting, and throughout the first half of the story everything feels very strange and creepy even if it is a bit repetitive at times, it is simply the explanation that falls short and this is because every explanation of the strange, weird or horrible is likely going to fall short of what I imagine.

If you love H. P. Lovecraft this is a story which touches on mythos, gives some interesting ideas and could be a great setting for an RPG, but if you simply want to sit down and read a story then you’ll be better off with something else.