Martin's Booklog

Panzer III – Terry J. Gander

Published on April 20, 2008

Cover of Tanks in Detail - Panzer 3

Tanks in Detail – Panzer III
Terry J. Gander
96 pages
published in 2004

Tanks in Detail is one of those overpriced series of military technology books quarely aimed at those of us with war nerd tendencies: short, packed with photos and drawings and going into slightly obsessive detail on a subject normal people at best find boring, at worst somewhat creepy. Reading books on warfare and military history can be justified because war is an important part of our history and it’s important to understand it, but you can’t justify this sort of book that way. This is for people who like their tanks, people like, well, me. As long as I don’t have to pay full whack for this, that is. At 12 pound 99 this isn’t exactly cheap for such a slender book, but fortunately the local remainder bookstore had these for five euros each. At that price, it was worth it.

Tanks in Detail – Panzer III is a reasonable introduction to the main German tank of the first half of World War 2, but which contains little that couldn’t be found on the internet for free. What makes up for it are the photos and drawings, especially the colour side views at the end of the book showcasing the various camouflage schemes used. There are some good pictures and drawings of the interior of the panzer III as well, showing e.g. the instrument panel and the gun mount. For those interested in such things, like model builders, there are however too few of these drawings to be helpful, nor is it clear which scale is used for the drawings and even dimensions aren’t given. It’s all a bit slapdash, to be honest.

The Hidden Family – Charlie Stross

Published on April 8, 2008

Cover of The Hidden Family

The Hidden Family
Charlie Stross
309 pages
published in 2005

The Merchant Princes series is Charlie’s attempt at writing a fat fantasy series. Unfortunately, the rules changed shortly after he had written the first book in the series, with bookstores no longer wanting fat fantasies. Hence what should’ve been the first book was split in two, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family each hastily rewritten to stand on their own. This wasn’t entirely succesful, especially in the first book; the best way to read these two novels is back to back and pretend it’s still one novel. As it is, you have The Family Trade setting up some plot threads which are only resolved in The Hidden Family; read them on their own and you only have half a novel. A pity, but nothing to be done about that.

In The Family Trade we met Miriam Bernstein, journalistic investigator for a IT/biotech trade journal, who stumbled on something far greater than the already impressive whitewashing operation she tought she had uncovered. She’s fired, her house is broken into and she’s almost kidnapped, but then she discovers she can transport herself to a parallel world. It turns out she’s a lost member of a family of worldwalkers, who were also behind that whitewashing operation that got her into trouble in the first place. Though she’s understandably reluctant to do so, Miriam slowly accepts her new family and her own role in keeping the family business –smuggling drugs absolutely undetectably into the United States by running it through their homeworld to make money to buy medcines and luxury goods not available there and selling those to the nobility– afloat. Once she does, she sees some opportunities for drastically modernising the family; The Hidden Family takes up the rest of the story.

The Compleat Enchanter – L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt

Published on April 6, 2008

Cover of The Compleat Enchanter

The Compleat Enchanter
L. Sprague de Camp

Fletcher Pratt
420 pages
published in 1975

J. R. R. Tolkien has such a hold on the fantasy genre still, both through writers following in his footsteps and through those consciously rebelling against his influence that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there was a fantasy genre before Lord of the Rings. There have always been fantasy writers, from the largely anonymous creators of myths, legends and fairy tales up to serious Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley and Christina Rossetti. And when science fiction was born from the American pulps of the 1920ties, fantasy was right there with it. In fact pulps like Weird Tales, devoted to weird or fantastic stories had existed long before the first dedicated science fiction magazine appeared.

Science fiction and fantasy then were even more intertwined than they are today, especially in the subgenre of socalled rationalised fantasy written by the writers working for John Campbell. As you know if you’re a proper science fiction fan, John Campbell was the editor who’s largely credited for lifting science fiction out from its pulp roots and he attempted to do the same for fantasy through the near-legendary magazine Unknown. The way Cambell and his writers approached fantasy was the same as how they dealt with science fiction, by giving fantasy an internal consistency, coherence and rationale, much less mood based than a lot of older fantasy. In Unknown‘s brand of fantasy there are rules to be discovered and experimented with. The Compleat Enchanter is one of the best known examples of this genre, with L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt having been regular contributors to Unknown for which they wrote the three stories that make up this book.

Lord of Chaos – Robert Jordan

Published on March 29, 2008

Cover of Lord of Chaos

Lord of Chaos
Robert Jordan
1035 pages
published in 1994

Lord of Chaos is the sixth book in Robert Jordan’s ever expanding Wheel of Time series. For me it’s the book in which the series’ flaws start to overwhelm its virtues. It starts with the cover, which is more suited to some fifth rate romance novel. Darrel K. Sweet never was a very good illustrator, though he inexplicably keeps getting assignments, but here he excelled himself in putting people that look nothing like the characters, in scenes that occur nowhere in the book, with anatomy that suggest they’re not quite human, or suffering from some severe physical disability.

The novel itself is not very good either; in my opinion its the worst entry in the series, the one where the series really went off the rails for a while. It’s also the longest in the series, which many fans think is not a coincidence. The rot actually set in with the previous novel, Fires of Heaven, but it’s fully visible here. The plot sprawled out of control in all directions, but without moving forward, more new viewpoint characters were introduced and worse of all, Lord of Chaos also saw the return of several supposedly defeated villains. The latter especially raised the spectre of a never ending series. Fortunately, Jordan managed to rein
himself in with the next books, but it was a close shave.

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward

Published on March 23, 2008

Cover of Rivers in Time

Rivers in Time
Peter D. Ward
315 pages including index
published in 2000

Rivers of Time is a new edition of The End of Evolution, a book originally published in 1994, roughly around the same time as E. O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life, with which it overlaps to some point. Like that book, Rivers of Time mixes exploration of the Earth’s evolutionary past with concern for the
present, focussing on the historical three mega extinctions as well as the one currently under way. Unlike E. O. Wilson’s book however, this is not a call to arms. Ward is much more resigned to the great extinction than Wilson is.

Partially this may be because in Ward’s view, this great extinction has already happened, with the disappearance of the megafauna of Europe, North America, Australia and many parts of Asia and Africa during the last 15,000-20,000 years, coinciding with the rise of modern humanity. The extinctions still taking place now are just the aftermath of this. I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but at the very least it puts the current destruction of ecosystems in place like Brazil or Borneo into a new perspective, when you realise the same thing had already happened in Europe thousands of years ago.