Usually taken to be the first book to be written in the 'Hainish Cycle' by Ursula Le Guinn, the action of the book happens towards the middle of the period covered by the eight (so far) novels within the cycle. Located on the third planet of the Gamma Draconis star, the book depicts the interaction and mutual characterization of two hominid groups on the planet. One group are the native High Intelligent Life Forms (HILFs), who have inhabited the planet for millenniums and are well adapted to the 60-earth-year orbit of the planet around the star with nomadic lifestyles and neolitic level of technology. The other group are the Alterrans, a mix-breed of Terrans from Earth and another species, which arrived on the planed 600 years ago (10 local years) to try to include the planet in the "League of Worlds".
However the League entered heightened state of war at the time of the Landing and the starship that brought them had to go back, tacking with it the 'ansible' and instantaneous communication device regardless of spatial parameters, and pretty much all advanced technology. The people that remained on the planet lost most of their advanced technology, some through 'cargo laws' and some through ignorance, and although living in real houses and cities, are lowered to the level of hunting with spears and knives, as the locals do.
The locals have some strange customs, like never looking directly in the face of another person, and consider the Alterrans and inferior breed, non-humans, which feeling is reciprocated by the Alterrans themselves, however they are much weakened numerically and because of their abandonment of their original superior technology. The Alterrans also have breeding problems; they have very few children and are slowly disappearing. This is exacerbated by the fact that the locals (Tevarans) and the colonists (Farborns) cannot interbreed, though they theoretically have a common ancestor in the people from Hain, which colonized most of the known universe with their own genetic code.
The Alterrans and the HILFs are forced to unite, just before the oncoming of the 15-year long winter, when a barbarian horde from the North comes and destroys the Tevaran city and tries to do the same with the Alterran one as well. The united people, or what is left of them, succeed in defending the new city and become more friendly towards each other, the leader of the Alterrans, Jacob, taking a HILF wife, Rolery. During the battles the Alterran doctor realizes that their bodies started to adapt to the local conditions to the point where they can be infected by local bacteria. This leads him to think that Alterran-HILF breeding would soon be possible and a new race will emerge.
Towards the end of the book, after successfully defending the city, Jacob realizes that they are no more on a planet of exile, but that the planet has become their home too.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
"Poodle Springs" by Raymond Chandler and Robert Parker
Yes, yes, I know I said I won't be reading any more abridged Marlowe novels, but since this was the last (eighth) novel and Chandler wrote only the first four chapters, I thought I won't lose much by reading the abridged version. I was right, as after the beginning, which is Chandler's work, the rest is too mushy and presents Marlowe as too much of a softie, which he is, but never shows it in such obvious ways in Chandler's original novels. Parker brings a more modern feel to the novels but also a modern sensitivity and emphasis that should appeal to contemporary readers. This, however, is not a continuation of Chandler's style, and rings unauthentic.
Marlowe is married to Linda and they move to Poodle Springs, which is Chandler's sarcastic moniker for Palm Springs. Marlowe is backed by 200 million dollars from father-in-law and at least 10 million (of 1954 dollars) in his wife's personal wealth, but he insists on working and paying for his office only with his own money. He gets on a case for the local casino runner Lippshultz, who has an IOU from a guy for $100,000. On the way to finding the guy, Marlowe discovers two murders and gets in trouble with the police (again), for helping the guy, Les Valentine aka Larry Victor escape, because he has a soft spot for the young married couple. Another inauthentic detail here is when the tough riverside cop almost breaks Marlowe's knee with a blackjack in front of Bernie Ohls, Marlowe's old friend from D.A.'s office in LA. Although Ohls intervenes, it is doubtful that he would ever let the other cop come close to Marlowe in Chandlers original novels, as they are quite close.
At the end Marlowe's marriage falls apart, but in the last scene Linda comes to his new rented apartment in LA and proposes that they be lovers ... forever. Cheesy, if you ask me, coming in line with the sensibilities of the modern time which Parker aimed to satisfy, but I don't think Chandler would have approved. This book is a good reading, but definitely not on par with Chandler's best Marlowe work.
Marlowe is married to Linda and they move to Poodle Springs, which is Chandler's sarcastic moniker for Palm Springs. Marlowe is backed by 200 million dollars from father-in-law and at least 10 million (of 1954 dollars) in his wife's personal wealth, but he insists on working and paying for his office only with his own money. He gets on a case for the local casino runner Lippshultz, who has an IOU from a guy for $100,000. On the way to finding the guy, Marlowe discovers two murders and gets in trouble with the police (again), for helping the guy, Les Valentine aka Larry Victor escape, because he has a soft spot for the young married couple. Another inauthentic detail here is when the tough riverside cop almost breaks Marlowe's knee with a blackjack in front of Bernie Ohls, Marlowe's old friend from D.A.'s office in LA. Although Ohls intervenes, it is doubtful that he would ever let the other cop come close to Marlowe in Chandlers original novels, as they are quite close.
At the end Marlowe's marriage falls apart, but in the last scene Linda comes to his new rented apartment in LA and proposes that they be lovers ... forever. Cheesy, if you ask me, coming in line with the sensibilities of the modern time which Parker aimed to satisfy, but I don't think Chandler would have approved. This book is a good reading, but definitely not on par with Chandler's best Marlowe work.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Fridrich Nietzsche
I've read this book for a third time now, and I am not sure I understand it more than when I read it for the first time at age 16 in high school, pretty much exactly 16 years ago. Nietzsche's Zarathustra walks around talking to dead men, animals, trees and other men and saints, exposing his beliefs of God, the Universe, the proper way of living, morality and, of course, Nietzsche's favorite topic - the eternal return.
This is the book where Nietzsche through Zarathustra's mouth proudly exclaims "God is dead!". I don't buy much into the bible verse style of writing though. I know other philosophers used it below, and it allowed Nietzsche to claim that it is the 'deepest book ever written' but it is arguable how much questionable depth you can put in piles of bad poetry. Just look at Aliester Croweley, and the piles of verse garbage he wrote, for which he claimed to contain the deepest secrets of magic.
I find other Nietzsche's books, like 'The Twilight of the Idols' and 'Beyond Good and Evil' much more accessible and valuable for getting acquainted with his thought, which was very new and very radical in his time. This book also got me in big trouble with the local librarian when I was 16, but that's another story :)
This is the book where Nietzsche through Zarathustra's mouth proudly exclaims "God is dead!". I don't buy much into the bible verse style of writing though. I know other philosophers used it below, and it allowed Nietzsche to claim that it is the 'deepest book ever written' but it is arguable how much questionable depth you can put in piles of bad poetry. Just look at Aliester Croweley, and the piles of verse garbage he wrote, for which he claimed to contain the deepest secrets of magic.
I find other Nietzsche's books, like 'The Twilight of the Idols' and 'Beyond Good and Evil' much more accessible and valuable for getting acquainted with his thought, which was very new and very radical in his time. This book also got me in big trouble with the local librarian when I was 16, but that's another story :)
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
"Playback" by Raymond Chandler
The sixth novel in the Marlowe series, set in Esmeralda, a city near San Diego, a moniker for La Jolla, where Chandler lived during the last years of his life. The novel is weaker than Chandler's other Marlowe works on the account of the simpler plot, no big twist at the end, and actually having some decent and positive characters in it, primarily from the police.
Marlowe is hired to follow a woman, without being given a reason. During the job he goes south to Esmeralda, where he meets a handful of colorful characters: Ex-gangster turned proprietor, a private eye from Kansas City, a few decent and honest cops, a Mexican-Chinese-black immigrant who likes smoking pot and hangs himself after injecting morphine and a gigolo who blackmails his charges for more money.
There are two subplots going on concurrently: one being Marlowe's following the girl, who is in turn blackmailed by the gigolo, and eventually falls for the ex-gangster for whatever reason. The other is the private eye from Kansas City and the gigolo blackmailing the ex-gangster (who's also from Kansas City) to reveal his past to the exclusive and very rich crowd living in Esmeralda.
The novel is adapted from a screenplay of the same name that Chandler wrote some years ago and was rejected by studios. The screenplay was published posthumously and people who've read both usually prefer the screenplay. Towards the end of the novel Marlowe gets a phone call from Linda from 'The Long Goodbye' who's now in Paris for over 1.5 years but still missing Marlowe and staying faithful to their one night they had together in his office. Marlowe tells her he didn't stay faithful to her, as in this book he sleeps with the lawyer's secretary who hired him and also with the woman he was following, Betty (yes, the panties go down fast as usual). Linda says she doesn't care and she loves him and she wants to marry him. Marlowe tells her to come to LA and they will talk. In the next novel 'Poodle Springs' which is Chandler's moniker for Palm Spring, Marlowe and Linda are married and living in Poodle Springs.
I've read this one in non-abridge version, and although indeed a bit weaker than the other Marlowe novels, it still brims with the hard-boiled dialogue, insightful descriptions and shrewd social observations about people and life in SoCal in the 1950s which is the main allure of Chandler's work today.
Marlowe is hired to follow a woman, without being given a reason. During the job he goes south to Esmeralda, where he meets a handful of colorful characters: Ex-gangster turned proprietor, a private eye from Kansas City, a few decent and honest cops, a Mexican-Chinese-black immigrant who likes smoking pot and hangs himself after injecting morphine and a gigolo who blackmails his charges for more money.
There are two subplots going on concurrently: one being Marlowe's following the girl, who is in turn blackmailed by the gigolo, and eventually falls for the ex-gangster for whatever reason. The other is the private eye from Kansas City and the gigolo blackmailing the ex-gangster (who's also from Kansas City) to reveal his past to the exclusive and very rich crowd living in Esmeralda.
The novel is adapted from a screenplay of the same name that Chandler wrote some years ago and was rejected by studios. The screenplay was published posthumously and people who've read both usually prefer the screenplay. Towards the end of the novel Marlowe gets a phone call from Linda from 'The Long Goodbye' who's now in Paris for over 1.5 years but still missing Marlowe and staying faithful to their one night they had together in his office. Marlowe tells her he didn't stay faithful to her, as in this book he sleeps with the lawyer's secretary who hired him and also with the woman he was following, Betty (yes, the panties go down fast as usual). Linda says she doesn't care and she loves him and she wants to marry him. Marlowe tells her to come to LA and they will talk. In the next novel 'Poodle Springs' which is Chandler's moniker for Palm Spring, Marlowe and Linda are married and living in Poodle Springs.
I've read this one in non-abridge version, and although indeed a bit weaker than the other Marlowe novels, it still brims with the hard-boiled dialogue, insightful descriptions and shrewd social observations about people and life in SoCal in the 1950s which is the main allure of Chandler's work today.
"The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler
Another novel that I read abridged. I will definitely stop doing that from now on, since you don't get the real thing. It is hard to recognize them on torrent sites though. But the rule of thumb is that a 300 page novel, coded in speech quality mp3 format should be between 150MB and 250MB. The version I had for this was barely 60MB, and the quality was not insufferably low, thus the small size cannot be blamed on the low quality conversion.
This novel was written while Chandler was nursing his lover, 18-years his senior, who eventually died and was a huge blow for the writer who passed away himself some years later. It has some autobiographical elements, and that is one of the reasons why it should be read in its entirety, without any abridging, when some prof or self-styled expert decides which parts are important and which can be dropped.
The novel is about Marlowe's friendship with Terry Lennox, an alcoholic married to a promiscuous heiress of great fortunes. When she is brutally killed, Terry skips to Tijuana with Marlowe's help and later kills himself leaving a confession. Marlowe doesn't buy this and is roughed up several times by some tough guys who knew Lennox and his dark history from the times when his name was Paul Marston, a british commando in WWII, captured by the Gestapo in Norway.
Another character, an alcoholic writer, comes in the story, initially looking unrelated, but eventually turning out that his wife, who kills him, and also the lady in the beginning of the story, was Marston's first wife, who thought he died in Norway. At the end Lennox/Marston comes back to Marlowe's office as a mexican, after a face-job, but Marlowe sees through him. Lennox offers the peace branch, but Marlowe refuses, saying that he thought they were friends, and apparently he was wrong, and he doesn't want anything to do with him anymore.
The novel won Chandler the Edgar Award, and some critics consider it his best novel, while others say it is not up to the quality of the first two, which I find magnificent. At the end Marlowe has a short affair with the sister of Lennox' dead wife (as all women immediately drop their panties at the mere sight of him), but this time he feels for her something he hasn't felt for any other woman. She is one of the rare fully positive female characters in Chandler's works. She proposes they marry and go to Paris but he refuses. She is significant since Marlow apparently never forgets her, and talks to her again at the end of the next novel, 'Playback' which is next to last. And in the last novel 'Poodle Springs' of which Chandler finished only the first five chapters before he died, they marry.
This novel was written while Chandler was nursing his lover, 18-years his senior, who eventually died and was a huge blow for the writer who passed away himself some years later. It has some autobiographical elements, and that is one of the reasons why it should be read in its entirety, without any abridging, when some prof or self-styled expert decides which parts are important and which can be dropped.
The novel is about Marlowe's friendship with Terry Lennox, an alcoholic married to a promiscuous heiress of great fortunes. When she is brutally killed, Terry skips to Tijuana with Marlowe's help and later kills himself leaving a confession. Marlowe doesn't buy this and is roughed up several times by some tough guys who knew Lennox and his dark history from the times when his name was Paul Marston, a british commando in WWII, captured by the Gestapo in Norway.
Another character, an alcoholic writer, comes in the story, initially looking unrelated, but eventually turning out that his wife, who kills him, and also the lady in the beginning of the story, was Marston's first wife, who thought he died in Norway. At the end Lennox/Marston comes back to Marlowe's office as a mexican, after a face-job, but Marlowe sees through him. Lennox offers the peace branch, but Marlowe refuses, saying that he thought they were friends, and apparently he was wrong, and he doesn't want anything to do with him anymore.
The novel won Chandler the Edgar Award, and some critics consider it his best novel, while others say it is not up to the quality of the first two, which I find magnificent. At the end Marlowe has a short affair with the sister of Lennox' dead wife (as all women immediately drop their panties at the mere sight of him), but this time he feels for her something he hasn't felt for any other woman. She is one of the rare fully positive female characters in Chandler's works. She proposes they marry and go to Paris but he refuses. She is significant since Marlow apparently never forgets her, and talks to her again at the end of the next novel, 'Playback' which is next to last. And in the last novel 'Poodle Springs' of which Chandler finished only the first five chapters before he died, they marry.
"The High Window" by Raymond Chandler
I read this book as an abridged BBC radio-drama that fits on two audio cassettes, which not only doesn't do justice to Chandler, but also denigrates the entire story, lowering it to the plot-only variety of the previous British detectives. I have a strong distaste for BBC dramas in general, as I believe they never catch the right feeling of the original novels, and cheat the reader/listener of the enjoyment of the original.
The plot is intricate enough, a rare dubloon stolen from a rich, old miserette's house, implying her son and daughter and law. A private secretary who seems to be tied to the family with something stronger than a salaried job, and a string of murders within the circle of the people that got into contact with the stolen doubloon.
Marlowe discovers the truth, which implicates the old lady and her son, but the detective does not surrender them to the cops, his private dick's ethics having a higher priority, but only deals his own sort of justice by giving freedom to the enslaved secretary living a lie.
The novel was filmed as a movie called 'Brasher Doubloon' which was the only movie with Philip Marlowe which I could not find available on any P2P network, which speaks volumes about its quality and by transference, the quality of the book, which seems to be considered among the lower quality Marlowe stories.
The plot is intricate enough, a rare dubloon stolen from a rich, old miserette's house, implying her son and daughter and law. A private secretary who seems to be tied to the family with something stronger than a salaried job, and a string of murders within the circle of the people that got into contact with the stolen doubloon.
Marlowe discovers the truth, which implicates the old lady and her son, but the detective does not surrender them to the cops, his private dick's ethics having a higher priority, but only deals his own sort of justice by giving freedom to the enslaved secretary living a lie.
The novel was filmed as a movie called 'Brasher Doubloon' which was the only movie with Philip Marlowe which I could not find available on any P2P network, which speaks volumes about its quality and by transference, the quality of the book, which seems to be considered among the lower quality Marlowe stories.
"Farewell, My Lovely" by Raymond Chandler
The second book about Philip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler is equally impressive as his first one. The same hard-boiled style, a cynical and dark representation of Los Angeles in the 1940s which rings more real than most of the Hollywood's make-believe fairy tales. The story is just as complicated, if not more, than in the first book. The characters are just as negative, not even the cops managing to squeeze out much goodness and morals.
Marlowe does not really have a client this time, being at the wrong (right?) place at the wrong time he gets involved with ex-con Moose Malloy, a giant of man, who's looking for the love of his live, Velma Valente. The person who eventually hires Marlowe, as a bodyguard, turns, towards the end of the book, to want to kill him, because he was on track to discovering the identity of Velma, who's now married to a billionaire, and leads the decadent and spoiled life of a rich widow, while her husband still being alive, sleeping around profusely, and apparently wanting to include Marlowe in her collection as well.
One things that bothers me about Marlowe, as I read more and more books about him, is not his hard-boiled style, which at times makes it hard to be believable, but is very entertaining, neither is his apparent ability always to get the upper hand in conflicts, no matter how beaten up he gets, or what odds he's against, but that damn apparent charm, or charisma, or whatchamacallit, that makes every beautiful woman (and they are ALL beautiful in the books, apparently LA in 1940s was teeming with gorgeous ladies) drop down her panties (or desperately want to) as soon as she lays eyes on his 6'3'' frame or hears his hard-boiled voice. A bit over the top, but I understand that it was the fashion at the time.
This is a very enjoyable book. I especially enjoyed the hard-boiled dialogue between Marlowe and various tough guys, cops and tough girls. Some of Chandler's books are not available in audio unabridged (and I almost stopped reading books with my eyes, but only with my ears for years now), and that loses all the charm, since the most enjoyment is to be found in the scenes that are not essential for the plot, but are kind of outlet for Chandler to show off his hard-boiledness and perceptiveness in dialogue and witty and insightful descriptions.
Marlowe does not really have a client this time, being at the wrong (right?) place at the wrong time he gets involved with ex-con Moose Malloy, a giant of man, who's looking for the love of his live, Velma Valente. The person who eventually hires Marlowe, as a bodyguard, turns, towards the end of the book, to want to kill him, because he was on track to discovering the identity of Velma, who's now married to a billionaire, and leads the decadent and spoiled life of a rich widow, while her husband still being alive, sleeping around profusely, and apparently wanting to include Marlowe in her collection as well.
One things that bothers me about Marlowe, as I read more and more books about him, is not his hard-boiled style, which at times makes it hard to be believable, but is very entertaining, neither is his apparent ability always to get the upper hand in conflicts, no matter how beaten up he gets, or what odds he's against, but that damn apparent charm, or charisma, or whatchamacallit, that makes every beautiful woman (and they are ALL beautiful in the books, apparently LA in 1940s was teeming with gorgeous ladies) drop down her panties (or desperately want to) as soon as she lays eyes on his 6'3'' frame or hears his hard-boiled voice. A bit over the top, but I understand that it was the fashion at the time.
This is a very enjoyable book. I especially enjoyed the hard-boiled dialogue between Marlowe and various tough guys, cops and tough girls. Some of Chandler's books are not available in audio unabridged (and I almost stopped reading books with my eyes, but only with my ears for years now), and that loses all the charm, since the most enjoyment is to be found in the scenes that are not essential for the plot, but are kind of outlet for Chandler to show off his hard-boiledness and perceptiveness in dialogue and witty and insightful descriptions.
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