August 30, 2008 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
Quid Pro Quo by Manna Francis (Science fiction, mystery, short story collection)
This collection of one novella and five short stories is the sequel to Mind Fuck. As I mentioned in that review, almost the entire series is available online, but the print versions are much nicer.
Quid Pro Quo
The book begins with a novella which isn’t yet available online–it was written specifically for the print release, so that loyal fans of the online version would get a little something new as incentive for buying the book.
Liz Carey, a Specialist Investigator for I&I’s Corporate Fraud Department requests Toreth’s help with a joint CF/General Criminal investigation into a corporate kidnapping case. The kidnapping, rape, and dismemberment of 17-year-old Sofie Kenward would ordinarily be a job for the civilian police, rather than the Investigation & Interrogation division, but the possibility of corporate sabotage or fraud make it I&I’s business.
The team’s best lead seems to be a connection to the sensational kidnapping of Louise Selman fifteen years earlier, but her father wants the case buried–and when one of the Selmans, of Selman-Sterntech, one of the Administration’s more influential corporations, wants something buried, it’s more than an investigator’s job is worth to go digging.
“Quid Pro Quo” is another complex, twisty mystery, and quite satisfying in that respect. Surprisingly Warrick, the series’s other protagonists and Toreth’s regular lover, doesn’t appear in this novella beyond the first chapter. It makes sense, because so early in their relationship, when they haven’t even moved beyond their Friday night assignations, there’s no reason for Toreth to discuss his work or for Warrick to become involved in his cases the way he occasionally does later. I actually found the mystery so interesting that I didn’t even notice Warrick’s absence until the story was over.
Friday
This is quite a short piece, only eight pages long. A few months after “Quid Pro Quo”, Warrick thinks about some of the changes in his life since he’s been–involved–with Toreth. Looking forward to leaving SimTech for one of their regular Friday meetings, he has one last meeting with Cele, an old friend of his sister’s…and she’s sure to notice the fading bruises on his face.
“Friday” is one of the series’s first attempts to answer a recurring question: how can someone like Warrick, a fairly decent, ordinary human being, involve himself with someone like Toreth, a sociopath and professional torturer? Warrick will eventually come up with some answers, later on in the series.
Pancakes
Definitely no mysteries in this short story: Pancakes is all about relationships. Mainly, Toreth’s relationship (such as it is) with Warrick, but also some nice scenes between Toreth and the inestimable Sara, his admin (i.e. his secretary/personal assistant.) Toreth meets Warrick’s sister, Dillian, and in one of the funniest scenes from the series, Toreth meets Sara’s new cat.
For pretty much the first time since Mind Fuck, Warrick is forced to confront what Toreth does for a living, which doesn’t make him happy.
Surprises
Toreth proves his ability to maintain a semi-permanent relationship while taking commitment-phobia to new extremes when he has Sara help him pick out a gift for Warrick:
“Buy him something kitchen-y, then.”
Immediately he regretted telling her about his sudden gift-giving impulse, but it was much too late. Something kitchen-y. Something nice and domestic. For a moment he actually felt sick, the overly sweet smell of the melting chocolate catching at the back of his throat. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said, when the feeling passed.
Once again, no investigation. That’s not a complaint–as good a mystery writer as she’s proved herself to be, Francis is so good at writing complex, dysfunctional relationships that her short stories never feel like there’s anything lacking.
There are a lot of sex scenes, which usually aren’t my cup of tea. My automatic, completely involuntary reaction to graphic sex in a story is usually to skim rapidly through it–not because they make me uncomfortable, but because they’re almost always boring. Most of the time I don’t even notice I’m doing it. In The Adminstration, though, I really don’t mind them; this is one author who manages to make graphic bondage & donmination sex scenes interesting and funny, using them to explore characters and their relationships without putting me to sleep with tedious detail.
Family
For some reason, I’d forgotten how much I love this story. Toreth’s first meeting with Warrick’s family pretty much defines uncomfortable, with side orders of horror and hilarity. And the ending was so unexpected the first time I read, but so perfect, and it still makes me smile.
Family, besides being a really good character-driven short story, sets up a fair amount of background information that becomes important in some of the later novels.
Mirror, Mirror
This author really does have a way with sex scenes. Toreth just has so much fun setting up elaborate scenes for Warrick that I have fun reading about it. And the last line is just perfect.
It’s hard for me to evaluate this collection as a whole, because I’ve read all but the first story many times before, but I get the sense that it would work just as well for a first-time reader as it did for me. There’s a very nice progression in Toreth and Warrick’s relationship through the book, mirroring the ever-greater depth of characterization as the reader gets to know them better. The last two stories, Family Values and the very short Mirror, Mirror work well together to bring the collection to a close while leaving some interesting avenues for later stories.
This book won’t really make much sense without some of the background information from Mind Fuck, and it also contains spoilers for that novel, so the two should definitely be read in order. Quid Pro Quo is available to order from Casperian Books and from other major online booksellers like Amazon.
Except for the novella “Quid Pro Quo”, all the stories from this collection are available online (including “Unlucky Break“, the short story which became the first chapter of “Quid Pro Quo”).
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Manna Francis, R.I.P. III, short story collection, The Administration
July 7, 2008 at 4:22 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
93. First Meetings by Orson Scott Card (Science fiction, short story collection) 208 p.
Twenty-five years after the first publication of “Ender’s Game”, it was re-published in this collection, along with three new short stories set in the same universe. The first two stories are prequels of sorts, starring Ender’s father as a child and as a young man, and the last in the collection is an Ender story set between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.
The collection is a thematic one, the stories tied together by featuring some of the important first meetings between various characters in the series. It’s a link that seems tenuous but works surprisingly well, since part of the fun of each of the stories is that we, the readers, already know how these new relationships are going to turn out, which gives the stories a similar feel even when they have very different moods.
The only exception to this is “Ender’s Game” itself, which isn’t really a first meeting story, although it does include Ender’s first encounters with two very important people (and was itself many people’s first meeting with Ender.) It’s okay that it doesn’t completely fit in with the other stories–it isn’t just another short story set in the Enderverse, so its inclusion in the collection doesn’t really need any justification.
The Polish Boy
At the age of five, John Paul Wiggin has his first meeting with the man who will shape his family’s lives. This is a fun story, and the one which is closest in feel to “Ender’s Game”, focussing as it does on Ender’s father as a boy. I’m particularly fond of Card when he writes from the perspective of young children, especially brilliant ones like John Paul or Ender.
It was also nice to get an explanation for the unusual interest displayed in Ender’s family later on, which I found a bit strange when I read Ender’s Game. It reaffirms my faith in Card that he was able to produce a valid reason for it–it’s a minor plot thread, but I’m glad it wasn’t left dangling.
Rating: 10 out of 10
Teacher’s Pest
John Paul Wiggin, now a university student–and a rather arrogant and obnoxious one, at that–meets Theresa Brown, his future wife, when he is enrolled in a class that she’s teaching. I started out not liking John Paul is this story; his superior intellectual abilities, though they partly justified his attitude toward the class, in no way excused the way he was planning to behave. His reaction to Theresa was endearing, though, and a character with a vulnerability is much easier to care about, so I ended by enjoying the story much more than I expected.
This story, along with The Polish Boy, illuminated a number of things about Ender’s family life in a relatively short amount of space. For example, John Paul’s and Theresa’s own family backgrounds, and John’s Paul intellectual arrogrance, went a long way toward explaining how they managed to produce a son like Peter.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Ender’s Game (original novella)
“Ender’s Game” originally appeared as a novella in Analog in 1977. Card expanded it and published it as a novel in 1985, and it’s as a novel that most people are familiar with Ender’s Game. I picked up a remaindered copy of this collection for $2, because I’d heard a lot about Ender’s Game and wanted to read it. And of course I couldn’t resist reading the novella first, even though I was worried it would spoil the experience of reading the novel. As it turned out, my fears were totally groundless; it really doesn’t matter which you read first. Essentially, both version tell the story of Ender Wiggin, a brilliant boy who is in military training sometime in the near(ish) future, and of humanity’s war with the first alien species it has ever encountered.
It’s funny, but when I re-read “Ender’s Game” today, I realized for the first time just how many things in it are different from the novel. Card didn’t just expand the novella when he transformed it into a novel, he re-wrote it and made many small but telling changes. For example, “Ender’s Game” is a novel which includes no women, not particularly surprising for a short piece of Military SF written in the 1970’s. Ender’s Game, however, contains several important female characters, two of whom are absolutely critical to the story Card tells in the novel, which is not quite the same story as the one he told in the novella. Likewise, Ender is given a family and a psychological history that are quite different to the one off-handedly mentioned in “Ender’s Game”, and the nature of humanity’s enemy, and the war being fought, is startlingly different.
All these changes are for the better. Without disparaging the novella in any way–because it is, without question, among the best short pieces of science fiction ever written–there was not one change made in it’s transformation into a novel that was not for the better. Given that, I think it’s a testament to the quality of “Ender’s Game” that even though the novel is superior, the novella is still an entertaining and absorbing story that is worth anyone’s time–even if that someone has already read Ender’s Game.
Rating: 10 out of 10
The Investment Counselor
An avaricious accountant’s attempt to blackmail Ender is foiled by his new investment software, a helpful, human-like program called Jane.
This is by far the weakest story in this collection, but in a way that isn’t primarily Card’s fault. Unfortunately, the story depends on a lot of background material from the novel Ender’s Game. Since that material isn’t in the novella, “The Investment Counselor” has to summarize a great deal of information about Ender and Valentine that anyone who has read the novel will already know. This story is the most frivolous in the collection, and it’s simply too light to carry the weight of so much exposition–it isn’t worth giving so many explanations in order to tell what is essentially a joke.
Card is certainly talented enough to have found a more graceful way of weaving the necessary backstory into this tale, but it would have lengthened it considerably and been more effort than the story itself is worth–not to mention that it would have been a rehashing of the same material Card did a beautiful job of presenting in Ender’s Game. Frankly, I think Card should have cut most of the exposition and let the story be dependent on Ender’s Game. (Since it first appeared in an anthology, I understand why he didn’t, but it still diminishes the quality of the story.)
Ender’s encounters with Jane were delightful, but the story glossed over the serious events–the near-exposure of Ender’s identity, which would certainly have been fatal for both him and Valentine, and the fate of Benedetto–so fast that I hardly had time to take them in. The tone of the story was very light, but a lot of the events in it weren’t, almost as if Card didn’t understand their significance, which I don’t believe for a second. All in all, a very odd little story, far rougher in its execution than I’ve ever seen from Card before, but still a good read.
Rating: 7 out of 10
It’s a shame that First Meetings ends on a weak note, but the quality of the first three stories is such that it doesn’t matter much. Even the book itself is quite attractive, a nice little hardcover with a decent cover. The inside is even better, with lots of fun, quirky illustrations by Craig Phillips, and a better font and layout than any other Ender book I’ve read (including the 20th anniversary hardcover edition of Ender’s Game, which has a great cover but an unattractive interior.)
This collection will have limited appeal to anyone who hasn’t read Ender’s Game, but I urge anyone who loves that book to pick up a copy of this collection: these stories shouldn’t be missed by any Ender fan! And if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, go out a get a copy right away–it’s certainly the most entertaining, well-written, thought-provoking, and emotionally honest work of science fiction I’ve ever read, and very accessible even to non-SF fans.
Overall rating: 9 out of 10 (10 out of 10 for the first three quarters)
Pages read:27,239
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Cardathon Challenge Redux, Enderverse, Orson Scott Card, short story collection
April 3, 2008 at 1:50 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
51. Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 346 p.
It’s funny to remember it, but when I was younger, I didn’t really like Miss Marple. In fact, I found her quite dull. Right up until the point when she became my favourite of Agatha Christie’s characters. Old and gossipy, Miss Jane Marple has spent her life learning all about human nature, while hardly ever leaving her little village of St. Mary Mead.
This is amply demonstrated in The Tuesday Club Murders. At Miss Marple’s home are gathered her nephew Raymond, artist Joyce Lemprière, retired Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, clergyman Dr. Pender, and a lawyer, Mr. Petherick. At Raymond’s suggestion, they decide to play a game: each will tell the true story of a baffling mystery only he or she knows the answer to, and the others will try to guess the solution. Although they invite Miss Marple to play only out of kindness, thinking an elderly spinster who has spent her whole life in a small village cannot possibly know anything of murder, Miss Marple gets the solution every time!
Some time later, when Sir Henry is again visiting the village, a dinner party which Miss Marple attends leads to the same game—with much the same result. In the thirteenth story, Sir Henry is once again in St. Mary Mead, when the apparent suicide of a young girl turns out to be murder. These thirteen stories form the largest part of the collection. The rest is made up of the seven Miss Marple stories that were published in the collections The Regatta Mystery, Three Blind Mice, and Double Sin.
The Miss Marple stories are uniformly excellent. I adore her rambling conversation, and her village parallels. This collection contains some of Christie’s funniest passages, like this one from The Thumbmark of St. Peter:
“Now, I dare say you modern young people will laugh, but when I am in really bad trouble I always say a little prayer to myself—anywhere, when I am walking along the street, or at a bazaar. And I always get an answer. It may be some trifling thing, apparently quite unconnected with the subject, but there it is. I had that text pinned over my bed when I was a little girl: Ask and you shall receive. On the morning that I am telling you about, I was walking along the High Street, and I was praying hard. I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, what do you think was the first thing that I saw?”
Five faces with varying degrees of interest were turned to Miss Marple. It may be safely assumed, however, that no one would have guessed the answer to the question right.
“I saw,” said Miss Marple impressively, “the window of the fishmonger’s shop. There was only one thing in it, a fresh haddock.”
She looked round triumphantly.
“Oh, my God!” said Raymond West. “An answer to a prayer—a fresh haddock!”
“Yes, Raymond,” said Miss Marple severely, “and there is no need to be profane about it. The hand of God is everywhere. The first thing I saw were the black spots—the mark of St. Peter’s thumb. That is the legend, you know. St. Peter’s thumb. And that brought things home to me. I needed faith, the ever-true faith of St. Peter. I connected the two things together, faith—and fish.”
Sir Henry blew his nose rather hurriedly. Joyce bit her lip.
Pages read: 13,904
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Miss Marple, short story collection
April 2, 2008 at 1:35 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
50. Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 277 p.
Mr. Parker Pyne, a retired government statistician, runs a rather unusual business. His advertisement in the Times agony column reads:
ARE YOU HAPPY? IF NOT, CONSULT MR. PARKER PYNE, 17 Richmond Street.
The experience and knowledge acquired in the course of his career has made Parker Pyne an expert on human happiness. As he says in the speech he gives prospective clients, there are only five main causes of unhappiness, and once you know the cause, the cure shouldn’t be hard to find. For a fee, Mr. Parker Pyne provides that cure.
In the first six stories, we see Parker Pyne at home in England, solving problems from his London office. In the last six, he goes on vacation to the East, but finds that his Times advertisement precedes him wherever he goes. Parker Pyne handles any situation with aplomb, from bored city clerks to cases of murder.
This was a very quick and enjoyable read. I’ve read this book before, but not in a long time, so it was fun getting to know Parker Pyne again. He also has odd story in other collections, but this is the only book he has all to himself, since he never appears in a full-length novel. I find these some of Christie’s most successful short stories; since Parker Pyne isn’t, strictly speaking, a detective, she had more freedom about the kinds of stories she could tell.
Pages read: 13,904
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Parker Pyne, short story collection
March 31, 2008 at 5:07 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
45. Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 224 p.
Partners in Crime features Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the husband-and-wife team who first appeared in The Secret Adversary and went on to star in N or M, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and Postern of Fate. I’ve always found the latter three strange and confused, but I adore early Tommy and Tuppence.
Somewhat bored with life as a London housewife, Tuppence feels she’s grown to take the good things in her life for granted, and vetoes Tommy’s solution:
“Shall I neglect you a little?” suggested Tommy. “Take other women about to night clubs. That sort of thing.”
“Useless,” said Tuppence. “You would only meet me there with other men. And I should know perfectly well that you didn’t care for the other women, whereas you would never be quite sure that I didn’t care for the other men. Women are so much more thorough.”
Instead, she wishes for something exciting to happen—and only moments later, she gets the answer to her wish. Tommy works in an unspecified government intelligence agency, and his boss, Mr. Carter, offers the couple the chance to do a bit of field work. Tommy and Tuppence agree to take over a small detective agency, working on perfectly genuine cases while they keep an eye out for espionage.
The Beresfords take to detecting like ducks to water, amusing themselves (and me) by using the methods of various fictional detectives, including both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Their efforts are amateur, but aside from one or two embarrassing incidents, they generally manage to carry the day.
Partners in Crime is partly mystery, and partly a hilarious parody of fictional detectives’ methods and mannerisms—in fact, Tommy and Tuppence spend most of their time imitating the mannerisms rather than the methods, which only makes it funnier—as do their clients bemused reactions to them in their various roles.
This book was another re-read for me, but I’d forgotten just how wonderful it is, and I had an even better time revisiting Tommy and Tuppence’s adventures than I anticipated.
Pages read: 12,560
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, short story collection, Tommy and Tuppence
