Books

As I’m now two weeks behind on my What I’m Reading posts, time to start catching up.
THE DISAPPEARING SPOON And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of Elements by Sam Kean is a random but entertaining walk through the various elements, their discovery and their role in human life, from the title practical joke (spoons of the liquid metal gallium dissolve if you stick them in hot coffee) through the value of europium in anti-counterfeiting, the toxic effects of thallium and nitrogen (apparently if we breathe an all nitrogen atmosphere we don’t even notice we’re dying), molybdenum’s role in building cannons and more. Informative and well done.
DARK LORD OF DERKHOLM by Diana Wynne Jones stems from the same distaste for epic fantasy/D&D cliches as Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, but works much better: The premise is that a man from our world who’s bound a powerful demon uses it to force a peaceful fantasy world to act out Tolkienesque epic adventures for paying tourists (with side businesses such as gem smuggling and assassination). Only this year, the assembled wizards have a scheme to finally put a stop to this—unfortunately nobody’s told Derk, the hapless wizard designated to play Lord oF Evil. Much more entertaining than I found it first run (just as Tough Guide is a lot less so).
AEGYPT by John Crowley is a dull literary novel in which an unsuccessful college professor brooding over his life contemplates writing a history of occult beliefs (which Crowley seems to believe is a groundbreaking idea) and toying with the idea that these beliefs might actually represent ancient truths we’ve forgotten (ditto). As someone who likes Crowley’s fantasy work, this was very disappointing, reminiscent of Foucault’s Pendulum in its tedious pontificating about ancient secrets.
DOMNEI, by James Branch Cabell, has a young noblewoman selling herself to the pagan warlord Deucalion to preserve the life of the reformed rogue Perion (her Great Love), creating in an eccentric triangle as Perion and Melucent strive to reunite against all odds while Deucalion and his sidekick Ahasueris scoff at such over-the-top romanticism while also envying and eventually succumbing to it. The unabashedly romantic ending is very out-of-character for the cynical Cabell, which may explain why he considered Music Behind the Moon (paired with my edition of Domnei) as the true end of the story: This narrative of a poet constantly haunted by music no-one else can here plays to Cabell’s more familiar themes about how Great Passion satisfied only leads to dull domesticity and compromise (Domnei is definitely the more entertaining of the two).
SHARDS OF HONOR was the first book in Lois McMasters Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, an Opposites Attract SF romance in which a female commander in the peaceful Betan spacefleet winds up working with Captain Aral Vorkosigan of the imperialistic Barrayar, first to thwart a treasonous attack threatening them both, then to prevent a disastrous Barrayar invasion of another planet, all the hile insisting to themselves their love is Hopelessly Impractical and Unworkable. Good, but not terribly memorable (the clash reminds me of a lot of Klingon/Federation fanfic romance).
The sequel BARRAYAR (a couple of chronologically later Vorkosigan books intervene between the writing of the two), on the other hand makes me appreciate why Bujold has such a devoted following. In this one, Cordelia’s adjustment to Barrayar’s militaristic society becomes more complicated when her husband’s regency is targeted by a usurper and an assassin’s poison-gas attack makes it likely her son will be born crippled on a world where “handicapped” is about as horrifying as “mutant” in Marvel (said son is the protagonist of the body of the series). Much better.