I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from Boneshaker. Victorian dandies in anachronistic airships? Coal-fired robots? Huckleberry Finn with zombies?

I admit that when I read the back cover and saw that zombies were mentioned, I was a bit skeptical. Zombies have become somehwat ubiquitous lately. Certainly, they symbolize the problems with our modern society quite well. It’s just a bit unfortunate that they seem to have become the secret ingredient du jour, like cilantro, acai berries, pomegranate. However, Boneshaker was published in 2009, so I can overlook this.

Boneshaker is the story of Briar Wilkes, whose son, Zeke Wilkes, has ventured into old Seattle to find answers about his father. The catch is that Seattle is surrounded by a wall, meant to contain both a noxious gas called Blight, and the horde of “rotters” that the Blight created. The Blight was released from beneath the city some fifteen years earlier when a drilling machine called the Boneshaker went out of control. That machine was invented by Briar’s husband, Leviticus Blue, who hasn’t been seen since the incident. This association has caused both Briar and Zeke to become pariahs in the Seattle community. Thus Zeke’s adventure into old Seattle.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I was prepared for something really over-the-top in terms of suspension of disbelief, such as The Difference Engine or even The Age of Unreason. Fortunately, most everything in Boneshaker was within plausibility. Of course, there was a character with a cybernetic arm and another with what had to have been LEDs in his gas mask. And there was the Blight, of course, but that an explanation for that was never offered. I believe that it’s sometimes better to leave a mystery than to offer an unsatisfactory explanation.

I thought the book was fairly well written. The author did something that I thought was interesting. For most of the book, Briar’s story takes place a few hours behind Zeke’s story. This kept the suspense a bit higher than it would have been had the stories been presented synchronously.

Unlike (I assume) most other day planners, this one has places to track how far you’ve traveled, what you’ve had for breakfast, how many books and movies you’ve seen, hours worked, whether you learned something, your friends, their dietary restrictions, and your ratio of good times and bad times with each.

It appeals to both my highly organized and my absurd sides.

For example, I can now tell you that in January:

• I traveled an average of 37 miles per day.
• My breakfasts were: 70% Protein Shake, 16% Food Bar, 9% Pancakes, 3% Eggs
• I read three books with a total of 1,086 pages.
• I watched an average of 1.28 hours of television per day.
• I saw only one movie, Best Worst Movie (documentary, 93 minutes.)
• While my friends tracker shows zero bad times (yay!), it doesn’t show too many good times, either (boo.) This probably has something to do with my work tracker, which is solid black and seems to be bleeding over into the next few pages. (Maybe I shouldn’t have filled it in with a big black Sharpie.)

There is one more tracker that I found enlightening, the “Dreading/Looking Forward To” tracker. It’s a string of bubbles (twelve strings, actually) that represent each day of the year by month. Another series of bubbles serves as a key: “Dreading,” “Looking Forward To,” and “Over.” I think that one’s meant to color in the bubbles with colored pencils. I don’t have any, so I’ve been making happy and sad faces in the bubbles. And do you know what? In January, the “Dreading” faces outnumber the “Looking Forward To” faces by 7:1.

The good news is that many things that looked like boogiemen on the way in, looked like grumpy old men in Halloween masks on the way out. So I can, at least, get that big black Sharpie, and change those past “Dreadings” to “Overs.”

Just Finished: Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery

What an unusual book Spaceman Blues was. I admit that at first, I was skeptical, and even suspected the title to be metaphorical, as the early part of the book described parties, neighborhoods, and musicians in great detail. But, I was hooked as the story’s mystery began to unfold.

When a man named Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González vanishes, New York City goes into mourning. Soon after, his apartment explodes, leading many to believe Manuel to be alive and in hiding. Among them are Wendell Apogee, whose love for Manuel leads him to stranger places than he could have imagined.

I was pleasantly surprised and entertained by this story, most of all by the author’s storytelling style. I can only describe it as an interesection between William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut. (This may have been the author’s intent, as a the story contained a character named Trout.) He packs a lot of activity into his prose, creating an impression of something like a visual montage of a busy metropolis.

I’m looking forward to future books by this author.

I feel as though I may need to preface my review of this book with a disclaimer of sorts.

I hate to use the words epic and saga as they’ve been horribly abused by both media and public. An epic is simply a long narrative, and a saga is basically a historical account or biography. If I were to use either word, I’d make sure to use them to mean what they really mean.

That having been said, let’s continue.

Open Secrets continues the epic saga of Vanguard Station, or Starbase 47, as it’s officially known. The series is something of a departure from the standard Star Trek novelizations. As with the previous books in the series, the Enterprise is nowhere in sight, though it and her captain are mentioned from time to time, if only to link up with the established timeline.

This story covers the repercussions of the events of the previous book, Reap the Whirlwind. Diego Reyes, commander of the station, is replaced and faces court-martial. Intelligence officer T’Pryn is taken, comatose, back to Vulcan to undergo a desperate healing attempt. And, of course, just enough of the mysterious and powerful Shedai is revealed to keep the space opera fans happy. (Myself included.)

Open Secrets eventually does something that I believe is the mark of a good prequel. (Never mind that this story takes place at the same time as the original series.) I believe that a good prequel will take elements from the original work (whether loose threads, red herrings, or underused symbolism) and connect them together in a way which adds a new layer of understanding to the earlier work, or may alter its meaning entirely. (A bad prequel, of course, consists mostly of improbable meetings, name-dropping, and flimsy reasons why nobody remembers or wants to talk about anything that happened in the prequel when they later meet for the first time.)

The writers of the series have so far also resisted the temptation to bring in any mention of the Q or the Borg, thank goodness. This would have been terribly out of place in what is essentially a story of spies, diplomats, and scientists that work in secrecy.

Though I did grow slightly impatient with the pacing of the book, I did enjoy it, and am looking forward to the next volume.

Although there are many such actions that I could take to improve my life, I have found that announcing a resolution is a sure-fire way to torpedo it. However, there are always those merry souls that will greet one throughout January with a hearty “Happy New Year!” and will then (whether greeted in kind or not) proceed to quiz one about one’s New Year’s Resolutions.

In such cases, I could try to supply a plausible resolution such as, “I’m going to eat healthy foods!” Unfortunately, that would (consciously or not) result in the torpedoing of that resolution, and I’d inevitably find myself eating The 20 Worst Foods In America in a single meal.

And then I’d most likely also be subjected to a disappointed tsk-ing from that merry busybody who had not only but also learned of my gastronomic indiscretions, but had also (for some reason) memorized my resolution.

So you see why that strategy is right out.

I could simply tell such interested people that I’ve resolved to do something highly unlikely. Perhaps I’ve resolved to hike Mount Kilimanjaro, to dive the Great Barrier Reef, or to prove that P=NP.

This is a tricky strategy to get right. Too extravagant of an answer might just prompt the merry busybody to begin a conversation about the supposed goal, and worse, mention it again (repeatedly) later. Too implausible of an answer might initiate a game of Guess The Resolution, in which case the merry busybody iterates through one’s shortcomings until one can take no more and, in desperation to escape, agrees to the very next resolution that the merry busybody suggests. Another outcome to be avoided. Worse, one then finds oneself in the Plausible Resolution scenario above.

So that strategy is out as well.

Instead, I prefer to resolve not to make a New Year’s Resolution. This immediately settles the question of when one’s New Year’s Resolution will be broken, allowing one to focus on such important things as improving one’s diet, saving more money, and going to bed at a reasonable hour each night.

Even better is the idea that is supposedly being celebrated. We are not here to pay tribute to family members. No, we are here to share a sense of optimism about the coming year. We are here to celebrate that one moment of potentiality, when we can dare to wish and hope that tomorrow really will be better than today.

You can abandon it at the curb, you can chuck it into a wood chipper, you can even chop it up and set it afire. (Local ordinances permitting, of course.) Or you can give your tree a Viking funeral… and blast it into space!

(Local ordinances most likely do not permit, unfortunately.)

Sincerely,
The Electronic Replicant

I’ve encountered this situation before, and solved it by installing FreeBSD instead. I considered doing so again this time around, but for my own convenience, I decided to try Gentoo Linux first. Gentoo is the distro that makes you build all your software from source, therefore ensuring you have the latest versions, and customizing all your software (at a certain level) to your particular machine. It’s an appealing concept to those who want to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of a new (or old) machine.

The installation has been rather difficult. And when I say “difficult,” I don’t mean “challenging in skills,” but rather “bad-tempered, argumentative, and uncooperative.” It’s not so bad that the configuration is done entirely by commands entered at the shell. It is bad that I’ve memorized most of the commands because I’ve had to restart the process several times. Usually because something didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to on this weird old system.

The worst part is, it still doesn’t quite work yet. For some reason, it doesn’t want to mount my root partition. I think I’m just a boot option away from a working system, but if not, FreeBSD is looking more and more attractive.

It seems like The Humbugs are really going around this year. It seems as though festive is out. Most people I know, myself included, are regarding this holiday season with little more than a sense of good-natured disinterest. Some others do seem to be making a token effort of jollity. This lack of enthusiasm is little surprising, after the mania of Black Friday, but perhaps both that and the sense of indifference share a root cause. The economy?

Maybe it’s just that the sales made affordable those things that people wanted for themselves. I’m certainly not spending fortunes on lavish gifts. You might get a tee shirt, if you’re lucky. And, people are apparently spending less on themselves than they used to. I read that cinema attendance is at its lowest level since September, 2001.

Maybe it’s the economy. Maybe it’s just winter. Even I have been bothered by the short days, for once, but mainly because of the nuisance the premature darkness causes on the road. Lots of people suffer from Seasonal Anxiety Disorder, which is triggered or exacerbated by the long nights. Is it hitting everyone especially hard this year? Or am I, too, unwittingly affected? I wonder.

Well, perhaps in enforcing cheer amid the long nights, the inventors of the modern Christmas tradition knew exactly what they were doing. Keeping us from dwelling on it. “‘Tis the season to be jolly,” our songs insist. “Love and joy come to you, and to you glad Christmas, too! Think of raindrops on roses and cute little kittens, and maybe you won’t feel so bad! And a hap-pee ne-e-ew ye-e-ar!”

Of course, if song doesn’t cure the Humbugs, there’s always egg nog, mulled wine, and peppermint Schnapps.