Pun Salad

I own the hardcover, which I purchased back in 1980 for (I think) the full retail price at the time, $11.95. And it has sat, unread, on my bookshelf since then. About time I got to it.

Reader, I mean no disrespect to the late Philip José Farmer, but the word that kept popping into my head while reading this was "interminable". Things go on for many, many pages.

And, not that it matters, but: that's a neat cover picture, but nothing like that shows up in the book.

And, to add to my kvetching, my edition has a back-cover quote from Farmer that states:

Now ends the Riverworld series, all loose ends tied together in a sword-resisting Gordian knot, all the human mysteries revealed, the millions of miles of The River and the many years of quests and The Quest completed.

And then just a few years later, his actual last novel, Gods of Riverworld, was published. I'm sure there was a good reason for that besides squeezing out a few bucks from readers with more money than sense. Like me.

Riverworld is falling apart here. The once-reliable "resurrection" feature that rebooted dead humans into a new life along the River has stopped working: when you're dead, you're dead. And the semi-magical grailstones that provided periodic food, drink, and other consumables to humanity stop working entirely on one bank of the River. Which causes that bank's inhabitants to go to war against the other, resulting in the death of half of Riverworld's billions of souls. (Easy come, easy go.) A lot of these troubles are brought about by "X", a mysterious (and murderous) renegade from the race that created Riverworld, the "Ethicals".

Worse: there are two competing riverboats racing upriver, aimed at finding the "Tower" at the River's source: one helmed by King John, the other by Samuel Clemens. They go to all-out war, too, because why not. This involves an interminable dogfight between each boat's airplanes, closely followed by an interminable battle between the boats themselves, fought out on the river's surface.

Leaving a ragtag group of survivors to proceed to the Tower. Their (also interminable) trek is perilous and deadly, but they still have time to engage in discussions (reminiscent of college dorm rooms) of wathans, a soul-like psychic gadget that acts as a backup device for humans.

Eventually, things wind up, and it turns out to be fortunate that one of the survivors of all the carnage is Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's inspiration. Spoiler: She saves the day.

A good review in the WSJ put this book by David Baron on my get-at-library list. It's easy to write off our modern age as one where the unwashed masses believe in utter claptrap, but guess what? The author, David Baron, demonstrates that back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, plenty of Americans got hooked into believing in Martians. And many of those people were well-washed.

Leading the way were the "amateur" astronomers of the day. (By our lights, most scientists back then were amateurs, although very enthusiastic.) The most famous was Percival Lowell, one of the immensely wealthy mill-owning Lowells of Boston. Percival wasn't that interested in mills, but used his fortune to build telescopes and (eventually) observatories, and his attention was concentrated on Mars.

And he reported some astounding news: Mars was an arid, dying, planet, but it had polar icecaps. And a vast network of canals, clearly meant to carry runoff water from those icecaps down to oases at lower latitudes. Clearly, the inhabitants of Mars had built them as a desperate measure to survive.

Although there were critics of this scenario, the public was swept up by Lowell's certainty. Nicola Tesla was also a True Believer, and made serious efforts to communicate with the Martians, either by huge reflecting mirrors or a even bigger radio antenna. H.G. Wells also got in on the craze with (you may have heard) his novel War of the Worlds.

But by the early 1900s, the craze was in decline. Although Lowell remained a believer in his fantasy until he died in 1916, he was increasingly isolated and depressed. (Tesla, as you might know, was even crazier, developing an (um) eccentric attachment to a white New York pigeon that he claimed visited him daily.)

Baron does a good job of getting into Lowell's head. Occasionally his prose gets purple and (perhaps) overly speculative, but that's OK.

Another book picked off the shelves of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's list of 2025's Best Mystery Books. The reviewer, Tom Nolan, likes the author, Denise Mina, quite a bit and he says this "may be Ms. Mina’s best book." Alas, my fancy was untickled.

The protagonist, Claudia O’Sheil, is a forensic scientist, and her specialty is the "Blood Spray Probability Scale" (BSPS), a crime scene analysis tool that's brought her fame. By Dickensian coincidence, she is nearby when the grisly murder of an aristocrat and his fiancée is uncovered. (And also, a dog.) Suspicion falls on the wastrel son, but Claudia's not so sure. Even though her BSPS seems to point to him, she's becoming less convinced of its utility. Alas, the son pleads guilty, even though Claudia's increasingly convinced that someone else did the deed.

And she's got other problems of her own. Her husband was recently killed in a seeming auto accident. (Or was it suicide? Or murder?) Her sister is a drug addict. She's worried about the school her two sons will attend. And… well, she's not very sympathetic. Or interesting. Her investigatory efforts seem half-hearted and random.

The book is also full of unexplained Britishisms, most of which I couldn't even figure out from context.

I'm probably wrong. As usual, the book's Amazon page is full of praise.

I remembered this title earlier this year while reading a very good history book about Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. It was originally published in 1999, and was part of the "Feynmania" of that era. And I had never read it, and the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library still had a copy on its "530" shelf, so…

It's a 13-chapter hodgepodge of interview transcripts, speeches, talks, magazine articles, etc. And also Feynman's devastating "minority report" on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which excoriated NASA's "well, we got away with it this time, so…" attitude toward risk evaluation, criticism that the rest of the Rogers Commission found unable to support. (Or maybe understand.)

The lightly-edited interviews are uneven. Things can get jumbled when you or I think faster than we can talk. Reader, Feynman could think much faster than you or I, and things get very jumbled here on occasion. But still interesting, if you can follow him over the leaps and bounds.

Feynman's famous musing on "cargo cult science" shows up multiple times; he was fascinated by the Pacific natives who tried to keep World War II benefits coming to their islands by crafting aircraft models, runways, control towers, and so on. He saw analogous behavior in some contemporaries, who adopted the superficial aspects of science, but lacked understanding and self-doubt. As his famous quote, aimed at 1974 Caltech grads, goes (included here): "You must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."

Many chapters here can also be found "out there" on the web. I found my favorite one was a transcript of his 1966 talk to the National Science Teachers Association, "What is Science?" You can read it here. It contains yet another quote that should be more famous: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Picked this up at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ list of 2025's best mysteries (WSJ gifted link). If that's not enough for you, the book's Amazon page will reveal more copious critical praise.

But a mystery? Or even a crime thriller? You may ask yourself those questions until around page 307 of the 386-page hardcover; no mystery, and the crimes, if any, are pretty minor before that. But those last 80 pages are pretty blood-soaked.

The book reminded me somewhat of Tom Wolfe's novels, although the author's politics seem to be a couple miles to the left of Wolfe's. We have a detailed look at the three central characters: (1) Chicky is the titular doorman, working at the "Bohemia" apartment building on Central Park West in Manhattan. An honorable widower who is not just teetering on the edge of financial ruin, he's dropping down the cliffside, hitting every rocky outcropping and cactus on the way down. (2) Emily, living up in Bohemia's apartment 11C and D, is trapped in her marriage to a fantastically wealthy cartoon villain she despises. And (3) Julian, down in the much cheaper (but not cheap) apartment 2A, a "gallerist" (look it up, I had to) who is being edged into irrelevance by changing tastes and has a pretty serious health problem.

For the first 300-or-so pages, there is (of course) some building suspense, as we see hints and foreshadowing of what the book's finale will bring. But it's mostly a (very) well-written examination of the characters' inner lives and their environment. There's plenty of strife (economic, racial, ethnic, social), some steamy sex scenes, infidelity, occasional perversion. Just don't go in expecting a whodunit; keep your eyes open and you'll figure it out before it's revealed.

This completes my "Reread Robert Crais" mini-project, which I started back in 2020. I previously read this one in 2019, snapping up the Kindle edition on its release day. Since then, Mr. Crais has adopted a very leisurely schedule: only two newer novels.

For blog readers: my 2019 report on the book is here.

It was interesting to compare this book with one I read just previously, the new one from James Lee Burke. Crais's prose is spare, while Burke's is ornate, maybe? And certainly Crais's heroes, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, are a lot less haunted than Burke's Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel. Still, they all have dedicated their lives to going down Chandler's mean streets. So I'm there, with my finger waiting to punch Amazon's "Pre-order now" button, whenever it may appear.

I will save you a trip to Wikipedia (which I think you can trust on this): Hadacol was a patent medicine (12% alcohol) briefly popular in the 1950s. "Hadacol Boogie" was a popular song recorded by many artists, most notably Jerry Lee Lewis.

This is the 25th entry in James Lee Burke's series centering around Louisiana's finest, but also most psychologically tortured, cop, Dave Robicheaux. I am apparently up for reading them as long as Mr. Burke keeps writing them (he's 89 years old, as I type).

One difficulty faced by writers of long-running single-character series: how to deal with their characters aging. Mr. Burke solves it here by setting the novel "very close to the turn of the century"; which makes Dave old, but not 89,

Things kick off when Dave gets a garbage bag dumped on his front lawn by a scary-looking figure with sticks in its hair. The bag contains the nude corpse of Clemmy Benoit, a girl with a pair of rose tattoos on each breast and a guitar string wrapped around her neck.

The usual course of events occurs: an array of possible suspects are presented: a handyman/ice cream cart vendor who seems disconnected from reality, but nevertheless is obsessed with Dave; a pimp from Dave's Vietnam past; a mobster who wants to build a garish casino in Dave's town; a guy who tortures people for hire; bigoted cops; and (eventually) an Asian guy who knows how to fly a Huey helicopter, because, well, someone has to do it. And more.

But there are also the continuing characters on Dave's side: his daughter Alafair; his longtime partner Clete; his long-suffering boss, Helen Soileau. And a new one, detective Valerie Benoit; she's hiding something, but her heart's in the right place.

Dave's investigative method involves talking to all these people, which nearly always involves a lot of psychodrama, insults, threats, and occasional extreme violence. (Dave sometimes gets set off by remarks about his parentage.) And there's Dave's non-stop monologuing, reflecting on his past, and Louisiana's. And a hefty dose of left-wing politics He rambles about "neocolonialism" four times. Which is four times too many for me. He mutters darkly that JFK's assassination "may have had strong ties to New Orleans. We'll never know. The Warren investigation was not meant to clarify; it was meant to distract." Boy, anything to avoid pinning it where it belongs, on a Fidel fanboy.

I placed this book on my get-at-library list thanks to the WSJ reviewer, Tom Nolan, deeming it one of 2025's best mysteries (WSJ gifted link). And, yes, it's not a particularly pleasant read, but the author, Bruce Currie, makes it seriously powerful. Two of the back-cover blurbers compare Currie to Dennis Lehane; I get that. And I might toss in some Carl Hiaasen, too, if more of Hiaasen's characters were psychologically haunted substance abusers.

Babs Dionne is the central figure around which the Franco-American community in Waterville, Maine, revolves. We are introduced to her as the ancestor of Acadian driftwood, with a long history of maltreatment and oppression by the privileged in Canada and Maine. And in a chilling prologue based in 1968, she murders her rapist, then goes seeking … something … from city's new Catholic priest, Father Clement.

Then we jump ahead to 2016, and Babs has become the widowed matriarch of Waterville's illicit drug trade: pot, meth, oxy, heroin, step right up. She's in sordid league with the town's police chief. And has two surviving offspring: oxy-inhaling Lori, ex-Marine, back from a hellacious tour in Afghanistan, and crack-addicted "Sis". Who (page 29 spoiler) becomes a murder victim, left in her burning Subaru at a local junkyard. Worse, an oddball drug kingpin from Canada and his henchmen want to take over the Waterville drug trade, and they have no problem with killing, if that makes their goal easier to accomplish.

Oh, and Lori has a habit of seeing dead people, just like Dave Robicheaux.

So, it's the polar opposite of (say) Nita Prose's "Maid" novels. Be warned, or encouraged. I, for one, consider myself lucky that Waterville is at a respectably safe distance from Rollinsford, New Hampshire.

What can you say to a title like that, except "Noted"?

Before you accuse the authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, of fear mongering, alarmism, and attention-grabbing, let me reassure you: that's something they readily admit to. They want your attention, alarm, and (above all) to make you afraid of the path AI research and development is on.

Their argument centers around the "AI alignment problem". Which is (see Wikipedia) a real thing. (Not that you should trust Wikipedia.) The alignment concept is pretty simple: making sure that your AI shares its designers' "intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles."

Fortunately, this is not yet a major problem. Chess-playing programs will beat you, sure. At chess, because that's their goal. They won't start taking over NORAD, like in War Games.

But it is, the authors allege, an unsolved problem. Worse, it may be insoluble with the current state of the AI craft. Once AIs reach the level of "superintelligence", and given even a shred of autonomy, we are inevitably in for it. And, since AI operates millions of times faster than puny human intelligence, we are destined to see it spiral out of control before we even understand what's happening.

The only "solution", the authors argue, is an effective worldwide ban on AI R&D. We don't know where the critical threshold for AI-doom lies; we only know, since we are not all dead, that we haven't passed it yet. Probably not, anyway.

The book is written for the lay reader, with lots of analogies and metaphors. (E.g., Chernobyl, leaded gasoline, freon, nuclear weapon proliferation.) There is an accompanying website that goes into detail on technical issues, and encourages your activism.

Counterpoint is readily available: see Neil Chilson's review of the book at Reason: Superintelligent AI Is Not Coming To Kill You . And the relevant Wikipedia article (which you shouldn't trust, see above) states: "Reviews of the book by critics have been mixed." For example, the NYT reviewer "compared the book to that of a Scientology manual and said reading it was like being trapped in a room with irritating college students on their first mushroom trip."

What do I think? I readily admit I don't know. I want to be optimistic. And I'm introspective enough to realize that's likely to bias my beliefs. Also, it seems to me that we are treading into areas we don't understand that well: natural intelligence, human consciousness, and free will. Would we even recognize artificial superintelligence if it occurred? Or would it be very, utterly alien, so much so that predicting its behavior would be impossible? Over to you, sci-fi authors.

I guess I was feeling too pollyannish about Great Britain, or something, so I turned to the fifth book in Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" series. (Also the basis for the most recent season of the TV show.) That cleared things right up. The gang's all here, at least the surviving members of Jackson Lamb's dysfunctional team.

A small team of bad guys are looking to terrorize the Brits, and they kick things off by shooting a bunch of civilians in a small English village. Their identities and motives are unknown to the more respectable wing of MI5. But one of the Slough House team, the technically adept, but socially clueless Roddy Ho, seems to have a connection: against all odds, he's managed to snag a foxy girlfriend. And he escapes assassination only by (barely) being saved by Shirley Dander, another Slow Horse, with drug and anger issues.

The book's ultra-cynical take: the "respectable" pols and spies are concerned mostly with how to turn their response to their political/bureaucratic advantage (or avoid it being turned to their disadvantage). Jackson Lamb's main goal is to preserve his team against all odds; if this manages to thwart the terrorist team, all the better.