Q3 2021 Roundup

With the fall equinox, summer is now over.

This blog has passed 2800 daily posts in a row, though reported hits are way down from last year.  Posts will continue until readership improves.  : – )

This summer saw many posts on favorite topics, including dinosaurs, robots, solar energy, and cryptocurrencies.  And robot helicopters on Mars.   And the melting cryosphere.

If we hear about a solar powered robot dinosaur that eats cryptocurrency you know it will appear in this blog!  Especially if it emerges from a melting icecap and goes to Mars to transform into a helicopter.

Book Reviews

As always, weekly reviews of 14 fiction and 6 non fiction books.

Notable book:  The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor

Fiction

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien
The Very Nice Box by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Captain Moxley and the Embers of Empire by Dan Hanks
The Paris Labyrinth by Gilles Legardinier
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Questland by Carrie Vaughn
The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Elysium Fire by Alistair Reynolds
The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Non-fiction

The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor
Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen
Venus and Aphrodite by Bettany Hughes
Forget the Alamo by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford
We Had A Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff
Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko

Great Names For a Band

Terms found in real technical papers, not made up at all.

“Spin Orbit Torques”
“Cadmium Telluride”

Book Review: “The Paris Labyrinth” by Gilles Legardinier

The Paris Labyrinth by Gilles Legardinier

Legardinier has published quite a bit in France, but this is his first English translation, so this is the first one I’ve read. (I regret to say that I’m fluent in one or fewer languages.)

The story is a historical fantasy, set in Paris at the time of the 1889 World’s Fair, and Legardinier gives us lavishly detailed life of the time.  He does a great job of portraying the everyday background on which the new technology was displayed. Electricity was all the more wondrous when you understand the dimly lit city before it.

The protagonists are a small group of artificers who deploy the skills of conjurers to create secret rooms and passages for wealthy clients.  Architectural magicians, creating illusions that you can walk into.

This is a charming idea and the works described are so cool, not least because they use nineteenth century technology.  No computers or fancy electronics, it’s all analog. Cool.

Any intelligent reader immediately realizes that helping people hide vital secrets or themselves is a dangerous business to be in.  Sooner or later, someone will want to make them talk or make sure they don’t talk—or both.

And sure enough, they soon come under attack. Possibly from more than one antagonist, it’s hard to know.

At the same time, they are called to a project with a slightly different task: finding and opening other people’s secret passages.

This is all fun enough, especially with all the loving details of the architecture and devices, as well as sympathetic if simple characters.

But at the end, the plot gets awfully DaVinci Code-y for my own tastes. My tastes are set by Foucault’s Pendulum (1980) as well as 50 years of SF.  So my standards are pretty high.

You know, frankly, I don’t even care what happened to the Templars, and I find Illuminati stuff just  plain stupid.

Anyway.

Overall, this story is pleasant enough, even if the plot is pretty silly.  Read it for the scenery.

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1. Gilles Legardinier, The Paris Labyrinth. Translated by K. Robinson, Paris, Flammarion, 2020.

Sunday Book Reviews