Carlucci's Heart, by Richard Paul Russo

If I was a science fiction writer (as opposed to an Avid Reader) I'd try to avoid the near future as a setting for my stories. The near future so easily becomes the near past.



Carlucci's Heart (1997) by Richard Paul Russo is a case in point. It has all the right ingredients for an exciting near future thriller - mysterious underground organisations, corrupt mega-corporations, a decaying and dystopic city (in this case, mid-21st century San Francisco). Yet a bit over halfway through this absorbing book I suddenly sat up and exclaimed: "Where the hell is the Internet?"



That's right. In a plot revolving around a man-made plague and corporate corruption, the chief sources of information available to the protagonists are world of mouth and the mainstream media. In Carlucci's Heart there are no bloggers out there promulgating rumours and theories, no Wikileaks publishing secret caches of information, no members of the public bearing witness via Facebook and Twitter. It feels odd, frankly, and makes you realise just how recent all these new media are!



All the same, for anyone looking for an entertaining read I can recommend this book. The story moves along at a good pace, there are a number of intriguing mysteries, and the characters are well-rounded and sympathetic enough that you care what happens to them.

Some Interesting Websites

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine, who is another Avid Reader, gave me the URL of one of her favourite websites: http://manybooks.net//. As its name hints, it the home of many books - digitised, out-of-copyright books. Most of them would not find audiences large enough to bear the cost of republishing in hard copy, except by the occasional specialist press, but are still fun reads. I've been browsing by genre (mystery and science fiction) and at the moment am dipping into The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings (1923):


"Then I became aware of a dim shape in the foreground--a shape merged with the outlines surrounding it. And as I looked, it gradually assumed form, and I saw it was the figure of a young girl, sitting beside the liquid pool. Except for the same waviness of outline and phosphorescent glow, she had quite the normal aspect of a human being of our own world. She was beautiful, according to our own standards of beauty; her long braided hair a glowing black, her face, delicate of feature and winsome in expression. Her lips were a deep red, although I felt rather than saw the colour.

"She was dressed only in a short tunic of a substance I might describe as gray opaque glass, and the pearly whiteness of her skin gleamed with iridescence.

"She seemed to be singing, although I heard no sound. Once she bent over the pool and plunged her hand into it, laughing gaily.

"Gentlemen, I cannot make you appreciate my emotions, when all at once I remembered I was looking through a microscope. I had forgotten entirely my situation, absorbed in the scene before me. And then, abruptly, a great realization came upon me--the realization that everything I saw was inside that ring. I was unnerved for the moment at the importance of my discovery.

As it was payday today I also hied me to my two favourite online bookstores: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/ and http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/. The Book Depository is located in the UK, and will send books to you without charging postage almost anywhere in the world - which is definitely a consideration when you live in Australia. Better World Books is located in the US, and offers free postage within the country and very low postage elsewhere. It sells both new and secondhand books, some fairly hard to find, and the proceeds go to literacy projects around the world. In other words it offers me a chance to do good while indulging myself!

Return of the Blogger

I've just noticed - it's exactly two years and six days since I last posted! I should probably post more frequently in future - say, every one year rather than every two.

(That's a joke, by the way!)

Having rediscovered and resuscitated my blog, I suppose I should say something about what I've been reading lately. I've just finished Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse, perfect comfort reading as the cold nights of a southern winter creep in.

Every era has its bestsellers. Most of them don't outlive their era (I look forward to the day when Dan Brown's books have been consigned to the same merciful oblivion as the works of Marie Correlli.) Wodehouse is one of the few to survive from the era between the World Wars, along with the likes of Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer. Leave it to Psmith is his standard fare -dotty old aristocrats, cheerful young asses, bright young things and formidable aunts, misunderstandings and mistaken identities, cross-purposes and coincidences.

Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learner

... And since I set up this blog as part of a work-related course, I should post something on the "Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners".

Like most other people who have written on this topic, I find the learning habit most easy to acquire is the habit of "playing". When I learn something new I itch to play around with my new knowledge, to make a game of it.

Next to that, I find teaching/mentoring other people a most useful way to build on my skills and knowledge, because I am forced to work out how and why I do the things I do in order to explain it to others. Sometimes clarifying things down to first principles make them easier to understand for the teacher as well as the pupil.

And lastly, the hardest learning habit I find to acquire, is the habit of starting with the end in mind. Like the shipwrecked sailor in the A.A. Milne poem, I sometimes come up with so many ideas that I find that I have trouble setting clear goals, let alone bringing them to fruition! Let's hope I don't wind up like A.A. Milne's old sailor:

And so in the end he did nothing at all,
But basked on the shingle wrapped up in a shawl.
And I think it was dreadful the way he behaved -
He did nothing but basking until he was saved.

Testing, testing

So here I am. Brand new blog. Time to get posting!

And since it's a reader's blog, I think I'll start by mentioning what I'm reading now: Rome & Jerusalem: the clash of Ancient Civilizations by Martin Goodman. It's a surprisingly easy read: the author seems to have a knack for turning historical facts into an entertaining narrative, while never writing down to his audience. As I progressed through the book - 119 pages to go! - it became apparent that what Goodman was describing were two of the main sources of modern western civilisation. He compares two ways of viewing the world - Roman and Jewish - in the 1st century AD, and their modern counterparts, secular and religious, still clearly create tensions in society today.

There are also some surprising resonances with modern current events: it's hard not to compare Goodman's description of Rome 2,000 years ago with America today when he writes that Romans commonly thought of all their wars as defensive wars, and that for the ordinary Roman citizen war was "like watching a story, the bloodshed kept at a safe emotional distance". One wonders if Goodman is not reading the present into the past somewhat.