The Peace Machine, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-03582-X

A little lacking in posts this month. The following has been ninety percent finished but has been sitting on my USB portable drive for close to a month. The good news is that I can get two posts out of it.

This is one of my favourite Bob Shaw novels, whether it is called Ground Zero Man or The Peace Machine. I first read it in paperback as Ground Zero Man and it fairly rolls along. It’s a cracking read and in my opinion is Shaw at his peak as a writer. The update, issued in hardback by Gollancz as The Peace Machine in 1985, is more or less Ground Zero Man with some updates on a topical references such as television shows – although they are now ancient history references to televisions shows.

Shaw mentioned this novel in his HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION Book, making a comment that some people thought he should move into thrillers on the basis of this book. And I agree that Shaw would have made a good thriller writer. At his best Shaw is not only a master at plotting but also a master at building suspense and piling the pressure on his characters.

It starts off intriguingly, with the main character telling us ‘My finger rests lightly on the black button’ and who wouldn’t be intrigued by that?

The rest of the novel is in the third person and brings us answers to questions posed in the prologue. Lucas Hutchman is staring at a piece of paper and finds himself in a cold sweat. He is in his office and despite interruptions from other people the thought dancing through his head and filling him with excitement and some fear is ‘I can make neutrons dance to a new tune’. Hutchman takes the afternoon off and as he drives home we get an inkling into his marriage and the personality of his wife, and while he is pursuing his hobby of archery we learn that his ability to control neutrons meant he could build a nuclear machine; one that Hutchman insisted would be an anti war machine.

Then comes the news that Damascus is in flames because a nuclear bomb exploded over the city. This affects Hutchman deeply and deepens his resolution to create the machine that will stop all governments from keeping nuclear weapons. As his relationship with his wife goes back and forth Hutchman commences the project of building a machine that he hopes will bring peace to the world. Hutchman too goes back and forth about the Peace Machine; if he can be brave enough to use it or if he knew deep in his heart that he would never cross that line.

The decision is taken from his hands and Hutchman by the actions of his wife and Hutchman is put on a path that eventually brings him to the attention of the authorities. Intrigue, kidnaps and deaths follow as Hutchman tries to stay ahead of the authorities and use his invention to save the world from itself.

I found it a very enjoyable novel when I first read it in paperback and equally enjoyable when I read the updated and revised edition in Gollancz hardback when it was reissued in 1985. As I’ve said I feel this is Bob Shaw at his finest. The writing is crisp and elegant, the book is well plotted and the characters feel real, even minor characters. The situation isn’t as relevant or as oppressing as it was in the seventies when it was first issued and in the eighties when it was re issued. Nineteen eighty five was a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall and the USSR. After the fall of the USSR nuclear weapons and the nuclear standoff that is pivotal in this novel more or less disappeared. Nowadays the enemy is a lot more difficult to identify and no one knows where to point their nuclear weapons.

The epilogue to the book, like the prologue, is in the first person, and the book ends a little pessimistically but this doesn’t detract from any aspect of the book and is, in a way, quite fitting.

Portable Probs.

My U3 portable drive has been acting up a little lately, and it feels loose and ready to fall apart. I’ll use it for as long as I can but I’ve invested in a new drive for under a tenner as a replacement.

I bought another Sandisk Cruzer drive but the U3 installer insists that it isn’t and turned its nose up at it, refusing to acknowledge its existence let alone install the program on it. So I installed the free portableapps menu on it and copied over files and documents. It meant downloading some programmes again in portable app format instead of U3 format and that ran away with a fair amount of bandwidth, but it does come with its own backup program. On the U3 drive the program that I use to backup comes in two flavours, low volume free and unlimited paid for.

One of the good things about using the portable apps instead of U3 is that it lead me to a site where there was a program that allowed you to use Windows Live Writer on a portable drive – I’m using it to write this post – along with a few other programs I looked at before but never tried. Unlike U3 – the U3 website has totally gone now and I don’t think it will be back – all the portable apps programs are free. U3 had a lot of free programs but also a lot were paid for. The prices for the programs ranged from dirt cheap to bloody extortionate.

I haven’t read a novel in weeks. The last one was Ghosts of Manhattan, a pretty decent story of a hero in an alternate world at the early part of last century, even if it was about a third too long. (It was while reading that book that I noticed –some- books nowadays have at least 1 1/2 line spacing and not single line spacing: when did that start and how come I didn’t notice it before?) Since then it’s been short stories all the way; the Captain Midnight hardback edition  (paperback edition) ordered a few months ago has arrived, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions signed by six contributors also arrived this week and I’ve dipped into that, and the latest issue of Interzone dropped through my letterbox this week too.

Virus! Arrgh!

Well, more a serious malware program to be accurate. I came across something like it before at work. It stops anti-virus and malware programs from running so they can’t remove it from your system.  The one I experienced before didn’t stop web browsers so I could go online with information about it and find a way to remove it. The one that recently infected my machine was worse: I couldn’t reboot the machine successfully, or even load Windows in Safe Mode.

Norton Ghost came to the rescue. I slapped in the disk and loaded it up, less than an hour later my computer was in the state it was five days previous. It does automatic backups every Sunday and am I glad of those? Yes I am.

I checked the programs I have on the computer – some of them are dependent on activation – and they all ran fine. A little weird in that the Windows update history is completely gone. My computer says it is up to date but there is no list of all the updates that have been installed over the years.

And as I store all documents on my U3 disk I don’t have to worry about losing any recent files.

I never found out what the malware/virus was. I have malwarebytes on the system which I run every now and then. I’ll get a couple more as a precaution, maybe try and find one that works in real time. I’ll also see about getting a different firewall and not relying on the one that comes from Microsoft. Although it’s good it’s sort of anonymous and so a little unnerving as I’m unsure of what it’s blocking and what it’s letting through.

Book Binge

I didn’t mean to but I went on a sort of book binge today. I happened to be in a WHS today and browsing through it noticed they had a clearance on some books. I picked up an Ursula K Le Guin collection of short stories for two pounds; The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Hopefully it will be more interesting than the previous collection of hers I picked up where I couldn’t get into any of the stories. I also picked up a novel set in ancient Rome for a pound and two Ben Elton novels for a pound each – they were sold together. Four books for a fiver. Not bad.

Then, minutes later, in Waterstone’s, I pick up another three for two. Right in front of me as I walk into the store was a signed edition of Transition by Iain Banks. No M in the name but it deals with parallel worlds and the time between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. I remember it had some mixed reviews when it came out last year but it sounded interesting enough for me to pick it up and give it a try.

Although, as it’s a signed copy, perhaps I should keep it pristine (?). More than likely it was a batch lot signed by Iain Banks for Waterstone’s, or for the publishers to distribute to booksellers. But, seeing as he lives a stone’s throw from Kirkcaldy (or, as he has been quoted as saying – with Kirkcaldy being in the constituency of Smiler Brown – a ‘mortar lob away’:) ) there is a also every chance the shop got copies signed by him direct.

The three for two was rounded off with another collection of short stories (supposed to be as rare as hen’s teeth nowadays as short stories ‘don’t sell’ but I’ve picked up a few main stream collections recently) and the 5oth anniversary edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the one I got ‘free’.

Also I have a copy of The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer to be winging its way across the Atlantic any day now. This is a collection mostly about Philip Jose Farmer and is a limited edition. I’ve been told my copy is number 128 and it’s being signed by the authors attending FarmerCon V.

It seems like I spent most of my time online updating laptops, which for some reason seems to take at least half an hour per update. There is the downloading of the updates then the installing of the updates and then the obligatory reboot; nine times out of ten after install of updates I was informed there were further updates available. And round it went.

Blogger re design

I tried to change the design of this blog a couple of times with Artisteer. The program works great with Wordpress but not so good with Blogger. It uploads all the files ok and the site appears for a second and then the whole site disappears from view while it goes searching for something. And it continues to search for a very long time. So I just chose another design within Blogger. The designing in Blogger has changed since the last time I used it.

It's not as straight forward as Worpress, the export to Blogger in Artisteer was a little more complicated and involved copy and paste of code - the second time; no such option was given  on the first attempt to change the Blogger theme. I'll stick to the inbuilt options for Blogger and use Artisteer for Wordpress only.

Warren Peace, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04918-9

Warren Peace was published by Gollancz in hardback in 1993 but renamed as ‘Dimensions’ when it came out as a paperback – also published by Gollancz in the UK. It is the sequel to Who Goes Here?

I had this short review all ready until I realised something: it is also the last novel that Bob Shaw published. It has been said that Shaw went through a period of writer’s block: indeed during the eighties and nineties Shaw released revised and updated versions of his works. For books like Ground Zero Man and The Shadow of Heaven this may have been justified as they had limited releases in the UK on their first outing. For a while Shaw issued a book a year: indeed during the seventies there were sometimes two per year, with the latter part of the seventies perhaps his most productive time.

Although saying Warren Peace is a sequel may not be entirely accurate as the book takes the story, characters and situation to a different level.

Peace is now one of the Oscars, the elite Golden Supermen who have no need for food, drink or sex. But Warren is not happy with his situation. In fact he is bored rigid. We meet him on the eighth day of the Oscar Galactic Jamboree and he is not having any fun at all. Luckily for Warren he comes across a group of criminals who are getting ready to attack the Oscars.

Warren thinks the plan is to strand the Oscars on the planet but the big glowing purple rock that is dropped on them and kicked away into space by Warren has more implications.

The rock turns out to have been Pryktonite, which for Oscars is a fate worse than death – it turns them back into human beings.

The Oscars quickly deduce that this is the work of the Galaxies greatest villain, Jeeves. Jeeves has evaded the Oscars by reverting to his nice side any time he is captured. However, his evil side will want revenge on the person who foiled his plan to eliminate the Oscars: Warren Peace.

The Oscars want to protect Warren but Warren doesn’t want to be bored to death by their lifestyle. He is still kept within the Oscars but sent to worlds where the Oscars can’t do much. His first job is at the sea planet Golborne where he has to work out what exactly is the alien porn that keeps turning on the workers called squelchers.

It is on this planet that Peace is caught in an elaborate trap laid out by Jeeves, who, in classic villain style, explains the trap to Peace. It seems that Jeeves’ assistant, Wimpole, didn’t get the black holes needed for the plan but instead got Puce Holes, which have an entirely different effect.

Peace thinks he has only been displaced in space due to the actions of Jeeves. His ship is lost in waters as he lands. The situation becomes confusing as Warren tries to figure out where and when he is without making the locals suspicious – it doesn’t work as the local Landlord gets angry at Warren a couple of times; the threat of violence which he manages to extricate himself from.

Warren quickly concludes that he is in another universe, where time and circumstances were different and society grew in a different direction. His next step was to go to Manchester, where they built spaceships. Warren gets a job as a draughtsman and his next plan is to work out how to get back to his universe and tackle Jeeves.

To be honest the book is a bit of a mish-mash, and I think Shaw padded it out with a couple of short stories from elsewhere as the first part of the book is a little episodic, something similar to Ship of Strangers which was a novel created from previously published short stories.

This doesn’t stop it being tremendously enjoyable – although not quite as funny as the predecessor Who Goes Here – particularly when Warren finds himself in an alternate world with a close to Victorian society. Personally I found too many situation changes for my liking. Generally there is only one real twist in most novels, which should occur halfway through. With Warren Peace there are a couple which, although it doesn’t spoil enjoyment of the book, didn’t ring right either.

This may have worked a little better if it wasn’t linked to Who Goes Here? An entirely separate hero going through the latter half of the novel may have been more entertaining and rewarding. Certainly the predicament Warren finds himself in halfway through the novel is very far removed from the central premise and the central threat of Jeeves.

The Jeeves/Oscar storyline could have been issued on its own and the time/alternate universe story could easily have stood on its own.

But we have this novel from Bob Shaw, his last. Not by any means his best but a good solid novel revisiting familiar characters and exploring high concept ideas. The alternate universe was well drawn and well thought out and would have been fun to explore further.

Upgrades

I upgraded the laptop today with more memory. It arrived quite quickly and was no problem installing. Switched the laptop on and the new memory worked like a dream.  Although there is a notable difference with most of the programs one is giving an error since the memory was installed. I'm not too bothered as it is a program that I hardly use, and I got it free from a computer magazine about four or five years ago.

Still getting problems with Firefox V2 so I downloaded and installed the portable version of Google Chrome. When I first tried it Chrome it wouldn't open several sites, including ansible.co.uk, u3.com, and a few others but since then I have been able to access some of them. U3 dot com hasn’t been available for the last few times I’ve tried to access it and maybe it’s gone for good. This is a shame as it’s about the only place where I can get official U3 software which, in my opinion, is far superior to Portable App software.

I’ve tried Chrome and it’s ok; not as fast as people say it is and it doesn’t have any menus. It imported the Firefox bookmarks no problem but I’ve still to get the saved passwords into it. Even though it’s portable the default setting for importing is to look at the browser on the hard drive.

I use Windows Live Writer for blogging (write once blog many times) and I’ve also upgraded that by adding other Windows Live components. The main one being Windows Live Mail. Again it’s quite good. I added a few email addresses and it went and got the emails with no problems – Yahoo involved only entering the email address and password, no POP3 settings or outgoing mail server requests that you get from other email programs.

Screening

Not been online much lately. Just bits here and there.

There was a crack on the screen of one of my laptops. I'd looked into getting it sent off to be repaired but the prices that were being charged would have made it cheaper to buy a new laptop.

Then I started looking into prices of replacement screens alone and it was there that the prices plummeted. Provided I was willing to change the screen myself the cost was a pittance; less than half the price of some 'repairs'.

So I ordered a replacement screen and looked up some tutorials on YouTube. At first there was a little trepidation: although I've built computer systems from scratch for myself and friends laptops are apparently a totally different ballgame.

And they are.

Apart from fiddling around with lots of tiny screws changing the screen involved taking out two plugs and putting in two plugs. Simples. The laptop is better than new, the replacement screen being brighter and with more vibrant colours. To celebrate I even bought extra memory from Amazon. So the laptop wont just look better but should work faster too.

I'm still going through books of short stories. I picked up an Ursula Le Guin collection from Amazon for under a fiver. It only has five stories so they're technically closer to novellas and novelettes than short stories. Still to get into them: going through one I was reminded of why I was a little turned off from Le Guin the last time I tried to read her work - which was a big thick book - and that is that there were snippets of music in the stories. Personally I found that distracting. I don't read music. It's as annoying as reading through a story to suddenly find a quote in a foreign language that is not explained. It gives the reader a little kick which dislodges them from the narrative; and that defeats the purpose of telling a story to someone.

I bought a Robert E Howard book of short stories about a year or so ago. It was only £2.99. When I got it I saw I had read a lot of the stories in it but there were a few that I hadn't read so I dipped into it now and then. Recently I chose a couple of stories here and there. One I read again was 'Pigeons From Hell'. I think I first read this years ago when I got The First (or it may have been The Second) Book of Robert E Howard in American paperback.

I don't care what anyone says, 'Pigeons From Hell' is without doubt the best thing Howard ever wrote. It surpasses Conan, Solomon Kane or anything else: his weird fiction, his sword and sorcery, his westerns. It is pure genius. Storytelling, atmosphere, horror. It's a damn near perfect story, and pretty chilling too.

Who Goes Here?, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02347-3

I bought Who Goes Here in the Ace paperback edition and enjoyed it immensely when I first read it.  This is a good old fashioned comedy romp through space and alien worlds with funny situations and some inventiveness from Bob Shaw in the form of space travel, aliens and wacky characters.

Who Goes Here was first published in 1977 and was good enough to warrant a sequel, Dimensions, also published as Warren Peace.

Warren Peace, the hero of this book, wakes up to a pretty nurse who asks him if he feels better. He does but he is a little confused. Slowly it is brought to his attention that he has signed up for thirty years* service of the Space Legion. Questioning why he would be stupid enough to sign up to the Space Legion he is answered with another question: Why did people sign up to the French Foreign Legion? To forget he tells Captain Widget.

And that’s the same reason people join the Space Legion; to forget. And the Space Legion has a machine that removes memories so people do forget.

Unfortunately for Warren Peace he seems to have forgotten everything.

Everyone that he subsequently meets responds to this with ‘You must have been a monster!’

Peace doesn’t believe he has signed up for the Space Legion, until he sees himself on video doing exactly that, and he also sees his signature on the contract.

Peace soon finds that there are precautions built into the system to stop recent recruits defaulting on contracts or trying to disobey. Each recruit has a Mark Three command enforcer surgically implanted in them. It adds harmonics to the voice which ensures ‘absolute, unthinking obedience’.

One of the funniest scenes for me was when Peace decided to get out of the situation by getting a hulking great Sergeant mad at him. It’s a great pay off to the situation which I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t yet read the book.

Peace finds himself and his new friends in the 203 Regiment, sponsored by Triple Ess; Savoury Shrimp Sauce, and soon they are onto basic training – with some of them still harbouring plots of escape – which consists of pulling the trigger on their weapons and hitting the target. Peace and the rest of the group – the Fort Eccles class of ten am – were then shipped out.

Peace is annoyed at the wait when they are in a long narrow room with benches, waiting for the transfer to the tall ships for space travel to the stars; so much so that to the at first humorous delight of the others he tries to open the door of the room. It is then, with his friends sitting on his chest after having stopped his attempt to open the door, that peace finds out they are in the ship, and that it is hurtling through space as they speak using ‘Non-Elucidean tachyon displacement’. Or instant matter transmission.

Not across vast distances but only a few hundred metres: the ship transmits itself forward a few hundred metres to the receiver at the other end.

They find themselves thrown straight into the action under the command of the youthful Lieutenant Merriman.

Warren finds out his weapon isn’t as effective as he was told it was; however he not only survives but gets himself a prisoner of war. And there is the first mention of the ‘throwrugs and the Oscars’. And no the Oscars aren’t an award. The capture of a prisoner means that Peace and the rest of the unit are considered too good for this battle, and are shipped out to Threlkeld, a planet without intelligent species and where the only job of the Legion is to make the jungles safe for miners

However, Peace wants out, and he wants to rediscover his past, find out who he is and why all his memory was wiped. It’s on Threlkeld that Peace devises his plan to escape from the Legion, and with a little buttering up of Merriman – from whom he gets the broadcast frequency of the voice command enforcer – he can create a device which nullifies the effect of the voice command enforcer.

Finally Peace gets to the planet he wants to, Aspatria. There he uses his four hours leave to escape from the Legion and start to investigate his past, and get back his memories.

This is more of a talky novel than other of Bob Shaw’s work in that there is a lot more dialogue in this novel than normally in a novel by Bob Shaw. It’s very funny in places and moderately funny in other places. There are a few running jokes which crop up throughout the book and these are well used by Shaw: not overused as can happen. A lot of the book is snappy and a lot of the dialogue rolls on, taking the reader further into the story and letting us get closer to Warren and the other characters – even the minor ones. It is a very enjoyable book by Bob Shaw, although its core isn’t as high concept as some of his other work.

* The figure thirty can read as taken to be forty, or even fifty, according to the contract.

Books Books Books

I’m surrounded by books at the moment. I've got a Sturgeon book sitting on my ‘to be read’ pile and right underneath that there is a Harlan Ellison short story collection. I'm working my way (backwards!) through the last omnibus of Doc Savage adventures. I started with the two ‘afterwards’ and then read Doc's final adventure, Up From The Earth's Centre.

And to be honest I was disappointed. It didn't read like a Doc novel, and Doc behaved a lot differently than in other novels. The other two novels I read in the omnibus are the same; Doc is out of character. And to be frank they are very short, a lot closer to novellas or novelettes than novels, with a couple of them coming in under one hundred pages. The afterword by Will Murray mentions the last editor of Doc Savage magazine and how a lot of changes were asked for and implemented. They were changes too far in my opinion. However it seems that it wasn't sales that saw off Doc in the end but the Publisher’s decision to get out of pulp magazines; sales of Doc Savage (Science detective) were still quite good.

I bought Foster’s Scottish Oddities as an impulse purchase on Amazon after reading extracts in a daily newspaper during the week. There are some hilarious facts in it and some great stories, one that had me rolling about was the one about someone reporting to the police the fact that there was a live shark thrashing about in a Glasgow street. Only in Glasgow. It’s a good book to dip in and out of and also for reading chunks at a time as it is divided into relevant sections.

Also I got a pretty good three for two at Waterstone’s; two short story collections and a novel with a free book attached. It's very rare for short story collections to be seen in book shops outside the SF section. So I snapped them up. So, four for two actually, and they were all at the cheap price of £6.99 - a price which is getting a bit scarce in bookshops.