Booklog: another miscellany
A bit slower this past couple of weeks.

The White House mess. Christopher Buckley, 1990: published Allison & Busby, 2004.

A pastiche of "political insider" memoirs, set in a comically inept post-Reagan administration. It's nice as far as it goes - there's a couple of nicely Pooterish sections - but a lot of it just misses the mark and falls flat. Also, Buckley falls prey to the idea that in a comic novel, everyone needs an elaborately silly name. (I get quite irritated by this, sometimes.)

It's an early novel, and it shows. Skip it.

Falling free. Lois McMaster Bujold, 1988: published Baen, 1999.

For some reason, I don't seem ever to have got around to reading this one. Better than I expected.

Bujold's writing is clearly a bit patchier than the later books - and there seems to be a lot more infodumping than she usually uses, when talking about the jump systems - but it's pleasant to see a fragment of the Vorkosigan universe outside of her standard setting. No wars, no dashing mercenary fleets or political machinations, just a small corporate research base with the profit motive getting out of hand.

It's a nicely constructed idea. A researcher has (somewhat surreptitiously) created a genetically-modified race of people to live in zero-gravity, mainly obvious by the fact they have four arms. The problem is, to the company, they're not people; they're property, legally defined as experimental tissue cultures, and when the economic justification for them collapses, so does any reason to keep them around.

The bulk of the novel is the attempts by the protagonist to contrive some way of rescuing the population from... well, the unpleasant fates for an expensive failed experiment are fairly apparent. The story pushes along at a nice clip; heroic feats of engineering manage to actually convey being heroic rather than just background detail; characters who had previously been fairly definitely on the side of faceless evil suddenly turn out to have had consciences all along. The deeper ideas of individual rights and responsibility, political indoctrination, bureaucratic indifference, are all gently highlighted and left for the reader rather than being beaten on loudly, which I appreciated.

Otherwise, in the past two weeks:

• A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away - Christopher Brookmyre
  
• The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll
  
• Common Sense [with: Agrarian Justice] - Thomas Paine
  
• Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
  
• Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present and Future - Jason Epstein
  
• Hammer And Tickle: A History Of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes - Ben Lewis
  
• Bad Monkeys - Matt Ruff