Review: Bob the Wizard

Bob the Wizard by M.V. Prindle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. My experience would be closer to 3.5 stars, but I cannot justify rounding it up to 4 stars.

The premise of the book is that our hero, Bob, watches some otherworldly figure murder his family. He is handed a magical device that will allow him to jump between astral planes/parallel-worlds/time/etc. He follows his family's murderer through space and time.

Bob eventually finds himself in a place where he discovers that he isn't the good guy anymore. He outright kills a couple of good guys. He didn't know, but the deaths are the result of Bob arrogantly thinking that all of his prior actions had been appropriate.

He soon discovers who the bad guys are and is enslaved by them. He eventually helps his fellow slaves escape and they all meet up with the good guys. He discovers that he is a descendant of a unique race. He learns to use some powers. His side eventually wins the day.

While I was fully engaged with the characters and the general narrative, there were just too many instances of poor writing for me to overlook. Also, this is obviously the first book in a series. I discount books in a series that are not self-contained story arcs.

In the early scenes, Bob finds himself up high on a building that has banister. Bob hangs from the banister rather than standing on a ledge that the banister would be protecting. I think the author wanted the cool image of Bob hanging off the side of a building. A little later on, Bob jumps from the building to follow his objective through a dimensional portal. He ends up landing on the grass without much fuss. All of that momentum from the fall apparently doesn't matter when passing through a portal that is hanging in midair.

At another point, Bob suggests that he is "wondering" the "Astraverse". I think he meant that he is "wandering". There is an instant where it is apparent that the author doesn't know how guns work. There is a reference to a deer having "fauns". The word is "fawns".

With a little copyediting, this would be a solid 4-star book.

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Review: Cloud Castles by Dave Freer

Cloud-Castles by Dave Freer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review which is a reasonable estimate of my experience.

Cloud Castles was written by Dave Freer and it won the Prometheus Best Novel Award for 2023 that is presented by the Libertarian Futurist Society. The award is named for the mythic hero, Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals. Prometheus represents human effort and in particular the quest for scientific knowledge even while risking overreach and unintended consequences. The Prometheus Award is presented for works that illustrate either the positive benefits of individual liberty or the negative consequences of a larger society imposing restrictions on the individual.

The book follows our protagonist, Augustus Thistlewood, as he embarks on a personal mission to help the less fortunate citizens of the planet Sybill III. Augustus, later just "Gus", is a scion of the Thistlewood family. While focusing on an engineering degree, Gus wandered into a sociology class and decided to add to his courseload by taking sociology courses. From there, he was inspired to "help" the less fortunate by "uplifting" them. Gus hails from the Azure civilization of humanity.

Sybill III is a gas giant with a dense solid core surrounded by a gaseous environment. There is an elevation range with the right gas mixture to support humanoid life. There are clouds that are thicker than Earth clouds. There are plants that have evolved to live on/in those clouds and end up creating a sort of spongy surface where people can walk. Other lifeforms have also evolved to live on the spongy plant/cloud structures. There are some interesting features to this biome.

The only "city" is called Big Syd. It exists on a massive antigrav plate. The descendants of a crashed prison ship now live on a few square miles of the plate. The only effective "government" are the many street gangs that run their various territories.

The population is dominated by the warring remnants of two alien races; the Thrymi and the Zell. The Thrymi are quite aggressive and will take humans as slaves to work on their cloud castles (roll credits!). The Zell generally leave the humans alone unless they encounter them out on the plant/cloud platforms. The Zell then capture the humans, sterilize them, and drop them back on Big Syd regardless of where the Zell first encountered those humans.

The one stabilizing force is that an Azure admiral arrived with his fleet in the wake of the deaths of Azure citizens visiting Sybill III. He threatened everyone with death if another Azure citizen ended up dead. This limits the ability of the Bid Syd denizens to respond to Gus' arrival.

Gus received field training from a charitable organization known as the "Blue Men". He is ideologically motivated to help out those whom he believes are beneath his status. Gus is also a bit clueless. Upon landing on Big Syd, he promptly has his bag and watch stolen by Briz. Gus thinks that Briz is leading him to the one good hotel on Big Syd and follows along.

A few narrow alleys later and Briz ends up saving Gus from a predator (human variety). Gus has no idea that he had been a victim of theft (courtesy of Briz) and narrowly avoided being murdered (also courtesy of Briz).

This sets the tone for much of the book. Gus wanders around trying to "uplift" the locals. He is delightfully unaware that each of his endeavors almost uniformly ends up crushing a criminal enterprise without meaningfully "uplifting" anyone. The sole exception is when he teaches mathematics to a bunch of trafficked underage girls. Gus thought he was visiting a normal school for girls and wanted to "uplift" them. He taught them the skills needed to know that the brothel owner had been shorting their pay and responded accordingly.

None of the locals in Big Syd are interested in being "uplifted".

Knowing about the admiral's threats, the street gangs (and others) are hard-pressed for an easy solution to Gus' interference with their various rackets. Eventually, they find a way to give him to the Thrymi. This ends poorly for the Thrymi. Gus and Briz eventually free themselves and discover that there are people living on the cloud/plant platforms.

This new population has fewer resources but has much better societal relationships. They farm what they call "the outback".

Gus discovers a different way of dealing with these farmers. They value hard work and Gus is willing to work hard. Eventually, he applies his engineering knowledge to build things that improve the lives of the farmers. In return, they improve his life as well. The free-will commercial exchange of goods fosters positive growth in the local culture.

The story ends well for almost everyone. The Thrymi, the Zell, and the various gangs are set for a bit of a rude awakening. Gus, his old family, and his new friends find they have many mutually beneficial opportunities.

And Briz...gets a piece of the action, but not the piece one would expect based on the beginning of the book.

There are several elements that work well. Gus is generally clueless which leads to some amusing circumstances. Gus learns that the best "uplifting" is when it is done with people instead of "for them" or "to them". Briz has several moments of self-discovery. The biology of the flora and fauna living on the clouds is logical as is the impact of coming from a home world with slightly higher gravity. There weren't any logical breaks in the worldbuilding to undermine the suspension of disbelief.

One element that is less effective is the general observation about sociologists and other "do-gooders" who seem to have no practical knowledge about how the world actually works. The plot elements of that assertion are a little too "on the nose". For example, I took the "Blue Men" to be an aspect of our modern United Nations.

Another questionable element is the binary contrast between the city and the country. All of the Big Syd denizens are morally compromised. All those living in the outback are hearty, honest, and hard-working. The manufacturing giant Thistlewood family is also presented as being almost uniformly good. A bit more nuance in this book and it would be a solid 5-star effort.

Cloud Castles is a solid choice that illuminates the objectives of the Prometheus Award and the Libertarian Futurist Society. It illustrates the benefits of people participating voluntarily in mutually satisfying relationships. To a lesser extent, it illustrates the harm of letting small powerful groups control society.

There is a strong Australian flavor to the language and perspectives used in this book. Language aside, there are references to old Australian outlaws. Also, the city's name "Big Syd" is an obvious reference to Sydney, Australia.

This is a fun if not terribly difficult book.

Dave Freer's acceptance speech for the Prometheus Awards is presented in Part 1 and Part 2.

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Review: On the Beach

On the Beach by Nevil Shute
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review which is a reasonable estimate of my experience with this book. Spoilers follow. Read at your own risk.

On The Beach is a book about a group of largely Australian and American people in the months following a nuclear war that encompassed all of the northern hemisphere. The fallout from that war is slowly drifting ever southward killing everyone in its path. Due to the differences in weather patterns, it takes time for the fallout to reach the southernmost points of inhabited land masses.

The book was written in 1957 and was hailed at the time as a significant anti-nuclear war book. The story is reasonably well told within the context of the time in which it was written. The women are largely accessories for the men who are the focus of the narrative. The cities and villages all adhere to a stereotypical 1950s ethos of civility. [The book also unironically views government officials as capable and competent - think Raiders of the Lost Ark and the "top men" researching the Ark.]

The book is notable in that it never offers the characters a chance of hope of survival. In every instance where survival is discussed, it is dismissed out of hand with a note that everyone will die. The characters then go on with more mundane activities such as planning parties, planting gardens, and caring for children. The women are most likely to ask if there is a chance of survival with the men being more likely to offer a kind-hearted but stoic version of "nope, now let's think about something else".

The war was conducted using cobalt bombs launched between Russia and China. However, Russia has been giving away bombers to other nations and cobalt bombs are "cheap". Egypt used a Russian-supplied bomber to drop a cobalt bomb on Washington D.C. The Russian markings on the bomber cause the US military to believe that the Russians have attacked and counterattack. This draws the rest of the northern hemisphere into the war.

There are several issues that undermine the narrative. Some of those issues are best understood as resulting from having seventy additional years of science to help inform how nuclear weapons work.

- The book focuses on cheap cobalt bombs. There is no hard evidence of any nation developing such a bomb. It is theoretically discussed by anti-nuclear activists, but no military has ever developed, much less deployed, such a weapon.

- The book's presentation of nuclear fallout is not in keeping with any understanding of how it would happen in reality. Irradiated debris would certainly end up in the air, but it would come back down again quickly enough. The idea of a global cloud of radiation slowly settling over the earth is contrary to how such things work.

(For the record, nuclear fallout will kill millions and is very serious business. People can still survive if they live far enough from where the bomb explodes and if they take certain precautions.)

- The characters in the book take no precautions to help them survive. It is possible to decontaminate surface soil contaminated with cobalt-60. Mostly, that involves scraping off a thin layer of soil and storing it somewhere until the 5-6 year half-life has reduced any life-threatening potential. It isn't easy, but it is possible if precautions are taken.

- The author has given the characters uniform patterns of speech. Almost everyone sounds as if they stepped out of a 1950s vintage British movie where the characters are all erudite. It is only towards the end of the book that we encounter someone who is more workaday in their speech patterns.

-- The book involves Australian and US naval personnel. Both sides have remarkably similar speech patterns.

- "suicide pill kits" are distributed to pharmacies in sufficient potency and quantities to permit anyone who wishes to use them. Most people wait until the symptoms of radiation exposure become clear before doing so. This is all presented as an example of sound government planning.

- Everyone carries on as if nothing has happened. People still run their stores. Patrons still pay for goods. There is a concern for having gainful, if somewhat relaxed, employment. Coal mining continues so that the power plants can produce electricity. People plan for events in the years to come despite the narrative making it clear that people will not survive the coming radioactive fallout that will arrive in months. More human reactions would include a certain level of chaos.

-- As an example, some government minister has to be persuaded to allow the fishing season to start a few weeks early so that people can go fishing before the fallout arrives. People are otherwise prepared to abide by the prior restrictions on the fishing season. The minister passes this change as a "one-time only" circumstance after a bit of persuasion by other members of his social club.

The most realistic actions within the book are where people begin to cut loose from the formal social/military structures that otherwise defined their lives. In one case, a sailor leaves a submarine that is exploring the west coast of the United States. Being below water protects the submarine from radiation. The sub surfaces off the shore of the sailor's hometown. He swims ashore without permission to explore.

In the other case, a scientist came to own a Ferrari racing car in the days following the nuclear war. That sub-plot terminates with the last Australian Grand Prix. The drivers race with little concern for their personal safety as they would prefer to die doing something they enjoy than spending a week succumbing to radiation-induced illness. Much death and wreckage is the predictable result.

On The Beach is a satisfying read for those who want to experience an emotional case against nuclear weapons. It is an otherwise unproductive experience.

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