The second component of my birthday present from Mooch and Sarah was the second installment of the Millennium Trilogy by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire picks up right where The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo left off returning to the complicated lives of Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomkvist.

Whirl and I watched the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two nights ago. And without going into a protracted screed about the risks of adapting complex literary stories to film, both of us were somewhat disappointed by the adjustments made from the source material for the sake of transfer to the screen. Several of the double-binds, the psychological catch-22s, and character flaws were stripped away leaving a much more pedestrian story as a result.

So it is with that in the back of my mind, that I’m starting into the second novel, unencumbered by the specific demands of film. The Girl Who Played with Fire focuses upon “All the Evil” Salander referenced obliquely when working with Blomkvist on the Harriet Vanger disappearance. Larsson laid a great deal of groundwork here — mostly through Salander’s refusal to discuss anything about herself or her past.

The main plot of The Girl Who Played with Fire begins when a freelance journalist, approaches Blomkvist with plans to publish a story that exposes people in high office involved in Sweden’s sex trafficking business. Svensson’s story is based on research conducted by his girlfriend, a criminologist and gender studies scholar. When the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment, Salander must talk. But as I learned in the first novel, Salander prefers to talk not with words, but action. Decisive, vengeful action.

For my birthday Mooch and Sarah gifted me with the very last copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo left in Chicago. All other copies have been sold, borrowed or stolen to accompany summer vacationers, weary business travelers and college students returning for the fall semester. It seems like I must be the last man standing who has not read this book. I am exaggerating a little bit about receiving the last copy in Chicago. I am not exaggerating about the widespread interest this book has generated or how frequently I have encountered people reading it — particularly travelers. On my last trip to Los Angeles, I counted over thirty copies on board the plane. And I was flying Southwest. There are only 137 passenger seats on each of their planes. Almost one passenger in four was reading this book.

After retrieving the book from Whirl — who decided it was her prerogative to read my birthday present before I did — I’ve now joined the rest of the world in consuming this posthumously-published millennium trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson. I do not often read crime novels. I think the last ones I may have read were a couple of Joe Kurtz novels from Dan Simmons. I’m only a handful of pages in as I write this and I’m already hooked.

Robert Dessaix of the Sydney Morning Herald described the story this way:

“An epic tale of serial murder and corporate trickery spanning several continents, the novel takes in complicated international financial fraud and the buried evil past of a wealthy Swedish industrial family.”

Travel times are here again. And travel — particularly airplane travel — means reading. Call me anachronistic, out of it, behind the times: I prefer a low-tech paperback to high-tech alternatives any time I travel. Batteries expire just at the exciting part. Earphone buds and charging cables run off and elope with essential plot devices, fascinating characters and narratives. And they don’t return my calls to their cellphones. Assuming I can even get reliable service. No. Give me a book. Give me a big paperback book. I’ve yet to have a paperback crash on me even when I’ve dropped one in the ocean. The data are still recoverable. The story goes on.

To this point, my book is the collaborative novel Black House written by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Black House is a follow-up novel to their first collaboration, The Talisman. Whenever asked what my favorite King novel is, I answer The Talisman. Whirl suggested I read it shortly after we’d met. It was on the strength of The Talisman that I went on to voraciously consume a large section of King’s prodigious library.

Whirl and I have been enjoying the TV series Fringe and remarking on the similarities between Fringe and the parallel-world structure that King and Straub have used in The Talisman. King has fleshed out something similar with his Dark Tower series. I’m one of many fans who believe that Midworld and the Territories are the same place. — And with Fringe now completed for the season, picking up Black House accomplished three goals at once: I have an appropriate potboiler for plane travel; I get to pick up one of my favorite stories with the sequel to The Talisman; I get to analyze the links between King and Straub’s “Territories” and J.J. Abrams’ “Other Side”.

And of course the various literary references throughout Black House are tantalizing to me to try and catch: the obvious references to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe are easy. Others are more subtle. In further good news, Straub has announced that he and Stephen King are planning to begin work on a third novel later this year.

Jack Sawyer is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the small hamlet of Tamarak, Wisconsin. He has no recollection of the events twenty years ago that led him to a parallel universe called the Territories to save his mother from certain death. When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin, Jack’s buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help the inexperienced force find the killer. As cryptic messages in Jack’s waking dreams become increasingly impossible to ignore, he is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he must find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted tract of forest–and to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.

My friend and collegue Dan brought this glowing review of Ian McEwan’s latest novel Solar to my attention last month. Charlie Jane Anders boldly states in the review:

If Ian McEwan’s Solar isn’t on the Hugo ballot next year, it’ll be a miscarriage of justice. The two-time Booker Prize winner does something few literary darlings have done before: treat science with respect, as central to the story.

That’s all it took.

Wait. Who am I fooling? Those opening sentences are powerful praise. The full review that follows goes into considerable analysis and detail. But it didn’t matter to me at that point. I wanted to read this book right then. Two sentences were all it took.

I went looking for it right away. In the several subsequent trips I’ve made to bookstores, I seem to have run into an odd dimension of bad luck. I arrive just shortly after the last copy has left the shelf. Yes, I know there are stores online where they are happy to sell you books and deliver them to your door. I use those too. I happen to really enjoy bookstores. Today I broke out of the Last One Just Left Dimension and was able pick up a copy of Solar for myself. The fact that I’d finished my last novel last night and was busy trying to decide what to read next added a bonus helping of serendipity.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to keep this one short and go read my new book.

In the 1990s Kim Stanley Robinson published three hard science fiction novels that have captured my attention and never quite let go. Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars make up the Mars trilogy. To say that the trilogy is about human exploration, colonization and eventual terraforming of the red planet is to do it a huge disservice. Science certainly, but psychology, sociology, politics — all of these elements are played out over 200 years of narrative through the intensely personal points of view of Robinson’s characters. Robinson owns this world completely, and is able to compose a compelling science fiction story to talk about our world in a meaningful way.

For his efforts, Robinson has received the highest awards given to science fiction authors. Each of the three novels were nominated for multiple awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, Campbell and British Science Fiction Awards. Red Mars won the Nebula award in 1993. Green Mars won the Hugo award in 1994. Blue Mars won the Hugo award in 1997.

I tore through these novels over ten years ago. And in recent weeks I have found myself wanting to go back to them again. Perhaps it is the unprecedented success of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Or the troubled political state of the direction of manned spaceflight to Mars from NASA. I know I will never go to Mars myself — and so I do the next best thing. I open a tried and true time/space teleporter, the novel. And it takes me there effortlessly.

I’ve used this device to travel to Mars before. Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter took me there when I was a kid. Robert Heinlein and “Poddy” Fries took me there in high school. I went with Dan Simmons not that long ago. Now I’m going back. I’ll rejoin the First Hundred: John Boone, Frank Chalmers, Arkady Bogdanov, Ann Clayborne, Hiroko Ai and the ever-phlegmatic Saxifrage Russell. I will scale the Olympus Mons. And I will witness a new world born through toil and care and violence.

A children’s book for grown-ups, B Is for Beer is Tom Robbins’ tribute to beer. Christian Toto of the Denver Post describes it as “social satire gussied up as children’s literature.” That description immediately alarms me; I have to wonder whether Toto has read anything else by Tom Robbins. The review goes on to suggest he’s at least familiar with Tom Robbins, but I’m not sure Toto quite gets Robbins. And that is, of course, part of the brilliance of Robbins as a writer. He’s surprising and whimsical and clever and poignant. Tom Robbins is one of my favorite authors.

Inspired by a cartoon in the New Yorker, Robbins novel is an ode to all things beer. When asked why an ode to beer, Robbins responded:

Why not? As ode fodder, its got to have at least as much potential as nightingales and Grecian urns. Beer is so universally beloved that 36 billion gallons of it are sold each year worldwide. It’s been popular for thousands of years. It has deep connections to the earth. Bittersweet, like much of life itself, it’s exceptionally thirst-quenching and enormously refreshing; it’s cheerful, accessible, affordable, lovely in color, and somewhat nourishing, being one of our few neutral foods: perfectly balanced between acidic and alkaline, between yin and yang. Best of all perhaps, beer makes us tipsy. What’s not to ode?

It is difficult to describe Tom Robbins novels in traditional terms — again, an element of his charm is wrapped in that challenge. Suffice it to say that B Is for Beer will illuminate and entertain. Whether you’re a child or a grump or even a woodpecker.

I have been recommending River of Gods by Ian McDonald since I finished reading it in November. Plenty of praise has been given to McDonald on the novel: “masterpiece”, “major achievement”. Nominated for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The richness of the world McDonald created in that novel is something I have repeatedly compared to William Gibson‘s watershed novel, Neuromancer. Cyberabad Days is a return to the India of 2047. It is a smaller volume than the novel that spawned it. Weighing in at just short of 300 pages, it contains seven stories all set in the same world of River of Gods.

“The Little Goddess” is a 2006 Hugo nominee, best novella. “The Djinn’s Wife” is a 2007 Hugo Award winner, best novelette. Also included are the previously-published stories “Sanjeev and the Robotwallah”, “Kyle Meets the River”, “The Dust Assassin”, “An Eligible Boy”, and the new novella “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”.

Cyberabad Days is a triumphant return to the Inda of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate change-induced drought, water wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children who age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas.

No, I’m not talking about the Bruce Springsteen album — although I do have that album and have enjoyed it a great deal. The Boss doesn’t do zombies. And this is a zombie novel. Steamboat Wille lent it to me so if there is some reason I end up disliking the book, I can conveniently blame him and escape any sense of culpability. As an aside, after about fifty pages in, I am enjoying it, so I think he’s off the hook. The Rising is the first novel by Brian Keene. It won Keene a Bram Stoker Award in 2003. It’s the story of a zombie uprising, but an uprising unlike the more familiar George Romero fashion.

I’ve learned that The Rising is actually the first in a two-part series of zombie novels by Keene. The second is the novel, City of the Dead. Keene is a new author for me. I’m intrigued by his take on the zombie legend. Keene’s zombies are intelligent. They are smart; they have a purpose. They want more than to shamble aimlessly around the shopping mall and consume.

From the back cover:

Nothing stays dead for long. The dead are returning to life, intelligent, determined … and very hungry. Escape seems impossible for Jim Thurmond, one of the few left alive in this nightmare world. But Jim’s young son is also alive and in grave danger hundreds of miles away. Despite astronomical odds, Jim vows to find him — or die trying.

Joined by an elderly preacher, a guilt-ridden scientist and an ex-prostitute, Jim sets out on a cross-country rescue mission. Together they must battle both the living and the living dead … and the even greater evel that awaits them at the end of their journey.

I came late to reading Ian McDonald. A couple years ago I read the second of his recent popular science fiction novels, Brasyl. I skipped the book that appears to have put him on the map, River of Gods. I am trying to remember why I did that, and what occurs to me is that I couldn’t find River of Gods in the bookstore and Brasyl had just been released. So maybe I picked it up as a book of opportunity. I remember being underwhelmed by Brasyl. And while I appreciated what McDonald was trying to do, I never felt fully satisfied by the execution of it. It didn’t compel me. It didn’t pull me in to a world like I had expected it to do. At some fundamental level, it just didn’t seem to work.

River of Gods is having the opposite effect. I’m a third of the way through this monstrous novel and I am having the hardest time putting it down. All my criticism about the lack of reader engagement in Brasyl is completely misplaced if I were to apply it to River of Gods. This is a wonderfully rich world. The characters are fascinating. The extrapolation on technology is engaging, insightful and frightening. I am repeatedly reminded of my first time through William Gibson‘s Neuromancer. While McDonald’s work is decidedly post-cyberpunk there is a striking similarity of breadth, depth, complexity and nuance. This 2004 Hugo Award nominee is a great science fiction novel.

As an aside, I was intrigued to learn that a former coworker of mine, Stephan Martiniere, did the cover illustration for the American trade paperback.

From the back cover:

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business — a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj — the waif, the mind reader, the prophet — when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.

In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.

River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples, cultures, and technologies — one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, and a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.