Thursday, July 17, 2025
39. The Tower by Richard Martin Stern
Sunday, July 13, 2025
38. There's a Hippie on the Highway by James Hadley Chase
The title, though, is more of a framing device. Harry Mitchell is a Vietnam vet hitching his way down Florida looking for summer work and some "sea and sun". He gets picked up by a trucker who warns him about the hippies on the road, stoned youth who will ruthlessly set upon anybody who stops. I guess Chase wanted to do something set in Florida (perhaps keying into John D. MacDonald's popularity?) but this feels more like Mad Max. Mitchell stops at an Italian roadside restaurant run by a really nice old Italian guy and his plump daughter and there confronts a gang of these hippies who chase another traveller inside. Mitchell busts them up and their pursuer, Randy, tells Mitchell he is heading to a restaurant/ beach resort where he could get him a job as a lifeguard.
See already, I'm trying to write a summary of the plot, but JHC always has so much going on right from the get-go that it's hard to know which details to exclude. Even before they get to the restaurant, they get picked up by a woman towing a "caravan" (another word that we don't say in North America; JHC is always good for a few of these) who then leaves them with a dead body (this is where the cover image comes from; his wig comes off when they bury him). I'm already giving away spoilers. I'll stop there and just say it gets even more interesting at the restaurant.
Among the cast of characters is an over-ambitious cop, the weirdly aggressive and ex-peterman (safe cracker) owner of the restaurant, his over-sexed daughter, the murdered man and his two associates both rough-edged women. As always with JHC there is a lot of story. The intricacies of the crime and its fallout are well thought out and coherent. The characters are colourful and just slightly unreal, but not in a way that lessens the entertainment.
There are two layers of racism in the book. On one level, the Black characters are portrayed stereotypically (although more for the 50s than the late 60s) and this is racist enough (like more than once, Joe the always friendly bartender goggles his eyes). There is a second, worse level where the racism feels off and I think it's again because Chase has no actual experience with actual American Black people. So you sense not only did he copy an ugly stereotype, he also sort of amped it up and made a point to emphasize it.
I am guessing this was perhaps also to reinforce the overall reactionary politics of the intro and outro (where the evil hippies return brutally). Chase thought that certain Americans would want to read about the hippie scourge and the triumph of a hardworking vet and a little background racism fits right in.
So not without flaws, this book is nevertheless overall entertaining and well put together.
Saturday, July 12, 2025
37. The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World's Most Powerful Mafia by Alex Perry
The thing with these journalistic books, though, is that ultimately I just want the facts. Because it's not an academic history, the writer has to make it into a "story." For myself, these two demands make an end result that is not entirely satisfactory either for the facts or the story. Perry's thesis is that women were ignored by the Mafia and the prosecutors going after them because of traditional Italian machismo and by finally paying attention to them, they were able to break the crime families. These powerful and brutal families, rooted in the gangster history of poverty-stricken southern Italy, were not able to get past their misogynist culture and this is what undid them. He does a good job arguing this thesis. It's the narrative that I found a bit forced, as he hopes between the three women's stories (which were all connected but not that closely). I was impatient to just find out what happened. This isn't really a critique of the book, just that as I was reading it, I remember why these kinds of popular non-fiction books are not really my jam.
What this book did really help me with was understanding better the political geography of Italy and the Mafia. I had heard of Calabria but didn't really get the deal with it. I'm no expert but this book had excellent maps and Perry does a good job of giving an overview sense of the geography and culture of the region. He glosses over it with a couple of sentences, but I also can understand how poor brigand families in remote mountain areas who met with revolutionaries could have evolved into a more sophisticated level of crime. What is missing is how they could all just become so brutal and murderous, even (especially) to their own families. Are they just this backward? I would be interested in a more nuanced treatment of the culture of the region. Still, humans. We can be as shitty as possible.
The other thing that I still don't understand is how these local thugs who dominate a region can also be controlling major finance and law firms with international scope. I guess this is the plot of the The Firm and it must be happening, but I'd like a clearer explanation with examples of where an archaic, country family can also be able to make decisions for billion-dollar firms. How does that work?
Wednesday, July 09, 2025
36. System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells
Network Effect is about rescuing ART's crew and figuring out the mystery of the Lost Colony. Now that we know what is going on. And there is a lot going on with factions of colonists, two layers of semi-failed terraforming/colonization, the evil corporation coming and trying to turn the colonists into indentured servants while the good people of ART's university crew (actually more of an advocacy group that secretly rescues and supports lost colonies) and Murderbot's Preservation friends try to save them.
The final act gets a bit confusing and drawn out and was somewhat of an anti-climax. There were so many moving parts and while it was emotionally satisfying and there was some decent action, I was hoping for something on a grander scale. An epic battle between secunits riding those crazy alien-contaminated ag-bots for instance would have worked. I'm nitpicking and as this is an episodic type series, going against my own values. Still very entertaining. I'm excited to learn that there is a new novella at work for 2026 and two short stories online that I will read next.
Some thoughts on the Murderbot TV series
I've watched the first 6 episodes and it's not quite doing it for me. It looks great and most of the actors are excellent (and look correct as well). I have two issues. First, while Skarsgard is fine, I hate to be super work but I really have to question the casting. One of the genius touches of the books is that Wells never identifies Murderbot's gender nor really their appearance. I realized at some point in that I was vaguely imposing my own masculine default image in my mind, but Murderbot could be any skin colour, gender or body type even. Like why not a thick, short butch lesbian look? Skarsgard is about as generic white male as you can get. It just anchors the show back to the 20th century. He is an executive producer so maybe a lot of the money came from his work, so I can accept him wanting to star if so, just not an ideal choice.
I can live with the boring safe choice but what really irks me is the obviousness of the writing. The books are far from subtle but Wells always delivers her various themes with a light touch. Murderbot is always sardonically commenting on the naivete of humans outside the Corporation Rim, but they are all quite competent (again, for humans) and don't ever flip out unecessarily and screw shit up. In the TV series, Dr. Mensah has to keep having panic attacks and they even wrote in an entirely new character who would betray them just so Murderbot could blow her head off in front of them all so we could get an entirely new level of freak-out and mistrust by the wimpy liberals. Yes, they are humanists and soft-hearted, but they are all experienced researchers who come from a refugee colony and have seen some shit. I can just see some producer going "we need to punch this up!" It's just so stupid and obvious and manipulative rather than good characters reacting with complexity to interesting situations (which is what the book delivers so well on).
This concept that progressives are soft and don't understand reality is a long-used propaganda narrative by the right and given that the entire thesis of the Murderbot Diaries is against corporatism and the need for authoritarian control (in the symbol of Murderbot's rejected governor module), it is depressing to see Hollywood once again internalizing it making it a fundamental aspect of the show. That's your coastal elites for you, always bending the knee to money and the power behind it.
Sunday, July 06, 2025
35. Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries #6) by Martha Wells
I am happy to say that Network Effect continues all the great elements of the previous Murderbot books: awesome sci-fi physical and computer action, hilarious techno-neurodivergent yet overly-emotional and sensitive Murderbot commentary on stupid humans (I love the "privacy blah blah blah" line), super cool space setting with evil corporations and mellow hippy planets thwarting them. And all this goodness in full novel length!
This time, Murderbot is out with a scientific team from Preservation (including Amena, Dr. Mensah's adolescent daughter) when they get raided by a tougher yet weirdly more primitive transport ship that turns out to be ART, Murderbot's old transport bot/secretly super powerful research AI friend that has somehow been deleted and taken over by these weirdly grey humanoids. Murderbot gets most of the crew off and seemingly saved except for Amena and the two of them get sucked into a wormhole that leads to an abandoned colony planet and a fun mystery. This narrative has two main themes that keep you turning the pages: Murderbot needing to save both him and ART's crew while dealing with a corporate that wants to claim the colony and figuring out the mystery of who these gray people are and how could they have taken over ART with some weird mold.
The climax is really cool as we get not only another SecUnit involved, but also a copy of Murderbot in software form only and the three of them work together with ART. It's complex and fun and also allows Murderbot to get all in huff constantly because he can't deal with his emotions. I'm turning into one of those fans who will be demanding more when I finish the last book.