Books: Worlds, Children, Singularities, And The Life Of Scrooge McDuck

[woodwardiocom]

Betrayer Of Worlds by Niven & Lerner

Fourth in the "Worlds" series, which stitches together the existing stories of Known Space, revealing the secrets behind it. This volume is the first adventure of Louis Wu and Nessus, years before Ringworld, which ends up wiped from Louis' memory. Nessus recruits Louis to help him stave off a Puppeteer civil war, a Gw'oth civil war, and war between the Puppeteers and the Gw'oth. It continues to play with the technologies and politics of the setting, and admirably sets up Louis' later problems with addiction. It ends neatly, but there are clearly more stories to be told. (E.g., the Hindmost at the end of this book is probably not the Hindmost in Ringworld.) Recommended to Niven fans.

Children Of The Atom by Wilmar Shiras

A 1950s story of an educational psychologist who stumbles across a superintelligent child, and realizes that the nuclear accident that created him may have created others. This novel was one of the inspirations for the original X-Men, and is a quick and entertaining read in itself. Mildly recommended.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Set on a vaguely-Soviet colony world in the distant, post-Singularity future. The one law of the universe is, "Thou shalt not violate causality." Our backwards Russians get attacked by a self-replicating interstellar swarm of info-starved cellphones with cornucopia machines, and attempt to respond with naval force . . . and a causality violation. Our heroes, a couple of agents provocateur from civilization, try to talk them out of it. Hilarity ensues. Not Stross' best, but still recommended.

The Life And Times Of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa

The classic stories of Scrooge McDuck (Donald's uncle) were written in the 1940s and 50s by Carl Barks, and were mostly set in contemporary times. However, they contained numerous hints of Scrooge's long history, in which he went from poor Scottish lad to the richest man in the world through hard work and shrewd dealing. In these 1990s stories, Rosa takes all those hints and builds a biography of Scrooge around them, including his adventures in every corner of the world and the moments that built his character. Despite the "funny animal" subject, there is genuine character building in here, in particular the tensions between Scrooge's love of family and his greed, and between his greed and his determination to be a square dealer. (And between his love of hard work for its own sake, and his greed. And between his admiration for the beauties of nature, and his desire to run an oil pipeline through it. Etc. Y'know, I'd be fascinated to see what Objectivists would make of this work...) I particularly admire Rosa's demiurgic fidelity. In writing RPGs based on extant properties, I've often had to piece together the history of a character from hints dropped in the primary canon (e.g., in the Hellboy RPG). Rosa does an admirable job here, and weaves in excellent nuggets of real-world history, too. Highly recommended, and well-deserving of its Eisner award.

Comments

[tactical-grace.livejournal.com]

I thought Singularity Sky was OK, but the followup book, Iron Sunrise, was really quite good.