Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• The Economist: Wine And Seafood – Science has found an explanation for the old rule about not drinking red wine with fish.
• The Economist: Food, glorious food – The way health claims about food are regulated is changing.
• Guardian: Deadliest Drugs – The drugs that cause the most deaths are not the ones that get the most press attention.

The narrator of Cat’s Cradle is writing a book about the day the first atomic bomb was dropped, by collating the stories of people who were involved in its creation. One of the inventors of the bomb, Dr. Hoenekker, no longer lives, so the narrator contacts his three children instead, to record their impressions of the day.

Hoenekker’s three children, the narrator, and some other people happen to converge on the island of San Lorenzo, a poor island dictatorship somewhere close to the US. The state religion in San Lorenzo is bokononism, a joke of a religion founded to give the people of the island something to be happy about.

The children have inherited Hoenekker’s last invention: ice-nine, a form of water that is solid at room temperature. It is also very stable, and when it touches ordinary water, it turns that into ice-nine too. (A pre-nanotech version of grey goo.) Each of the three got a small piece each. And though none of them is evil or power-hungry – just careless and thoughtless – they manage to destroy the world.

The book has no one central point; rather, it has a bundle of ideas. It’s a tight and focused book, and Vonnegut fits a lot of story and a lot of ideas in few pages. There’s the obvious commentary on the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. There’s making fun of just about every kind of blind following: blind nationalism, blind local patriotism, blind adherence to religion, blind belief in science, etc. There’s man’s folly and tendency to, semi-innocently, invent things that can destroy the world, while claiming that technology is not inherently evil. (”Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”)

And underlying it all is the darkly humourous view that life just does not make sense. And yet we try to make it make sense. The opening quotation of the book is as follows:

Nothing in this book is true. Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Which is what most of us do most of the time, anyway.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Economist: Go forth and multiply a lot less – Lower fertility is changing the world for the better
• Jon Skeet: OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – A few reasons why writing software is hard
• Slate: How decent bike parking could revolutionize American cities. – A surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters.

Ondvinter (“Evilwinter”) is a most rare thing. Good contemporary Swedish fiction is hard enough to find; good Swedish fantasy – like Ondvinter – is almost never seen.

Sunia and Wulf are twins in their early teens, living with their father at a small farm some way off from the village. They’re a bit different from the other families, true, but they’ve never given it much thought. Then their father comes home from the woods one day, fatally wounded. He dies in a fever. Strange creatures turn up around their farm, and soon the two children have to flee for their lives.

They discover they’re of the Blood, whatever that means, and find an ally in the Lady of the Mountain, whoever she may be. They find out all sorts of unexpected things about themselves and their father. Events unfold around them that they’re somehow involved in, but don’t understand at all to begin with.

“Country boy/girl discovers that s/he is more than s/he thought” is nothing new, of course, but done well it can still feel all fresh. And the world in this book, and its creatures, are refreshingly non-clichéd. There’s a distinct Nordic feel to them, without falling back on the tired tropes of Norse mythology. It also feels very Nordic to have the incarnation of evil be an endless, all-consuming winter! The landscapes that Wulf and Sunia move around in are such as I can easily imagine finding somewhere in Sweden a few hundred years ago.

The language fits this all well: very Swedish, with slightly archaic phrases here and there, and a definite preference for words of Germanic origin.

This consistency of tone and mood – low-key and chilly – is a real strength for the book. The physical landscape, the events, the world, the language, all fit together. Never overwrought, and yet vibrant, varied and evocative. A joy to read.

Adlibris.

The world of Mainspring is a clockwork world, powered by the mainspring, created by God the master Clockmaker. The globe is divided in two by a vast equatorial wall, and the gear teeth of that wall mesh with the brass orbital track along which the Earth travels around the lamp of the sun. The wall also separates the known, civilized northern world from the wild southern one, which is only known from myth and legends of magic and riches. Much of the North appears to be controlled by the English empire (powered by a Royal Navy of huge ocean-crossing airships) and the Chinese.

One day Hethor, a clockmaker’s apprentice, receives a visitation from an angel who tells him that the mainspring is winding down, and he needs to find the Key Perilous and rewind it. And as if bearing that momentous responsibility wasn’t enough, Hethor is given no pointers and no advice on how or where or what. Plus, he has no money and hardly any friends. Plus, the political landscape is dominated by Rational Humanists, who tend to think that the mainspring should be allowed to wind down, and that humans should take back from God the responsibility for their lives. (There are no atheists in this world, since God’s handiwork is very conspicuously visible to all.)

It’s not a bad setup, and the idea of an actual universe of intelligent design was interesting, but the execution is pretty weak.

Hethor barely deserved to be called a protagonist. He is bland and passive, and follows the winds and the forces that push him around. Luckily for him they tend to push him in the right direction. When he survives a perilous encounter, it’s by luck and for any merit or effort of his own. As a result the story flows very straightforwardly in one direction. Almost no events, once past, have any repercussions on future events, and future events shed no new light on past ones. Things just happen, one after the other. Secondary characters (except for the hero’s inevitable romantic interest) come and go. None stays with us long enough to warrant much attention, or becomes more than a sketch.

Most mysteries in the book remain mysteries, and not in a pleasing way. Why on Earth was Hethor chosen? Why not tell him how he is supposed to achieve his task? What are those powerful characters in the background attempting to achieve? Why do some people choose to believe Hethor’s story and help him, without any visible good reason? Why does Hethor seem to gain magical abilities after some time?

I began reading this book with high hopes, and gradually became more and more disappointed. The weak ending clinched it. I won’t forget the unique concept, but I have already forgotten most of the unremarkable story.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.