Edison's Conquest of Mars

Edison's Conquest of Mars

by Garrett P. Serviss

My Blurb:

One edition falsely describes this as "an absolutely wonderful SF masterpiece", but then says it was written in 1947, so that shows how much they know!  It's actually a newspaper serial first published in the late 1800s.  Anyway... the same blurb that got the year wrong goes on to say the following:

"Edison's Conquest of Mars is a science fiction novel by American astronomer and writer Garrett P. Serviss. It was written as a sequel to Fighters from Mars, an unauthorized and heavily altered version of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. It has a place in the history of science fiction for its early employment of themes and motifs that later became staples of the genre."

Following the events of The War of the Worlds, in which Martians attack and lay waste to huge areas of Earth, humans across the globe must rally an effort to defend their planet from a repeat attack.  Fortunately for them, they are led by that amazing inventor and heroic warrior... Thomas Edison!  Will their efforts succeed (as is heavily implied by the title of this book)?  You'll have to read to find out! (Or not.  The title kind of gives it away, really.)

My Reaction:

Donald and I read this together for the 372 Pages We Won't Get Back podcast/book club.  

I haven't read much (any?) "space-themed" science fiction, though I've watched my share of TV shows and movies set in space.  Serviss apparently was the first or one of the first authors to write about... space suits, I think it was.  He also has a few other ideas that will be familiar to anyone who reads, views, or otherwise consumes space-y sci-fi.  

I give him credit for his creativity, but sadly, he wasn't much of a fiction-writer.  He had terrible pacing, practically no attempt at characterization, only the most barebone plot, and zero flair for storytelling.  Just awful, really.  Maybe a child without any expectations or experience of quality writing might enjoy this.  For everyone else, it's a curiosity, at best.  The occasional moments of unintended humor are the best thing this has going for it.  

One thing that particularly annoyed me about this book:

On the one hand, Serviss' version of Edison is an unapparelled genius, in this tale.  He reverse engineers alien technology (only his version is even better, don'tchaknow), conceptualizes and whips up new inventions and improvements on the fly (all behind the scenes, of course), and basically has the most amazing brain God has ever given a man.  

On the other hand, he continually makes idiotic strategic mistakes, at the cost of the other men's lives!  

"Hey!  There are some Martians coming!  Mr. Edison, should we use our powerful weapons to safely destroy them before they get too close, seeing as how they tried to annihilate us all on Earth just a while ago?"  

Edison says no.  Let's just wait and see what happens, first.  

Shocking surprise:  The Martians attack.  Many men are killed.

Edison:  "Oopsie!  Well, okay... Yeah, let's use our death ray... I guess..."  

And he never learns!  Some variation on this happens at least a few different times.  When you're on a mission to Mars to avenge Earth and protect it from further harm, you don't dilly-dally and pussyfoot, man!  You kill-kill-kill until every last Martian is dead.  (Or at least that's what I'd do, probably.  Hey, they started it with an unprovoked attack, and for all Edison's genius, it was only by a stroke of fortune that Earth's heroes were able to achieve the "conquest".  The Martians would be very lucky if I left any of them alive.)

Conclusion:  Glad to leave this one behind!

 

Upgrade

Upgrade
by Blake Crouch

(Edited) Blurb:

The unwilling recipient of a DNA "upgrade", Logan Ramsay is about to get the brain he always dreamed of, along with a host of other gene-level enhancements.  A holy grail of genetic engineering—one that could change our very definitions of humanity—has just been unearthed.  And now it's up to him to stop it from falling into the wrong hands.  But will he be transformed into something more than human… or something less?  

My Reaction:

Eh...

Well, to start with, unlike many of the readers whose reviews I've skimmed, I was unfamiliar with this author's work until I started reading Upgrade, so I came in with no expectations or preconceptions of what this novel might be.  (Though after starting it, I did see that Wayward Pines was based on his work, and I watched the first season of that...)  While reading reviews for The It Girl, I saw someone suggest that people would be better off reading this, if they wanted a real page-turner of a thriller.  (I'm not sure I agree.  Maybe this is the better of the two books in some ways, but I probably enjoyed reading the other one more, despite that.  And honestly, they're just such completely different books!  Comparing them feels pointless, really.)

So, I went in not knowing what to expect.  Aspects of the initial world-building phase of the book gave me the feeling I probably wouldn't like everything about it, but I hoped the story might move in a different direction.  In some ways, it did, but I probably should have trusted my gut reaction, because it was correct:  I didn't like this book.  

My chief complaints?  

• These are flat characters who elicit mostly flat emotions (with one or two notable exceptions toward the end).  
• The combination of dry science textbook infodump and descriptions of action sequences is boring.  Some reviewers have speculated that this was written "for the screen" (or at least with that as a fond wish), and it certainly feels like a possibility.  This author has had other works adapted for TV/movie, which bumps it up to a likelihood!
• Characters who are supposed to be geniuses display distinctly sub-genius intelligence.
• We're supposed to believe that humanity is a century away from extinction, and yet... most things seem pretty okay in the parts of the world we visit during this book.  Certainly not on the brink of extinction, barring something like a "planet killer" asteroid.  Yes, certain areas have flooded.  Yes, non-synthetic meat seems to be an expensive treat rather than part of a daily diet.  Yes, we're told that people are starving (somewhere).  But the major population centers are still there, around the globe.  There have been major advancements in transportation, as well as other engineering feats, and things don't seem to be too bad in middle-class America.  Again, not on the verge of collapse.
• A colossally irritating ending.  I guess it's not worth going into spoiler territory to expand on it, but I really don't buy Logan's theory for how to save the world.  I found it obnoxious, to be brutally honest, and it completely negated the previous however-many pages I'd read.  UGH.

I skimmed large chunks of the info-dump pseudoscience babbling after briefly considering just skipping straight to the end.  

A couple of quotes, since I bothered to take notes...

—"...Drive to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, which had been hit by two cat 7 hurricanes in the last decade and left with no economy to speak of, and wonder how people found the will to go on."

First of all, allow me to guffaw my ever-lovin' head off at the ridiculous little "let me slip this in here all casual-like" factoid that they've added two more levels to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.  I live on the Gulf Coast and have lived through multiple hurricanes.  This little cutesy "cat 7" stuff...?  No.  Also, if things were that bad in coastal Mississippi, I think most people would find a way to leave, even if it meant leaving everything behind but what they could carry on their backs.  Why does this author think the people of MS are so powerless (or stupid?) that they would stay in a hellscape "with no economy to speak of" and no hope for improvement when there's a normal life still to be had in much of the rest of the country?  How insulting!

—"What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were.  Soldiers.  Criminals.  Politicians.  Capitalists."  

Oh, here we go.  Ok, I'll grant you the politicians, because I'm fed up with them all, at this point and have trouble trusting a word any of them say, but saying that "capitalists" and "soldiers" (just any soldier, I guess, not narrowing it down to some type of scary, evil mercenaries, but including people who simply want to serve and protect their country) are on the same level as criminals?  Good grief.  Well, at least we know where he stands!

Was it worth the read?  For me, probably not.  I didn't love it.  

The It Girl

The It Girl

by Ruth Ware

Blurb:

April Coutts-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford.

Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious, and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends—Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily—during their first term. By the end of the second, April was dead.

Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison. Relieved to have finally put the past behind her, Hannah’s world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that Neville may have been innocent. As Hannah reconnects with old friends and delves deeper into the mystery of April’s death, she realizes that the friends she thought she knew all have something to hide… including a murder.

My Reaction:

This novel could have benefited from trimming down, in my opinion.  Too many paragraphs were just "round and round" clichéd internal dialogue.  Every time we had to hear about Hannah's blood pressure or the baby kicking or her present-day interactions with Will, it felt like a waste of words and time.  I started skimming those sections, at some point.  

More than once, I found myself wondering just how intelligent Hannah is actually supposed to be.  She made it into Oxford, and yet... There are several times that she doesn't seem like the brightest bulb.  

At a certain point, the murderer's identity became very obvious (more on that below), and from then on I was mostly just waiting around to see how long it took Hannah to realize.  I was still curious about the "why", though I could come up with a few plausible reasons on my own, based on April's behavior to her "friends" as a whole.  In the end, I was a bit "meh" about the explanation of why the murder happened.  It fits well enough, I guess.  A bit of a let-down, though I'm not sure what else I wanted from the explanation.  More of an emotional connection or motivation, maybe.

I found it difficult to connect with Hannah or care particularly much about April.  Also, the setting...  I don't know much about Oxford, except that it's old and "elite", and frankly, I'm not particularly interested in learning more about it.  I get the impression that we are supposed to care much more about Oxford than I do (or even can).  Maybe I'm a bit jaded by the whole college/university thing.  It's largely a racket!  Possibly I also found most of the circle of friends to be utterly obnoxious caricatures of rather bratty and unsympathetic college students.  Whatever the reason, my reaction to the setting was not positive.

Final note (before I get to spoilers):  When I first saw this book's title, I thought it was The IT Girl, as in "information technology"— so a mystery/thriller centered around a young woman working in IT, I guess?  That probably would have been fresher and potentially more interesting than a spoiled "It girl" in a college setting, to tell the truth!  

SPOILERS 

FOLLOW:

After a long while of not being sure who would be revealed as the killer, the solution suddenly became blatantly clear (to me, at least).  As soon as we learned that Hugh sent Hannah out of the room to seek help, I was positive that he'd killed April.  There were only two ways this could have worked.  In the first, he could have drugged April to render her unconscious (tricky to plan and time perfectly).  The second option was that April had arranged with Hugh to pretend to be dead to scare Hannah; paired with April's love of pranks (and the fact that she hadn't pranked Hannah), that seemed the likeliest scenario (though maybe still not foolproof).  ...Ta-dah.  (Is it better to guess whodunit ahead of time and feel a mild sense of superiority or have the fun of not having a clue until the very last minute?)

Another kind-of-a-spoiler:  Hannah needs to get over her guilt for supposedly being the one to send John Neville (was that his name?) to jail.  All she did was tell the truth of what had happened to her and what she'd seen with her own eyes.  Besides, Neville was a predatory creep and stalker who should most definitely not have been working in close proximity to vulnerable young women!  Maybe he didn't commit a murder, but he certainly seemed the type to do something nefarious, and I wouldn't lose too much sleep over his incarceration. 

Oh, and this isn't a spoiler, but do any modern-day, living, breathing English people— even the posh ones— actually unironically call one another "old bean" these days?!  Hugh does it repeatedly, which I found unbelievably ridiculous.  I ain't reading about Bertie Wooster here!  I know Hugh's supposed to be some sort of British version of Niles Crane, with the embroidered dressing gown and everything, but... Please, try to keep it realistic!

A Pelican at Blandings

A Pelican at Blandings

by P.G. Wodehouse

Blurb:

Blandings Castle lacks its usual balm for the Earl of Emsworth, as his stern sister Lady Constance Keeble is once more in residence. The Duke of Dunstable is also infesting the place again, along with the standard quota of American millionaires, romantic youths, con artists, imposters and so on. With a painting of a reclining nude at the centre of numerous intrigues, Gally's genius is once again required to sort things out.

My Reaction:

I read this together with Donald, in between "assignments" for the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back book club / podcast.  (I've yet to read Wodehouse solo, that I can recall...)  

There's not much to say:  It's typical Wodehouse, with just about everything you expect from him.  Maybe it's not one of his very best works, but it's still pretty darn good— clever, light, and funny.  Even at his less-than-best, Wodehouse is the perfect antidote for the more depressing realities of life!  

Susan Settles Down

Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

Blurb:

Young Susan Parsons has just moved, with her unmarried brother Oliver, to a newly-inherited property in the Scottish Highlands. Their neighbors prove a mixed bag, including the towering, kindly Jed Armstrong, a farmer whose land 'marches with' theirs, the local vicar and his family, and the three gossipy Pringle sisters, who travel by donkey-drawn cart and get their knives into one and all. After a bumpy start, with a disagreeable cook and her nincompoop daughter as their only help, Susan and Oliver begin to settle in nicely, and find themselves in the midst of romance, confusion, and earthy hilarity.

My Reaction:

On the whole, I enjoyed this book.  It's a calm story set very firmly in reality.  A gentle book, which is very nice in some ways.  On the other hand, because it is so gentle and calm, it didn't really grip me and compel me to read longer or faster.  If you're in the mood for something steady and not particularly dramatic, this would be a good choice— particularly if you like British books written and set "between the wars".  

There were things I didn't like so much, too, however:

• The nearly indecipherable presentation of certain characters' Scottish accent/dialect.  You can get the gist, but it's not easy! 
• The saccharine, "oh-aren't-they-adorable" children.  Fortunately, they're not in the book much.
• The part of the story with Jo-ann.  Maybe it was meant to add realism or gravity to the tale, but it felt oddly out of place to me.  
• The fact that the romance was split between two couples.  It cut down on the time for either to develop fully.  Eh, not bad, but could have been better.  

I don't really care for Oliver, to tell the truth, and it's fairly obvious for most of the book exactly how things will end—but that's okay with me.  In some types of books, predictability is not a flaw, but part of the appeal.  

It does have some entertaining elements, though, and some of the descriptive passages are a pleasure to read.  

I'd give it 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 and would consider reading more by the author.