Never Ending Stories (and their reviews)

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Yes, that's Hugh Laurie, the guy who played Dr. Gregory House on TV. Or perhaps you think of him as the the Dad from Stuart Little, or Dr. Cockroach from Monsters vs Aliens, or you remember back to his days on Blackadder. But in his first novel, the role that I was thinking of most was that of Bertie Wooster from Jeeves & Wooster. "But this is a book he wrote, and not a TV show he's acting in," you say. And you're right. It's the story of a PI who turns down a job that don't meet his morals, and then ends up getting dragged deeper into the immoral morass than he ever wanted. It's got thugs and politics and assassinations and conspiracies and all that, but at the center of it, the main character has the personality of a P.G. Wodehouse character injecting a hint of silliness into the most desperate of situations. I suggest reading the book in your head as if Mr. Laurie himself is reading it aloud to you. (perhaps there is an audio book that does just that?)

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov
This is a collection of Sci-Fi short stories by one of the great science fiction writers. The first story is also included in I, Robot, but the stories are generally not about robots. They are about people in the sometime near, sometimes very distant future, and like many short stories, each story is there to frame a single central idea or question. How would humans get along with aliens, and what if one species is inherently dangerous to the other? What if computers know us better than we know ourselves? As computers start to do all of our thinking for us, will we still learn how to think? Many more of the stories center around computers rather than robots, and along the way its fun to see what Asimov saw of the future, back when computers were brand new to the world. Like many, he didn't appreciate how quickly computers would become both extremely small and extremely cheap. He doesn't seem to imagine pictures taken without film that needs to be developed, or the invention of user friendly computers. But what he does find is questions and situations that are compelling, even if the technology around them seems at times both out of date and futuristic.

A Zion Canyon Reader edited by Nathan N Waite and Reid L Neilson
This is a collection of essays and things about Zion Canyon. 28 of them make up the 244 pages, so they're not long, and they cover things from geology to plant and animal life in the canyon, to early settlers, to more modern concerns. Writers feature well known names like John Wesley Power, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey and Juanita Brooks, as well as plenty of people you've never heard of before. Occasionally it was way too touchy-feely, "feel the spirit of the canyon wash over your soul", but even at its most annoying, that essay would be over in a few pages anyway. The more interesting ones (to me) focused on early Mormon settlers, as well as some of the first (white) people to document trips through the canyons.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is the second book I've read by Kim Stanley Robinson, and I'm noticing a trend. Most sci-fi books have a well defined story line, where even from the beginning you know what bad guy needs to be defeated, or curse reversed or whatever. The fun is in the details and journey along the way. Mr. Robinson, however, writes books that don't go where I expect them to. This book is about a spaceship taking a multi-generation trip to colonize a new planet, Aurora. So it's a book about setup up a new colony, right? Nope, we spend a long time on the ship just getting there, dealing with the impossibility of maintaining a self-sufficient biosphere for 160 years. Then we get to the new planet, it sucks, and we have to make a new plan, and start a new trip with new challenges, and surprises along the way. Really, when you think about it, most novels are contrived in the way they have such clear cut story arcs that lead up to a big conflict at the end. Real life, at least my life, doesn't have such clear cut beginnings and endings to stories, but is just a single story that lasts a lifetime.