The Invisible Intruder

So some of the honeymoon is starting to wear off with my shiny new computer. Particularly because I think there's something seriously wrong with it.

For the last couple of weeks, it's been getting harder and harder to boot it up. At first it was glitches about not being able to find a bootable device, which I attributed to loose connections to the main hard drive, possibly from when I was installing the secondary drive. But it's gotten steadily worse. Sometimes it crashes and restarts in the middle of Windows startup, sometimes it actually gets into Windows(or almost)and starts either complaining about files on C: that it can't write to, or just BSOD's. Today it took me about eight tries to get it booted up. Once it's been in Windows for a few minutes without crashing, then it's fine, and will stay fine for hours, so I may just start to not shut it down.

Because of the flashy light patterns on the side of the case, I have been tending to turn off the power switch at the back of the computer(after it's been normally shut down); whether that has something to do with it, I don't know. Or possibly the time that Simon turned off the power switch when he thought the computer was shut down, but it actually wasn't. (He has since been enjoined to strictly refrain from turning if off without asking first.) But I assume that it's more likely some kind of hardware problem. Something in the connection to the C: drive, perhaps, or in the motherboard. It doesn't seem particularly like the memory problems one of our computers at work was having, which also manifested in severe trouble booting up but clear sailing once you were in.

Anyway, I'm sure I will eventually give up and take it in to get fixed. Installing that second hard drive probably voided my warranty, which doesn't bother me unduly. I'm willing to pay to get it fixed. Luckily I bought it from a decent computer store, that may be able to try fixing it without reformatting the C: drive. (Though I may just try to finish backing things up onto DVD-R first.) So if I drop out of site for a while...well, it won't seem unusual, but that is one possible reason.

Closely Guarded

While I'm in a bit of an updatey mood, and since I just finished cataloguing the last month or so's books that we bought, I might as well update my reading list:

9. Kathleen Sky: Ice Prison Kathleen Sky is, of course, the author of Vulcan!, one of the small number of Star Trek novels done before Pocket Books started cranking out the series. I frankly don't remember much about it, though I suspect that Spock gets emotions or something at some point. Anyway, I seem to recall that I got this book free in the dealer's room at a convention(ConText '91 here in Edmonton), as a bonus item for buying more than a certain amount. I may have been able to pick it out of a small selection or not, I don't remember. It's a Laser Books edition, one of Harlequin's first abortive attempts to enter the SF market, though they still numbered the books in the line.

How was the book itself? It was okay, nice and short, which was what I was looking for. Ambitious but unpopular officer gets sent to an ice-planet penal colony(hence the title)from which nobody, not even the staff, ever escape. He is determined to actually solve their problems, though, most of which were caused by the last half-dozen incompetent wardens, and falls in love with a nubile young revolutionary. Quite frankly I would've been willing to read more of the plot, but, like I said, it was short.

10. Frederic S. Durbin: Dragonfly This was an impulse grab from the library paperback racks, and I was hoping it would be quick, but it took me more than a week. It started out kind of interesting, then slowed down for a long time before it picked up again. Dragonfly is the main character, a ten-year-old girl with jetsetting parents who lives with her funeral-home-running uncle. After they start hearing noises in the basement, her uncle calls in an odd friend to investigate; when he goes to investigate, Dragonfly jumps after him. So far, so good, and they have a great combat scene with a bunch of vampires in a glassworks not too long after that. Unfortunately, Dragonfly ends up getting separated, captured by the bad guys a few times, and mopes around a lot before she finally meets up with allies again. Overall I suppose I liked it--it's got a good Hallowe'eny mood to it, pity I was reading it in February. Just a little draggy in the middle.

11. Michelle West: The Riven Shield Fifth in the Sun Sword series. I intentionally started this one on my Super Sekrit Calgary Trip, when I had two bus rides to fill, and as a result it actually took me less time than Dragonfly, despite being much longer. It was actually better than the last couple of Sun Sword books, or at least maintained a more consistent pacing. Or maybe it was just having three hours to devote to getting started on it that gave me the momentum to continue. I'm more confident that she will actually tie most of the plot threads up in the last book. (Though I seem to recall her saying that this book was supposed to have been the last one...)

12. Alan Dean Foster: The Tar-Aiym Krang I've read two prequels to this book, Nor Crystal Tears and For Love of Mother-Not, but neither of them made much impression on me. I've since mostly gotten over the need to read later-written prequels before the earlier-written books. I still don't think Foster is the greatest writer out there, but this book is okay, and fairly fast-moving. I gather there's about eight or nine more Flinx books, and I may read some of them sometime. No hurry.

13. James Alan Gardner: Radiant I've been a big fan of James Alan Gardner's books from the beginning(heck, I was a fan from the moment I read "Muffin Explains Teleology To The World At Large"). While all of his books have been good, this is, IMHO, the first one to measure up to Expendable. Expendable set up the League of Peoples universe, where anyone who causes the death of another sentient being is deemed a "harmful non-sentient" and killed by godlike beings the next time they leave their planet, set up the Explorer Corps, where the ugly, disfigured, and other social misfits get to do all the dirty and dangerous work, and introduced Festina Ramos, our heroine. She turned up in most of the other Explorer Corps books, including this one, though mostly as a secondary character. In this one, our viewpoint character is Youn Suu, another Explorer, and the plot builds on some of the previous books(especially Ascending)and really begins to get a little cosmic. If you haven't read any Gardner yet, then by all means start with Expendable, but this is a reason to keep reading until you get to this one. Yummy.

14. Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson & Kate Elliott: The Golden Key I've only read one of these three authors, Jennifer Roberson, and that was the first five books of her Cheysuli series a couple of decades ago. So I might not have picked this book up on my own, but I got it as part of the "Dirty Santa" book exchange of the Cult of Pain this past December. I also felt a certain obligation to read it a little sooner than I might have otherwise.

It's a fantasy novel set in a sort of Fantasy Europe. The language the characters speak, terms from which are liberally sprinkled throughout the work(a nice touch, actually)is somewhere around Italian, though possibly with Spanish and Portuguese influences as well(e.g. "filho" for "son"). The plot is heavily concerned with painting, and particularly with one family of painters, the Grijalvas, whose blood is considered polluted after they adopted a number of children of rape fathered by Arab-types. However, this blood has also gifted a number of their painters with the ability to influence people and events through their painting, at the cost of rendering them sterile and shortening their lifespans.

The book is divided into three sections; it's tempting to map them to the three different authors, but I'm not confident about that. The first section, and unfortunately the slowest, is practically a prequel, setting up two important characters and doing little else. The second section takes place a few centuries later, and things pick up quite a bit, more characters and plot threads zipping around; the third section is a couple of generations later, and still including some of the characters from the second section. The third section manages to tie off most of the plot threads from the first two sections, though sometimes the resolutions don't seem quite plausible. Still, it almost made up for the slow first section, but the book still took me a couple of weeks to finish.

15. Karl Schroeder: Lady of Mazes Karl Schroeder is a Canadian SF author(as is James Alan Gardner, if I didn't mention)whose previous two solo novels, Ventus and Permanence, were pretty good, though thick. Lady of Mazes is a bit thinner(a relief after The Golden Key), but still packs a potent punch, and in fact worked all the better for its compactness. It's set in a future solar system where most people live with constant access to something called "inscape", a gigantic, heavily-customizable network. The book explores many aspects of the effects of inscape on human society, as well as dabbling in post-humanism and lots of other neat ideas. Recommended.

Now I've started(now don't be too quick to judge me here...)a book called The Haunted Showboat. Recognize it? Well...yes, I suppose it is technically a Nancy Drew book. And I haven't read Nancy Drew in...well, longer than since I'd last read Jennifer Roberson. But dammit, it was sitting there on the shelves, and I couldn't remember if I'd read it! Okay, I admit, I'm a bit defensive about it, but at least it'll be a quick read. After that I'll probably go on to another library book(did I mention that Lady of Mazes was a library book?), either Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver(the mass-market version, which is to say the first book of the eight-book "Baroque Cycle" as opposed to the first book of the three-book "Baroque Cycle")or Paul Parks' A Princess of Roumania. Stay tuned.