Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? by Tom Holt

Tom Holt’s Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? is a silly caper story involving a hidden cache of Norsemen, an archaeology graduate student, and their journey together through Britain while trying not to gather too much attention — and failing.  It’s a story that reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld books, which means that it was an entertaining read involving quirky characters and a kooky plot.  This is a good thing.

The entire thing starts with the discovery of a Norse ship uncovered by a construction crew in Scotland.  A rather naive grad student, Hildy Frederiksen, is sent to check it out.  She’s excited to see that the boat is a complete specimen, goes back to her hotel, and then gets the urge to return to the mound.  Once there, she discovers the crew of the boat awake and walking around, which they most certainly should not be doing, having been buried there for twelve hundred years.

The crew really is a well-honed battle group whose slumber has been in place merely until the time is right to prevent a particularly bad person from doing … well, something particularly bad.  Hildy takes on the responsibility of finding food and clothing for the men, as well as shuttling them around and getting them acquainted with the modern world.  This last task, surprisingly, isn’t as hard as it would seem.  The Norsemen take modern technology in stride, thinking it the same as their magic; most likely it is, seeing as they have brooches they connect to electrically-charged chthonic spirits to make things happen.

Mixed in here is the story of Danny Bennett, a fluff-piece reporter who earnestly wishes to write something more substantial.  He stumbles on the Norse gentlemen, and his future gets entwined with theirs.  Also making an appearance is the enemy’s guy Friday, whose experiences help to fill in a little back story (and provides for some nail-biting).

I think this book is really quite good.  The writing is light, pulling just short of treating the plot as inconsequential.  Holt manages to give us a full story with some endearing characters experiencing something very surreal without it feeling like a fairy tale, which is nice.  The end feels as realistic as possible for a fantasy tale; things aren’t perfect, but they turn up good at the end.

A couple of things were a little off with the book, though.  I didn’t quite get why we needed the chthonic spirits (other than to give the plot something to turn on).  If they’re basically little living batteries, why can’t they use batteries when they discover them missing?  They managed to do that with the other brooch, so that was a little confusing.

I also felt like the book was a little light on substance.  It’s one thing to have a breezy feel.  It’s quite another to whisk the reader by points before they get a chance to sink in.  A slightly slower pace would have made Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? a little better.

The last problem I have with the book is that, without an interest in Norse history and literature, you might be a little lost during some sections of the book.  Sure, the person might know “Viking”, but I’m not sure how many know the mythology, the Eddas, and the sagas well enough to pull out some of the more interesting bits of the story.

Overall, though, Holt put together a delightfully humorous story about Norsemen in modern-day Britain.  This makes him okay in my book.

Rating: 4/5.

A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove

I like hominids.  When I was in college, I took a physical anthropology course to fulfill some of my natural science credit, and really enjoyed it.  I even remember most of what I learned, which is a feat in and of itself.  So I looked forward to reading A Different Flesh, which puts forth the question — what if American Indians never settled the Americas, and instead Homo erectus (here called sims) was present when Columbus sailed?

To tell the truth, I had no idea where Turtledove was going to go with this.  Having only read his Worldwar series, I was guessing that there would be a lot of warfare.  I was fairly wrong.  Turtledove, rather than following one particular person, spends each chapter in a section of time and explores human-sim interactions.  This felt to me to be a fantastic way of exploring the idea, and one that most authors don’t employ; movement along time to uncover the differences and similarities between his imaginary world and ours helps expose the gulf between the two.

In the beginning, there is violence, and the sims give as good as they get.  Soon, however, it’s clear that the sims are not capable of adaptation, and thus start losing ground — quite literally.  Their land is slowly taken from them, and they become more marginalized.  They are also “domesticated” and used for menial labor.  Sims’ existence also provides a backdrop for the earlier formation of the theory of evolution, which sparks earlier scientific achievements of other types.

Against this backdrop, Turtledove shows us a world in which the Americas outlaw slavery for humans at a far earlier date than our own country decided to — against creatures such as the sims, humans of any type are obviously much the same and are worthy of the full rights deemed appropriate for one’s fellow man.

While declaring all people of equal worth, there is also the prominent struggle of putting sims in the proper context.  Are they human, or merely animals?  What rights do they have?  Turtledove brings this topic up again and again, sometimes in disturbing ways.  Sims are used for medical experiments, much as animals are.  The arguments about using them in such a way are similar to those used to justify the use of other animals for medical research.  How strange it feels to use creatures who have the ability to understand language (plus create spontaneous sentences of their own), create tools, live in camps, cook their food, and plan ahead for our own benefit and not necessarily theirs.

I enjoyed this book greatly.  I have often wondered about what life would be like with another hominid still alive and kicking on Earth.  Turtledove did a remarkable job of providing a possible answer.  His prose is clear, and his conclusions follow in logical fashion.  It is a thought-provoking book, raising questions about how we treat one another and our fellow species on this planet.

Rating: 5/5

Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling

Island in the Sea of Time sounded good to me.  I love alternate history and speculative fiction.  What could be better than a book that blended both in an innovative way, incorporating some science fiction into the mix?  Unfortunately, despite some good aspects, Island in the Sea of Time fell flat for me.

Let’s start off with the good.  I liked the idea of an entire island of people from our own time being suddenly tossed into the far past.  What challenges they would face?  How would they meet the obstacles facing them?  A fantastic plot, in my opinion.

I also delighted in the anthropological aspects Stirling put in.  Linguistics is an interest of mine, so I found some of the exposition language structure and evolution absolutely fascinating.  His conjectures on how various cultures functioned and how they would react to visitors from today’s world were obviously well-researched, at least on the European side.

The cultural part that I disliked, however, was the heavy focus on building or maintaining technological conveniences, creating weapons, military training, and warfare.  I just wanted to skip over the pages that dealt with this stuff, and that’s bad, since it makes up about half the book.  Many (and I mean many) of the characters have military training, which I found too convenient to be believable.  This leads me to my next issue with the book.

The residents of Nantucket are far too accepting of their situation.  There are a couple of freak-outs in the book, as well as allusions to points of crises within individuals.  I, however, find it difficult to believe that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the time shift.  There are off-hand comments about suicide, but they felt like they were obligatory mentions so that Stirling could get on with the story.  We follow no character who has such inclinations; this probably would have made Island in the Sea of Time more compelling, more human on an emotional level.

Character abilities and skills also felt too well-distributed to reflect reality.  A Coast Guard ship just happens to get trapped in the time shift, so we have a military force with at least one fighting ship, plenty of trained soldiers, and modern weapons.  There’s the woman who runs the greenhouse, so we have someone who knows how to grow crops and can teach others how to do so.  We have a librarian who is apparently so freaking talented that she can keep everyone apprised of the information they need to perform their jobs.  We have a historian with interests in the time period the island has been thrust into, as well as a working knowledge of linguistics.  We have an astronomer, who has the ability to communicate with the English tribes because she also can speak a Baltic language that is similar to proto-Indo-European. We have a captain who is, apparently, God’s gift to both military strategy and tactics.  And we have a native woman who is gifted in so many ways that it makes suspension of disbelief very difficult.  On top of that, we lose exactly one of the main cast of characters.  He doesn’t happen to be a central character, either; we probably follow him about a half-dozen times, whereas most of the other characters get approximately thirty to forty sections scattered throughout the book.  That smacks of the unreal to me.

Also unfortunate, in my opinion, Stirling focused on the prehistoric British inhabitants, which was baffling to me, seeing as the island tossed back in time was Nantucket.  We are given very little information about the Native Americans of the area; he allows us to read about their first encounter, and then leaves them almost completely.  This struck me as strange; why toss away a fascinating people who could help the Nantucketers with farming, gathering and the like — as well as trading — in favor of the long sea voyage and constant skirmishes in England?

The other aspect of this is, when we are allowed to view one extended encounter with Central American natives, they are portrayed in a horribly brutal light.  While this might be accurate, some of the actions taken by the Olmecs were horribly graphic — graphic enough to cause me to have a nightmare about one particular scene.  It freaked me out to no end, and also felt unfair to the indigenous Americans.  Why do they get to experience such a characterization, while the European peoples encountered are as nuanced as the Nantucket residents?

Based on the comments by Harry Turtledove and Robert J. Sawyer, I thought I was in for a spectacular read.  I’m saddened to find that wasn’t so.  A more Nantucket-based, psychologically sensitive book would have been fascinating.  Since this is one in a series of books, many of the battles could have waited.  As it is, Island in the Sea of Time leaves the reader with a dry book about martial history, martial tactics, and flat characters.

Rating: 1.5/5

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by Isaac Asimov.  I’m thinking middle school was probably when I read my last Foundation series book.  But I’m always sure I’ll like him in a certain sense, if for no other reason than the same that keeps me from forgetting that I have a similar love-hate relationship with Heinlein and picking out one of his books to read: the weirdly unbalanced way men and women work in their fictional worlds.  Somehow neither thought about a growing equality of the sexes, and both, for the most part, left it out in fundamental ways in a lot of their work.

Sure, Heinlein has sexual liberation in a lot of his fiction, of a sort, but the traditional roles still exist for the most part, with women submitting to men on the important stuff.

I actually enjoy watching the odd interplay — Asimov was able to envision flying cars, robots, and, strangely enough, something extremely similar to applied stem cell technology — but women are stifled.  They are either homemakers who are irrationally cruel to their children, or are employed but not taken as seriously as their male counterparts until they have bent over backward to prove their abilities.

Dr. Calvin, the protagonist, is indeed a woman.  She’s intensely professional, but also portrayed as cut off from her emotions, other than when she is lied to about a matter of the heart; then she’s emotional and cruelly destroys a robot who only did what it was programmed to do.  Colleagues dismiss her at one point, telling a man unacquainted with her that she’s neurotic and that she shouldn’t be taken seriously.  This strikes me as interesting, seeing as a man in a previous section put a coworker’s life in danger without letting him know — and gets to keep his job without penalty.

Another issue I have with Asimov’s writing is the tendency toward text as long monologues.  That’s a part of a lot of science fiction, though, and I’m more than willing to overlook it for the wonder of the story.  It’s a wonderful exploration of the social impacts of sentient machines, and was thoroughly enjoyable to read.

Rating: 3/5.