Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Review, from Paul Di Filippo at Locus
Monday, October 14, 2024
Publishers Week Review (and it's good)
The Tongue Trade By Martineck, Michael J.
Interpreter William Kirst is trapped between a word and a hard place in Martineck’s unique and inventive science-fiction thriller. For William, language is his livelihood: as an Interpreter, he bridges the gap between parties whose languages have splintered into unique and often inscrutable dialects, based on their trade specializations. However, when William’s newest client, businessman Arthur Loam, admits to murdering a man after lying to the police, he’s held to a professional silence that would destroy his career if broken. Desperate, William finds himself spiraling down a dangerous rabbit hole as he searches for a way to bring the truth to light without landing himself in the unemployment line—or worse, at the wrong end of a gun.
Martineck’s construction and investigation of a world where language and its barriers are paramount results in a poignant, well-conceived slab of science fiction. From the witty prose, the individual argots and how they shape the dialogue (and characters), even down to William’s love of 50 Cent and other hip-hop acts—each nugget of detail is carefully considered and artfully executed. William is endlessly entertaining as a sunny inverse of the noir archetype: he stumbles through each escalating situation in a terribly vulnerable, human, and relatable way that harmonizes, rather than disrupts, the gravity driving the narrative.
Martineck (author of The Link Boy) flexes his experience in actualizing the high-concept world of The Tongue Trade, smartly written with crisp pacing, creative twists, and energetic characterizations backdropped against a sweltering semi-futuristic New York, where even those with William’s specialized training can be tripped up by semantics: “Interpreters who spend too much time with the same clients, conversing in the same language, can develop expectations” he acknowledges. Martineck has crafted a sunny noir, a charming spin on a storied genre that makes for an ecstatic journey readers will struggle to put down.
Takeaway: Words speak louder than actions in this sunny-noir sci-fi thriller.
Comparable Titles: Richard K. Morgan’s Thin Air, Matthew Farrer’s Enforcer.
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Review: Limited Verse, David Martin
Would you rather be loved or respected? David Martin’s new book, Limited Verse, made me ask the question as I read. It is a series of well known poems written in New English, which has only 850 root words. There is a thoughtful story explaining the transportation of words from the old, big group to limited new group, written by a man going to prison. He will no longer have Old English. He will no longer have words that are not roots.
This transportation of words from the old group to the new group has value. It’s also a pain in the ass, and I can’t do it anymore. I don’t now how Martin did it for a whole book – even a short one. I couldn’t do it for much more than a paragraph. It’s maddening. Trying to limit your ideas to the confines of 850 base words cramps your ideas. If you can’t express something, you drop it. Your ideas stay inside you and eventually die. Heart wrenching, frustrating, frightening.
Which makes Limited Verse challenging to love, but demanding of respect.
At first, I read this book the way one watches figure skating. Wow. That’s cool. The trick of writing within a highly limited lexicon is impressive. Martin translates, amongst others, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, or William Shakespear (who made words up ‘cuz there weren’t enough for him) with aplomb. Maintaining meanings, even as the rich imagery fades (to no fault of his own) billows out the breadth of the book. As the level of difficulty increases, and the greats begin to slip on the ice, you realize this silly, ill-mannered, hodgepodge, potluck old English language is a deep and wonderful gift.
We can think a lot and freely. I love this book for reminding me of that fact. Respect.
Monday, October 7, 2024
Give a hoot, this review is cute.
Monday, August 19, 2024
Big Ideas, Best Books
Check out my first post, on books with big ideas.
Thursday, August 8, 2024
Harris and Walz: A rich, gooey middle
Cusp babies are a little different. I’m a Cancer sign, but only a couple of hours from being a Leo. At a party several years ago, an astrologer refused to do my chart. Beliefs aside, it made me feel special. Odd but special. In a good way. I have felt that way all my life. On the edge, leaning on the door jamb. Living in liminal space.
By birthyear exacerbates the effect. 1965 is the shadowy year between the baby boomers and generation x. A transition period. I feel – as I bet many of my graduating class does – affiliations to both groups. I am as likely to listen to Simon and Garfunkel as I am to Jay Z. Liminal time.
While I don’t think about it all the time, I can’t say it’s infrequent either. Dwelling in misty time/space gives you a different angle from which to view the other, fixed time/spaces. I have always felt more like an umpire than a player. An observer. It could be just me, but I don’t think so. Working with others in my cohort, I’ve noticed the subtle differences in values and temperaments. A small, alien effect. Mork reporting to Orsen. Alf calling Melmac. Trevor Noah or John Oliver commenting on what we too are seeing, but from farther back. It’s not that we tweeners are not invested, were just a little careful.
Kamala Harris was born within six months of me, Tim Walz a little more. They do not share my particular cuspiness, but they are from Sesame Street. Regardless of how you feel they feel about variety of issues, I am quite certain they bring measured perspective with them wherever they go. They are of the middle and that is a great place to start.
Thursday, July 25, 2024
The Downloaded. A review.
Sawyer brings several sciences together to create an entirely plausible future. Quantum physics, astrophysics, computer architecture, biology – the usual. The real gift of the book, however, is slow titration of soft sciences into the hard: sociology, phycology, political science (the one that pulls so far from the others we put ‘science’ in the name as a kind of dog chain.) This will not surprise long-time Sawyer fans. What might is the literary composition all this chemistry concocts. The Downloaded covers so much ground it grows into something full and rich. Sawyer attempts to show so many of the directions the main story’s roots can take that he succeeds in creating a very real world.
As an off-shoot, he also creates a hybrid rose of a novel. Fragrant, pretty, and robust. All the various literary conflicts are here: Person vs. others, person vs. environment, person vs. self. My students would be so happy if I assigned this book, because it would take the place of three. And they would enjoy the read, which in the end, is what we really want from whatever novel we pick from the big garden of books.