A welcome repackaging of stories from a premier writer of hard science fiction as he sallies into science fiction humor. Included are two books (he insists on calling them novellas) and a handful of short stories.

The centerpiece is the lead book, “The Starcrossed,” based on the notorious syndicated, Canadian-filmed TV show, Starlost, offered to ill-prepared viewers in a time long before Star Trek the Next Generation set a quality standard for syndication in general. Bova was the science adviser, fantasist Harlan Ellison was the creator and story editor. Not only were both routinely ignored but the suits additionally disemboweled Ellison’s prize-winning story. The results were well-documented in Ellison’s revenge essay that led off the novelization of his script for the planned mini-series  (casually turned into an open-ended series consulting telling him).  “The Starcrossed” is Bova’s own entertaining act of revenge.

“The Starcrossed” is set in the near future with a proposed science fiction story pitched for three- dimensional television by a brilliant, courageous, skirt-chasing writer resembling Bova’s partner-in-TVland, Harlan Ellison. Bill Oxnard has developed the perfected three-dimensional television technology that will make The Starcrossed the flagship for Titanic Productions. When Titanic executives get involved, the result is the same as for the company’s sea-going namesake. No accident on Bova’s part.

The other book in this collection is “Cyberbooks.” Think of it as an alternate world story of the introduction of what we call ebooks, written in 1989. Carl Lewis invents a device that lets people download books that will make literature available to everyone everywhere and even teach the illterate to read. Then there’s the response by maniacal publishers and fearful salesmen and distributors. In the real world, ebooks have eased into the public consciousness, aided by the internet, without a sweeping conversion from print to cyberspace as Bova postulates in his story. Of course, Bova admits that isn’t the point, as he skewers New York book publishers, in the style of “The Starcrossed,” working real nightmare anecdotes into the fiction.

Of the short stories, “The Great Moon Hoax” is my favorite, telling the story of aliens who landed in Roswell in 1948 and how they have worked to hide their origins by making sure we never get a clear vision of populated Mars, Venus, the Moon, and the other planets. (The story could be viewed as a skeptic’s interpretation of the gargantuan hurdles that would have to be overcome to explain why there are so many UFO’s, assuming all those UFO’s are truly flying saucers.)

This is long enough to keep you tied up for awhile and it’s good stuff. Definitely one to grab.

The Kindle does have many advantages. It is small, compact, sturdy, and indeed is infinitely more space economical than any physical book could ever be, in terms of words per inch or ounce. If you are going on vacation, one kindle in your luggage would replace any amount of novels you could hope to finish reading while sunning on the Caribbean beach. The number of novels it could hold is in the thousands, so if you tired of one genre of writing, you could easily flip to another, again cutting down on storage space for all those books. If you are a student of literature, it would mean no more backpacks stuffed with novels carried about from class to class – as long as you could get the ones you needed in kindle files. It has a note-taking feature, so you can make notes as you read, recording your thoughts or observations in a footnote style attached to the text. Then again, you have all your material in one place together, and easy to transport. There is no doubt that the Kindle has its good side.

It also has some drawbacks, however. The Kindle is attached to Amazon.com as a device and also in its content. That means, you can only get your book-files from Amazon, at the moment at least. This is a dangerous system in terms of access to diverse information, opinions, content etc. In future, publishers may offer kindle book-files directly, allowing for a range of material sources as wide as there are now for books, but for now Amazon sits on all that control by itself. Think Big Brother. Because all content comes from Amazon, it effectively still is under their control, even once loaded onto your device. If there is a problem with a file, a copyright issue for instance… or perhaps, a censorship issue?…. Amazon has the capability to remove that file from your Kindle, automatically, without warning. It would take all your saved notes along with it. This is an uncomfortable possibility for many.

Size and eye strain is also an issue. Anyone who has ever spent a day working in front of a computer knows it is not easy on the eyes, and no matter what the Kindle manufacturers say, you are still staring at a screen, and a very small one at that. The lowest price format Kindle at the moment has a screen 6 inches in diameter. That is certainly smaller than most paperback books. Presumably you can increase the font size, but then you decrease the word count on the screen, and would need to scroll more often…which can be annoying. Font options are also very limited, although that may change in time – so you must be a fan of Ariel and times to enjoy this technology, until kindle software can expand to allow diversity in design and layout.

We do not know how stable this technology will be over time. Will this device, like all others, need to be replaced or updated every 2 or 3 years? Will the cost of doing that outweigh the low price of the book-files, evening out the overall cost to match that of paperback novel purchases over the same amount of time? Books are made of paper, admitedly a fragile material, but it is by no means certain that digital files are more stable than ink on paper. The world still holds books over 500 years old, but will the same be said of digital files in the same amount of time? What does that say for the archival needs of civilization as a whole?

I believe that the Kindle will have its place in the realm of books and reading. Its advantages are appealing to many, and it would be folly to write off a new technology with such benefits simply for the sake of nostalgia for the texture of books. As we have seen with mp3s files and players, it is inevitable that the media will be overtaken by the medium, and finding a way to work along with that, as such musicians as Radiohead and U2 have done by taking control of the release of their own content, is a much better way to approach the new technology than ineffective resistance and control. Users will find a way to disseminate the content themselves, and this will hurt those who profit from the distribution. When text files are so easy to share, publishers and novelists will suffer. In fact, publishers may become obsolete altogether, and authors may begin to distribute their own content and cut out the middle-person. This could be a good or a bad effect, but it will need to be reckoned with either way.

I would not be surprised if, in time, the kindle replaced the paperback novel. Our society embraces and relies on digital technology more every year, and it serves us well, for the most part. For those of you who appreciate the feel and sensation of books, as many do, the disappearance of the physical object will be hard to accept. But books won’t disappear altogether, I think, and the electronic device may have some positive side effects for our beloved paper and ink friends. Books will become more rare, and more appreciated, I believe. Instead of being common, taken for granted objects, ignored because of their utilitarian nature, books will be freed to evolve as art objects, as objects of collection, desire, beauty and uselessness. There is no denying that people who love books love them for their beauty, rarity, and tactile presence. When novels no longer have to be cheapened to compete with each other, when pulp fiction and common content is available digitally, the book object can rise to an art form, and be appreciated and heaped with as much expensive production, fine materials, and lavish design as wished.

I believe that common fiction and useful non-fiction will be better served by the Kindle, for reasons of accessibility and portability, but volumes of art, criticism, special interest, even history and memoir, not to mention antiquarian volumes, will still occupy the sphere of the physical. I look forward, with some anxiety but also great curiosity, to what will evolve from the possibilities opened by the Kindle. I will cherish my books always, and even more once they are endangered, and I feels certain others will too, and books will never die.

Cover of The Property of Rain

Sam Savage is born during hard times in a poor rural Suffolk village in England. His father is home from war and is suffering the consequences of witnessing death in the trenches. His wife and children are suffering too, his fists beat them and his lust ensures the arrival of Sam into the world.

Sam survives the school bullying, starvation and a brutal father. His mother follows all laws laid out in the bible and Sam learns to read it during an illness. When fear or doubt clouds his vision, he remembers inspirational words and they give him hope. His love of reading intensifies and he is encouraged by his teacher.  Sam has character and stamina, the will to live and survive against the odds. Eventually he escapes the clutches of his father.

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On a parallel line of life, Lakshmi  lives in Kanpur, India. She is the daughter of a sweeper and is in the lowest caste, The Untouchables. To add to her misery, she is unwanted by her parents. The young couple meet, they are fifteen years old and a monsoon rages all around. Tragic events take place, harrowing events.

The author gives us vivid insights and descriptions of what both characters endured in their own villages. There are no frills around the edges, traditions are compared and there is a price to pay. Injustice, cruelty and a simple tale is told through the extremely sad times of this young man’s and woman’s life.

This was the last novel written by Angela Lambert before her death in 2007.

Detective Wade Jackson investigates a bombing at a birth control centre in Oregon. He becomes involved in a separate investigation when the body a fourteen year old girl is found. I appears that she is a client of the centre he had been investigating prior to looking into her death.

Her body is found in a garbage bin and a nurse from the clinic, Kera Kollmorgan, confides that she wonders if the bombing and murder are connected. She cannot give too much information to Jackson as she is bound by confidentiality in her job. Are they connected? Not convinced the powers that be ensure they are investigated as individual cases.

Still unconvinced, Kera looks into the murder of the girl and puts herself at risk. When another girl connected to the clinic is murdered, Jackson becomes concerned for his own teenage daughter. A local church holds a teenage bible studies group. Do they study the bible? What goes on within the group?The storyline keeps bringing in connections to link the two. the clinic and the bible study group. There are many twists and turns during the search for the bomber and murderer. The novel has a few surprises for the reader throughout the book.

In some novels with twists and variety one can get confused, you lose track of who is who and what is what. The Sex Club is written at a good pace, no rushing from scene to scene. The characters are well described and you are aware of who is who. The main characters have their own personal problems and they are portrayed well by the author, L J Sellers.

Eliot was a man of conservative, right-wing views (recently his reputation has been affected by allegations of anti-Semitism in some of his work) and a believer in a variety of traditional values. In his criticism, he focuses on the concept of the objective correlative – by which he means that there should be a congruence between a dramatic character’s state of mind, the language used to refer to it and the reasons causing that state of mind. Famously, he relates this concept to the character of Hamlet and, noting the language used so brilliantly to describe his feverish imagination, concludes that the situation in which Hamlet finds himself is not sufficient to account for this great anguish. Hence, he finds, the play must be accounted a failure. As can be imagined, this has been a controversial conclusion and it has come in for a great deal of debate subsequently. To some extent, Eliot in his later years softened his earlier stance on this and other positions – but then again, many men find it impossible to sustain the rigorous positions they took when younger once they have been more fully infused with the sympathy for human frailties that often comes with age.

In other aspects of his criticism, most notably in the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ Shakespeare is recognised as the genius he is generally taken to be. In this essay, Eliot argues for the importance of placing literary works within not just the context of contemporaneous events but also in the context of previous works written about the same subject matter or in the same tradition. By drawing so frequently upon the works of the past, therefore, Shakespeare shows that he is not only conversant with the lessons of the past but is able to use commonly available material to indicate his own ideas and feelings about the way of the world. This is similar to Sir Isaac Newton’s famous dictum that, by following the properly observed scientific methods of past experiments, we are able to ‘stand on the shoulder of giants.’ Consequently, even with works primarily of romantic imagination, such as the Sonnets, are still rooted in the traditions of the past by the adoption (and indeed adaptation) of the sonnet style and structure.

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Fiction can be separated into two divisions, works of interpretation and works of escape. An interpretive story presents us with an insight into nature and our life conditions. It gives us a keener awareness of of what it is to be human. It helps us understand ourselves and those around us. An interpretive story takes us out of ourselves and says, Look, here is the world.

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On the opposite end of the scale is escape literature. The escape writer is full of surprises. He pulls rabbits out of hats,snatches brightly colored balls out of the air. He takes us on a wild exciting ride of the imagination on an impossible venture. He entertains us and allows us to escape from the mundane.

Now, there are two kinds of readers just as there are two kinds of fiction. The immature or inexperienced reader, even when he thinks he is reading for interpretation insists that what he reads always return him a pleasant image of himself or the world. Although most people may think they have moved on from fairy tales they may be mistaken. The signs of an inexperienced reader is that he demands and is disappointed unless his demands are met. He expects every story to conform to his expectations. He wants a happy outcome and a theme that confirms his opinion of the world. He wants stories that slip easily through the mind.

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The experienced reader, on the other hand, takes deep pleasure in fiction that deals with life rather than formula. He doesn’t reject escape fiction because it can be absorbing and well written. Remember these escape stories? “Peter Pan” and “Treasure Island” but too much of this kind of reading can give us a false sense of life and distort our sense of reality. The harmless kind of escapism never pretends to be other than it is and never asks to be taken seriously. The second kind wears a mask and pretends to be a faithful rendition of life. In its shallowness it falsifies life and may lead us to expect from life what life doesn’t provide.

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There are so many good books to read. We can never read them all. Our problem then is to get the most out of the reading time we have. We need to choose the best books that will repay us for our time and attention. If you don’t know where to start you might ask your librarian for a list of suggested books to set you on the path to good reading.

http://socyberty.com/philanthropy/a-woman-worth-her-salt/

http://bookstove.com/poetry/byron-herbert-reece/

http://bookstove.com/classics/harriet-beecher-stowe/

http://socyberty.com/history/all-men-are-created-equal/

The poem is written in Rhyme (or Rime) Royal, which requires seven line stanzas of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ababbcc. The five unstressed and stressed feet may be seen in the lines: “He had the dialect and different skill,/Catching all passions in his craft of will.” There are forty-seven such stanzas in the complete poem. It is a narrative poem, which means it involves a specific individual telling a story in verse. In this case, the central figure is a young woman by a riverside who is bemoaning her fate to an older listener. The woman is distraught that she fell for the charms of a young man who, as young men so often do, loved her and then left her. The woman observes that, had she the chance to meet him again and become exposed to his charms once more, it is most likely that she would once again succumb, revealing perhaps that she has learned nothing from the experience or that the experience was not so traumatic that she would not mind revisiting it or, even, the inevitable weakness of the flesh when faced with temptation.

It is possible to interpret the poem such that it has a number of deeper, subtler readings but, given the limited depth of meaning and language in the work, this seems to be a little forced. Of all the arguments that various scholars have put forward to explain that it was written by someone other than Shakespeare, the most persuasive is surely that it is simply not as good as the remainder of his work. It is technically competent – the author strings together forty-seven stanzas which both rhyme and scan well enough but, thematically, it seems that Shakespeare is able to infuse more meaning and emotion in just one of his sonnets than the author did in the entirety of the Lover’s Complaint.

Critics who take a Marxist viewpoint, therefore, look to see how Shakespeare was able to draw upon these ideas in his work and whether he was, so to speak, on the right side (i.e. the proletariat rather than the capital-owners). In this vein, therefore, Marxist critics of Shakespeare look at plays with revolutions or outbreaks of rebelliousness such as the first part of Henry VI and Julius Caesar and consider the reason for these events and the ways they are suppressed. They look at struggles between the high and mighty (for example in Coriolanus or Macbeth) as struggles for power by capitalists who only exist as viable members of society through suppression of the working classes. Repression takes place through Repressive State Apparatus (e.g. the use of force by police and army) and through Ideological State Apparatus (e.g. religion, worship of kings, education). Additionally, romances between characters are analysed in terms of their reliance upon economic factors rather than emotional factors such as love. Miranda in The Tempest, for example, falls in love with the first man she sees who is not her father or the monstrous Caliban – could such love have a meaningful human factor or is it a representation of Miranda’s desire to escape from a society dominated by her father and keen to take anyone as a husband for the sake of economic freedom? Similarly, the romance between the eponymous Henry V and the French princess may be considered as, instead of a tender romance between young lovers, a means by which the ruling classes reproduce power systems in the next generation by which they can continue to rule in the same way that they have done in the past.

Marxist critics will not that, coming several centuries before Marx was in fact born, it is hardly to be expected that Shakespeare would be able to elucidate all the complexities of the class struggle without access to Marxist thought. Consequently, this helps explains the other parts of the plays and poetry that do not work well with Marxist analysis. On the other hand, careful scrutiny of Shakespeare’s work as a whole has persuaded many influential critics that the author had no overwhelming philosophical position so much as he had understanding and sympathy for human beings in all walks of life.  

Cover of The Kensington Way

The Kensington Way by Stephen Twigg, a holistic health practitioner who counts the late Princess Diana among his clients, is a weight-loss program that relies on combining specific foods, rotating food choices, and using mind-body techniques – such as affirmations – to transform you from fat to fit.

The right food combinations—fish or poultry with vegetables, for instance – take off pounds, Twigg contends.  Conversely, the wrong ones – like proteins coupled with starchy carbohydrates—keep them on.  Likewise, he says, all the foods you eat should be on a five-day rotation, except for fruits, vegetables, and yogurt, to eliminate the toxins in the body.

Is this brilliant science – or sheer nonsense?  “Whenever you put limits on what you eat, it leads to weight loss because you eat fewer calories,” Cheryl Rock, PhD, RD,

 Family and Preventive Medicine professor says.  “But this plan isn’t healthy because you’re likely to miss lots of nutrients.  There’s little guidance on portion control – and no scientific evidence that food combining works.  The food-rotation concept is another trick to make you not eat stuff you’d normally eat.  The whole thing is amazingly unscientific.”

The two central symbols are the eponymous Phoenix and the Turtle-Dove (not the reptile). The dove is a well-know symbol of eternal love, since doves have the reputation of making life-long and loving partnerships. It is often identified, therefore, with the concept of the soul and its love for God (and vice versa), although sometimes this is only revealed after a period of difficulty or suffering. The phoenix, on the other hand, is a mythical creature which periodically perishes in a fire only to be reborn from those same flames. The rebirth is, consequently, often associated with Christ, since he is believed to have died and been reborn and, by doing so, bringing the possibility of redemption for all of humanity. However, Christ is not the only individual to have become associated with the possibility of rebirth and resurrection. In any case, the poem concerns the relationship between these two figures and the nature of their love. In the years since the poem was first published, a number of people have tried to identify the historical figures who are believed to be secretly referred to in the poem, whether they are Catholic martyrs, members of the Elizabethan court or some star-crossed lovers. Irrespective of whether Shakespeare had particular people in mind whose story he wished to tell in the narrative, it is clear that there is at least one additional level of meaning in the poem above and beyond the purely historical.

The poem is not written in the iambic pentameter which was Shakespeare’s most common mode of writing; instead, it is divided into verses of four lines long with a rhyming scheme of ABBA. Each of the lines begins with one stressed foot followed by three iambs (i.e. unstressed, stressed). Overall, therefore, each line is a tetrameter of four feet. This organization is reminiscent of a ballad, which is a traditional piece meant to be sung and accompanies by music. Such ballads appear in several of Shakespeare’s plays.