Not so long ago, Beam Me Up dusted off the old hand-crank and sent the wayback machine chugging to 1930 with a reading of “The Cosmic Express,” by Jack Williamson. Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding, a writer of men’s adventure stories, lives in a 25th century completely devoid of adventures. In fact, the world is just as devoid of nature, which means his beautiful wife, Nada, is an equally acclaimed poet of nature. The only place where they can find what they need is the jungle world of Venus.

So it’s a period piece, describing a far-flung future that still has typewriters, televisions, and subways. They even mention a bear market and imply Prohibition. (Now there’s a gloomy projection.) The one futuristic element is the Cosmic Express, which is basically a transporter beam.

After Eric and Nada discuss how it works (in a lengthy exposition that cites Millkan), they finally go to Venus. Finding the jungle a tad uncomfortable, they search fruitlessly for the necessities of life, “with a good fraction of the new planet adhering to their feet.” Just as it seems they are done for, they are saved by bureaucracy. To sum it up (in a very non-period way), Civilization Sucks, Civilization Rocks.

For all its faults, it held my attention with its descriptions and wit. It’s not fair, but I enjoyed catching the things the passage of time has done to the ideas in the story. I smiled at the foolishness of the characters diving into the unknown without bothering to look first. And I laughed at the ending, where Eric manages to profit from the episode after all.

I liked also that Nada is Eric’s peer. She prompts his exposition without acting as a dumb device. On Venus, she is the first one to say sensible things like: Did you bring any matches? And she is the first to admit hunger. Heck, she wanted to go to Venus in the first place, which makes her an instigator. I just wish her name meant something.

Holds up pretty well, considering.

Usually I enjoy Iain M. Banks, so I was excited to see him return to the Culture with Matter. I was not so excited to see how thick it was. I was even less excited to plow through palace politics with a lost heir, an evil vizier, a naïve prince, and a superhuman warrior sister on her way home. Even though she is the one with a connection to the Culture, the writing seems extra clunky every time we visit her. Oh, were you wondering about the character’s names?

Sorry.
I just. Don’t. Care.
The book spends the first hundred pages establishing that, despite their education and knowledge, not one character can see who the villain is. The one who sees the king’s trusted advisor literally rip out his heart can’t believe his eyes. Can’t say I blame him; I found it pretty hard to believe myself.

I could never remember where I left off or anyone’s name or what level of the world they had climbed to. Bad signs all around. So guess where I gave up? Page 180. (Extra stubborn.)

This book makes me want to re-visit the Culture books I do like, just to get the taste out.

Home Depot Buddleia

Volunteer Buddleia

You know you’re obsessed with bees when you buy a Butterfly Bush (or Buddleia) because there are gigantic bees buzzing all over it. Meanwhile, there was a plant sprouting in my yard that I half-knew what it was but couldn’t quite name it, until I plunked down the storebought Buddleia.

I took one look and thought, Wait a second. The shape of that flower spike looks awfully familiar. And the color of those first few flowers. I had a volunteer Buddleia. It’s like when you’re looking for a book, and the surest way to find it is to buy another copy. Except I didn’t know I already had one.

And would the volunteer attract as many bees?

Ginormous bumblebee on volunteer Buddleia

Yes! Biggest Bumblebee ever!

Giant bumble and honeybee on Buddleia

As an attempt to show you the scale of these buzz bombers, here’s a honeybee and a Bombus Grande sharing space on the storebought flower.

Butterfly nowhere near the butterfly bush

I haven’t seen a whole lot of butterflies, though. The occasional solitary monarch has flitted through, too fast for capture. The cabbage whites. And this character. None of them have come anywhere near the so-called butterfly bush.

Yet.

Before the Little Ice Age, there was the Medieval Warm Period. In Western Europe, the centuries around the first millenium were a time of mostly long, warm summers and a steady rise in prosperity. But of course, climate is global, and most of the rest of the world didn’t fare so well. In The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Brian Fagan looks around the globe during this period and sees it as a warning for the future.

In short, there were terrible, persistent droughts in the past, and if the climate responds similarly to anthropogenic warming, we should fear the droughts of the near future. Civilizations of the Maya, the American Southwest, and Angkor Wat all tried to manage water and ultimately failed. This argument sounded more coherent and the descriptions of ancient civilizations were more intriguing when I first heard the interview.

The book offers tantalizing glimpses of little known territory. The gold kingdoms of Africa. The Inuit already trading for iron with the Siberians, when the Vikings showed up with more iron. The Maya, with pyramids filled with dark waters. But since it’s about climate, not world history, there’s only space for a few broad strokes.

The book denies being simplistic, and then suggests that good harvests led to overpopulation in the North, which meant young men had to go Viking to make a living. And then it suggests that droughts led to a lack of fodder in the East, which meant horse raiders had to ride far afield to make a living. Either way, the weather seems to push a lot of people around.

From the beginning, the book hammers away at the statement that subsistence farming barely suffices and most of history was lived at the mercy of the weather, until you’re thinking, Okay, I get it. Most, but not all chapters, start with a vignette imagining life at the time. Some, but not all, of the technical information is intermingled with the historical, with no clear rule for what needed to be segregated in sidebars. It makes it hard for the reader to see how the book is supposed to be organized.

Only in the last chapter does it come together, with a circular argument about how much drought there was and how we should be afraid of severe droughts to come and how this global warming is manmade and comparing it with the warm period of the past is relevant to the future because we could be facing terrible droughts. Okay, I get it.

In a wonderful example of graceful worldbuilding,”Family Values“, by Sara Genge plunges you into an alien society without stopping to explain. An alien society where females gain power by bearing children and keeping house, and teachers are high status? That’s different. An alien society where males aim to ingratiate themselves with breeding females? That’s familiar. A good mix.

My only problem while listening to it is that I wasn’t sure if anything happened.

Senator Wu feels challenged by Aspiring Senator Brida, but most of the story is dominated by Teacher of Muddy Waters flirting with Wu so he can join her breeding creche. He is charming and bold, but my attention wandered and suddenly the story was over. I kept losing the thread at the same point: when Senator Wu decides she needs a nap. You can’t let your characters take a break!

Things do happen in a flurry after that break, and you’re left with the sense there might be more to come. I wonder if this was meant to be an episode in a longer work.

Just in case you don’t have enough summer reading, the Rocket Girls Reading Club offers science fiction featuring girls in space. One that draws a vivid portrait of life on Mars is Journey Between Worlds, by Sylvia Engdahl. Unlike most scifi heroes, the last thing Melinda Ashley wants is to leave home. At first, when her father (who she barely sees) offers her a year on Mars as a graduation present, she can’t even imagine why he is so excited about it. But the prospect leads to a fight with her boyfriend, Russ, and she decides to accept, just so she can get away from him. Which turns out to be a smart move.

Although the book was updated for reissue in 2006 to reflect current knowledge of Mars and to remove some sexist references, Mel is profoundly conservative. She wants to teach because that will give her space in her life to raise a family. She expects to inherit her grandmother’s house. And she hasn’t looked beyond her high school sweetheart for a lifemate.

And for all that, Mel feels very real. She has an opinionated voice and lovely descriptive powers. Her traveling to and then living on Mars are so convincing they are simply part of the story, instead of distracting Big Ideas. As Mel evolves from a space skeptic to a believer in the worthiness of colonizing other planets, even that is only part of watching her grow up and learn to let go of her preconceptions.

Those assumptions are shaken before she even gets on the ship. She meets Alex, who was born on Mars, and is glad to be returning after going to college on Earth. Relentlessly decent, patient, and forgiving, Alex is obviously the Right Man. Even as Mel comes to understand Alex’s growing love for her, she never seems to explicitly realize that her old boyfriend Russ is a possessive jerk. It’s clear where the story is going, and yet I enjoyed it and found the ending unexpectedly moving.

Bumblebee on goldenrod

The coneflowers have been feeding bees for weeks now. So have the veronica, the wood sorrel, the St. John’s wort, and the bladder campion. It’s starting to get boring, all that growing and flowering and growing and flowering. Even the squash blossoms are getting familar. So it’s nice to see goldenrod join the crowd, complete with bees. Except one of them wasn’t a bee.

Syrphid? fly on goldenrod

It looks like yet another kind of syrphid fly has emerged to fool me.

Surprise! A fly on thistle, too.

I got fooled again by this thistle growing next to a rose bush (which seems a bit redundant). I didn’t even see the fly until I looked at the picture on my computer.

Sneaky flies.

Like “The Spray,” one magical object says something about fickleness and love in “Crazy Glue” by Etgar Keret. The story is so short, this animation of it might take longer to watch than just reading it. But a lot happens between the lines, as in this early exchange, when the narrator argues with his wife about the worth of the Krazy Glue® she just bought.

‘Nothing around here needs gluing,’ I said. ‘I wish I understood why you buy all this stuff.’
‘For the same reason I married you,’ she murmured. ‘To help pass the time.’
I didn’t want to fight, so I kept quiet, and so did she.

It turns out she has good reason to want the glue. When he comes home, it’s amusing to see what happens when he finds out what she’s done with it. It can hold anything together. The story ends with a memorable image that forces him to see her in a new light. You know they are the sort of couple that might stray occasionally, but stick together anyway.

A sweet little story that’s always good for a smile.

Which mystery squash do you pick?

The squash are beginning to declare themselves.

#1 is the monstrous plant taking over everything. It really looks like the son of the sugar pumpkin that rotted before we could eat it.

#2 is a mostly bushy plant with just the one fruit on the end of one tentacle. The mottling makes me think of kabocha or buttercup squash.

#3 is a compact bushy plant with five fruits on it. The ridges have me hoping for acorn squash, but that’s what I thought the pumpkin was before it got so big.

More mystery squash to come as they flower and set fruit. I think I won’t need to stock up on squash at the farmer’s markets this fall.

The Hugo winners have been announced, and I’m stunned that 3 out of 4 of my favorites won. Evidently there was a massive attack of good taste. (By which I mean, they agree with me.)

But that’s not why I’m happy.

Here are the ones I voted on:

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Novella: “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis

Novelette: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Short Story: “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear

I never took all that buzz about YPL winning the Hugo seriously. When did SF fans care about good writing? What a world. Maybe I was too quick to stick out my neck for Halting State, but the winning novel is still a book I like. Who could argue with that?

I am more surprised than pleased that my picks for shorter fiction won. As for the other categories, I didn’t do my homework so I didn’t vote on them. Oddly enough, the award that gave me a little leap of joy was this:

Campbell Award: Mary Robinette Kowal

I still haven’t even read any of Campbell nominees, not even the winner’s, Mary Robinette Kowal. I’ve only crossed paths with her a couple times at Readercon. And yet I feel absurdly happy. Go figure.

While I’m at it, I’m overdue for mentioning a couple other people I’m happy for.

Chris Howard’s book Seaborn was released in July.

N.K. Jemisin’s book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is due out in fall 2009.

So happy dances all around, and maybe we’ll see them as future Campbell winners.