A Nameless Book, V for Vendetta and Primary Inversion

Cullen just burst into to my room to ask if I have finished reading a book we got out of the library. It's an old one by one of our favorite authors. I won't say what it is or who wrote it because that would spoil it. I said yes I did and he said it almost made him very angry because the book almost made the detective into the bad guy. And I said yes and we would have hated that because we like the detective and he said yes. I said we trust the author not to do that to us and he agreed and went off to go to sleep or something.

Trust is a major issue for us these days. There are authors that I read that I don't trust. Robin Cook is one of them. He almost always kills the first character I meet. As a result I never really let my guard down when reading one of his books and I don't get swept away. I stay in this world and just peer into the worlds he builds.

Dick Francis and PG Wodehouse are authors that I absolutely trust. In fact I am so comfortable with them that if I am sad, or cynical, or disillusioned I like to read their books because they always make me feel better. They don't just make me happier, they make me feel the world is a better place and there is hope for everyone.

Hope for the future is something that I used to get when I was young and reading sci fi. Growing up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb and coming from a terrifying and abusive background means you really don't think you'll live to be an adult. Either a family member or friend of the family is going to kill you or you'll die in a bomb attack. Either one seems pretty likely.

Sci fi set in the future, no matter how dark, meant we made it through what Heinlein called the crazy years. Even Star Trek made me feel like we could do it as a species.

Today I read Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. I bought this a few months ago and then put it in my pile of things that I want to read but I want to enjoy knowing I can read them for awhile first. (If you don't understand that I probably can't explain it to you.) Now that the movie is coming out I thought I had better read it before I want to talk about the film for my column.

It's an amazing book. It's beautiful and dark and sad and hopeful and disturbing. I'm now intensely curious about the film. I see our own government as increasingly totalitarian and I am surprised that someone would think this is a good time to make this film. I feel this way partly because of the news story that said that all references to God and religion were being removed from Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials books for the film. It seems to me that if we are going to censor films because of fear of the religious right then we're not going to do very well with a film about overthrowing a totalitarian government either. I could see the same people who rant and rave about how the homosexuals are destroying the family saying yes, shipping them off to camps is a wonderful idea and yes, please do take the colored people and the foreigners with you. Is all of that going to stay in the film? I recall something happened that made Alan Moore pretty upset. Maybe the film is about a superhero overthrowing a terrorist instead of the lead being a terrorist. I wonder.

And then when I finished it and thought about it quite a bit I started Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion, which is set in the same universe as Catch the Lightning, the audio book I heard earlier this week.

This is a lovely and compelling book. I would call it Romeo and Juliet set in space but that doesn't do it justice because Juliet wasn't doing things like fighting space battles while trying to save 600 million people from Romeo's father.

If you see this book anywhere pick it up and read it. The story is terrific and the science is extremely interesting. Catherine Asaro's writing makes me want to study quantum mechanics.