Asimov's Elijah Baley stories

Thanks to the advent of electronic books, I've been reading more now than ever before...well, more books, that is. And saying that I've been reading more is an exaggeration, even then. I've actually been rereading more. I find myself buying and reading books I already own more often than I'm buying new books.

Case in point, I was ecstatic to find that they were finally releasing Asimov's Elijah Baley books. I preordered them so that they would show up on my Nook as soon as they were available. I remembered reading and loving these books as a teenager, and I was actively watching for their release.

Having reread them, I'm not sure why I was so taken with them.

Basically, they are science-fiction mystery books. The main character, Elijah Baley, is a detective on Earth. Assigned to solve various mysteries, he is accompanied by his unwelcome (at least, at first) partner, R. Daneel Olivaw. The R stands for robot. But Daneel is a special robot, even by robot standards, as he is almost unmistakably human-like.

The first book, The Caves of Steel, introduces the characters and their world, where Earth has been left behind by those who have settled fifty other worlds. Those settlers, referred to as Spacers, consider themselves vastly superior to their forebears on Earth, who have consolidated themselves in massive city complexes where thing like weather and even sunlight are all but forgotten. Baley, with Olivaw's help, must solve the murder of a Spacer with Earth's position in the galaxy in the balance.

The second book, The Naked Sun, takes Baley off Earth to the planet Solaria to solve the murder of another Spacer, reuniting him with Olivaw and introducing the dead Spacer's wife, Gladia. Once again, Earth's position in the galaxy rides on Baley's ability to solve what is essentially a locked room mystery.

Lastly, the third book, which I've been reading this week, is The Robots of Dawn, which takes Baley off-world again to solve another "murder", this time of a human-like robot in the service of a relocated Gladia. Not to sound like a broken record (shouldn't that phrase really be a scratched record?), but Earth's position in the galaxy depends on Baley's ability to solve the murder, as does his own position within Earth's police force.

In the first two books, quite a bit of time is spent with Baley making bad guesses about what was going on. For example, in the first book, he spends an entire chapter detailing Baley's supposition that Olivaw wasn't really a robot, when simply having Baley, a supposedly good detective, ask Olivaw, who must obey orders from humans, to prove his robotic nature would have shortened the book considerably.

The second book also spends quite a bit of time dealing with Baley's newly-discovered agoraphobia. Having been raised in the all-encompassing City on Earth, Baley hasn't spent any time out in the open. Asimov constructs many contrived situations that force Baley into the open, only to spend needless pages on the consequences. Baley supposedly can't solve the case without traveling to interview the witnesses instead of using a three-dimensional video phone, yet there's nothing in what he discovers that proves him right in that respect.

The worst, by far, is the third book. Firstly, Asimov uses this book as an opportunity to tie together all his previous robot books and short stories, by referring to Susan Calvin, and his Foundation novels thanks to continual references to psychohistory. In addition, there is a secret, mostly unimportant to the story, but leading up to the reveal, Asimov can't resist making little off-hand references to it, which on rereading come off as smug, almost as if Asimov needed to point out how much smarter he was than the reader. Lastly, he also breaks one of my cardinal rules of writing by making many references to a hard-to-find short story starring the pair. If you intend to spend pages referring to a short story, you might be better served just including the story.

These books are fine for what they are, but now I'd be hard-pressed to give them more than a passing grade. The first two are better than the third, but not by much.

Stumptown 2011

Last weekend found me making my way to Portland, Oregon, for the Stumptown 2011 comic convention. The main reason was due to the fact the Larry Marder, creator of Tales of the Beanworld, was going to be there signing books and giving a talk about the origins of the Beanworld and where he's going to be taking the series in the next couple of years.

Recently, the series has been reprinted in smaller hardcovers, and a whole new story was also released in the same format. The next book in the series had been previously announced, but at the talk he revealed plans to publish a thinner volume collecting missing stories including the story from Asylum, his online-only story, and his holiday special.

While I was there I also had him sign my copies of the hardcovers (I had him sign my issues and trade paperbacks a couple years ago at a previous Stumptown) and also bought a couple pieces of art, including a Mr. Spook that I requested since he didn't already have one for sale. You can see those above, along with the piece I bought at the earlier Stumptown.

I also bought a couple books from some other creators, including one by Phil Foglio. I always enjoyed his work at DC and it was great getting to meet him.

What I read: October 3, 2010

Incredible Hercules: Assault on New Olympus TPB: Herc and Amadeus Cho reunite to take on Hera and her plans to recreate the world.  This has been a great series written by Greg Pak with art by Fred Van Lente.  My only complaint is that toward the end of the trade, Pak seems to have forgotten that Herc brought heroes with him, as they aren't mentioned for about two or three issues.  I also wish Pak would get a gig on Spider-Man.  He definitely has the correct "voice" for him.

Daredevil: The Devil's Hand TPB: It seems like forever since the last trade came out.  This one tells the tale of Daredevil's taking over the Hand (a group of assassins who have plagued his life for years) and his first couple of "missions" leading them. This was the first storyline written and drawn by the new team of Andy Diggle and Roberto De La Torre, respectively, and I certainly enjoyed it.  I would have preferred there to have been a bit more movement in the story, as there was quite a bit of political machinations by the Kingpin, and some obvious contrivances with repect to Matt Murdock's support team of Foggy Nelson and Dakota North.  However, the story itself was interesting and the art ranged from good to excellent.

Ms. Marvel: Best You Can Be TPB: In this book, Ms. Marvel tracks down Mystique because she believes that Mystique is impersonating Captain Marvel and attacking Kree-religion churches, but discovers she has a much larger plot.  While the first issue in this book has extremely uneven art, the rest of the art in the book was stunning, and the writing was great.  However, the editor should be replaced.  In one issue, Ms. Marvel supposedly takes someone 500 miles in 5 minutes, but in the next she claims that she can fly 700 miles in 2 hours if she's going flat out.  In showing that flight from San Francisco to Seattle, they show her flying north with Mount Rainier behind her.  For those Pacific-Northwest-impaired, that would mean she's in Eastern Washington, and couldn't be a straight-line flight as she said it was.  Otherwise, it was a great book in a great series.

The New Avengers: Luke Cage TPB: This book covers three stories.  In the first, Luke Cage goes to Philadelphia to help an old friend stop an incoming drug shipment.  This story was okay, but the art by Eric Canete was awful, and I'm not a big fan of stories where a superhero faces off against normal thugs.  It seems like a waste of a super-hero story.  After all, how big a hero can they be when they really have no possibility of losing?  The other two were fun, meaningless, one-off stories.  It also includes a reprint of the first issue of Luke Cage's original series, Hero for Hire.

 Captain America Reborn TPB: This is another that I was looking forward to, much like Wolverine: Old Man Logan.  Thankfully, this one was much better.  It tells the story of the return of Steve Rogers, who was killed at the end of the sort-of-recent Civil War series.  I did feel that too much of Ed Brubaker's story was spent telling snippets of Steve Rogers's past, but the art by Bryan Hitch and Butch Guice was good and, overall, the story was entertaining and held my interest throughout.

That's it for today.  I should be back later this week with more books I've read.  I still have a couple of Marvel TPBs to go, as well as three (soon to be four) weeks of regular issues.

What I read yesterday

Old Man Logan TPB: This was a book I was very excited to read, as I had heard so many good things about it while it was coming out.  Unfortunately, it didn't live up to the hype for me.  Written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven, it tells of a futuristic Hawkeye and Wolverine crossing a country controlled by various super-villains.  Wolverine has been broken, becoming a pacifist (which annoyingly he reminds you every four pages or so) and Hawkeye is blind due to cataracts.  Hawkeye coerces Wolverine to become his navigator on this cross-country trip, so that Hawkeye can try to create a place for himself in the new society.  Unfortunately, Millar makes Hawkeye and Wolverine sound exactly the same, and he continually uses the same phrasing over and over.  By the end of this book, if I never hear the phrase "pop his claws" again, I will die a happy man.  Also, there was very little new in the story.  It followed many of the same tropes as every other "future of the super-heroes you know and love" story.  We run into Spider-Man's daughter, who coincidentally was Hawkeye's wife once, and Spidey's grand-daughter (Hawkeye's daughter).  We see what happened to each of the major heroes as the main characters fight their way across country.  And the ending was telegraphed from nearly the first page.  The art was good, but there were many things where artistic license overrode realism and that took me out of the story for a panel or two each time.  For example, in the scene of Hank Pym's gigantic skeleton, it showed that his finger bones were apparently fused together, as his fingers were pointing upright into the sky.  Once the skin, muscle and tendons had gone, the bones should have fallen apart.  At any rate, this book didn't live up to the excitement with which I anticipated it.

Comics I read yesterday

Incorruptible TPB #2: Mark Waid proves to me once again why he's in my top 10 or even top 5 comic book writers.  Though I still prefer Irredemable, this is a great series set in the same universe.  The art was good, but it could be better.

Adventure Comics #518: Unfortunately, my copy had a binding/printing issue that affected both the Legion story and the Atom backup.

Batgirl #14: A great story that attempts to re-establish a link between Batgirl and Supergirl.  The worst thing about this issue for me was that it reminds me what we lost thanks to Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Batman #703: Finally, they allow Dick Grayson to do something and use the fact that he's Batman, rather than writing Batman in such a way that it doesn't matter who's wearing the costume.  However, once again they can't decide how long Bruce Wayne has been Batman, saying that he fought Getaway Genius ten years ago.  Up till recently, hasn't Bruce Wayne only been Batman for five years or so?  I guess Damian proves that wrong, but still they need to get their story straight.

Batman and Robin #14: Admittedly, I'm not a fan of Grant Morrison's current writing style.  Moreover, I really hate the way he writes Batman, particularly with respect to Batman's villains.  Morrison's point of view is, apparently, that Batman only fights villains who are insane and who speak in non sequiturs.  Unfortunately, that makes his stories totally incomprehensible for me anymore.

Batman: Odyssey #3: I can't believe this series is scheduled to go to 13 issues.  Neal Adams's art is great, but his writing is mediocre at best.  I don't remember Talia even acting the way he writes her in this issue, and since when does "water" rhyme with "order" (a sub-plot in the story depends on this rhyme)?

Booster Gold #36: Keith Giffen writes an okay story, but it's obvious that he's at his best when his writing is tempered by J. M. DeMatteis.  And really, Estrogina? It's official, all the hero names have been taken if this is the best he could come up with.

Doc Savage #6: The Doc Savage story plods along, and I have an idea they don't know where they are going with it.  The Avenger story begins a new arc, and was intruiging.  Generally I've enjoyed the backup stories more than the main stories, and I'm a fan of the Doc Savage pulps.

Doctor Solar #2: While this issue was certainly better than the first, and much better than the first issue of Magnus, Robot Fighter, it appears that Jim Shooter has forgotten that kids occasionally read comics.  I wouldn't want my kid reading this one.

 More to come later this week, I promise.