I haven't caught up to the present in my recent catch-up listen-through of Bernice Summerfield stories (which I began back in July!), but I have caught up to the most recent one that I own. Read my review of Treausury, and soon I'll return my attention to catching up on Torchwood, Big Finish Originals, The Seventh Doctor: The New Adventures, UNIT, and more!
Hardcover, 36 pages Published 2016 (originally 2015) Acquired February 2017 Read June 2018
Doctor Who: The Scruffy Piper
by Justin Richards
illustrated by David Wardle
After I moderately enjoyed The Grief Collector, the Time Lord fairy tales are back to the same-old-same-old. You can guess how this story is going to go from page 1, and it does so without a single surprise. The second Doctor uses his recorder to lure away a group of Cybermats from a space station, and saves the day. Why bother riffing on "The Pied Piper of Hamlin" and use only the most basic part of its idea? Work with the creepiness of the concept, don't sanitize it!
Next Week: An extra helping of mediocrity in Twins in the Wood!
The Way to the Stars is the backstory novel for Sylvia Tilly, chronicling Tilly's life at age 16. This means it kind of reads like a young adult novel, but that's no complaint. It might be more accurate, though, to say that this is a bildungsroman, or at least part of one; this is how Sylvia Tilly struggles to fit herself into society but then discovers the place where she belongs. Tilly is harangued by her mother, goes to space boarding school, tries to succeed in academics and extracurriculars, struggles to make friends, and eventually makes a momentous decision. That's the point where the book-- which had always been good-- becomes great. The Way to the Stars takes Tilly further than she's ever gone before, as she meets a variety of people who accept her and shape her and help her to grow. It's really heart-warming without being saccharine, optimistic without being blinkered. It's just a really good book about growing up and finding your place.
I enjoyed every page of it, zipping through it in just over a day. There's a lot of nice side characters, like Tilly's grandmother and her grandmother's husband, plus a crotchety space mechanic, even just random bureaucrats. I particularly enjoyed the USS Dorothy Garrod and its captain. It's cool to see a dedicated science vessel in Star Trek in something other the role of victim. (Do we think it's Oberth-class? I think it would fit what we're told. One thing I didn't buy was that the engineers were the only non-scientists aboard; what about helm and security?)
Una McCormack totally gets Tilly (who is a favorite in our household), the awkward overachiever who wants to be a space captain, and the character at her best is on display here. McCormack has always been one of my favorite Star Trek writers because she understands character, and how to represent it on the page. It's not just capturing the dialogue of the actors, but embodying a way of thinking in the action of the story. Tilly makes some wrongheaded choices here, but the reader understands exactly why she does it even as they know she shouldn't be.
It's also successful as a prequel. I mean, there are obvious ways for it to be so: Tilly mentions her mother on screen in one Discovery episode, and she appears briefly in Short Treks, and Tilly's mother is a good extrapolation of those bits. But there's a deeper, better way for a prequel to work, which is when you're watching the original again, you experience resonances in things that worked fine on their own the first time around. Like, Tilly's father tells her there's something of her mother Siobhan in her, in the way Siobhan can command a room. Tilly doesn't believe him. But she must have realized he was right when she had to pretend to be her mirror counterpart. After reading The Way to the Stars, it's easy to imagine that she's drawing on her mother in those scenes, even if she herself doesn't realize. It's moments like that that make a good prequel into a great one, and this is the most enjoyable Discovery novel thus far.
A couple years ago, I wrote a post about how David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990) and Álex de la Iglesia's Dance with the Devil (1997) adapted novels in the same series, but with completely different casts. I began that article with an anecdote about a situation where that went differently, about adaptations of two different Elmore Leonard novels. After I posted the article to facebook, my friends Christiana and Dean told me I ought to watch those Elmore Leonard movies. So my wife and I did, with one extra film.
The core of what we might call the "Elmore Leonard Cinematic Universe" is Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) and Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), which adapt the Leonard novels Rum Punch (1992) and Out of Sight (1996). Both films include the character of Ray Nicolet played by Michael Keaton. Then you have the movie Life of Crime (2013) by Daniel Schechter, which adapts The Switch (1978). Rum Punch was a sequel to The Switch, so Life of Crime is essentially a prequel to Jackie Brown, showing the characters of Ordell Robbie, Louis Gara, and Melanie Ralston twenty years younger.
Jackie Brown is about a flight attendant and occasional drug smuggler (Pam Grier's Jackie Brown) who gets pulled into an ATF sting operation against career criminal Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson). Michael Keaton's Ray Nicolet is one of the law enforcement officers pressuring Jackie to do this, a kind of goofy guy who's always moving around and sitting in odd positions:
Ray Nicolet reappears in Out of Sight, now working for the FBI, in a romantic relationship with the film's female protagonist, Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). Ray is married, but Karen is going out with him anyway, much to her father's disappointment. It doesn't last long, though, because Karen soon falls for bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney). Ray's definitely the same kind of goofy guy; my favorite scene is when Karen's dad makes a sarcastic comment about the subtlety of his "FBI" t-shirt, asking if he has one that says "undercover" too.
Ray doesn't get it, just going "huh?"
It's not a big connection, but it is a nice one, I think. Keaton made the appearance in Out of Sight uncredited; he was apparently very enthused about it: "I thought that was the coolest idea [...]. I said, 'I'll do it. But you have to do one thing: You have to make sure he is that guy.' There has to be something in the wardrobe that you go, Oh, there he is again! 'Cause I wanted the people to be sitting in the theatre going, 'Oh, I might see him at the Dairy Queen later, like he's a real guy out there wandering around in life. Then he might pop up in another movie. He might be down at the mall!'"
Jackie Brown might not know Karen Sisco, but you know they both could meet, because they both met Ray Nicolet. It's like how before The Avengers came out, Iron Man might not have met Thor, but you knew they could meet because both men knew Agent Coulson. (A little confusingly, though, Samuel Jackson also appears in both films, but as a different character in Out of Sight than Jackie Brown.)
Life of Crime came out fifteen years after Jackie Brown, but is set twenty years earlier. The two films aren't officially connected, but the books they're based on are. Mos Def plays the young Ordell, John Hawkes the young Louis (Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown), and Isla Fisher the young Melanie (Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown). Ordell and Louis are criminals who kidnap Mickey Dawson (Jennifer Aniston) to extract ransom money from her husband.
I actually think Mos Def was doing a little bit of Samuel Jackson with his voice. It's not an imitation or anything, but it would come through on occasion. You can definitely see how 1970s Ordell would become 1990s Ordell. He's already a little ruthless in Life of Crime, though it seems like he hasn't actually killed anyone before. He has big aspirations, however, and of the two men, he's the one more inclined to go through with them. With twenty years of success, Mos Def's more reserved character could evolve into Jackson's more over-the-top one.
Louis was an old criminal friend of Ordell's who had just gotten out of jail at the beginning of Jackie Brown. In Life of Crime, he's a criminal, but definitely naïve. At the beginning of Life of Crime, he gets robbed in a bar restroom; later in the film, he falls for his kidnap victim. Other than Mickey, he's the character you sympathize with the most in Life of Crime, and thus there's an extra layer of tragedy if you've seen Jackie Brown, because you know he's going to end up burnt out, hopeless, with severe anger issues. Given how likeable Louis is, it gives a little bit of frisson to his sporadic attempts to do the right thing in Life of Crime.
The transition between Isla Fisher and Bridget Fonda as Melanie is the hardest to buy. She's Mickey's husband's mistress in Life of Crime, and one of Ordell's girlfriends in Jackie Brown (though she hooks up with Louis). The ages don't line up, as Fonda is too young to have been an adult in 1978 (she would have been just fourteen*). Fonda's Melanie is stoned and disaffected; Fisher's Melanie is more active and conniving. Though both have the apparent catchphrase of "Wanna fuck?" It's hard to believe Melanie would end up with Ordell after the events of Life of Crime, or that Louis would want to have sex with her, though I guess it goes down that way in the books.
I guess there are twenty years between the two films, even if Melanie somehow de-ages by four. But it's pretty clear in Jackie Brown that Louis and Melanie have never met before.
What unites the three films is more than a continuity of character, though. All three films, even though they're from different directors, have a similar tone, with bizarre, eccentric characters committing crime badly, and a pleasing mix of violence and comedy. There's always something to laugh at-- but there's always someone to root for too, on both sides of the law. We want to see Jackie Brown, Tom Foley, and Louis Gara get away with it. Plus there's awful people to root against. (I was a big fan of the neo-Nazi in Life of Crime for that reason. What happens to him in the end is glorious.) I suspect if you hadn't been told, and Ray wasn't in the films, you could still work out that Jackie Brown and Out of Sight came from similar source material. (I'm less sure about Life of Crime; it is less sharply directed than the other two.)
We enjoyed all three, though Jackie Brown felt like it could have been tightened, and I don't think Life of Crime was as funny as the other two. (It did have an absolutely amazing ending, though.) But Out of Sight was excellent, with a strong-as-always performance from George Clooney, and the best performance I've seen Jennifer Lopez give. The scene where they have drinks together is something else.
Recently, a YouTube video did the rounds where the maker claims that certain historical movies work well together if you view them as a "cinematic universe" à la Marvel. It's not as bad as most YouTube-based criticism; I liked his overall point that there's something neat about seeing the same events and the same characters filtered through the sensibilities of different directors and the conventions of different genres. What's interesting about the Elmore Leonard Cinematic Universe is that you kind of get both. These are similar novels filtered through distinct directors to come out with something similar again. A nice little unofficial trilogy.
* Actually, there's a scene in Jackie Brown where Louis looks at a 1976 photo of Melanie, and she says she's fourteen in it.
'I believe the time has come for flying to be possible. Real flying!'
'Flying!'
'Up in the air. Aeronautics! Machine heavier than air. It can be done. And I want to do it.'
'Is there money in it, George?'
'I don't know nor care! But that's what I'm going to to do.' (203)
One could write a whole book just on H. G. Wells novels featuring scientists who are married, I suspect. Though Tono-Bungay is probably a good book, it has little to offer the dedicated H. G. Wells reader. I saw elements of many of Wells's domestic novels in it: Love and Mr Lewisham (1899-1900), Ann Veronica (1909), The History of Mr Polly (1910), The New Machiavelli (1910), and Marriage (1911-12). Not to mention aspects of Wells's own life, as well as resonances with The Time Machine (1895), The First Men in the Moon (1900-01), and The War in the Air (1908). Like so many of Wells's other domestic novels, a man from a lower-class background seeks a scientific career, has an affair during a disintegrating marriage, and has his career aspirations derailed by the social exigencies of modern England. To be fair to Wells, though, all of the domestic novels I listed above (except for Mr Lewisham) were written later; I just happened to have read them first. The angle of Tono-Bungay itself does yield something new, and the scenes between George Pondervo and his uncle were usually the best parts.
George Ponderevo ends up apprenticed to his uncle, who is a chemist (in the sense of being a pharmacist). Edward Ponderevo is always trying to sell people things they don't need, because the difficulty of being a chemist is that people only need stuff when they're sick. He comes up with the quack tonic Tono-Bungay (Edward Mendelson's introduction says it's basically Coca-Cola), which soon becomes a huge success. George doesn't contribute to the drink, but he runs his uncle's manufacturing concerns, keeping the production line efficient with his analytical mind. As the Ponderevos expand the commercial empire more and more, becoming more and more successful, George gets married, has a marriage disintegrate, throws himself into his work, takes up inventing heavier-than-air flight, and goes on an expedition to an African island seeking radioactive minerals. It is, perhaps, more capacious than most of Wells's domestic novels, with the effect that it doesn't quite cohere. I like many of the parts, but the whole left me cold.
George has a scientific mind, as the novel reminds us on several occasions, but like a lot of Wells's protagonists, he struggles to apply it. He has a (supposedly) scientific theory of society but I'm not sure what good it does; he never gets the science degree he wanted because he gets demoralizes and basically flunks out before he goes to work for his uncle; his flying machine is of limited success; he ends his career helping design battleships that the British government doesn't want to buy. And, of course, the world is too complicated to apply science to it in any real useful way, something I think Wells eventually forgot: "The perplexing thing about life is the irresoluble complexity of reality, of things and relations alike" (195).
George occasionally glimpses truths, though; I found a section where George compares the radioactive decay of "quap" to the potential end of the world really effective: "I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry rotting and dispersal of all our world. [...] I do not believe this can be the end; no human soul can believe in such an end and go on living, but to it science points as a possible thing, science and reason alike" (329-30).
The scene where George, without any emotion at all, kills a native on the quap island to keep his expedition's presence a secret, is also really interesting. George himself doesn't understand the importance of the moment, but he clearly knows it is important, because he included it in his account of his life. To me it points toward a fundamental theme throughout Tono-Bungay (and Wells's other fiction, domestic and sf alike): the alienating nature of modernity. We meet these people so different to us from fantastic places, and all we can think to do is kill them to make ourselves richer. We have this wonderful chemical sciences, and what we invent with them is a "medicine" that no one actually needs. We can almost build flying machines, but no government will fund their development. We know so much about sex, but we teach none of it to our men and women.
Uncle Edward is a great character, too, and the ever-increasing accounts of his ridiculous ambitions (he tries to buy the British Medical Journal at one point, so that it will run articles favorable to Tono-Bungay) are just good fun to read about even as they appall. I loved that his never-finished mansion included a billiards room with a glass ceiling placed beneath the ornamental lake. Some, like Adam Roberts, say he is a Dickensian character, and I agree.
Adam Roberts calls Tono-Bungay a "rich and brilliant novel" and I don't know if I can quite bring myself to agree-- maybe I would have thought so if I'd read it where it belonged in Wells's own development as a writer, as he did-- but like the best Wells, it speaks to both its own moment and to our moment. But it's ambitious and interesting and I think helps make the case (as my colleague Cari Hovanec sometimes does) for H. G. Wells as a modernist writer.
Bernice Summerfield: Filthy Lucre
by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown
The novels haven't exactly been a highlight of Bernice Summerfield's "Legion era," though this one isn't terrible. It's not as good as The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis, though I did find more to interest me here than in The Weather on Versimmon. This is a mostly standalone adventure for Benny, Ruth, and Jack (with small parts for Peter and Irving), set during the New Frontiers box set (between episodes 1 and 2, specifically). In parallel plotlines, the trio meet a chip tycoon who's very interested in archaeology and rescue a disabled cargo ship.
The book is well written and interesting enough. The writers have a good grasp on the main characters' voices, and know how to write an interesting action sequence. Moving between the two parallel plotlines maintains the reader's interest; it actually takes a long time to figure out how the two plots actually fit together. Once you figure it out, though, it's a bit underwhelming, and one suspects the novel was structured this way because doing it chronologically would reveal how little it actually has going on. If the crashed ship story was inserted where it goes chronologically, it would be a long, irrelevant diversion from the book's main plot. The main plot isn't much: a wealthy person is sponsoring archaeology, but he turns out to have a hidden agenda. A man is sexually interested in Bernice, but he's just taking advantage of her. These are surely clichés of Benny's solo adventures at this point. It would be more of a twist if it turned out everything was aboveboard. And the bit where he comes back at the end to torture her once the main story is over feels like padding when the authors realized they were thirty pages short; it goes nowhere and does nothing.
For those keeping score, this book features the third popular resort planet within easy flight of Legion, the supposed most distant planet in the galaxy (after ones in Road Trip and The Slender-Fingered Cats). More than that, Benny is popping back and forth between Legion and worlds of significance all the time in this book, rather undermining the setting of the Legion era.
In other Doctor Who Christmas news, my review of the Bernice Summerfield box set that takes place during Space Christmas, New Frontiers, is up at Unreality SF. It was released in April originally for some reason, though.
I keep thinking I've read all the Doctor Who Christmas books, and BBC Books keeps releasing more just in the nick of time; in 2018, they published novelisations of two different Christmas specials, and thus I read The Christmas Invasion for this year. (Twice Upon a Time will wait for 2019.)
It's exactly what a novelisation should be, I reckon, a pretty straight retelling of the television episode that reminds you why you liked it so much. Actually, "The Christmas Invasion" isn't one of my favorites, but like all Russell T Davies stories, it's chock-ful of brilliant moments, which Colgan usually captures. Jackie Tyler gets all the best lines, and I love the way everyone in the universe reacts to Harriet Jones. Some moments, like a swordfight or an evil Christmas tree, aren't really suited to prose, but she makes up for it by fleshing out the characters. By the end of the book, I really liked Sally Jacobs, the secretary at UNIT I probably wouldn't have even remembered before opening the book. Colgan gives us some nice moments with her, especially the night as the Sycorax ship approaches. Now I want to know when she will reappear in Big Finish's UNIT audios! The fleshing out of Major Blake (surely the shortest lived UNIT-UK commanding officer) was nice too.
Colgan also has a good handle on the regulars. There's a great moment at the book's end, where this new Doctor realizes what's changed about his relationship with Rose Tyler, and he's excited and frightened all at once. It's a good piece of characterization, and some nice foreshadowing of "Doomsday" all at once.
"The Christmas Invasion" isn't a very Christmassy story to be honest; most of the seasonal flavor on screen comes from visuals and music, which don't replicate well on the page. But I liked how Colgan used apt Christmas carols for chapter titles (e.g., "Do You Hear What I Hear?" when Mickey and Jackie hear the TARDIS land), and the closing Christmas dinner is a highlight of mixed emotion, like Christmas dinners so often are. Like the best Doctor Who Christmas books, a nice way to get into the spirit of the season.
(This is the first of the 21st-century Target novels I've read; it's a very nice little retro package. I particularly liked the "CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO" blurb for the tenth Doctor.)
Next Week: Back to the Time Lord Fairy Tales, with The Scruffy Piper!
Everyone has their instance of "the Mandela effect," I suppose. For me, it's a belief that when working at Kroger as a cashier in the early 2000s, one of the songs that frequently rotated on corporate radio (along with the inferior Counting Crows cover of "Big Yellow Taxi") included the lyrics "deep space is my dwelling place / the stars my destination." I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true now because no evidence exists, but by God I remember it. How those lines from a poem in a 1950s sf novel would have otherwise ended up in my consciousness, though, I don't know, because I didn't read the book until fifteen years later. I probably first heard of Alfred Bester in the mid-2000s, reading episode guides for Babylon 5 and the terrible 1970s British children's telefantasy programme The Tomorrow People. The former named a character after him; the latter reused the term jaunte from this novel to describe mental teleportation.
All this is to say, the book was a long time coming for me. I finally felt moved to read it when I read Bester's other big sf novel, The Demolished Man, because it won the 1953 Hugo Award for Best Novel. There was no 1957 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but if there had been, The Stars My Destination might have won it.
But I found the novel disappointing. I would say it failed to grab me, but it actually did grab me: the opening is great, with Gully Foyle stranded on a spaceship and doing his damndest to survive, going from ordinary man to extraordinary. I love the exploration of how jaunting would change our culture's conceptions of privacy and security. Gully's adventures in prison and such are clever and interesting. However, somewhere around the midpoint of the novel, once Gully embarked on his ripped-from-Count-of-Monte-Cristo campaign of anonymous revenge, I found that my interest had evaporated. The set-up is great, and Bester's prose is miles above his sf contemporaries, but he just doesn't do anything particularly interesting with it all, and like Demolished Man, things get all mindtrippingly weird in the last few chapters, and not in a good way.
Also I think it's weird that the back cover of my Gollancz SF Masterworks edition trumpets an introduction by minor sf critic Graham Sleight, but fails to mention at all the presence of an afterword by Neil Gaiman!
When I reviewed the Hawkworld ongoing, I noted that the lack of commentary on what succeeded it* was conspicuous: "I don't have much of a sense what Hawkman vol. 3 is like. You can find a lot of write-ups on the Internet about the Hawkworld ongoing, but Hawkman vol. 3 is usually only mentioned for the bare fact of its existence." I didn't find this article until later, but it's basically all I could find. Just skimming the covers and issue descriptions, though, made me think that reading Hawkman vol. 3 in its entirety wasn't going to be for me; it was clear that the series moved away from the science fiction elements that attracted me to the original Hawkworld in the first place.
So I ended up limiting myself to the issues of Hawkman vol. 3 written by Hawkworld writer John Ostrander (#1-6, Annual #1) or that sounded otherwise interesting, which wereits "Year One" story (Annual #2) and a Shayera Thal focal issue cover-branded with the title Hawkwoman (#19).
Ostrander's run picks up a few months on from the end of Hawkworld: Hawkwoman (Shayera Thal) is presumed dead, Hawkman (Katar Hol) is missing following a battle, and there's a new Hawkman out there, willing to cross a line the old Hawkman wouldn't. The first issue builds up a lot of mystery as to who this new Hawkman is; the second reveals it's Katar Hol again, so I don't know what the point of that was.
He's essentially a completely different character, though. In issue #6, it's revealed that in the months between Hawkworld #32 and Hawkman #1, Katar discovered his secret past: when his father Paran Katar visited Earth in the Justice Society era, he fell in love with a Native American woman and fathered a child with her; he took them both back to Thanagar with him, though eventually the woman got tired of space life and was returned to Earth. This retcon stretches plausibility even further than the myriad ones during Hawkworld vol. 2 already did. The original introduction of the Paran-Katar-on-Earth retcon made it clear the JSA Hawkman and Hawkgirl didn't know Paran was from space; this version shows they did.
It's clear the point of this is to reduce Hawkman's science fiction elements and increase his tie to Earth. Like all retcons, I judge it on the standard of: is the new thing, if not more interesting, at least equal in interest to the thing it's replacing? Here, the answer is a clear no. The Thanagar introduced by Tim Truman in Hawkworld vol. 1 was a fertile ground for telling interesting stories, and John Ostrander took it some interesting places in vol. 2. Now, Hawkman is yet another angry 1990s superhero.
The main upshot seems to be to give Hawkman "Native American powers"; he can commune with animals (of course he can). Also, now, when he flies into a place, it makes a noise that sounds like the wind. Only this is comics, so this gimmick can only be communicated by having people go, "What's that? It sounds like a tremendous wind only the leaves on the trees aren't moving!" I made up that dialogue, but it's not far off the real thing.
In short, it's mediocre, and I'm sure the post-John Ostrander issues, even if they aren't actually bad, will be devoid of what drew me to the character in the first place, and reading Hawkman Annual #2 validated this, as it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about Hawk spirits and reincarnation. The writing out of Shayera is a real shame, too, as she was essentially co-lead in Hawkworld vol. 2, but the trajectory here makes it clear that Hawkman vol. 3 will be focused on just Hawkman. I did enjoy her starring role in issue #19; she's as awesome as ever even if the story isn't that good. More angry vigilantes.
Man, the mid-1990s were a dark time in comics.
* Hawkman is a little tricky to follow through publishing chronology thanks to the changing names of his series. It goes: Hawkman vol. 1 (1964-68), The Atom and Hawkman (1968-69), The Shadow War of Hawkman (1985), Hawkman vol. 2 (1986-87), Hawkworld vol. 1 (1989), Hawkworld vol. 2 (1990-93), Hawkman vol. 3 (1993-96), Legend of the Hawkman (2000), Hawkman vol. 4 (2002-06), Hawkgirl (2006-07), The Savage Hawkman (2011-13), Death of Hawkman (2016-17), Hawkman vol. 5 (2018-present).
"I want to know how this research is going on, and how it will end."
"It will go on and end in the service of humanity. If I gave you the details, I think that you would regard me rather as a quack than as a doctor—a quack with the restless ambitions of a mad man." (101)
The characters speaking in my epigraph above are the two central figures of this novel: Claudius Sandell, a would-be novelist, and Gabriel Lamb, a doctor who's ended his private practice to devote himself purely to research. Claudius's life has reached a low point, and he almost dies on the street, penniless and homeless, but for the ministrations of Lamb. Claudius is initially willing to do anything for Lamb, and ends up promising to serve him the rest of his life in exchange for eight days of freedom: eight days where Lamb will give Claudius £1,000 per day to use as he pleases.
You might guess that Lamb has nefarious motives, otherwise there wouldn't be a plot, and you'd be right. Lamb is clearly intended as a critique of the motivations and practices of vivisectionists, who claimed to be causing pain for the greater good of humanity. Sometimes, anti-vivisection novels criticized this as a self-serving lie; these men are just out to cause pain and/or for their own self-interest, and vivisection furthers those goals (e.g., Heart and Science, The Beth Book). Sometimes, anti-vivisection novels were willing to believe this was true, but explored the harm it causes regardless (e.g., The Professor's Wife).
It's hard to put Lamb in The Octave of Claudius in either category. He definitely sees the world differently than other people; in one scene, he looks out his window at London: "Each man of them is nothing as an individual. Charles Peace and William Shakespeare were both accidents" (101). When he explains why he gave up his practice, he says, "I asked myself if that kind of thing [helping an individual patient] was science as I loved it—if it really assisted the great cause of humanity for which alone I live. I gave up my practice. I study the individual man only when he is likely to throw light on the aggregate. I never work on behalf of the individual" (22-3). If it was just down to his conversations with Claudius, I'd be inclined to believe him. He's going to have to leave the country to do what he wants to Claudius; he'll never get acclaim for what he learns within his lifetime, but he's okay with this if it helps humanity in the long run: "I certainly have my reward. You have noticed, perhaps, that only people with imagination lay down wine. The old man in his cellar, storing the vintage that he knows he cannot live to drink, tastes in that moment all its unborn perfections that one day his grandson overhead will praise" (100).
But one of the other key characters in the novel is Lamb's wife, Hilda. They used to have a good marriage, but it fell apart at some point, apparently after the death of their only child; now Lamb tells her, "My interest in you is largely scientific" (33). But when Hilda gets hysterical at one point, he beats her with a whip, literalizing the metaphorical connection between vivisection and domestic abuse I've noticed in The Beth Book and Lynton Abbott's Children. Lamb claims to take no pleasure in what he does to Claudius, but it's impossible to read what he says and does to Hilda and not believe that he doesn't derive satisfaction from it. So he might genuinely be doing terrible things to further the human race... but he clearly also has failed as a husband, which thus means he's failed in one of his most basic ethical obligations according to the Victorians.
Like a lot of these anti-vivisection books, it's not great-- basically everything Claudius does when Lamb is not present is dead boring, especially his dull romance-- but it contains fascinating nuggets of how science and scientists were seen in the late Victorian period. I'm very glad I took the time to read it, and I feel like it ought to make it into my book.
Pick of the month:Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey. This is one of those months where though I read a decent amount of strong stuff, nothing in particular rose to the top (also I read a decent amount of mediocre stuff). But the third Expanse novel was a good one, giving me exactly what I want out of the series: good sci-fi action in an interesting milieu. Other good books were The Christmas Invasion, Paper Girls 5, and The Spy Who Loved Me, any of whom on a slightly different day might have taken this.
Christmas always nets me a lot of books, of course; in fact, I think it's the only time each year I really get new ones in a substantive amount anymore! #9-14 were presents from family, while #16-17 I got from LibraryThing's SantaThing event. #15 I found on a cart of free books in a mall in northeast Ohio, so that was nice.
Books remaining on "To be read" list: 656 (up 3) Books remaining on "To review" list: 15 (no change)
These days, even in months where I read a lot of books, they don't necessarily come off my "To be read" list, thanks to the quirks of my weird system. But this month was a good month for reading stuff off the list; #1, 7, 14-19 in my first list above all came off it! In any other month that would allow me to gain some ground, but I got so many books this month, that I actually lost ground. Oh well. Maybe I can maintain this into January.
