Reviews and Comments

This was my first Battletech novel back in the 90s (when I read it in German as "Stahlgladiatoren"). As I recently got into the franchise again I decided to reread it, this time in English. And it is definitely a breezy read. Hardly a good one, but at least the action keeps coming, even if some of the plot points feel a bit sus. We encounter Jeremiah Rose, who lost his Battlemech but still wants to fight the Clans who invaded the Inner Sphere and were stopped at the Battle of Tukayyid. So he goes to his home planet and tries to get support there, only to be frozen out by his own father. He does manage to recruit both his sister and a cousin, then goes to the arena planet Solaris VII to somehow get a Battlemech for himself. After a surprisingly short time there he has both mechs and companions, goes to a mercenary planet, then the company is hired to be stationed on some backwater planet where nobody even believes the Clans would ever invade. The Clans DO in fact invade and we follow along as our rag-tag band of misfits fight against the meager Clan Invasion force.

Things keep happening in this book one after another, and yet it feels like there is not actually that much of a plot. In a way it feels like a picaresque, a perfect little introduction into the setting, but with no actual substance to it. That doesn't mean it is necessarily bad, but it certainly isn't really good either. Rose keeps stumbling from scene to scene, and stuff just keeps falling into his lap for no good reason. Rose is an idiot. He is shrewd, but his priorities are out of whack, and one could not believe people would follow a man like this, and yet lots of them do. Which I guess fits with how mechwarriors in general are presented in the franchise.

One of the main issues I have with it is how we as an audience are promised one thing (gladiatorial battles with giant robots) on the cover, while in the book these get the short shrift. Rose spends a minuscule amount of time on Solaris VII, fights in a single non-standard match, spends part of the chapters set on the world recounting the Battle of Tukayyid (clearly the author just threw in another story he had written as filler) and then buggers off never to be a gladiator again. There's something to be said about keeping promises to the reader, and this is not it.

It's hardly the best of the Vorkosigan saga books, but it does have it's charm. Unfortunately it also is quite uneven, and the brisk pacing drops considerably during the second half of the book. Which is odd, as this should be just the time when it should pick up. The book is a screwball comedy in the science fiction setting of the Vorkosigan saga. Ivan Vorpatril, cousin to the series' main star Miles Vorkosigan and often recurring side character, is on a work trip to the planet of Komarr. There an agent from Imperial Security he knows recruits him as a bodyguard for a girl who might be in danger. After a complicated few days, with local authorities, interstellar criminals, and his boss on his back, he and his charges are backed into a corner and he comes up with a rather gallant but foolish proposal: marriage. Weirdly enough it works. But now he has a wife who is a target of a Jacksonian crime syndicate, and worse: his family and friends are utterly delighted he got married.

This books has a lot going for it, unfortunately it also is very, very uneven. There are some brillant scenes in there, like the whole chapter about his birthday which considering it's sheer fanservice (it's basically just a retelling of events that happened in the novel Barrayar) is chillingly effective. But it's not the only instance of fanservice, and after a while one has to wonder if there are any people in that universe that are not somehow intimately connected to the Vorkosigan clan. Because yes, a slight hint every once in a while is ok, but constant reminders about previous books are getting on my nerves. One of the worst things about it is that it peaks about halfway through, and then slows down. And it shouldn't be like that, because the events become almost farcical, but nothing really seems to be happening, stuff just drags on. It's not a big problem, the book is brief and entertaining enough, but it's noticeable.

This, truly, is one of my favorite books. It is perfect in so many ways.

For one, it is a fantasy novel set on a fantasy convention. I would say this is a winning formula, but I also read "Bimbos of the Death Sun" and was less than happy with that. Deep Secret is different because it is actually well written, with a keen insight into the world of fantasy fandom.

Rupert Venables is a Magid. Not a magician, but something very similar. He is tasked with watching over Earth and other worlds in the multiverse, including, to his disgust, the Inter-dimensional Koryfonic Empire. The plot kicks off when 1. his mentor dies and he is tasks with finding a replacement, and 2. the emperor of the Koryfonic Empire is assassinated, along with much of his court. For reasons of his own making he now needs to juggle running a complicated reality altering spell while searching for the hidden heir of the Empire, all the while attending a fantasy convention that just happens to take place in a place of high dimensional volability. It all makes more sense once one actually read it. The charming part is that the convention is not just a backdrop, it is the actual place stuff happens. It has all the bustling charm of a convention where all kinds of people from all over the world (and it turns out other worlds) just roll up and do their thing.

I don't know any other mystery novel that uses a D&D game as a parlor scene. This one does. Unfortunately it sucks. It does manage to capture the atmosphere of a badly run exhibition game quite nicely though: At the the end of the game players and audience are frustrated, and the bored reader is glad that this waste of time is over. It's just as well the exposed murderer commits suicide, because this mess would never hold up in court. The whole mystery part of the book seems like an afterthought, a mere excuse to be able to sell it as some, any genre at least. In truth this is a book about SF fandom, but it hardly is science fiction in itself. So after half the book the asshole victim is killed, nobody really is bothered much by that, and the only reason the main character finds who killed him is because he is marginally more computer savvy than the police. But that's not the reason why this book is readable. It is readable because it's set on a small science fiction con in the late 80s, written by someone who knew what she was writing about. There's trekkies trying to organize a Star Trek wedding, roleplayers having meltdowns over their characters, postal gamers using the con for political scheming in a made up world, cosplayers (before cosplay was called cosplay), etc The guest stars are Appin Dungannon, an ass of an author who hates his main character and his fans (guess who ends up dead?), and the main character, a local professor of engineering called Jay Omega. Jay is, to his chagrin, the author of a hard science fiction novel that somehow contracted the title "Bimbos of the Death Sun" and a near-pornographic cover during publication. Jay and his fellow professor/ SO Marion spend most of the novel being bemused by the surrounding antics. Jay is new to fandom, Marion is an old SF fan who's seen it all. The fascinating thing about this book is how it manages to capture SF fandom so well, without resorting to the usual trite clichés. Sure, there are some spots that seem mean-spirited, but even these read like someone wrote from bitter experience. And yes, the parlor scene is an extended roleplaying session. I suspect the author did not really know how these worked or she had some really bad experiences. Altogether: readable for the view of the fandom in the 80s, but don't expect an actual mystery.

In the mid-2000s Lego was the bestselling toy manufacturer in the world.
It also was on the verge of bankruptcy.
This was a surprise to everyone, most of all Lego's management.
It took the work of a group of talented analysts to convince them that while some of their recent business decisions were quite successful to say the least (Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Bionicle), altogether the company was losing money on developing and even selling their products.

In the '90s, when action figures and computers became all the rage in the toy industry, a few bad numbers had convinced Lego's management to take a new direction. Old people with insitutional knowlege were let go, new people with the best, but often unrelated, qualifications were brought in. Multiple new development units had been created that were not providing any benefit to the company. New toys were created that did not really fit with the Lego brand.
Some created that were successes, like the buildable actionfigure line Bionicle, or the robotics supplement Mindstorms, but others fizzled out unloved and unlamented. A media tie with a TV series and action figures that could not interface with the usual Lego bricks was a non-starter. Classic Duplo bricks were replaced with non-brick toys. And sets started to become filled with specialized parts unusable for other models, but costing enormous amounts of money to produce.
In the end the company arrived at a point where many sets cost more to manufacture than they retailed for, while management was unaware of any issues, not talking to each other.

Spoiler: it helped that they went back to their roots and started creating high-quality, well-designed brick toys again.
Who'd have a-thunk?

This book is about the history of Lego and how they first became famous and successful, but it mostly is about the business decisions that lead to their near-collapse, and what the company did to turn itself around. This means this book has a lot of interesting parts about the company itself and the philosophy that drives it. It also has some long and astute observations about business decisions that are analyzed in how they can affect a company, and how they actually worked out for the company in question.

Unfortunately this is also where the book loses its impact. Maybe it is the fact that I am not an economist, but some of the analysis seems long-winded, overly-laudatory, and oddly contradictory in places. Some of the elements seem to come out of the blue with no explanation (e.g the first time we hear about the success of Bionicle is in the chapter about Bionicle). Sometimes economic jargon is used with no explanation whatsoever. This doesn't make the book unreadable, but it lost my interest about 3/4s in, when nothing really seemed to happen anymore, and I had to force myself to go on reading. I think the main problem is that while the topic of the book could be framed as an interesting story, after about the half-way point the author just seems to fill it with descriptions of how all those new and awesome product lines were developed.
Definitely interesting in parts, but drags.

The telegraph was the first tool that allowed rapid communication between parties thousands of miles away from each other. This book is a rather too short history of its development, starting with the failures that preceded the technology, over the optical semaphore systems originally used, towards the mature system that allowed instant communication in the later half of the 19th century. The book delves into the amusing follies that came with its development (the first Atlantic telegraph line failed after a month, and records later showed the operators were largely asking if the other side received them), touches on the subculture of telegraph operators that held sway for a long time (including at least one wedding conducted over telegraph), and goes on to see its slow and inevitable demise after the invention of the telephone, originally just an outgrowth of the booming telegraph market.
The book is a light and interesting read, maybe in parts a bit too light. It touches on interesting parts of the history alright, and often enough leads into yet another aspect leaving unanswered questions behind. I gladly would have read more about the subculture of telegraphers, the various scams and crimes taking advantage of the technology, and the impact on society it had, but instead after some short pages the book veers into a different direction, leaving unanswered questions.
One of the more quaint elements of the book is how the author tries to compare and contrast all those developments from the history of the telegraph with the development of the internet. Now I don't say that he doesn't have a point there, many of those parallels are perfectly valid, but the book was published in 1999, and he writes as if he had to explain what the internet is. Which fits in nicely with his description of how the public and politics adopted the telegraph. But I don't think that was intentional.

Dreadful. I was reading the old English translation of the book, which always is a problem because Jules Verne was butchered whenever translated into English. But this only accounts for some of the problems of the story. Verne seems to have tried to write a more funny take on nationalities of Europe, and so we have our hero Hector get whisked away from Algeria by a comet, which coincidentally also took part of the Med with it, including some of the most annoying stereotypes of European nationalities possible. This includes stodgy Brits, lazy Spaniards, and of course the impossibly greedy German Jew.
It is the latter which really leaves a bad taste for a modern reader, the treatment of the only Jewish character is so bad it was already a public issue when it was first published. Think about that.
It doesn't help that the rest of the cast is unlikable and arrogant, the science is dodgy even for the time it was written, and frankly I would have loved to see them all killed off in the end. Verne seems to have originally planned it like that. It's a pity his editor said no to that. It would have made a better ending.