Matti Vuento: Bakteerien planeetta

Aiheessaan hyvin perusteellinen tietokirja bakteereista. Kirja lähtee liikkeelle bakteereiden rakenteesta ja käsittelee sitten lyhyehkösti tärkeimmät tauteja aiheuttavat bakteeriryhmät, jonka jälkeen kirja käsittelee bakteereiden genetiikkaa ja evoluutiota, mm antibioottiresistenssiä ja bakteerien (suurta) merkitystä oikeastaan kaikessa.

Kiinnostava ja pääosin kohtalaisen yleistajuinen kirja, jossa joissain kohdissa tosin geenitasolle menevyys oli jo ehkä hiukan liian yksityiskohtaista, mutta toisaalta monesta asasta olisi halunnut vielä enemmän tietoa, etenkin taudeista ja niiden historiasta. Hyvin luettava ja jopa uutta tietoa tarjoava kirja, joka oli sujuvasti kirjoitettu pätevä tietopaketti.

A well written and fairly comprehensive look at the life of bacteria.

398 pp.

Christian Rönnbacka: Tuonen korppi (Antti Hautalehto #6)

 

I listened to another book in the car. This time crime police, led by inspector Hautalehto, tried to determine why an ordinary vocational school teacher with no enemies or criminal record at all was found dismembered at an old abandoned quarry. Smooth and fast-talking, with witty one-liners, just like the earlier parts.

Ja yksi Hautalehto lisää autossa kuunneltuna. Tällä kertaa sotaleikkiä leikkineet pojat löytävät hylätystä kaivoksesta irtonaisen käden. Lähettyviltä löytyy loppuosa ruumiista ja pian selviää, kuka kuollut on: täysin nuhteeton ammattikoulun opettaja. Miksi ihmeessä joku hänet olisi halunnut tappaa? Ja kun miehen tuttava löytyy kuoliaaksi ammuttuna, niin tapaus näyttää entistä omituisemmalta - kuka olisi halunnut tappaa toisen nuhteettoman taustan omaavan henkilön?

Samaa tasoa kuin edelliset kirjat, ehkä hiukan jopa parempi kuin edellinen osa, jossa alkuun lähdössä kesti aikansa. Itse tosin arvasin murhaajan jo noin puolivälissä kirjaa – se oli aivan ilmeistä, kun huomasi pariin yksityiskohtaan kiinnittää huomiota. Motiivi oli epäselvempi, mutta siitäkin aika pian heräsi vahvat epäilyt ainakin suuntaavasti, muu syy ei oikein olisi asioita voinut selittää. Ihan hauskaa kuunneltavaa kirja silti oli.

 248 pp.

William Shakespeare: Hamlet

The first Shakespeare play I have ever read and a very pleasant surprise. The new translation flows very smoothly and is very easy to understand. The play turned out to be very funny, with witty dialogue, many double entendres, and an ending that seemed to be directly from a splatter comedy movie. A fun and entertaining book to read.

Hamlet oli kirjapiirin kesän klassikkona, tosin yhteensattumien ja ehkä osittain koronatilanteen pahentumisen vuoksi kokoontuminen jäi pitämättä. En ole Shakespearea aikaisemmin lukenut yksittäisiä lyhyitä ja lähes käsittämättömältä tuntuvia lainauksia lukuun ottamatta, joten tietyllä varautuneisuudella lähestyin kirjaa. Uuden Matti Rossin tekemän suomennoksen sai vielä hyvin edullisesti e-kirjana – ei tainnut juuri olla kuluja kirjan tekijänoikeuksista. Kirja oli todella iloinen yllätys, suomennus oli hyvin luettavaa ja selkeää, enkä ikinä olisi uskonut ”draaman” olevan näin hauskaa. Isänsä menettänyt ja kostoa hautova Tanskan prinssi sekä yleisesti ottaen melkoisesti säheltävä joukko muita henkilöitä heittelivät niin paljon hauskoja letkautuksia ja kaksimielisyyksiä, että oli vaikea uskoa mitä oli lukemassa. Loppukin meni oikean splatter-komedia elokuvan tyyliin: kaikki kuolivat, mutta verisesti ja huvittavien mokien tuloksena. Oikeastaan kaikin puolin hämmästyttävän tuore kirja, todennäköisesti osittain erittäin onnistuneen käännöksen ansioista. 

247 pp.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July-August 2020

 

A pretty average issue.

Sticks and Stones • novelette by Tom Jolly

A spaceship has been on an exploratory mission and has found an intelligent bacteria colony from another planet that is on board. They have been forbidden to ever return to Earth, and the crew is bitter about that. There is a promise of a world with an oxygen atmosphere and they go there. They find a bizarre world with a lot of promise, have some adventures, encounter some hostile creatures and possible invaders, and eventually, everything goes well. A very naive story where both plot and writing are straight from the 50s. I am not sure if this should have been taken as a parody - but it was too near to the original style to mock it well enough. There were some problems with logic, also. If you always have a mess with tomatoes when you transit from 1 g to zero-g, shouldn’t you pick up the ripe fruits beforehand? If they are carrying an alien organism considered so dangerous that they can never return to Earth, how can they study other inhabited worlds for the same reason (wouldn’t that go without saying)? ***

Flyboys • novella by Stanley Schmidt

A young boy of a species where males are flyers and females aren’t, passes his initiation to adulthood. There are humans on the planet, also. There has been a battle between the humans and flyers, but after a peace treaty, things seem to have settled down. But there are some flyers who want humans out and they kidnap the youngster and try to persuade him to help them. A fairly nice story with average writing and a fair amount “as you know, Bob” style of exposition. The aliens behave very human-like, up to judicial customs. ***½

The Mad Cabbage • short story by Céline Malgen

A young scientist is studying fermented red cabbage as she notices that its color is off: the solution is far too acidic for what it is supposed to be. Lactic acid bacteria aren’t supposed to survive in such conditions - what is going on? A very simple story with very little actual plot. ***-

Aboard the Mithridates • short story by Sean Vivier

A spaceship is traveling to a planet with high sulfur content in the air. The air in the ship is slowly being adjusted to that content so that the passengers evolve to it. There is some gene therapy but strangely it is used after the air change to help current passengers (with autosomal changes?). One boy struggles with adjusting. I wonder why he isn’t on the list for gene therapy? The author seems to have an extremely strange Lamarckian view of evolution, and a bad understanding of gene therapy. Does Analog really have no editor who has any grasp of science at all?  A pretty bad story. **-

On the Changing Roles of Dockworkers • short story by Marie Vibbert

A dock worker tries to find out why a robot doesn’t work like it supposed to. It has become self-aware. But could it be talked around to continue working? A short simple OK story. **½

Mars, the Dumping Ground of the Solar System • short story by Andrew Kozma

Mars is a slum where the most inept people, criminals, and unneeded scum live. All planets (including Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury) have been terraformed and the genetically modified workers of that process live in apparent slum-like conditions on Mars. A girl has gone missing and almost no one cares. The story apparently tries to achieve some sort of a racial point, but manages to be clumsy and extremely stupid, and the “science” part of the story, which is implied, would have been ridiculous even in a story written at end of the 40s. Terraforming Jupiter and Venus is easier than using Mars for a living? Transporting the works to Mars, when the planet they have designed it for would at least have the right gravity? **

Retention • short story by Alec Nevala-Lee

Someone is trying to cancel his cable service/security system and is talking to a very insistent bot, which won’t allow cancellation. It talks and talks and eventually it turns out both are bots that have been left behind by disappeared humans. ***½

Keeping the Peace • short story by Elisabeth R. Adams

Lizard like aliens want to conquer habited worlds. They have sent ships to nearby solar systems with little success, but then the ship from Earth arrived offering information of a ripe catch to be won. But the lizard who is responsible for the solar conquest is having second thoughts. Not bad, takes a while to get into as there was little backstory, but this time that approach worked pretty well. ***½

Ennui • short story by Filip Wiltgren

The AI of a generation spaceship is worried, as its immortal passengers start to give up on life without any reason it can understand or correct. There are also similar problems at the other human settlements. The AI tries to find a solution, but eventually an alternative solution by the AI is needed. A pretty good and even moving story. ****

The Offending Eye • novelette by Robert R. Chase

Continues an earlier story. There are three factions of humans: Stability (authoritarian and conservative faction), Eternals (aiming to prolong human life span at almost any cost), and TransHumans (who aim for uploading human consciousness to computers). A political officer (who keeps watch on too much free thinking and anything which might hint on a machine AI), has returned from an exploration trip where there was a find which might be a threat to all factions of humans. Also, the computer on that ship has apparently achieved self-awareness, and that demands careful study and eventually even visiting the enemy camp, Eternals. Clearly a better story than the first part. There was still a bit too much obvious exposition at places, but there were fewer problems with logic. Even the writing felt better than before. ****-

Piiraan maku makea (Flavia de Luce #1) by Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)

In the first part of the series of detective novels, the detective is a precocious 11-year-old girl. She lives in a slightly derelict mansion with her older, very irritating and stupid (some unreliable narrative there?) father who apparently never got over the death of his wife. When Flavia finds a dead man in the vegetable garden she is thrilled: a real murder mystery to be solved!

A child as a detective isn’t the most realistic premise, but the “voice” of Flavia was delightfully precocious and self-confident. An entertaining, light book that was fast to read. I might pick up the next part, but as I have countless books in my queue it might take some time.



Ensimmäinen osa sarjaa 11-vuotiaan salapoliisin seikkailuista. Flavia de Luce asuu leski-isänsä (joka ilmeisesti ei ole päässyt missään vaiheessa yli puolisonsa kuolemasta) ja kahden isosiskonsa kanssa. Isä on niin vetäytyvä ja siskot niin ärsyttäviä, että Flavia elelee ilmeisen itsenäisesti talon palvelijoiden lievällä tuella harrastaen kemiaa vakavissaan ja jopa suunnitellen myrkkyseoksia siskojensa ärsyttämiseksi. Eräänä päivänä ovensuusta löytyy kuollut lintu vanha postimerkki suussaan. Ja vain vähän myöhemmin kasvimaalta löytyy kuollut mies. Tässä on jotain, mitä Flavia on ikänsä odottanut: oikea murhamysteeri ratkaistavaksi.

Mielenkiintoisella kertojaminällä kuvattu dekkari. Sinällään Flavian kertojaääni ei vaikuta hetkeäkään 11-vuotiaalta, mutta mitäs siitä, viihdekirjahan tässä on kyseessä ja ihan hyvä sellainen. Kieli oli vetävää, hyvää ja samalla helppo- ja nopealukuista. Juoni ei ehkä uskottavampia harvinaisine postimerkkeineen, taikatemppuineen ja ryöstöinen ollut, mutta sentään uskottavampi kuin Flavia itse. Sarjassa on monta osaa lisää, ei ole ollenkaan mahdotonta, että palaisin vielä niiden pariin, siinä määrin viihdyttävä kirja kumminkin oli.

388 pp.

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski

The only book I had time to even start from the “best related work” category. The book is an autobiography by J. Michael Straczynski, the genius behind Babylon 5, one of my favorite TV-series ever.  As I haven’t been reading comics, I wasn’t aware of the career he has had on that front, and most of the other parts of his post-Babylon career were pretty unfamiliar to me, too. A major part of the book is taken up by his childhood - and what a childhood he had! Whenever you thought things couldn’t get worse, they always did. But that is what one gets with a narcissistic, alcoholic, and abusive father, a true nazi, who kept a real uniform as a memento of the happy days of killing Jewish people during the Second World War on the eastern front. The mother tried committing suicide several times and was committed for long periods. That didn’t make for a very enjoyable reading; it was pretty interesting though, and it also explained why Michael escaped to imaginary worlds as a child first and an adolescent later. An interesting book, but the proportion between the author's early life and, later, his “famous” life could have benefited from leaning slightly more towards the latter part.

 

 480 pp.

Kaikki mikä kiiltää (Antti Hautalehto #5) by Christian Rönnbacka

Lisää Hautalehdon ja hänen tutkimusryhmänsä seikkailuja. Tällä kertaa Hautalehto kiinnittää huomionsa siihen, että hänen tuttunsa keskusrikospoliisista vaikuttaa postaavan jotakuta aivan Hautalehdon kotikentillä ilman, että hänelle olisi tästä mitään tiedotettu. Ilmenee, että kyseessä ovat pari entistä koulukodin kasvattia, joilla näyttää olevan kummallisen paljon rahaa käytettävissään. Ja pian ei vain poliisi, vaan myös konnat, jahtaavat samoja nuoria.

Ehkä aavistuksen heikompi kirja kuin edelliset sarjan osat. Osasyynä lienee se, että kesti aika pitkään ennen kuin Hautalehto ja hänen poliisiryhmänsä pääsivät kirjassa varsinaisesti esille ja turhan pitkään seurattiin nuoria, joihin ei kovin suurta emotionaalista kytköstä vielä siinä vaiheessa ollut. Loppua kohden kirja parantui selvästi ja oli loppupuolellaan ihan samaa korkeaa tasoa kuin muutkin sarjansa kirjat letkeällä humoristisella kielellä maustettuna.

Another police procedural abut inspector Hautalehto and his group. This time they try to find a group of youngsters who have angered some really, really bad people after their smuggling kick went wrong. Nice and entertaining writing, but not without some gore, like the earlier parts of the series.

287 pp.

Middlegame (Middlegame #1) by Seanan McGuire

The last of the Hugo nominees this time. The evil alchemists have created human constructs that could control all forces of nature. The latest attempt has been divided into two parts: to twins being raised as ”cuckoos” in normal families. The twins have been able to communicate telepathically since childhood, but on more than one occasion the alchemists have put a stop to it, believing that premature contact would ruin the experiment. After they establish contact again, after a long pause, they start to grow stronger—and because the alchemists still think of them as something of a test run for the pair that will actually be used for nefarious purposes, they now face termination.


The book was written in nice, easy-to-read, but fairly meandering language. There were many descriptions of mundane details having little to do with the plot; sometimes it felt like even the description of a person waking up in the morning and dressing themselves took several pages. As a whole, it wasn’t a bad book at all, but exceptional children on the run from an ancient and powerful organization is an old trope. In fact, there was another nominee this year with a strikingly similar plot—The Ten Thousand Doors of January—and that book did it better. I will reiterate: this wasn’t a bad book at all, and the last half was particularly enjoyable, but it will not be in the running for my top choices given this year's stiff competition.

492 pp.