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Well, it's Saturday once again. Time to do all manner of things:
While the Roomba blunders around, I may as well go into the reading material I fished out of its way from under the bedside table:
Arc of the Dream, A.A. Attanasio, Bantam:
Insideout, an alien from beyond space and time, visits Earth to commune with cetaceans and unwisely sets down its quarter-sized space ship on Hawaiʻi near Mauna Loa, where a student on a school trip picks it up and takes it out of contact with its transdimensional tramline and only way home. Agonized and desperate, Insideout reaches out more or less at random and contacts 4 other humans, 3 of whom acquire respectively the power of telepathy, telekinesis, and prescience. The first one, Dirk, a punk who lives in an orphanage after the death of his father in Vietnam, just gets the ability to think with his brains for a change. Dirk is kind of a bully, and starts out the book by swiping the alien from Donnie, the student who found it, and who is Dirk's roommate.
With just days to fix things before the connection breaks and it turns into pure energy and kills everyone on the island, Insideout gathers its human agents together; for some reason it's just too otherworldly to deal with one person at a time. There's a rather stilted romance between Dirk and the telepath, Reena, who the alien recruited out of an asylum in France where she'd been catatonic due to a congenital neurological defect. By the time they've teamed up, most of the way through the book, Insideout is in serious pain and the humans' powers become erratic. When they're not having trouble even talking to each other with Reena out of commission, they have to deal with the "orc", a manifestation of Insideout's dark side that gets stronger the more they use their abilities, and only the meditative discipline of "lusk" can stop it.
This is the third book in the Radix series, and maybe because it's set on present-day Earth, the least goofy, except for the parts that attempt to explain the nature of the alien and the compacted dimension it comes from, which end up sounding more like Alan Sokal's parody of post-modern criticism, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The characters start out pretty strong, not necessarily sympathetic but still interesting, which makes the disposable props introduced later rather obtrusive. Attanasio's relentlessly eccentric word choices keep up all the way through, but I guess I'm used to them by now, because I'm re-reading The Last Legends of Earth just for the sake of experiencing it in the context of Reena Patai's back-story.
Real quick now, a bunch of single issues:
Castle Waiting #11, Linda Medley, Fantagraphics;
The hammerlings help set up a game of ninepins while Rackham enthuses over the products of Jain's enchanted clothes chest.
Lords of Avalon #s 2 and 4, Sherilyn Kenyon, Robin Furth, Tommy Ohtsuka, Marvel:
I picked up these because of the "simple peasant girl" Seren's fabulous rack, although the content of the advertising intermixed with it is sort of interesting. It seems to be split between a younger demographic (Don't do drugs, industrial capitalism has no use for your leisure!) and an older one (Yay superheroes! and the Honda Element is so ironic, it's meta-ironic!)
Furrlough #181, Various Artists, Radio Comix:
Well, the Richard J. Smith stories weren't head-explodingly awful, and Sara Palmer's cover is quite nice.
Rex Libris #11, James Turner, SLG:
The meme-leakage from the previous issues reaches tinfoil-hat levels here, where Rex and co. move out to stop a re-appearance of Cthulhu with the help of the U.S. army and navy.
