Fiction Alert: Charlaine Harris

In an earlier post, I drew attention to Charlaine Harris' high-quality Sookie Stackhouse novels.

I contrasted quality urban fantasy series (in the case of Harris' Southern Vampire series, maybe suburban or even rural fantasy given Harris' back-woods and off-the-beaten-path small-town settings) with the long-derailed Anita Blake series, whose author hasn't been off the beaten path in her later works but completely lost in the woods. I have a hypothesis how Laurell Hamilton's work went awry. It was initially well-written work -- characters whose fear and anger made sense; crises readers understood needed to be solved and were solved (or one could see progress toward the solution ... but for each book at least the major crisis was solved); tension made complex and plausible by the different demands of the crises, character weaknesses, and motives of the involved characters. My lofty expectations were entirely justified. Yet, it was allowed to degenerate into an ill-designed and seemingly unending series of encounters designed not to resolve a crisis or advance the plot but to amuse the writer: excuses to put Blake into someone's bed, to show some poor sod being misused or having his affections ignored, or to involve the character Blake in some new sexual combination Hamilton hadn't previously described. Not that I mind erotica; but if I'm to read five hundred pages, I expect a plot and not simply a rewrite of Penthouse Letters with vampires. (Never mind the creeping addition of typos and logical inconsistency that suggest she's not bothering with careful craft, I'd be satisfied with the appearance of a plot.) My theory comes from this admission of Hamilton's about where she is taking the series: as described earlier, she has no idea.

Remember what Alice learned from the Cat? Alice asks: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" The answer is the wisdom of the ages. "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. Once we know Hamilton has no idea where Blake is to go, it's easy to understand how she suffers several books of tantalizingly almost-a-story vignettes glued together with group sex, taboo sex, and snubs against men looking for sex.

So, why the alert?

I just read this:

Q&A: What's next for Sookie and the series?
Harris: I have no idea.
via Borders, "Q&A -- A Conversation with Charlane Harris"

Mind you, the rest of the interview was not only non-scary, but quite articulate. People who use the verb "to obtain" as she does (to be established or customary) aren't an uneducated bunch, and to use it off the cuff like Harris does suggests she has all the literacy and intelligence her early works suggest (their understated humor, and their quiet allusion to so many other works in different genres). I don't expect "their" and "they're" and "there" to get confused in a Harris book like I've encountered in Hamilton. There is hope yet.

However, the book that follows the masterful All Together Dead was not as brilliant as her prior work. Rather than following one significant story arc (while peppering into the meal a variety side-plots that might develop over the series or minor problems creating distracting crises to be solved in the course pursuing larger problems), Harris seemed in From Dead to Worse to glue different segments back-to-back with the expectation we would accept the whole as one "story". This wasn't the artful work I'd come to expect, and I hope future works either claim to be multiple stories (which stand as stories) or are structured to be more satisfying. The lack of cohesion in the story parts really prevented the sort of "ahh!" feeling you get when the author wraps up the major crisis, and leaves you looking at the unfinished problems for clues where the next crisis will erupt.

Noting Harris' quick back-to-back release dates in 2009, I simultaneously fear that she's sacrificed care for quantity and look forward to repeated tales in case she has returned to turning out solid books.

I'll definitely remark back on it here.

Lunacy and Lunar Missions: Lessons in the Shortcomings of Media Claims

Less than a century ago, the institution promising "all the news that's fit to print" offered a written excoriation of Professor Goddard and his dreams of reaching the moon, the cornerstone of which was "knowledge ladled out daily in high schools" about thermodynamics. The New York Times' author wrote that "[t]o claim that it would be [feasible to steer rockets in space] would be do deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that."

The 1920 editorial, not only made after the realization of the law of conservation but actually citing it as support, seemed both to require special certifications before one could observe phenomenon in nature, and to overlook that a craft expelling accelerated exhaust would necessarily realize a change in its vector, lest the departing and just-accelerated high-speed exhaust particles create a net change in momentum of the system that includes the craft and its fuel.

The fact that respected news organizations can be so utterly wrong on what seems a point of basic science, to the point of issuing a public recantation one generation later when the folly has become laughable, should be noted by those of us who rely on the authority of a speaker's credentials rather than on the authority of the evidence in deciding how public resources might best be spent. After all, The New York Times' recantation of its 1920 editorial contained only this explanation for its retraction:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Issac Newton in the 17th Century and it is not definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

That a 1920 author purported to cite Einstein as an authority (whose speeches against space flight, if any, are unknown to me) is appalling enough without his ignoring or misunderstanding Newton to reach his erroneous conclusion.

So when media outlets confidently issue pronouncements on more complex interactions than those involved in space flight -- say, in the debate on man-made planet warming, an idea with great currency in Washington, D.C. but which has been dismissed in Tokyo as "ancient astrology" -- one does well to look at the evidence rather than the claims.

There could be another retraction coming in a generation or so.

Something New Under The Sun: A Venetian Gondoliera

News of the first-time-in-its-900-year-history induction of Giorgia Boscolo by the venetian gondolier's guild as an apprentice gondolier -- the guild's first trainee gondoliera and the first ever in Venice -- reminds the Jaded Consumer of this specious but entertaining account of Venice's harsh gondolier exams and its controlling supervising body.

Giorgia's father, proud of his daughter but not a particular fan of female gondoliers, hasn't sons to which to pass his craft. Her husband, a metal worker and father of her two children, knows better than to stand in her way.

Sometimes the news is worth reading :-)

Sales Share v. Profit Share

In the past when discussing Apple I've mentioned its sales share as less important than the amount of profit it derives from the sales it achieves. I sense this is greeted with a sort of "sour grapes" view by some readers.

This news piece brings the facts into sharp relief: Apple and RIMM have a combined worldwide cell phone market share of maybe 3%, but command something like 35% of all the cell phone profits to be had on the planet. Imagine you are competing for the other 97% of the market, and could not reach the delicious cream of the market held by the likes of Apple and RIMM. Whose business would you rather own?

With Apple's margins expected to be about double Dell's in the next earnings release, one hardly need ponder.

Iranian Election Protest Lives

Apparently the opposition isn't spent, after all.

Anyone got links to serious analysis of where the protest might be going (other than into Iranian jails)?

People Media Not A Bad Deal for ACAS

The People Media exit demonstrated ACAS can make profitable exits in these rough times. Although ACAS claims its equity investment represented a compounded annual rate of return of 76% over the life of the investment, ACAS invests at multiple altitudes on the balance sheet; zeroing in on the equity may be sexy, but it's not the whole picture. The whole picture -- senior and subordinated debt, plus the convertible preferred stock apparently identified with the 76% statistic -- shows a compounded annual rate of return of 35%.

Thirty-five percent compounded annual returns aren't shabby. The $57 million in cash ACAS received will definitely help, even if ACAS doesn't benefit from realizing a $15 million gain in the quarter (lifetime investment gain of $26m).

Opportunities like this suggest why ACAS might be interested in liquidating AGNC shares that are producing returns exceeding 20%.

With Deutche Bank apparently voting in favor of the funds management expertise of ACAS, the future of its funds management business may be looking up.

Kidney Worth Maybe $1600 In Pakistan

If selling your spouse or children is a bit much for you, there's another option: your kidney.

Although outlawed in 2007, the sale of human kidneys to would-be recipients is apparently not hard to arrange, and doesn't net sellers much for their risks: $1100-$1600.

It'd be interesting to see long-term data on the population's health, to ascertain whether the ban had an impact, and if so, good or ill.