Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

L.E. Modesitt's 1992 collaboration with Bruce Scott Levinson, The Green Progression, is a non-SF work, a thriller set in the world of environmental politics and the last vestiges of the cold war.

Jack McDarvid is an ex-EPA staffer, now working as a consultant for a law firm that specialises in environmental law. When his boss is killed mysteriously he's plunged into a mix of real and imagined conspiracies that change his life. Mixed in with ecoterror and communist plots to destroy American hi-tech industry by burying it in expensive regulations, Jack will struggle to find a new direction of stagnating career and an end to his nightmares.

The Green Progression is a largely unsatisfying book. There's little resolution of events, and the morass of Washington politics is keeps bogging the story down. While the ecoterror sub-plot adds a little frisson to the story, it's not really necessary to Jack's story, and acts more to illustrate the complex issues that drive ecological and environmental law. At the end of the book your left with a feeling that there should be more, perhaps a series of novels that was never written.

If that was the case, then we should be grateful, as Modesitt has since produced some of the more interesting and challenging SF of the last decade. This book, however, can be left on the shelves of the second hand bookstore.

Following up my recent entry on the extinct Haast Eagle, the largest predator in New Zealand, I noted this BBC News article, which discusses recent research into its DNA. It turns out that the Haast Eagle, one of the largest flying birds ever, was directly related to one of the world's smallest - a whole order of magnitude smaller...

Mary Janice Davidson's vampire chick-lit saga continues in Undead and Unemployed.

Betsy Taylor has a job at last. Not just a job, but the job: selling designer shoes in an upscale mall. It's tough being Queen of the Vampires when there's bills to pay... And now someone is killing local vampires, so Betsy is going to have to do something about it. It's a problem that is going to pay havoc with her life (or is that, un-life?), and she's going to have to deal with Sinclair, the uber-vamp who's making eyes at her...

Don't expect great things from this book - it's a light read that fills in the gap between heavier volumes. Sure, it's funny in places, and possibly even slightly witty once or twice, but the premise is struggling after just two books. Like many vampire romance novels it's largely formulaic with superficial and trite characters, and it's relatively easy to see where the story is going. It's a book for when you're trapped on a transatlantic plane or on the beach, not for those long winter nights when you want to curl up with a long and engrossing read.