Holy Water Othmer’s debut novel, The Futurist, was something of a mixed bag, though ultimately I enjoyed it and thought it represented a promising start to a good (if not exactly groundbreaking) writing career. Four years later, Othmer offers up Holy Water as a sophomore effort, and while it’s a palatable read, the author not only makes the same mistakes as in his first book, but has in fact crafted a much less compelling story.
Hunting Evil It has been more than a half-century since the Nazi rise to power; in that time, the Nazi ideology, its adherents, and its titular leader, Adolph Hitler, have come to be known in a stylized, somewhat exaggerated way. This is not to say that such opprobrium is any way undeserved; while the Nazis may not have been the most imaginatively cruel men to have murdered in the 20th century (regimes such as Pol Pot come to mind), the sheer scale and enthusiasm of their extermination of more than six million noncombatants has made them the favorite secular devil of the popular mind. Hence things like Godwin’s Law and the constant comparisons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Hitler (the former because, I suppose, he’s apparently a warmonger? and the latter because he apparently wants to gas your grandmother).
Needless to say, Nazis hold a certain place in the popular imagination, and for much of the civilized world, we desire nothing more than the application of justice to the outstanding iniquity of the Holocaust. That’s why figures such as Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi-hunter, are so revered, and why books about the topic sell so well.
The Stories of English Studying linguistics and etymology is something of a hobby of mine; I’ve read Baugh’s A History of the English Language, which is a more formal academic work, as well as books which would count as, I suppose, “pop linguistics” or “pop etymology”: Bryson’s Made in America and The Mother Tongue; Hitching’s The Secret Life of Words; John Mann’s excellent informal history of the alphabet, Alpha Beta; and probably others which don’t immediately spring to mind.
In the canon of linguistics/etymology books written for a general audience, there is perhaps no figure more formidable than David Crystal; he’s written more than a hundred books, most of which are related to language in some capacity. A whole-hearted descriptivist, he’s a sort of anti-William Safire, accepting that that Prescriptivism is a lot like the Empire: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. ”
The Gold Bug Variations With the exception of Powers’ latest novel (which, admittedly, felt more like a novella, for him), or at least everything of his that I’ve read, invariably contains two parallel plots, one current and one historical, that converge around some central idea. The Gold Bug Variations is no different, and it may be easily be Powers’ most well-known work, and I daresay his most lengthy and daring.
To put it glibly, The Gold Bug Variations draws connecting lines between genetics, music (specifically Bach’s Goldberg Variations), and to some degree, computer science. While the book certainly has a long reach, its ultimate impact fails to be quite as impressive as it promises to be.
The Mysterious Island Though Jules Verne was best known as the father of science fiction—his most famous works, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Journey to the Center of the Earth, but largely excluding Around the World in Eighty Days, all share this genre—but not even he could resist the hot topic of desert islands. Daniel Defoe arguably started the phenomenon with Robinson Crusoe in the early 18th century, and was imitated by everything from The Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss, 1812) to Gilligan’s Island (1964).
The only reason I so eagerly rushed out to read The Mysterious Island as a young boy was because I heard—the source is lost to me now—that the book contained an appearance by the hero (villain?) of 20,000 Leagues…, Captain Nemo. Moreover, I was promised, this later book would explain Nemo’s origins, heretofore shrouded in mystery. I was vaguely familiar with the genre at that point (I was probably about 10), having watched the requisite television like Gilligan’s Island and even, I suppose, Lost in Space, in addition to having read some pathetic children’s abridgment of Robinson Crusoe. Still, The Mysterious Island appealed to me for a number of different reasons which still hold true today.