kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, space fantasy
The galaxy of the Culture may not be the Milky Way. The time is certainly not our own. The roughly humanoid body plan of many, probably not most, species seems the only trace of anthro-hubris. Space travel is accomplished in hyperspace, vaguely defined as a buffer space between "concentric universes" (Interestingly, the notion that there may be two hyperspaces available, one 'within' and one 'without' is not explored). Space ships of a mere kilometer or two are considered small, and the largest "ship" mentioned has 11 billion residents. Energies are casually expended that we might expect to require the annihilation of stars. Machine intelligence has taken two directions, one called AI, the other Minds; only the latter are self-reflective and self-directed.
Thus freed from constraints of physics as we know it, in The Hydrogen Sonata Iain M. Banks strings a 500-page novel across a substantial portion of a galaxy as replete with space-faring species as our poor Earth is filled with jet-setting peoples. One such species, the Gzilt (Derived from guilt? Likely), is on the verge of Subliming. This is no mere "going to Heaven" aspiration by some suicidal cult. Numerous species have Sublimed, and the readiness of the Gzilt to do so is betokened by the Presence, a dark, teardrop shape dozens of miles high hanging above their major cities.
Upon this backdrop, but presented as introductory, before all this setting up, a smallish ship zips into Gzilt space, bearing a message from a long-Sublimed culture. A Gzilt ship destroys the ship before its message can be delivered. The plot proceeds as the young Gzilt woman Vyr and a coterie of Culture ships and their Minds (no ship is entrusted to a mere human) track down an alternate source of the lost message, which is thought to challenge the veracity of a Scripture volume called the Book of Truth. Vyr's key contact is QiRia, species never stated, but humanoid, who claims to have been present at the founding of the Culture some hundred centuries earlier.
Vyr Cossont, a mere half-century or so old, is a musician who has had an extra pair of arms grafted on so she can play an enigmatic instrument called—among other things—the elevenstring, which actually has at least two dozen strings, some of them internal, making tuning rather tricky. It is played with two bows. The Hydrogen Sonata is the only major piece of music written for the elevenstring, and indeed preceded its invention; a ticklish joke by the author. Vyr is also the most recent contact of QiRia, some 20 years prior. Considering the book's title I began to wonder if the Sonata itself encoded the message; not really. Rather, an amputated portion of QiRia does, and the collecting of this relic forces the climax of the action.
QiRia interests me the most. Alone among the galaxy's trillions (or quadrillions) he persists across the centuries in full consciousness, not spending long periods in Storage as others do who wish to experience far-flung time periods. A former lover of QiRia is one such: awakened, ported into a new body, and sent to find and contact him while Vyr is half across the galaxy. QiRia has used technology to be able to store his centuries of memories throughout his body. Other authors have speculated that we might lose most of our older memories if we were to live for two or three centuries or more, and that someone who remembers events more than a century before would be exceptional. Here we find a technological alternative.
How does QiRia cope with the ennui of having seen it all before? He seeks novel experiences. He has loads of time, so early in the book he has spent a couple decades as a "leviathid", a whale-like creature, and his more recent jaunt back in human form is to dwell in a very noisy place, where cyclonic winds tease titanic organ-pipe sounds from a series of tunnels drilled through a mountain range. It makes me wonder, what sense of purpose can remain in one who has outlived a couple of hundred generations? Living for millennia would seem normal if everybody did so. When death is rare, though, would people rush to experience everything they can quite so obsessively? Yet the panic of mortality might still be as keenly felt, no matter how long delayed.
I like an author like Banks who can so casually deliver loads of engaging ideas (Of course, he just may protest that it is really hard work!). The Culture of this novel, and probably a few others, as embodied for us in a number of ship Minds, is insouciant and playful, yet deadly serious as needed. It struck me as an echo of what the US might be had The Articles of Confederation not been superseded by The Constitution. I don't recall a book that has explored that notion.
Showing posts with label space fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space fantasy. Show all posts
Sunday, February 03, 2013
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
Scattering planets like billiards
kw: book reviews, science fiction, science fantasy, space fantasy, space aliens, interstellar politics
The book is billed as "The explosive finale to the 'Ringworld' and the 'Fleet of Worlds' series": Fate of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. This is the latest, and allegedly the last, of twelve books in these two intertwined "Known Worlds" series, half of them published by Tor Books.
Exploding planets and vanishing stellar systems are "explosive" enough. So far Niven has not introduced an exploding galaxy. Such events take far too long for a human-scale story, anyway. Even when "human scale" has been expanded in the "Known Worlds" books to a few hundred years beyond the traditional three score and ten. Niven didn't invent "boosterspice" but he makes great use of it.
The whole series encompasses events between 630 and 880 years in the future, more or less depending on relativistic effects, such as for the fleeing Fleet of Worlds, six planets driven toward galactic north at 0.8c, for which Tw = 0.6To (calendar coordination is hard enough when your year is as long as mine!).
Where a typical novel has 3-5 important characters, this one has 25 or more (depending on how many downloads of Jeeves you count), 21 of them "natural" individuals, the rest being AI's. The core characters are Nessus, of a vaguely equine alien species called Puppeteers, and the humans Louis Wu and Sigmund Ausfaller.
The Ringworld is Niven's most famous idea, a detailed construct probably inspired by the notion of a Dyson Sphere. Ringworld circles its primary star at a distance of about 100 million miles, or 160 million km, filling the orbit. Its length is thus more than 600 million miles or 1000 million km; its width is a million miles or 1.6 mkm. Its mass is similar to that of Jupiter, or more than 800 times Earth's mass. In one of the novels it is shown that such a ring's orbit is unstable, so it has engines along its rim (with its multi-mile-high walls to hold an atmosphere) that periodically correct the orbit. It is home to tens of trillions of "sentients" who belong to an unknown number of nonhuman species, most of whom know nothing of any of the others. There is a lot of room in 1.6 quadrillion square km, even when a substantial percent is shallow oceans: Earth's area is 510 million sq km, counting oceans. Inward from the ring is a smaller, segmented one, that revolves on a different schedule, producing days and nights on the Ring. This one is also driven as needed.
Among a ton of interesting ideas, one that seems unique to Niven is the Protector: A post-sexual development of a sentient species, when fed an appropriate diet, a protector is hyper-intelligent and pathologically paranoid. A protector's mission is preservation of the species from all imaginable dangers, and they have incredible imaginations. As gadgeteers, they are super-Tom Swifts, super-Edisons.
Another is the Gw'oth, starfishlike aliens that can link nervous systems via sockets in the ends of their five "arms" (tubercles in the story), to meld into group minds. A 16-fold meld in a hypercubical configuration is formidable indeed. One such group mind is found to be the power behind the "power behind the throne" of the Puppeteer planets.
The book weaves together numerous strands left hanging by all those that came before, returning not only Wu, Ausfaller and Nessus, but a number of other protagonists to a place of stability, if not honor. Considering that they all have used variously dishonorable means to accomplish their prior feats, that is no mean bit of writing! The drama begins when Ringworld vanishes, leaving a hyperspace- and gravitational ripple which rocks detectors for a considerable distance. It ends when a few planets also either explode or take flight; it seems someone has cracked a conundrum of hyperphysics relating to the behavior of a "spacecraft" deep in a gravitational well. There is a little fodder here for Niven and Lerner to continue the series should they so desire. I wouldn't mind.
The book is billed as "The explosive finale to the 'Ringworld' and the 'Fleet of Worlds' series": Fate of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. This is the latest, and allegedly the last, of twelve books in these two intertwined "Known Worlds" series, half of them published by Tor Books.
Exploding planets and vanishing stellar systems are "explosive" enough. So far Niven has not introduced an exploding galaxy. Such events take far too long for a human-scale story, anyway. Even when "human scale" has been expanded in the "Known Worlds" books to a few hundred years beyond the traditional three score and ten. Niven didn't invent "boosterspice" but he makes great use of it.
The whole series encompasses events between 630 and 880 years in the future, more or less depending on relativistic effects, such as for the fleeing Fleet of Worlds, six planets driven toward galactic north at 0.8c, for which Tw = 0.6To (calendar coordination is hard enough when your year is as long as mine!).
Where a typical novel has 3-5 important characters, this one has 25 or more (depending on how many downloads of Jeeves you count), 21 of them "natural" individuals, the rest being AI's. The core characters are Nessus, of a vaguely equine alien species called Puppeteers, and the humans Louis Wu and Sigmund Ausfaller.
The Ringworld is Niven's most famous idea, a detailed construct probably inspired by the notion of a Dyson Sphere. Ringworld circles its primary star at a distance of about 100 million miles, or 160 million km, filling the orbit. Its length is thus more than 600 million miles or 1000 million km; its width is a million miles or 1.6 mkm. Its mass is similar to that of Jupiter, or more than 800 times Earth's mass. In one of the novels it is shown that such a ring's orbit is unstable, so it has engines along its rim (with its multi-mile-high walls to hold an atmosphere) that periodically correct the orbit. It is home to tens of trillions of "sentients" who belong to an unknown number of nonhuman species, most of whom know nothing of any of the others. There is a lot of room in 1.6 quadrillion square km, even when a substantial percent is shallow oceans: Earth's area is 510 million sq km, counting oceans. Inward from the ring is a smaller, segmented one, that revolves on a different schedule, producing days and nights on the Ring. This one is also driven as needed.
Among a ton of interesting ideas, one that seems unique to Niven is the Protector: A post-sexual development of a sentient species, when fed an appropriate diet, a protector is hyper-intelligent and pathologically paranoid. A protector's mission is preservation of the species from all imaginable dangers, and they have incredible imaginations. As gadgeteers, they are super-Tom Swifts, super-Edisons.
Another is the Gw'oth, starfishlike aliens that can link nervous systems via sockets in the ends of their five "arms" (tubercles in the story), to meld into group minds. A 16-fold meld in a hypercubical configuration is formidable indeed. One such group mind is found to be the power behind the "power behind the throne" of the Puppeteer planets.
The book weaves together numerous strands left hanging by all those that came before, returning not only Wu, Ausfaller and Nessus, but a number of other protagonists to a place of stability, if not honor. Considering that they all have used variously dishonorable means to accomplish their prior feats, that is no mean bit of writing! The drama begins when Ringworld vanishes, leaving a hyperspace- and gravitational ripple which rocks detectors for a considerable distance. It ends when a few planets also either explode or take flight; it seems someone has cracked a conundrum of hyperphysics relating to the behavior of a "spacecraft" deep in a gravitational well. There is a little fodder here for Niven and Lerner to continue the series should they so desire. I wouldn't mind.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Beyond the game
kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space fantasy, space warfare, video games
My son has been playing the XBox game Halo, in several versions, almost since its inception late in 2001. I am sure the main draw for him is the combat and its realistic venue. What I didn't know until recently is that its developers and fans have together created quite a backstory and universe in which the combat game unfolds. Nor that it has become a multi-faceted franchise, managed by 343 Industries, a unit of Microsoft.
One facet is several series of novels, and the one that came my way is Halo:Cryptum by Greg Bear, the first of a projected trilogy. The cover proclaims it "Book One of the Forerunner Saga". To get a better grasp of the covering story and backstory, see this Wikipedia article. Here I concern myself with certain ideas.
Interstellar and intergalactic travel in the Halo universe is accomplished by travel through "slipspace", and "slipspace chips" seem to answer to the trilithium crystals of Star Trek, as an energy-conversion mechanism to retrieve vacuum energy, and as an access mechanism to the variety of subspace or hyperspace the term connotes.
The Forerunners themselves begin much as humans do, and are of similar size and shape, but go through a series of changes, as many as four, which in the book are called Mutations. This is a misuse of the word, and Greg Bear ought to know better, though he is probably constrained by the language of the franchise. Such a change to an individual is more properly termed a metamorphosis, making the protagonist of this novel, with the first name Bornstellar, a first instar who metamorphoses to the second instar halfway through. This second instar is called his First Form, and his height then exceeds two meters. His Third- or Fourth-Form father is some four meters tall, and has changed aspect almost beyond recognition. This is the way of Forerunners. (By contrast, human metamorphosis, like mammalian growth in general, occurs gradually, or we'd more readily compare ourselves with locusts or butterflies.)
A particular emphasis is placed upon the armor all Forerunners wear nearly all the time. It is an active agent, controlled by them through an AI agent called an ancilla ("female slave" in Latin), and the term is used for all AI agents, of all levels of power. Nearly all speak with female voices. This probably answers to the human prejudice in favor of being served by women in most personal matters. The armor cares for its wearer, and can keep a person alive—for not only Forerunners wear such armor—even in vacuum for a time, and even when gravely injured.
This young person, Bornstellar, has defied his family, visited the home planet of humans, and accompanied by two humans, including a re-engineered Florian ("hobbit" in recent scientific literature), goes a-treasure hunting, only to encounter the cryptum (not a crypt, which would hold a corpse, but a suspension chamber to retain an exile in time) of an ancient warrior named the Didact. The Didact kidnaps him and the humans, later guides him through a "Mutation" that eventually converts him to a sort of clone of the Didact, and then leads them all into an adventure that gets them crosswise with the highest Forerunner authority. The book ends with Bornstellar, exhibiting a mixture of First Form types, replacing the Didact, who has been executed. I find it ironic that the most powerful figure in this saga (so far) is a Librarian, and wife of the Didact/Bornstellar. Located for the time being in an intergalactic Ark, the protagonists are now in position for the opening of the second novel, due out in a year or less.
While the author has a compelling writing style, this is less of a page-turner and more of a book to keep you thinking. It bears some resemblance to the work of Olaf Stapledon, who wrote of galaxy-spanning civilizations and star-building and -destroying cultures of future men. While many epic SciFi works and series owe their vision to one writer or to a small collaboration, this is Microsoft at work, and their stable of fantasists. So far, the Halo universe hasn't become the "camel" most committees tend to create. May it remain so.
My son has been playing the XBox game Halo, in several versions, almost since its inception late in 2001. I am sure the main draw for him is the combat and its realistic venue. What I didn't know until recently is that its developers and fans have together created quite a backstory and universe in which the combat game unfolds. Nor that it has become a multi-faceted franchise, managed by 343 Industries, a unit of Microsoft.
One facet is several series of novels, and the one that came my way is Halo:Cryptum by Greg Bear, the first of a projected trilogy. The cover proclaims it "Book One of the Forerunner Saga". To get a better grasp of the covering story and backstory, see this Wikipedia article. Here I concern myself with certain ideas.
Interstellar and intergalactic travel in the Halo universe is accomplished by travel through "slipspace", and "slipspace chips" seem to answer to the trilithium crystals of Star Trek, as an energy-conversion mechanism to retrieve vacuum energy, and as an access mechanism to the variety of subspace or hyperspace the term connotes.
The Forerunners themselves begin much as humans do, and are of similar size and shape, but go through a series of changes, as many as four, which in the book are called Mutations. This is a misuse of the word, and Greg Bear ought to know better, though he is probably constrained by the language of the franchise. Such a change to an individual is more properly termed a metamorphosis, making the protagonist of this novel, with the first name Bornstellar, a first instar who metamorphoses to the second instar halfway through. This second instar is called his First Form, and his height then exceeds two meters. His Third- or Fourth-Form father is some four meters tall, and has changed aspect almost beyond recognition. This is the way of Forerunners. (By contrast, human metamorphosis, like mammalian growth in general, occurs gradually, or we'd more readily compare ourselves with locusts or butterflies.)
A particular emphasis is placed upon the armor all Forerunners wear nearly all the time. It is an active agent, controlled by them through an AI agent called an ancilla ("female slave" in Latin), and the term is used for all AI agents, of all levels of power. Nearly all speak with female voices. This probably answers to the human prejudice in favor of being served by women in most personal matters. The armor cares for its wearer, and can keep a person alive—for not only Forerunners wear such armor—even in vacuum for a time, and even when gravely injured.
This young person, Bornstellar, has defied his family, visited the home planet of humans, and accompanied by two humans, including a re-engineered Florian ("hobbit" in recent scientific literature), goes a-treasure hunting, only to encounter the cryptum (not a crypt, which would hold a corpse, but a suspension chamber to retain an exile in time) of an ancient warrior named the Didact. The Didact kidnaps him and the humans, later guides him through a "Mutation" that eventually converts him to a sort of clone of the Didact, and then leads them all into an adventure that gets them crosswise with the highest Forerunner authority. The book ends with Bornstellar, exhibiting a mixture of First Form types, replacing the Didact, who has been executed. I find it ironic that the most powerful figure in this saga (so far) is a Librarian, and wife of the Didact/Bornstellar. Located for the time being in an intergalactic Ark, the protagonists are now in position for the opening of the second novel, due out in a year or less.
While the author has a compelling writing style, this is less of a page-turner and more of a book to keep you thinking. It bears some resemblance to the work of Olaf Stapledon, who wrote of galaxy-spanning civilizations and star-building and -destroying cultures of future men. While many epic SciFi works and series owe their vision to one writer or to a small collaboration, this is Microsoft at work, and their stable of fantasists. So far, the Halo universe hasn't become the "camel" most committees tend to create. May it remain so.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Time and time and time again
kw: book reviews, future fantasy, space fantasy
For me, Olaf Stapledon has held the record for extended epics. His Last and First Men and Star Maker imagine billions of years into the future. I classify them as Science Fantasy because their speculations are grounded in natural and social sciences. Other authors, such as James Blish in Cities in Flight, imagination various scenarios of the end of the Universe, usually into or through the "big crunch" that would accompany the "big bang" for a closed Universe, some tens of billions of years in its future.
The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear is of another order altogether. Apparently based upon a flat cosmology, or perhaps the acceleratingly open cosmology that is now fashionable, it links a time in the near future with one that is a hundred trillion years away (that is an American trillion, a million million). There is a hint of social science here, but the ESP-ish methods of the protagonists and the immensely godlike aspects of other beings puts this book, for me, in the Future Fantasy category.
Rather than detail the plot of a story of near-impossible questing, I find a few ideas to be of interest:
I found myself wondering, as I neared the end of the book's 476 pages, if it could not have been told in half the space. Greg Bear's prose can be compelling, even breathtaking. Yet it frequently dragged for me. Epic stories need not require epic endurance of a reader.
For me, Olaf Stapledon has held the record for extended epics. His Last and First Men and Star Maker imagine billions of years into the future. I classify them as Science Fantasy because their speculations are grounded in natural and social sciences. Other authors, such as James Blish in Cities in Flight, imagination various scenarios of the end of the Universe, usually into or through the "big crunch" that would accompany the "big bang" for a closed Universe, some tens of billions of years in its future.
The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear is of another order altogether. Apparently based upon a flat cosmology, or perhaps the acceleratingly open cosmology that is now fashionable, it links a time in the near future with one that is a hundred trillion years away (that is an American trillion, a million million). There is a hint of social science here, but the ESP-ish methods of the protagonists and the immensely godlike aspects of other beings puts this book, for me, in the Future Fantasy category.
Rather than detail the plot of a story of near-impossible questing, I find a few ideas to be of interest:
- Final Sin replacing Original Sin,
- Text as the ultimate Observer, and Memory its Preserver,
- Chaos as an engineered quality, and
- Cats (Schrödinger's, or others'?) as ultimate Judges of
- A (perhaps) intelligent Black Hole-ish something called the Typhon (a thinly-disguised temporal typhoon), the enemy of time and order.
I found myself wondering, as I neared the end of the book's 476 pages, if it could not have been told in half the space. Greg Bear's prose can be compelling, even breathtaking. Yet it frequently dragged for me. Epic stories need not require epic endurance of a reader.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Do electric sheep dream of androids?
kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fantasy, space aliens
Just so you'll know, to me science fiction crosses the line into fantasy once the imagined universe becomes peopled with a myriad of alien species; the author can just produce species at will, with any attributes desired. This is all-too-similar to the fantasy writers' tendency to throw in a new magic spell or magical creature to solve any narrative problem that comes along.
In this regard, John Scalzi's restraint in The Android's Dream is commendable. Only Takk, the tough-guy alien that eats by engulfing humans (et cetera) whole, who suddenly reveals a spiritual side, seems to smack of ad-hocracy. But I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt; maybe he designed Takk that way from the beginning.
Early in the novel, the book's title is seen to refer to a genetically-engineered sheep, with electric-blue wool, a breed named The Android's Dream. Since it is mentioned that the name is a literary reference (not otherwise explained), it becomes clear that the initial story idea is a riff on Philip K. Dick's 1968 robot-ethics masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
I need to develop a "creative index" for novels. Were I to do so, the aggregate of plot twists, fresh ideas and tangled relationships among the characters would put this near the top of the list. Just a few of the ideas:
This is the author's seventh book, all written in the past three years. The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is nonfiction; the rest are Sci-Fi and near Sci-Fi. His blog, The Whatever, is one of the longest-running weblogs, and a style-setter of the web log genre.
Just so you'll know, to me science fiction crosses the line into fantasy once the imagined universe becomes peopled with a myriad of alien species; the author can just produce species at will, with any attributes desired. This is all-too-similar to the fantasy writers' tendency to throw in a new magic spell or magical creature to solve any narrative problem that comes along.
In this regard, John Scalzi's restraint in The Android's Dream is commendable. Only Takk, the tough-guy alien that eats by engulfing humans (et cetera) whole, who suddenly reveals a spiritual side, seems to smack of ad-hocracy. But I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt; maybe he designed Takk that way from the beginning.
Early in the novel, the book's title is seen to refer to a genetically-engineered sheep, with electric-blue wool, a breed named The Android's Dream. Since it is mentioned that the name is a literary reference (not otherwise explained), it becomes clear that the initial story idea is a riff on Philip K. Dick's 1968 robot-ethics masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
I need to develop a "creative index" for novels. Were I to do so, the aggregate of plot twists, fresh ideas and tangled relationships among the characters would put this near the top of the list. Just a few of the ideas:
- Genetic engineering that goes beyond the mere production of a blue sheep, to hiding the sheep's genome in a person's DNA.
- While a millennias-old multi-species galactic society is rather old hat, I think the Common Confederation is extremely well named. Other than a common court of adjudication for certain cases, it seems to keep its hands off, even allowing member species to war among themselves.
- A bit of "new law" that allows one very specific individual to become a new "Nation"...based on a Talmudic puzzle.
- A religion whose origin is very similar to that of Scientology, but with an interesting twist. The accepted poetic "scripture" is known to be nonsense, but devotees are enamored of its endearing style and determine to fulfill its seeming prophecies. Of course, the plot culminates on the fulfillment of a most unlikely prophecy.
- A couple of true AI entities, based on brain scans, modeling real brains (You know I find this unlikely; a brain alone won't do. It needs the chemical environment of the body. The software must also simulate pituitary, adrenal, and all other hormones, plus perhaps the immune system).
This is the author's seventh book, all written in the past three years. The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is nonfiction; the rest are Sci-Fi and near Sci-Fi. His blog, The Whatever, is one of the longest-running weblogs, and a style-setter of the web log genre.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Flinx, in a funk, finds more reasons he is invulnerable
kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, space fantasy, pip and flinx series
So what else is new? Flinx, or Philip Lynx, telempath extraordinaire, super-enhanced person number 12-A, watched over by super-aliens who've also given him a spaceship and unimaginable riches, also watched over by a mini-dragon that senses emotions more reliably than he and spits really vicious venom to boot, on a mission to find a missing brown-dwarf-size weapon and persuade it not to annihilate all sentient life in the Galaxy (for starters), is feeling blue.
In Trouble Magnet, Alan Dean Foster's latest, Flinx can't decide if saving sentient life, particularly human life, is worth the trouble. Having grown up a thief (you gotta read the earliest books in the Pip and Flinx series), and now being pursued by quite an assortment of legal and illegal organizations, he understandably has a jaundiced view of human nature.
Not to worry. I infer that super-altruism is as much a part of his makeup as the ability to receive and project emotions (pretty good weapon, when it works). On the rottenest planet he can find, he finds a youngster who reminds him of himself, the unenhanced version. Finding himself taking care of a gang of teenage thugs, then taking on the baddest bad guys on the planet, he finally finds a spark or two of actual human decency. The novel ends in a sappy paragraph plus a teaser to set up the next novel's premise.
Earth to Flinx: Try looking somewhere besides among crooks! The nominally law-abiding people you find almost anywhere are typically decent, honest, caring folks. Just to focus on one aspect, how people do their jobs, General Schwarzkopf said, "Most people don't go to work every day planning to do a bad job." Look among them, buddy. The checker at the market, the bank teller, the plumber, the engineer.
Of course, the title Flinx and the Carpenters wouldn't sell a novel. These are enjoyable to read; I just have to get past the silly premise.
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