I dare you to find another photograph featuring a Zentraedi Officer’s Pod, a cast-iron “rubber” duck, and a black LEGO minifig.

Context will arrive in the form of Thursday’s Quacked Panes comic.

When I was thirteen, Mom gave Sis & I to a nice couple from church named Ken and Virginia Savage for the duration of a summer or so. They lived in Soap Lake, WA and made annual road-trip pilgrimages back to Kansas City and to Omaha for the purpose of visiting relatives and important church sites. It was right around the time of that year’s trip when, while we were at the grocery store, I spotted a book cover near the checkout counters and decided that I really wanted that book.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

That little story, read out-of-sequence from the rest of its series, helped ruin me for lesser books. If it doesn’t involve friendship, wonder, perseverance against the odds and the bad opinion of people who shouldn’t matter, risk, reward, at least one proper brawl, and considerable doses of humor… then what’s the point of your book, I ask. I read the hell out of that book, and it survived up until just a few years ago… so I replaced it with another from the same printing.

I love quite a few books, but Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonsinger” will always hold a peculiar and special place in my heart. Only a few others share a similar prominence: Raymond E. Feist’s “Magician” volume, for instance, and Julian May’s “Intervention.”

Folks might look at a guy funny for listing McCaffrey as one of his favorite writers, but I can live with that. And, true, there are things about some of her books (parts of the Pern series in particular) that it doesn’t pay to examine too closely. In later years, I think she lost a bit of her storytelling verve and took to treating bad guys and good guys alike a bit too much with kid gloves; consequences became gentler than one might expect. That was her choice to make, of course, and it’s my choice to leave off the reading of certain novels.

Today’s a sad one, for today we all learned that Anne McCaffrey is no longer with us. This avid reader, at least, is largely so because of her talent and because of a very nice couple who indulged a spoiled little boy all those years ago in Soap Lake.

Say! I looked at the lava dome of a volcano a couple of weeks ago! See? I even took Explorer Duck along with! Excitement! Explorer Duck has since gone back home to her owner back in Pennsylvania, as my house was her final stop in the worldwide tour.

My daughter turns 18 on Monday. I guess I may have to stop calling them my “kids” now, though they’ll always be my “rugrats,” which admittedly makes no sense to anyone but myself. So be it; I’m a known weirdo anyway.

So far, the new webserver is working beautifully. It’s faster, it’s running a much newer Linux OS than the old one, and most importantly it costs $40 less per month. I should’ve done this years ago.

The job is… crazy. We just added three new clients and two new Kaseya management add-ons, so I’m never bored. Then again, I’m also never going to get caught up. Sigh.

My personal life is largely drama-free, and I count that as a very good thing. I get plenty enough excitement from my job and the day-to-day challenges of life without adding interpersonal conflicts, you know?

Once I get my head a bit more above water, maybe I’ll start looking at ways to spruce things up around here. For now… I’m just hanging in there as best I can.

The Kaseya road show event was scheduled for Tuesday morning, 8 o’clock sharp. My boss, John, gave me the go-ahead to register several weeks ago, then decided he’d attend as well. The debate about possible transportation methods went back and forth from driving up the night before, to flying, to taking the train, back to driving, then driving up the morning of the event, then back and forth some more.

Come Sunday night, John sent me a text advising me to come to work Monday packed for a drive up after close of business. Okay, sure, I packed my bag. When 5 o’clock rolled around, John came by the office to pick me up.

What we did not do, however, was make way to I-5 for a three-hour drive north. Oh, no. Instead, we pulled into Hillsboro airport and rolled out the Cessna two-seater he’s been flying around in lately.

Those of you who know me well are guessing at the panic levels I started wrestling with at that precise moment. But… I’m a grown-up, right? (Right? Okay, you, over there… stop laughing. I mean it! Don’t make me come over there!) And this is a perfectly safe and expedient way to get from city to city. You bet.

Thing is, John had looked at the weather reports and decided that things would be plenty clear enough to go up Monday evening and come back Tuesday afternoon. No worries! So he had the plane fueled up, went through the preflight checks, fired up the bird and got us into the air.

Oddly enough, I was only white-knuckled for about the first quarter hour. (“I’m in a tin can, thousands of feet above the ground, and there’s NOTHING UNDERNEATH ME AUUUGH!”) After that it became kind of fun to listen to the radio chatter and try to spot the company we were keeping up there. Mental discipline was involved, yes, in deliberately not thinking about certain panic-inducing facts. And, let’s face it, the view is gorgeous on a partly cloudy summer evening while flying over the Pacific Northwest. I even managed to snap a few pictures, though the propeller was a bit of a nuisance at first. Eventually I got a shot out of the side window that I was somewhat happy with:

That’s the Tacoma Narrows, new bridge and old, from a bit more than 3,000 feet up and some distance away. A while after this, we made a rather entertaining landing at Boeing Field (oh my, but those little planes can turn on a dime if you stand them on one wingtip in the air…) and wandered off toward downtown Seattle.

Via public transit. See, John wanted an adventure. (And wanted to avoid paying parking fees. And dealing with traffic.) So he chose the Seattle-area “Metro” system as his inauguration to the wonderful world of riding the bus hither and yon. Yes, as expected, we ended up with a half-drunk and mostly-loony shift-worker across the aisle from us. “Whoah!” “Wow!” “Whee!” every few minutes… I’m glad it was a relatively short trip to downtown, is what I’m saying.

Now, I like to walk. John likes to walk even more than I do, apparently, because he had no problem hiking about a mile each way to and from our dinner destination, Daniel’s Broiler on Lake Union. (Steak, $40. Blue cheese topping for said steak, $5. I shudder to think what his glass of wine cost.) The hike back burned off some of those calories at any rate. Besides, the weather remained utterly gorgeous and we looked forward to the prospect of a nice conference the next day and a quick flight home afterward.

Naturally, then, the next morning I woke to rain going sideways outside the hotel window.

Oh, and the hotel hosting the Kaseya event? About ten blocks away from our hotel. Through that sideways rain, of course, and forget using the umbrella or the hood of my jacket… it was nice, I quipped later, of Seattle to make sure I bathed an extra time that morning.

I’m grateful to the Kaseya folks for feeding me breakfast and lunch. Also, they put on a good presentation and I’m quite excited about some of the new toys I’ll be getting my hands on. In October. No, really, in October. We know this because Gerald Blackie made a humorous point of answering all release-date questions with those two words. (I want the Enterprise Monitoring module in the worst way, I tell you.) I learned a couple of new tricks for scripting as well. Win-win all around, really.

For the entire duration of the event, however, my eye kept wandering to the very large tree blowing around wildly in the lousy weather just outside the window. This was not flying weather. After some debate, John decided to see if we could snag a seat for me on the next Amtrak Cascades train heading to Portland. (He’d be staying an extra day so as to fly the plane back to Hillsboro where it belongs.) It would be very last-minute, thus something of a gamble, but as it was mid-week I figured it a reasonable chance to take.

So at about ten ’til 2pm we entered King Street Station, which has apparently been under reconstruction since shortly after the turn of the century. The 20th century. (Still, guys? Really?) We were just in time for what should’ve been the 2:20pm run, which was “about half an hour behind schedule” at the time. John procured me a ticket and said his goodbyes, then I sat down to wait for the boarding-pass cattle-call.

I didn’t wait long. Only a few minutes after I sat down, they announced that boarding passes would be handed out starting at about twenty minutes past 2pm. Nearly half an hour, mind you, but the huddled masses must have been yearning quite a bit because the line formed quickly. Not wanting to end up with a truly lousy seat, and taking in the vast hordes involved, I quickly got myself standing in line. I figured I’d be there for twenty minutes or so, then I’d get my pass and sit back down again or be boarding soon after.

No. Oh, no.

I didn’t move from an 8-foot-by-8-foot portion of the floor for an entire hour. And that was just to get the boarding pass, which they didn’t start handing out until nearly 3:15. The train itself didn’t depart until quarter ’til 4pm, almost 90 minutes late. (This didn’t endear Amtrak to me or to the lovely Kylanath who’d agreed to meet me at the Portland end of this journey.) Never mind that I got stuck in the car with every last one of the antsy rugrats in the entire train. Hey, this is what headphones are for… and I’ve got to plug the Sansa Fuze 4GB music player, because: Finest portable player I’ve owned yet. 800 songs, Ogg Vorbis friendly, a good randomizer, and it just kept on playing and playing for all four hours of the trip. Yes, we didn’t pull into Portland until 7:45pm.

Along the way, however, I couldn’t resist the urge to take this picture:

That’s the same bridge as before, but this time at mere feet above sea level… three thousand feet below where I was the day before. I’m a sucker for these bookending events, what can I say?

At any rate… Kylanath met me in Portland, we scampered to (barely) catch a bus out of downtown, she fed me Japanese food and then we wandered home to sleep. Adventure, complete.

1. If you’d like to play along, reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I’m doing here, you’ll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

I was given… “H”. And since I can do this, I’m embedding tracks in WordPress. Hah!

• [See post to listen to audio] Home By The Sea / Second Home By The Sea (Genesis) – I love this piece. I just plain love it. Especially the various live renditions with the dual drummers. This sort of thing is what I love about Genesis.
• [See post to listen to audio] Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie w/ Pet Shop Boys) – Two great tastes that go great together.
• [See post to listen to audio] Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Daft Punk) – Let’s be honest: They’re probably never going to top this.
• [See post to listen to audio] Hyperactive (Thomas Dolby) – This is one of those love-it-or-hate-it songs from Mr. Dolby, and I happen to love it. I can see why some people don’t enjoy it as much, though.
• [See post to listen to audio] Heat (Jethro Tull) – Speaking of love-or-hate, this is from the Tull album which is the most “electronic” they ever released, and it drove the die-hard fans batty. One of the things I like about it is that nearly the entire album could be used as the soundtrack to a cheesy 80′s spy caper flick… especially this track.

And there you go. Anybody want a letter of their own to run with?

Ha, ha. That’s what passes for humor today, folks.

Let’s start with the good stuff, which is considerable: There are many good and interesting and clever ideas in this book. As science fiction goes, it certainly qualifies as good speculative material, and less twee than a number of writers’ efforts I’ve seen in the past decade. (Note that “Phlebas” first saw print in the late 1980s.) Charles Stross, by comparison, is a clever fellow with a number of interesting ideas, but sometimes his writing comes off as being a bit taken with its own cleverness. Banks doesn’t give me that impression; in fact, he may have gone too far in the other direction. Some of the meaty speculative stuff sits apart from the main narrative, pulling you out of the story to bury you in concepts and navel-gazing. Interesting navel-gazing, sure, but still.

I’m impressed that our erstwhile protagonist is clearly opposed to the Culture society that Banks makes no bones about casting as the smarter, more valuable faction in the interstellar war portrayed in the book. At no point does he back down from his stance that the Culture is a path down which humanity should not further tread, and he’s not a raving lunatic or delusional or anything so trite: He holds well-reasoned beliefs that place him on the opposing side. It’s an interesting and effective way to frame the conflict.

But. And you knew there had to be one.

One of the big problems I have with the idea of writing a novel is that I’m lousy when it comes time to provide descriptive detail. Well, this book set my mind at ease… somewhat. It turns out that you could probably tell a better story if you leave out, say, two-thirds to three-quarters of the descriptive detail that Banks puts into “Phlebas.” Much of the fight choreography is… exceedingly precise, more often than not, for instance. I found myself skimming entire large paragraphs throughout most of the back half of the book, and I couldn’t honestly tell you precisely how the various combatants on Schar’s World end up getting from where they start to where they lay at the end. A lot was going on, and I was expected to track every aspect of it all. Never mind figuring out what happened at the Megaship, earlier in the story.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but you know, I’d rather expend my brainpower on absorbing the high-concept stuff. Call me crazy.

A story can win or lose me on the ending, however, and “Consider Phlebas” bears quite an ending. Lots of endings, in fact.

(Look, this book’s older than my kids. So here’s all the spoiler warning you get. Thpppt.)

I don’t mean “lots of endings” in the “Return of the King movie version” sort of way. No, I mean that pretty much everybody dies. Actually, everybody does die. Maybe not in the story proper, but what we’re given after the story is a bunch of, “And here’s what happens to the survivors, years later. So and so? Went into cold sleep, revived, then killed themselves. This other person? Dead. Everyone else who got through this? Dead. Oh, the Machine Mind survived, that’s good, right?”

Why tell me this?

The story could’ve ended at the last chapter. I’d have been saddened but moderately satisfied, as the mission was complete and the couple of sadder-but-wiser protagonists who made it out could… I don’t know, go on with their lives, and so on. But no. We get appendices and epilogues, including an entire chunk of detail about how the galaxy-spanning war which provides the backdrop and impetus for the story ends, decades later, for reasons which have nothing to do with the events I’ve just spent hours reading about.

What?!?

What was the point? Our erstwhile hero manages to nearly complete his dangerous mission, and not only does he die at the point of completion but his efforts amounted to a hill of beans. Righto, then.

Is it a good book? Arguably. Is it a good read? Only if you don’t care about a good ending, and if you don’t mind sometimes-obsessive levels of detail. Am I going to seek out more of Banks’ books…?

Probably not.