Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Summary:

Cryoburn has a sloppy plot, lazy characterization, and settings borrowed from watching too much television, all in the service of a final, authorial plea: please, let's let Miles live out his life without us, because he's no longer anywhere near his prime, and anything after A Civil Campaign will just get sadder and grimmer as he gets older. In that, the book succeeds.

Lois McMaster Bujold returns to her first and most popular character, Miles Vorkosigan, in the lastest novel, Cryoburn. Sadly, the story is sloppy and uninspired, the writing hampered by Ms. Bujold's personal cliches and obvious reluctance to return to this well, follows an entirely predictable arc from beginning to end, and even ends up as its own sort of used furniture, not so much from SF as from modern television police procedurals. The sort of brilliance that turned the SF lexiconigraphic "used furniture" into the literal used furniture scene of A Civil Campaign, by reaching back fourteen (!) books to deliver one of many "oh, yes!" scenes is nowhere to be found in Cryoburn. There is only one "oh, dear God no," scene and it's almost the last scene of the story. The rest of the story runs on rickety rails.

( Minor plot spoilers... )

All in all, this is a book designed mostly to Say Something About Families, And How Important They Are, a textbook Motherhood Statement, but somehow it manages to look more like Vorkosigan Fanfic, very definitively told by someone religiously avoiding Mary Sue, than it does a Vorkosigan story of any merit. This is a book that begs the audience, "Please, let's let Miles alone, this time. His time is done. Let me write something else." And the plea is strong, because it also conveys the message, "Look, I seriously injured Miles several times, and he's not going to live a completely full life. People get old, they get sick, and they die. Miles and I are only going to get worse at this, and you don't want me to write that story, do you?"

In that, the book does its job. It is time to leave Miles alone. Ten years of Miles should have been enough for all of us. It's obvious that this book was written purely to give the fans one last look at their hero in his later years, as if 39 were "later years!" Sadly, it does that job all too well.

Epic Vertical Ale: Nobody's going to wait that long!

This Friday, after the kids were in bed I opened a bottle of Stone Vertical Epic, an incredibly wonderful beer fermented with the juice of wine grapes on top of a Belgian golden triple, along with chamomile.

The total combination is a very tasty, only slightly bitter, tantalizingly sweet Belgian-style Ale, that also manages to be almost 10% alcohol. (I didn't realize that until I was into the second glass of the two-glass bottle; usually, I get stuff in the 5%-6% range, and I never get knocked on my ass quite the way this stuff did.) They claim it's a dry brew, but I didn't notice that at all, not with all the Riesling flavor thrown in on top.

Stone Brewery (the guys who make Arrogant Bastard, the stuff with the demon on the cover) also claims that this beer is meant to be aged for at least two years before drinking, but what they have on the shelves now is so incredibly good that I don't think anyone's going to wait that long.

Even better (and more demanding), they posted the recipe to their website! If you feel like making this at home, you're welcome to try. I might actually consider making beer, for this recipe.

If I do, I'm totally labeling it Fepic Ale.

Not This Again.

So, there's a website called "So, Why Is Wikileaks A Good Thing Again?" in which the writers cherry-pick their complaints in order to make Wikileaks look... something. But one of their claims is this: "WikiLeaks has revealed how scientists manipulated global warming research data in order to make it seem more consequential."

However, it's fascinating to note that the link SWIWAGT provides goes to a November, 2009 article about so-called Climategate, in which leaked documents from climate scientists showed them to be working with data, using foul-mouthed language, trying to publish ahead of their peers, and generally being human.

However, inquiry after inquiry into whether or not the stolen emails are evidence of wrongdoing (and I emphasize "stolen" because this "evidence" was obtained by the commission of a crime, something the right seems unwilling to discuss), no less than five in all, including one viciously partisan ideological witchhunt here in the US, the conclusion has consistently been, "On the specific allegations made against the behavior of C.R.U. scientists, we find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt."

Only in FoxAndFriendsIstan is Climategate a scandal, a done deal, and evidence that anthropogenic global warming is a vast left-wing conspiracy. What's a scandal is that precious news and life cycles have to be burned refuting this crap over and over again.