Charlie Hood Returns in T. Jefferson Parker's "The Famous and the Dead"

We are big fans of T. Jefferson Parker's series of Charlie Hood novels here at Cool Stuff We Like. Charlie Hood is a Gulf War II vet and an LA Country Sheriff on loan to the ATF in Southern California, working to interdict the gun trade along the border with Mexico, an "Iron River" of weapons flowing south through the border states into the hands of cartel gunmen. As an honorable man in a dirty business, he tangles with an interesting cast of good guys and bad guys on both sides of the border and both sides of the law:

Suzanne Jones, a descendant of legendary 19th century California desperado Joaquin Murrietta, is an elementary school teacher by day. At night, she dons a rhinestone-studded Zorro mask and becomes Allison Murrietta, a sexy derringer-packing outlaw who specializes in robbing unsympathetic victims, and donating a big portion of her gains to various charities, and becomes a SoCal celebrity in the process.

Bradley Jones, Suzanne's son, is a reserve deputy sheriff who uses his law enforcement credentials as cover for his real job running drugs, guns, and bales of cash for a Mexican drug cartel. Like his mother, he idolizes his notorious ancestor; his life's ambition is to carry on the outlaw legend of the bandit known as El Famoso.

Then there's the mysterious Mike Finnegan, an enigmatic figure who knows things he shouldn't possibly know, who emerges now and then from the shadows to be a catalyst for all manner of chaos and mayhem, then disappears back into the shadows without leaving any fingerprints behind... He may or may not be a centuries-old devil, a tempter, in human guise. Years before he befriended Suzanne Jones, and now he's taken what seems to be an avuncular interest in Bradley Jones and his burgeoning criminal career. He's also got a troubling interest in Charlie Hood, who senses the evil beneath Mike's cheery banter and eccentric manners.

The sixth book in the Charlie Hood series, The Famous and the Dead, is out now. We are reading it now and highly recommend it... but if you haven't read any of the series, definitely start with the first and read through the fifth before you pick this one up, or you'll miss the narrative thread that ties all of these fascinating characters and their activities together.

Update: I typed "Flinn" instead of "Finnegan".... doh. Corrected that.

"Beast from the Sea," A Supernatural Noir Thriller

Beast from the Sea is an unusual novel of speculative fiction written by a very talented author, a young woman who is a relative of ours writing under the pen name R.B. Kannon. It is a tale of the supernatural and the metaphysical, a murder mystery with a noir flavor, a political thriller and a horror story all rolled into one... The disparate strands of this subtle, sophisticated novel are artfully woven together into a seamless whole.

This tale is set in the (fictional) desert city of Babylon (not the actual city in Iraq!). Here is my short teaser introduction to the story with no spoilers:

Babylon, "a city both ancient and new," sprawls on the edge of an evaporating sea, and burns beneath a desert sun. Five years ago a popular uprising against her ruling Ministry and its allied religious establishment, the Unity, was put down with extreme violence. The city, now embargoed by the outside world, simmers with suppressed rage and teeters on the edge of chaos.

The brutal murder of Ministry Undersecretary Aaron Crowley has Detective Maxwell Summers caught in a dangerous bind. A powerful and feared Apostle of the Unity, Lucrecia Grey, was present at the scene when Crowley was murdered. Summers knows that the Apostle is essentially untouchable, even if guilty. Yet despite the dangers to his career, and perhaps to his life, Summers is driven to a relentless pursuit of the truth of Crowley's murder. Unfortunately for him, truth is a rare and unwelcome commodity in treacherous Babylon. 

Meanwhile, on the city's outskirts a controversial paleontology dig has uncovered mysterious artifacts of Babylon's ancient past. Some find it troubling that the Apostles of the Unity seem to have more than a merely scientific interest in these strange findings. Summers, as he wonders at the presence of the Apostle at the murder scene, finds it troubling that the murdered Undersecretary was the Ministry's sponsor of the dig. 

Crowley's handpicked dig site supervisor, Elijah Carver, may be the wild card in the deck. An outsider to Babylon, a man with an unknown past, the scientists on the dig team respect him but are puzzled by Crowley's choice, for Carver has no scientific credentials from Babylon's University, or any other, for that matter. Yet his apparent knowledge of the site and its ancient past is uncanny. 

As unwelcome as truth of any kind is to Babylon's rulers, truth will ultimately out when the paths of the Apostle, the detective, and the enigmatic Carver cross. Each of these three characters is in relentless, obsessive pursuit of his own conflicting objectives, and when they collide with one another the truth of Babylon's ancient past and troubled present cannot help but be revealed. The only question is, can Babylon survive the revelation of truth, or can it subsist only on lies?

The prose is beautiful and poetic, the settings are evocative and atmospheric. The characters are finely drawn, and the dialog is noir-detective-story snappy. One reader told me the world of Beast from the Sea is so vividly realized that from the first page he felt like he'd walked into a real world with a real history behind it. Another reader, a former professional photographer, called it "cinematic," like "a sequence of storyboards." I found it to be a compelling story, filled with gorgeous textures of light and color and sound. In some places it is horrifying, though never gratuitously so; in others it is heart-breaking, but throughout you sense that it is informed by a humane and compassionate sensibility.

Check it out, and especially see the reader reviews at the Amazon Kindle listing. And note that although author R.B. Kannon is young --- in her twenties --- this is not to be classified as young adult or teenage fiction, this is a book written for grownups, though it certainly can be enjoyed by intelligent young readers, also.

It's available now on Nook and Kindle... see our Kindle listing link below. If you don't have a Kindle e-reader, you can download a free reader for PC from Amazon, or one for the  iPad. If you prefer Barnes & Noble, they have free downloads of a reader application for Android mobile devices and also the iPhone and iPad.

The cover artwork was created by web and graphics designer Jason Sikes of Village Green Studios.

Update: Blogger Clayton Cramer has his capsule review here: Clayton Cramer's Blog: Beast From The Sea

Update 10/6/12: Hmmmmmm... a mysterious fossil find, the sea beast of Cincinnati...

The Aurora Shooting and the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill

My Brother Ron is both a personal telling of the grief, turmoil and frustrations that families with a mentally ill member experience, and a legal and social history of the turmoil and even violence that communities suffer when those who should be institutionalized are allowed to roam the streets. It was published just days before the shooting in Aurora, CO.

This book is written by my old friend, Clayton Cramer. It tells the heart-breaking story of his older brother Ron, who is schizophrenic. Ron has been in and out of mental health care facilities for many years. When he's out, he's usually on the streets where he is a danger to himself and others.

In the Sixties, this nation launched a dangerous social experiment: the mass deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Thousands of seriously deranged people were dumped out into the streets of our cities, especially in California (Clayton's family's home state). At the same time, many state legislatures passed laws that made it virtually impossible to institutionalize those with serious mental illness against their will.

In some respects, this experiment was motivated by budgetary concerns, a desire to cut costs. There was also a reaction against past abuses of the system in which perfectly sane people were involuntarily committed for nefarious reasons. The public was also increasingly repulsed by stories of the horrific treatment of the insane in our institutions; many of the psychiatric establishment's "treatments" would be called torture or mutilation in any other context; insulin shock therapy, hydroshock therapy, forced lobotomies, etc. Ken Kesey's best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, later filmed with Jack Nicholson in the lead role, told the horrifying story of a vital non-conformist who was forcibly lobotomized and reduced to a zombie-like state.

On the other hand, there was an ideological motivation in a time of great cultural changes; I remember talk back in the Sixties about how the mentally ill weren't really "crazy," they just saw the world in a different light, and who are we, the self-designated "normal," to say their perspectives aren't valid? Perhaps these people we call crazy actually have something to teach the rest of us about truth and the nature of reality. (I believe it can be justly said that the Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing was a popularizer of this view. I remember my freshman psychology professor scornfully summarizing Laing's ideas in the phrase, "We're all crazy now, and ain't that great!")

In the wake of the Aurora horror, this is a very timely book.

  

"It's Better in the Wind" Cafe Racer Photo-Essay Book

Cafe Racer in the Wind

We just saw this cafe racer photo-essay book for sale at the Dime City Cycles website, It's Better in the Wind by Scott Toepfer. From the excerpted pictures we've seen, it looks to be shot all in black and white film, the old-fashioned way... not digital.

In this book, photographer Scott Toepfer has documented a classic American road trip. See some of our great country's finest spaces from the saddle of a cafe racer.

He also created a short film, which you can read more about here at his website.

3D Printing Technology for Everyone

Star Trek Replicator Makes Coffee

Remember how the Star Trek crew could order dinner from the console of a wall-mounted "replicator" that would conjure up a four-star meal from the base elements?  Assembled from the ground up from the rawest of raw ingredients: carbon, hydrogen, etc? Today we refer to this kind of device as a "matter assembler," a concept popularized by Eric Drexler in his book, Engines of Creation. (For a really cool fictional treatment of the profound, world-changing impact such capability would have, see one of my all-time favorites, Neal Stephenson's awesome sci-fi novel, The Diamond Age.)

There are a lot of brilliant people working on realizing Drexler's concept of manufacturing essentially anything from the base elements of which it is composed... we call this "molecular assembly" or, more generally,  nanotechnology. Very ambitious, indeed, and probably not something you can do at home... Well then, for the rest of us, there is something a bit more modest but incredibly useful and fun called "3D printing"... and you can do it at home!

MakerBot "Replicator" Low-Cost 3D Printer

The first 3D printers that started coming to market a decade or so ago are very much like inkjet printers, but instead of printing ink on paper, they print three-dimensional objects in layers of extruded or liquid plastics. At first, these printers, from companies like ZCorp, Objet, and Stratasys, were targeted at engineering teams that wanted to quickly build product prototypes to check form, fit, and function (a process known as "rapid prototyping," or RP). The technology was new, so it was expensive ($50,000 or so) and hence out of reach of the home user. That's changing now... affordable printers are on the market now from companies like MakerBot Industries and Bits From Bytes.

The basic concept involves the creation of a 3D model in a computer-aided design (CAD) software system, such as Google SketchUP (which is free!), AutoCAD, or Rhino3D (one of my favorites). The software then translates the completed 3D model into a profile of the device in layered cross-sections... that is, horizontal slices through the model. A 3D printer uses that output file to build up the model in layers that are printed from the bottom-up. You can see this process in action here.

What if you don't want to invest in a MakerBot or RapMan for yourself? Well, now you can use an online 3D printing service, such as the popular Shapeways company. Download yourself a copy of the immensely popular Google SketchUP software, draw a model of the thing you want --- a toy, jewelry piece, whatever --- and upload the output file to Shapeways. Select the material you want it made from --- even metals, such as sterling silver and stainless steel! --- upload the model and get an instant quote on your design, then if you are happy with the price, put it on order.

3D printing is advancing now by leaps and bounds. It is moving beyond prototyping into "digital manufacturing," the creation of one-off, personalized products on demand. For example, you can get eyeglasses on demand from Make Eyewear.

UPDATE: This is incredible... 3D sculptures the size of a grain of sand, created in minutes by a laser printer at the University of Vienna!

Meanwhile, check out the possibilities of nanotech as Neal Stephenson envisions them in The Diamond Age. 

The Art of the Bobber

Billy Lane "Gangsta" Bobber

"Before choppers, there was the bobber."

The Art of the Bobber is a great "coffee table" photo book of bobbers that hit the market a few years ago. I've spent a lot of hours drooling over the awesome machines pictured in it. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone out of print now, though new and used copies are still available on Amazon.

Bikes from many of the great designer-builders, such as the late, great Indian Larry (of course!), and Von Dutch Kustoms are featured. Get a copy while you can.

Toward the Gleam

I read this book over the Christmas holiday and really enjoyed. This is a great one for you Lord of the Rings Tolkien fans. I will try to avoid any spoilers here...

In 1916, an English philologist out for a hike through the countryside is forced to take shelter from a summer tempest beneath a rock outcropping... The outcropping conceals a fissure that opens into a cave. He pushes inside and in the darkness there finds an apparently ancient artifact of an unknown, advanced civilization that flourished tens of thousands of years ago, a civilization lost in the last great Pleistocene glaciation that buried Europe under hundreds of feet of ice. Knowledge of this thing, and the knowledge it contains, could turn the world upside down: He instinctively knows from the moment he's found it that he must keep it secret and hidden from the world, even as he spends years decrypting its secrets... Unfortunately for him, a very sinister man, one who's been conducting his own parallel researches into this ancient civilization for years, somehow learns that the good and gentle philologist has this thing, and moves to take it for his own. What he could with the knowledge gleaned from this artifact would threaten all mankind.


  

The Difference Engine, a Novel of the Steampunk Computer Age

So, what would the world of the late 19th-Century be like if William Babbage had succeeded in bringing his mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, into widespread usage?

Cyberpunk great William Gibson teams up with another sci-fi superstar, Bruce Sterling, to envision an answer that question in The Difference Engine, a novel of alternative-history that imagines a world where Babbage did succeed, and the Computer Revolution came to be a century before it happened in our world.

We've got links here below to both the Kindle download and the paperback.

Roadside Picnic

This is the creepy-coolest sci-fi story I have ever read... you read it, too, and I think you'll agree with me that no matter how much sci-fi you've read, you've never encountered anything else quite like it.

Roadside Picnic was written behind the Iron Curtain in 1971 by two Russian brothers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, legends of Soviet-era sci-fi. It's set in Canada, some years after an alien visitation. Strangely enough, the aliens paid humanity no mind at all... they came down in six sites called "Zones" that are distributed around the globe, then left, as if they had merely stopped for a roadside picnic while on their way to some unknown destination. In the Zones, they left behind many artifacts, some useful, many that are dangerous to humans, and virtually all of which are utterly mysterious and inexplicable. The Zones also feature strange and scary physical phenomena, that seemingly defy or distort the laws of physics, such as spots of concentrated gravity capable of crushing a man who stumbles into one. In other places, shadows are twisted and distorted in such a way that they point in directions contrary to the light. The aliens also appear to have left behind extraterrestrial plants, such as the lethal Devil's Spitting Cabbage, and the Black Brambles that mark the boundaries of the Zones.

Outside the Zones, there are strange happenings, too, such as the appearance of Replicas of people buried in the cemetery adjacent to the Zone, beings that exist in a zombie-like state... One of the scientists chalks this up to some sort of local reversal of entropy... very creepy.

The human response to all of this is fascinating... How do we react to things that are totally inexplicable, that we simply cannot explain, yet are undeniably real? Well, the scientists want more or less exclusive access to study the Zones, while others want to mine them for valuable artifacts, and the police and military authorities wish it would all just go away. For those of a sinister bent, certain artifacts might have applications as weapons, others have some valuable property that can be commercially exploited, such as the battery-like cylinders called "So-So's", which generate electricity, seemingly without exhaustion.

The authorities have sealed-off the Zones to protect the public from the dangers, and to keep control of the artifacts. But they just can't keep everyone out when there is so much at stake, and so much of value hidden behind the barriers and military patrols... a whole criminal subculture of smugglers called "Stalkers" creep into the Zones under cover of darkness to steal artifacts and sell them on a black market that's sprung up around them. Between the military and police patrols with shoot-to-kill authority, and the dangers within the Zones, the life expectancy of a Stalker is rather short.

The protagonist of this story is Redrick "Red" Schuhart, an assistant at the International Institute for Extraterrestrial Culture by day, and a Stalker by night. He's a living legend among Stalkers, chiefly by virtue of just having stayed alive despite years of hair-raising trips in and out of the Zone. He seeks to find the greatest of artifacts, the rumored "Golden Ball," hidden deep within the Canadian Zone, which is said to grant wishes. But to get to it, one has to make it past the "Meat Grinder," a kind of turbulent phenomenon that ambushes anyone who approaches the site...

There have been rumors that John Travolta is making a Roadside Picnic movie, but my searches on that subject seem to indicate that's not getting anywhere. Too bad...

Gamers: The popular S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games were inspired by Roadside Picnic.

The book is still in print, I've embedded an Amazon link below. But, a complete Adobe Acrobat pdf version is in the public domain: click here.