The Manual of Reviews and its Giant Robot

Hey,

Finished up two books last night.

First up: The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. As you might guess it's a bit of a mystery novel, but there's a heavy dollop of the fantastic strewn in.

Charles Unwin works for the Agency -- a massive private investigation firm that protects the city. Mr. Unwin is a clerk and he writes up the official reports of the Agency's greatest detective Travis Sivart. But Sivart has driven most of his rouges gallery into hiding or the grave and there's been little to write about. Mr. Unwin even considers quitting his job and leaving the city. But a mysterious woman he spots at the train station stays his hand. Then Charlie gets promoted to Detective. It seems that Sivart has gone missing and his first case is to find him so that Charlie can go back to being a clerk.

The book has a constant under-current of surrealism and really just uses the private eye genre in order to subvert it in lots of pleasant ways. Another fun conceit is that each Detective receives a copy of "The Manual of Detection" -- the Agency guidebook on how to be a detective. Since you, the reader, are holding a book also called "The Manual of Detection", the two items overlap and when a character mentions a chapter or page number in the fictional "Manual of Detection", you can be sure that passages from the referenced page or chapter will be present at that spot in the real "Manual" that you hold. The book was a fun read.

I also plowed through Tom Swift Jr. and His Giant Robot. As you might guess, Tom is building a couple of remote-control robots to do dangerous work in the atomic power plant that his dad is building. Evil scientists attempt to steal the robots.

In this book, we see how Tom basically has private intelligence service at his command. Security at Swift Enterprises is maintained by a small army of investigators. Getting a job there means a detailed background check and you might be rechecked at any time. However, there are certain gaps in their intelligence as we'll see.

Tom tended to actually solve problems in this book and there weren't so many "Crisis! -- oh, wait no." moments like in the last book. The one big fall-down?

Hey, Tom, you're a super-genius. You've just been told that one of the top scientists at the atomic power plant happens to have an identical twin brother who is a mad genius. Said twin brother has just escaped from the asylum and is likely behind the various attacks you've suffered. I wonder where the identical twin brother is hiding out? How could the identical twin brother get close enough to interfere with your experiments out at the plant? The top scientist sure behaved strangely when told of his identical twin brother's escape. Cripes.

But hey, fun times and only a mild bit of racism towards Native Americans and only a little looting of their cultural artifacts. Good times.

later
Tom

The Manual of Reviews and its Giant Robot

Hey,

Finished up two books last night.

First up: The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. As you might guess it's a bit of a mystery novel, but there's a heavy dollop of the fantastic strewn in.

Charles Unwin works for the Agency -- a massive private investigation firm that protects the city. Mr. Unwin is a clerk and he writes up the official reports of the Agency's greatest detective Travis Sivart. But Sivart has driven most of his rouges gallery into hiding or the grave and there's been little to write about. Mr. Unwin even considers quitting his job and leaving the city. But a mysterious woman he spots at the train station stays his hand. Then Charlie gets promoted to Detective. It seems that Sivart has gone missing and his first case is to find him so that Charlie can go back to being a clerk.

The book has a constant under-current of surrealism and really just uses the private eye genre in order to subvert it in lots of pleasant ways. Another fun conceit is that each Detective receives a copy of "The Manual of Detection" -- the Agency guidebook on how to be a detective. Since you, the reader, are holding a book also called "The Manual of Detection", the two items overlap and when a character mentions a chapter or page number in the fictional "Manual of Detection", you can be sure that passages from the referenced page or chapter will be present at that spot in the real "Manual" that you hold. The book was a fun read.

I also plowed through Tom Swift Jr. and His Giant Robot. As you might guess, Tom is building a couple of remote-control robots to do dangerous work in the atomic power plant that his dad is building. Evil scientists attempt to steal the robots.

In this book, we see how Tom basically has private intelligence service at his command. Security at Swift Enterprises is maintained by a small army of investigators. Getting a job there means a detailed background check and you might be rechecked at any time. However, there are certain gaps in their intelligence as we'll see.

Tom tended to actually solve problems in this book and there weren't so many "Crisis! -- oh, wait no." moments like in the last book. The one big fall-down?

Hey, Tom, you're a super-genius. You've just been told that one of the top scientists at the atomic power plant happens to have an identical twin brother who is a mad genius. Said twin brother has just escaped from the asylum and is likely behind the various attacks you've suffered. I wonder where the identical twin brother is hiding out? How could the identical twin brother get close enough to interfere with your experiments out at the plant? The top scientist sure behaved strangely when told of his identical twin brother's escape. Cripes.

But hey, fun times and only a mild bit of racism towards Native Americans and only a little looting of their cultural artifacts. Good times.

later
Tom