I recently finished listening to the audiobook of More Than Human, written by Theodore Sturgeon and narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and Harlan Ellison. This audiobook is available from audible.com. As with many audiobooks, listening to the book greatly added to my enjoyment.

More Than Human, which was published in 1953, is a novel in three somewhat disconnect parts. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, begins with the story of a man, Lone, who has little intelligence but has telepathic power. Lone gradually connects with four others, Janie, Bonnie, Beanie, and Baby, each of whom is incomplete as a human being but each of whom possesses an unusual, inhuman power (Janie, telekenesis; Bonnie and Beanie (twins), teleportation; and Baby, superhuman intelligence). These five persons form a gestalt (a whole greater than its parts), which shows signs of becoming, as a group, more than human in its capabilities.

The second part, “Baby Is Three,” is narrated by Harlan Ellison. It is told in the first person by Gerry, who has replaced Lone as a member of the gestalt. Gerry is the new leader of the gestalt, but he lacks morality.

The third and final part, “Morality,” is narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. It tells how the gestalt acquires its sixth and final member, Hip, who serves as its conscience and provides morality to the gestalt’s actions.

The only element of science fiction in the novel is the invention of an anti-gravity machine by the gestalt, and this is what connects the first part of the story to the third part in a droll way.

On the whole, this is an unusual and especially interesting novel, and I recommend the audiobook highly. I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager, but I somehow missed Theodore Sturgeon in favor of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Now I view Sturgeon as the best writer of this group of four.

Rating: ★★★★★

Published in 2009, Drood is a fictional memoir told by Wilkie Collins (the famous Victorian author) about his relationship with Charles Dickens (the even more famous Victorian author) and their search for a mysterious and spooky character named Drood. The name Drood is taken from Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Dickens did not complete because of his death in 1870.

The premise of Drood is that it represents a memoir of Wilkie Collins that is withheld from publication until 125 years after Collins’s death.  (Since Collins died in 1889, the publication date for this memoir would be 2014, still in our future.) Although Collins was twelve years younger than Dickens, the two authors were close friends who collaborated on many projects. Collins is best known today for two novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the latter frequently cited as the first detective novel written in English and Collins’s masterpiece.

Drood is an impressive feat of scholarship on Simmons’s part. Clearly he did a great deal of research (attested by two and a half pages of notes and references in the acknowledgments), and this shows in the amount of detail he provides concerning the lives of both Collins and Dickens. The book begins with a recapitulation of the Staplehurst accident, a train wreck that killed many people but spared Charles Dickens, his secret mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother, all of whom were riding in a first class carriage. After helping Ellen and Mrs. Ternan escape the wreckage and assisting with caring for other injured passengers, Dickens returned to the train carriage to retrieve the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend (my favorite of Dickens’s novels).

It is while aiding other injured passengers that Dickens encounters Drood, a vampire-like, cadaverous figure with a head like a naked skull, dark vertical slits in place of a nose, and widely spaced, pointed teeth. It is Dickens’s impression that Drood’s aid to the injured and dying is to hasten their deaths, but Drood soon disappears from the scene. The plot of the book is driven by the search for Drood in the darkest neighborhoods of London by Dickens, Collins, and London police and private detectives.

The book is rewarding, but the reader must be patient because the book is long (771 pages). The first chapter is splendidly thrilling, but things quickly slow down thereafter as the fictional Wilkie Collins tells more than many readers really want to know about his and Dickens’s lives, collaborations, and secrets. Collins, who is addicted to laudanum (a tincture of opium), relates a tale that becomes increasing fantastical and doubtful, and the reader begins to wonder what is true and what is the result of the hallucinations of an opium addict.

Rating: ★★★★☆

David Flanagan, the author of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Sixth Edition, which was published this month (April, 2011), posted on his blog about his despair at seeing pirated PDF copies of his book available already from links identified by Google searches. David says he has made a living for fifteen years by writing technical books, but he feels that his books are selling less frequently now because Google makes it easy for people to find pirated electronic copies of his books.

Mark Pilgrim, who works for Google, responded unsympathetically in a post titled “The ‘Book’ Is Dead,” contending that Google does not encourage piracy merely by providing links to pirated material, although he ends with

The “book” is dead. Long live “content.” And God help us all if world-class writers like David can’t make a living from it.

There are many, many interesting comments to both posts; some are the usual outrageous trolls, but others are thought-provoking and worth reading. Dan Liu makes the best comment: Books contain and communicate ideas that cannot be found with a quick search of the Internet.

I buy a lot of technical books (currently I’m on a binge buying books about Python). I read the books cover to cover and add notes and annotation in red ink so my notes are easy to find. During this process, I often make additions to the index.

I also have a subscription to Safari Books Online ($23 per month), and this has more than paid for itself many times over. Sometimes I want to read only a chapter or two of a book, in which case it isn’t worth buying the entire book. In other cases, I decide that a book is not useful, in which case I save money by not buying a book I won’t use.

I thought that I would quit buying books, since my Safari Books Online subscription allows me to download and print five chapters each month for no extra charge (the terms are that I am not allowed to distribute the PDFs to other people). But the reality is that when I find a really good book, I buy the printed copy, mark it up, and put it on the shelf next to where I work. It’s easier to reach over for a real book to get a quick answer.