Book Review: Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers

Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The first section of Earthquake Weather felt somewhat disorienting and fractured, which may have been a purposeful reflection of Janis/Cody/et al Plumtree's multiple personalities. As Plumtree and her new-met friend Cochran meet up with several companions (all familiar from the first two books of the Fault Lines series), the book begins to gain cohesion. In part, this is because the enlarged cast has a single primary goal which provides a focus to both the novel and the characters, even as each of the characters has his or her own personal goals and motivations. Amazingly, Power's manages to bring the multiple threads of plot and character development to a satisfactory conclusion.


View all my reviews.

By the way, although the final two books of Tim Powers' Fault Lines series have been combined in an omnibus edition that includes Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather, the series starts with Last Call.

Controversy Surrounding McCain Staffer's Refutation of Story on Daily Kos

Today watermelontail posted this story about a statement made by Michael Goldfarb on John McCain's website as reported by BoingBoing, and referenced kadath's take on the matter in this post. Since the McCain statement links to an article on the Daily Kos and mentions "liberal bloggers at the Daily Kos," I hopped on down to Daily Kos to see what all the fuss was about.

Basically, rickrocket over on Daily Kos stated that a story McCain told about a cross scratched in the dirt by a guard "sounded so fake and so contrived" that rickrocket felt compelled to research it. He found another story in which a cross is scratched in the dirt among Alexander Solzhenitsyn's writings. He strongly implies that McCain's story may be a retelling of Solzhenitsyn's and points to a NY Sun article by John McCain that shows McCain admires Solzhenitsyn's work, but he doesn't come right out and say that McCain cribbed the story.

Now, despite the fact that I have played role-playing games, I haven't got a clue about the general political leanings of D&D players, or of paper role-playing gamers in general. So I don't know if Mr. Goldfarb's barb was correct. But, I will point out that had his post simply refuted the claim, without attempting to denigrate those "liberal bloggers at the Daily Kos," he probably wouldn't have received the scornful reply they posted, BoingBoing wouldn't have focused on the way he dissed D&D gamers, and the story spreading around the blogosphere like wildfire would be a very different one, possibly even one that looks at the original suggestion of plagiarism.

The real question is, does this hurt, or help McCain's campaign. And I have no answer to that one.