Actually, other than being Swedish, they are entirely different from Larsson’s novels. Larsson reads like an intelligent Dan Brown with real characterization. The Beck novels are police procedurals, telling the story of solving a crime from the perspective of a policeman, Martin Beck. The novels were also intended to be an examination of Swedish society, which sounds daunting but is quite effective in practice.

The Beck novels have some extremely funny scenes, scenes which are made all the funnier by the fact that nobody in the story considers the amusing at all, and indeed they would not be funny if you were involved in them in real life. For example, the police breaking into what turns out to be a completely empty room in The Terrorists (Terroristerna), resulting through a series of completely plausible mishaps in several shootings and near fatalities.

Henning Mankell, a popular current Swedish mystery writer, is clearly strongly influenced by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Many of Mankell’s novels are quite good, but I prefer the earlier ones.

In a lesser writer, I would think that the ending was setting up a sequel. I sincerely hope that is not the plan here.

Separately, I’ve been reading NESFA’s nice series of collected Zelazny stories. Zelazny has always been one of my favorite SF authors, and it’s refreshing to be reminded of just how good he was. His novels were generally good, of course (avoid the second five Amber novels), but it was in his short stories that he really shone.

Unfortunately, novels are where you get recognition, and their best work was in short stories. They are not well known today.

The Company series, which is11 books long (and there may be some more short stories not yet collected), is a complicated mix of time travel adventure and social satire. Baker is an excellent writer, and is a pleasure to read even when she is just unfolding plot points–and boy are there a lot of plot points. Her characters are well crafted, and her satire is amusing and more plausible than it really should be.

An aspect of Baker’s writing that I really appreciate is her ability to build up a character who appears to be a stereotype, and then flip the character into something completely different and unique, without in any way changing anything she already described. Bad writers often do this badly, but Baker does it superbly. That what was most impressed me about Sky Coyote, as Joseph, and the reader, keep coming to a deeper and better understanding of the Chumash.

The Company series is so complicated that I was not at all sure that she would be able to actually write a conclusion, but The Sons of Heaven pulls it off, wrapping everything up very satisfactorily while staying true to the series. She even makes parts of the story more plausible as she does so, and looks in on just about every single character–at least, I couldn’t remember any which she left out.

I’m really surprised that Baker has not won more awards in the SF field. At least all her books seem to be back in print now–for a while they were hard to find. I think she is one of the top tier SF writers, but she doesn’t seem to have quite the recognition she deserves.

Now the Canadian dollar has again reached parity with the U.S. dollar. This has happened mainly because the U.S. dollar has dropped in relative value, because the U.S. has become a huge importer of goods and because U.S. interest rates are fairly low. But book prices have not adapted. This means that when I’m in a Canadian book store, I could buy a U.S. book for 11 Canadian/U.S. dollars, or I could wait until I go home and buy the same book for 8 U.S. dollars.

There is obviously a big arbitrage opportunity here–I could buy books in the U.S. and resell them in Canada for a significant discount. I don’t know the arrangements that bookstores have with publishers, but clearly somebody is making a great deal more in Canadian money here. Book aren’t easy to transport or sell, so it would be hard for me personally to take advantage of the arbitrage. The company which presumably is taking advantage is Amazon. Amazon can sell books at U.S. prices, so it is now in the economic interest of Canadian consumers to buy their books from Amazon rather than from a local bookstore.

Amazon already puts huge pressure on local bookstores, so if the currencies remain similar in value, and if book publishers take a couple of years to adjust their pricing, then it’s hard to see how local Canadian bookstores can survive. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, I saw more and better bookstores in Canada then I see at home in the U.S. In the U.S. all the bookstores other than specialty stores or mass chain stores are dying. Their credit with the publishers is drying up, their shelves are getting emptier, and that is a downward spiral with only one ending. I didn’t see this in Canada, but that may also just be because I’m not familiar with the bookstore landscape.

Of course there are many people who live in Silicon Valley, but then R’lyeh must have inhabitants as well. Perhaps they have managed to adapt, or they were somehow immune. Or perhaps R’lyeh is only a state of mind–perhaps there is a R’lyeh for everybody out there somewhere. And perhaps a Cthulhu, too.

It seems that Orbit is planning to rerelease all of Banks’s SF books. Of course Banks should need no introduction to anybody who follows science fiction, but it’s nice to see some high quality editions sold in the U.S. My copies of his early books were all printed in the UK.

I recently read his latest novel, Matter, also published by Orbit. I was mildly surprised to see that he wrote another Culture novel–it seems to me that he pretty much said everything he had to say about it in Look to Windward. As it turned out Matter doesn’t have much to do with the Culture at all; it amounts to a background element in a reasonably typical Banks space opera. In other words, an interesting book well worth reading, but not the fascinating experience of, say, The Player of Games.

Of course Banks has also written a number of non-SF novels, also well worth reading. My personal favorite of those is The Crow Road.

Lukyanenko shows the light and dark forces as parallel, but unlike most such efforts he does it 1) convincingly given the background; 2) in a way which makes the forces of light seem like the good guys while also showing why the forces of darkness oppose them. The books primarily trace byzantine plot maneuvers run by the head magicians which the ordinary characters do not fully understand.

Also the books are originally in Russian and set in Moscow, giving them a different perspective than most books I read. The translation is not very idiomatic English–it’s hard to tell how much of that is the original Russian and how much is the translator. There are a few side comments on the Americans which are interesting.

I understand that there is a movie of Night Watch which was very popular in Russia, but I haven’t seen it. Anyhow, I think these books are definitely a cut above the standard fantasy fare.

In general the movie was pretty bad. The story was full of logic holes. The characters were completely unbelievable. The dialogue was badly written. The acting was stilted–not even Samuel L. Jackson could make his character remotely believable. On the plus side, the special effects were generally pretty good.

Also on the plus side, the story was so completely unlike the book that it doesn’t spoil the book.

Don’t go to this movie, even if it is still in the theaters. Save your money.