Book 55: "Land of the Golden Apple" by Eve Makis

Socrates saw no point in telling the truth, pleading for benevolence. No one would believe he'd meant well and anyhow his evidence had flown away, back to some grapevine or burgeoning plum tree. In all likelihood he would be judged on his past crimes, which were many and varied and mostly premeditated.

I bought this book from the author, who gave a talk at a convention I attended this autumn, and I preferred it to her novel "The Mother-in-Law", because I found the characters more likeable (apart from the baddies of course). Eve Makis is a Greek-Cypriot who was brought up in England, and worked as a journalist on Cyprus for several years, and her portrayal of the lives and customs of the islanders and the changing attitudes of the younger men and women, are very believable. She based Socrates on her husband, as he too ran wild as a boy and made home-made firecrackers every Easter by hammering open bullets to get the gunpowder.

This story seems quite light-hearted to begin with, as twelve-year-old Socrates and his friends run wild through the fields and hills of Cyprus, getting into mischief wherever they go, and I liked the sub-plot about the curmudgeonly cafe owner falling in love with his new employee. But there are dark undercurrents of domestic violence, sexual abuse and criminal activity that cast dark shadows over adults and children alike, with various people coming under suspicion of attacking one of the village boys. Some of Socrates' exploits are thoughtless and dangerous, and the happy ending is not really all that happy for those directly concerned.

Book 56: "Gateway" by Frederik Pohl

Sigfrid has a lot of Heechee circuits in him. He's a lot better than the machines at the Institute were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on the mat, to show how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume of my voice and spectrum-scans the print for overtones. And he also understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is.
It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one more minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain and it would have destroyed me.
Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.

When Gateway was discovered, the asteroid was empty except for more than a thousand alien ships abandoned long before by the long-dead Heechee civilisation. The ships will only fly to certain pre-programmed destinations, so every trip is a lottery, from which the prospectors may come back dying or dead, or may never be heard from again. The prospectors are paid on results so they hope to return alive with Heechee goods or valuable scientific information about their destination, as they are paid on results, and will be in line for royalties if they find useful alien tech that can be reproduced and manufactured.

The story alternates between Robinette Broadhead's reminiscences about his time as a prospector living on Gateway, and accounts of his therapy sessions with a machine therapist years later when he tries to get over his overwhelming feelings of guilt. It was interesting to have an avowed coward as a protagonist, but I am surprised that Rob ever went out to Gateway at all, knowing the odds against becoming rich, or even surviving. On the other hand, his previous job in the mines was also a dangerous one, and mining had led to the deaths of both of his parents, so maybe it wasn't until he made it to Gateway that he felt he had any choice in how he lived his life, and only then realised what a coward he could be when he did have the choice.

In the Gateway chapters I was aware that Rob was leaving things out,and that sometimes he seemed to misinterpret things, but it was the therapy chapters that really brought this home, and made me understand that Rob was not a deliberately unreliable narrator, but just subconsciously avoiding mentioning certain things, or making connections related to the traumatic events that he couldn't face up to. My only disappointment with this book was that the therapy sessions didn't uncover as much of Rob's past as I had hoped. I was expecting to find out more about what happened with his ex-girlfriend Sylvia back on earth, and why he had his first mental breakdown after they split up, but that was left vague, compared to the trauma caused by the death of his mother and what happened on his last prospecting trip on Gateway.