Geocaching or ingress?

I just read a post about ingress and the point was made that it was a more fun way to get exercise than a pedometer. Possibly so, but my phone can't handle that much excitement. I'm pondering upgrading said phone.... I've also thought about geocaching but again, that would require an upgrade of equipment. Opinions?

Don't know that it would help my nonexistent social life but it couldn't hurt....

Also I'm still feeling kind of down and messages would help.

Book Blog: Lost Things by Melissa Scott and Jo Graham

This was a rec by leecetheartist and I had no idea what it was about before I started to read it. It’s the first in a collection called The Order of the Air. I first worked out that it was set in the 1920s and involved aircraft and then also the supernatural in the form of an ancient curse tablet binding something very nasty. By then I was most intrigued. And hooked.

I’ve known Melissa Scott as a writer since finding her Silence Leigh trilogy, which were among her earliest works in the ‘80s and featured a universe based on Aristotelian physics. Since then I’ve read several of her more recent cyberpunk works, including the one which featured the most realistic and quite gory description of just how a jack inserted into one’s head would actually work. But I hadn’t heard of these.

At first the story seemed rather uncharacteristic of Melissa Scott, so I figured those elements were vis a vis Jo Graham, whose work I don’t know. Lost Things seemed too, well, straight. It conjured up memories of some of the older fantasy novels I’ve read, those where the term was “spiritualism” or “black magic” and where female characters exist only to be rescued from vile horrors, or else to be the femme fatale tempting the square-jawed hero. These include works such as The Devil Rides Out [1935] by Dennis Wheatley, or Jack Williams’ Darker Than You Think [1948] or Charles Williams War in Heaven [1930]. Also Lovecraft, who pervades the entire genre, although his almost dialogue-free writing style is not to my taste.

This is not to say that Lost Things didn’t portray 1929 accurately. As far as I know, it did and the world is beautifully complex. I appreciated the way it conveyed that world without recourse to infodumping, just by attention to the little things of how the characters lived their lives. Alma is a very unusual woman of the 1920s; an aviatrix and a leader, but real life characters like her did exist. Perhaps without her knowledge of higher powers.

The book does, however, include elements which are very much of our time. They were of the 1920s as well, but no author of the time would have put them into print if s/he wanted the right sort of public attention. And that’s where I realised that Melissa Scott had been leading me along the entire time, along with her partner in crime Jo Grant. Many things, indeed, are not as they appear.

I found this blurb for the book on Amazon and thought it informative without giving away too much, so here it is:

In 1929 archeologists began draining Lake Nemi in search of the mysterious ships that have been glimpsed beneath its waters since the reign of Claudius. What they awakened had been drowned for two thousand years. For a very good reason. Veteran aviator Lewis Segura has been drifting since the Great War ended, fetched up at last at the small company run by fellow veterans and pilots Alma Gilchrist and Mitchell Sorley, assisted by their old friend Dr. Jerry Ballard, an archeologist who lost his career when he lost part of his leg. It’s a living, and if it’s not quite what any of them had dreamed of, it’s better than much that they’ve already survived. But Lewis has always dreamed true, and what he sees in his dreams will take them on a dangerous chase from Hollywood to New York to an airship over the Atlantic, and finally to the Groves of Diana Herself…. The world is full of lost treasures. Some of them are better off not found.

Lost Things also evokes modern cinema. Indiana Jones, of course, and series such as X Files and Supernatural, whose backstory of the Men of Letters secret organisation studying the monsters, demons and mysteries of the world is a lot like that described in the book, except that the Men of Letters were almost wiped out by demons and in this world there are many magical lodges, with some being dedicated hunters of evil and others being, well, Hollywood posers. Literally in Hollywood.

The pace does slack off midway through the book and I got a bit tired of the long chase after the villain, where the attention to detail could have been less lengthy. Things did take longer then, with aircraft travel between cities taking many hours, with stopovers frequent and night flying being a rare and risky thing. Some of the book made me feel as though I had made the long and wearying journey with the characters. Even so, it’s worth persevering, as the ending was definitely worth it.

I’m into the second book already and can already predict I’ll pick up the fourth book, not included in the Omnibus. Thanks, Leece, this is really good.