Being too busy to review each and every book I read while in the land of Joyce, here’s a simple list of books I read while in lovely Eire:

The Black Count
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Manhunt: The ten-year search for Bin Laden
The Quickening Maze
The Little Stranger – 5/5 for mounting horror
The Long Song
The Garden of Evening Mists
The Glass Room
The Lighthouse
Swimming Home
The Children’s Book
The Finkler Question
Room
Summertime
The Sisters Brothers
In a Strange Room
Jamrach’s Menagerie – one of the best from this trip
Narcopolis
Parrot and Olivier in America
Snowdrops – good tale of exploitation in post-collapse Russia
Half-Blood Blues: A Novel – Mischlings in the Third Reich
South: the story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 expedition
American Psycho
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
A Hat Full of Sky
Equal Rites
Pyramids
Witches Abroad
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Zodiac
The Best of British SF 2
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Family Matters
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
Spawn of the Comet
Ships in the Night
Toy Shop and Two Others
The Pit and the Pendulum
Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 11
Year of the Jackpot

That is all.

Just when you thought you’d read everything by Asimov, this book comes along. Forget the Three Laws of Robotics and all that, this book is much more direct in its dichotomy of good and evil. The good guys are the victors of WW2 and the bad guys are the Nazis, as usual. Not only do the Nazis perform all their usual fiendish atrocities, but they go one further and try to build a mechanical man, an industrial Ubermensch of sorts. Of course, this is just robotics, but the Nazi robot is powered by human brains, brains taken from hapless prisoners in a Peenemunde-like facility. The Nazi robot is a man of iron, predictably black in colour, his evil simply oozing out of his malevolent negritude.

The Allies are obviously in on the game, but their robot, an American-built one is predictably called the Golden Boy. Initially buried in the aftermath of a disastrous accident, the Golden Boy lies dormant sub terra for nigh on half a century, at which time its services are required again. Of course, the black Nazi robot is alive and kicking as well, if only by feeding on human brains all along. The stereotypes are somewhat cartoonish and it is somewhat depressing to realize that sentient beings actually thought this way once, not so long ago. Luckily ,we know that this is not the pure work of the Grand Master himself, but a collaboration between his original idea and the writings of a newer generation.

Pick this one up for a quick read of a decent simile of what sci-fi was like during the Golden Age of Sci-Fi.

ISBN: 0-06-105539-5