Legends of the Sun Pig

I’m clearly a bad parent. Wee baby Alex is only three months old, and already Snoogums and I have left him alone with other people on four separate occasions!

Okay, so they weren’t complete strangers. My parents have some experience of child raising, but their techniques are thirty years out of date. My brother and sister-in-law are both smart and sensible, but until Alex came along they’d never held a baby before. How could I possibly entrust the life and well being of my baby boy to these people, even for a few short hours?

What if something happened to him? What if something happened to the sitters? What if there was a fault with my mobile phone? Maybe they’re trying to call me right now, but can’t get through! Quick, where’s the nearest pay phone? No, no! We should catch that taxi straight home to make sure he’s still breathing!

Pish tosh, I say. (I also say: bear with me for a bit. I’ll get to the restaurant soon.)

Human beings are enormously resilient, even at such an early age. Both Snoogums and I take a very dim view of modern trends in paranoid parenting. We have no intention of swaddling Alex in a protective blanket until he leaves home. We are quite happy to leave him alone on the rug or in his bouncy chair nearby while we go off and surf the net, cook, or do the dishes. Sometimes we even (gasp!) let him cry himself to sleep.

Teaching him how to relate to, and behave around other people is part of this attitude. We firmly believe that if he realizes there are other people who take care of him from time to time–and just as well as mommy and daddy, I might add–he’ll grow up to be a more adaptable child.

“Flow with it,” is the motto Snoogums grew up with. To a child, it is supposed to mean that the world doesn’t always revolve around you. Most of the time, there is stuff going on, like trips to the shops, visits to family, and work around the house. You may not be interested. You may even actively dislike these activities. But they’re going to happen anyway. So you can either paddle upstream, resisting the current and causing everyone grief, or you can Flow With It. The latter course has benefits for all: your parents stay relaxed and chilled out, and you get ice cream. Or chocolate.

FISHERS BISTRO (I told you I’d get there.)

So anyway, last week was our eighth wedding anniversary! (This whole lead-up was really an attempt to explain why we felt it was quite acceptable to leave Alex for the evening, and go out and enjoy ourselves on our own again for a change.) Fishers Bistro was the name; a pleasant evening of good food, wine, and intimate conversation was the game.

Fishers is situated on the Shore in Leith, a mere couple of hundred yards away from the Scottish Office, the new Ocean Terminal shopping centre, the Royal Yacht Britannia, and dozens of trendy pubs, bars and restaurants. It is tucked into the ground floor of a 17th century signal tower, and has a pleasantly close, low-ceilinged atmosphere. Fishing nets strung across the walls lend a certain nautical theme, while Victorian prints of gentlemen fishing add a freshwater touch. The plain wooden tables, simple place settings, and a clear view over a serving counter into the small kitchen give it a relaxed, continental air.

We had booked our table for 19:30, and even though this was a Monday evening, the place was almost full already. Our waitress showed us to a nice little table in the very far corner of the room, from where we could observe everyone else. Throughout the evening we were attended to by at least three different servers, and I think I counted five hovering around in total. This seemed quite a lot for a relatively small place (I reckon the whole restaurant would seat about 35 at a push), but it did mean that there was always someone ready to take your order, or pour more wine. Although a lot of the customers were smartly dressed the staff were all casual, which contributed to the friendly and relaxed atmosphere.

Fishers is a fish and seafood restaurant. For people who have been dragged there against their will and insist on having a chunk of meat with their dinner, there was one non-seafood starter (a warm salad of pigeon breast) and main course (roast lamb chops with coriander and lemon couscous) on the menu. But really–you go to Fishers to eat fish, and they have it in abundance.

The menu changes with the daily catch, and on our night we were told they were all out of queenies. Well, shucks. I suppose I would have felt more disappointed if I’d known what queenies are. Everything else, though, sounded seriously tempting, and I had a hard time deciding what looked best. Would it be the baked fillet of sole, stuffed with cream cheese and spinach? How about the stuffed whole sea bass with chorizo sausage, mozzarella and olives? In the end I settled on a char grilled tuna fillet with a mango, red pepper and basil salsa (£5.75), followed by a fillet of grilled wild arctic char with roast pepper mash and lobster bisque (£12.50). Yum!

The tuna was charred to a deliciously smoky crust on the outside. Like a fillet of beef, a tuna steak doesn’t have to be cooked all the way through on the inside, but I felt that mine was a little underdone. I would have preferred the choice to have it closer to “medium” than “rare”. The quality of the tuna was excellent, though, with a tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture and a clean, almost freshwater taste that contrasted beautifully with the grilled crust.

The mango and pepper salsa was tasty, crisp and fresh. Taken on its own it was marvellous, but after a few bites of tuna and salsa together I started eating them in alternation. The contrast between the warm grilled flavour of the tuna and the cool fruitiness of the salsa was just too much for a single mouthful. It’s a bold combination, but too disconcerting for my palette.

The main course was the first time I had tried arctic char, and I fell in love with it immediately. The arctic char is distantly related to salmon, and like salmon its meat is dense and rich. But there is none of the oiliness you get with salmon, and in taste it is probably closer to trout than anything else. Taken with a generous dollop of creamy mashed potatoes and roast red peppers, and a smear of lobster bisque, it made a heavenly combination. If it wasn’t considered inappropriate in polite company, I would have licked the plate to sup the last of the bisque. Fortunately, though, I had saved some mopping-up bread for just this eventuality, and was saved from social embarrassment.

When it came to choosing dessert, I was torn between honeycomb ice cream in a brandy basket with chocolate sauce, and a warm chocolate and pear tart. I’d seen other diners being brought both, and both looked decadent and tempting. The chocolate and pear tart (£4.95) won, but turned out to be a disappointing choice. The pastry was too dense, the chocolate filling was too dry, and it was loaded with nuts that simply overwhelmed whatever pear flavour might have been there. The single dollop of ice cream that came with it tasted bland and supermarket-bought. What I should have had (and what Snoogums wisely selected) was the baked amaretto peaches, topped with white chocolate cream and syrup. She let me have a large bite, and it was awesome.

Overall, Fishers was a fine place to have our anniversary dinner. The atmosphere was relaxing, and the food was good. But to be honest, we could have been taking a picnic on the moon for all it would have affected our enjoyment of the evening. We’ve had a great eight years together now, and the arrival of wee baby Alex has placed us in a blissful state neither of us could have imagined possible. Our senses are heightened with happiness, and every new experience seems imbued with magic. That evening at Fishers will stay with us forever as a sparkling point of joy in the constellation of our new parenthood.

I first visited a Pizza Express in 1995. I was on a training course in Marlow, Bucks, and my car had just exploded, so I felt like I deserved a little treat for myself. (Actually, it was only the exhaust that detonated. It blew a hole in our bank balance all the same, though.) Since then, I’ve been to branches in London, Edinburgh and Perth, and every time the experience has been consistently good.

This evening, we were in Perth to pick up my mum’s car (which we’re borrowing while my parents are off on holiday), and we decided to grab a bite to eat while there. The Perth Pizza Express is, like many others, a converted bank branch. Bank branches seem to have the right kind of space that Pizza Express restaurants go for: light, bright and airy, with tall ceilings, and all the acoustic subtlety of a tube station. Wee baby Alex stayed asleep for most of the meal, but when he woke up, his yells echoed through the restaurant like a yodeling constest in the back of a Ford Transit.

The food was good, though. Between the four of us we ordered two portions of garlic bread, and a portion of dough balls with garlic butter. At £1.45, each order is fairly inexpensive, but I’ve always found the portions a little stingy. The garlic bread is a single chunk of golden brown baked pizza dough, glistening with melted garlic butter. Very tasty, but one is rarely enough. On the other hand, massive all-you-can-eat platters don’t really fit in with the restaurant’s stylish modern demeanour. On yet another hand (er…), no-one is going to stop you from ordering more than one portion.

When it comes to choosing pizza, I’m pretty unadventurous. I like pepperonis and chillies, so the American Hot (£6.70) is usually the one I go for. Pizza Express’s pizzas are about nine inches across, and are made in the traditional Italian style: a thin base, topped with a relatively plain, un-herby tomato sauce, with thin slices of mozzarella draped on top and melted in place. This way, the cheese doesn’t end up spread evenly over the surface, so you end up with more varied bites. Personally, I prefer this to American style pizzas, where the base and crust are generally thicker, and each bite tends to be more uniform.

Although the American Hot pizza is loaded with sliced green jalopeno peppers, the flavours of the tomato sauce and the mozzarella cheese still come through clearly. I think this is the main reason I like Pizza Express: the ingredients they use are clearly of a very high quality. The tomato sauce is fresh and tangy, the cheese has just the right stringy texture, and the pepperoni sausage is recognizably meaty instead of greasy and bloated with generic spices. I’m a big fan of pizza, and this one ranks very highly on my list of all time greats.

If you’re not a pizza lover, there are a small number of other items on the menu, like cannelloni, lasagne, and melanzane parmigiana. This is a bit like lasagne, but with the strips of pasta replaced by slices of aubergine. Snoogums and my mother both had this. I tried a bite, and while it wasn’t as dark, rich, greasy and overcooked as it I like it, it was sweet and tasty nevertheless.

On this occasion we didn’t have wine, but from previous visits I remember the house red and white as both being nice and slurpable. Likewise, the desserts are all fun and unobjectionably sweet (the tiramisu is particularly good, though). But the name of the restaurant really spells out what they’re best at: pizza. They have branches all over Britain, and if you fancy something a bit more adventurous and a little less bland than your local Pizza Hut, try Pizza Express instead. You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re relatively new to this whole Internet thing, you may not remember the olden days when there was no such thing as Internet Explorer. Web browsers started out as simple things (ah, good old NCSA Mosaic!), used by researchers for publishing papers and documents. Then came Netscape, and an increase in popular and recreational usage of the Web. Around 1995, Microsoft decided they wanted a piece of the pie (it was only later they decided they would like to have the whole pie), and out popped Internet Explorer.

Now, in 2001, the Internet is one of the main reasons people have a computer at home. Your web browser is now much, much more than a simple document reader: it’s your gateway to the on-line world. Chances are, it’s the first thing you start up when you switch on PC, and it’s the last thing you shut down. It’s a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a telephone, a shopping centre, a village hall. There are few people who would dispute that it’s a communications revolution.

And more likely than not, your gateway to this revolution is Internet Explorer. But why?

Two reasons. First of all, Microsoft fought a hard battle to make Internet Explorer the default browser for anyone using any form of Windows. Because most people use a Windows PC (sorry, Mac fans), and have a natural reluctance to change default options, Microsoft was going to win that battle from the start. (Although recent court actions in the US have proved this to be an illegal business tactic, this conclusion is about five years too late for it to matter.) But secondly, Internet Explorer is a very good product! It had features that people wanted, and after version 5 it was much faster at displaying web pages than Netscape was. As we all know, on the Internet speed matters.

But is there anything even better out there? For me, the answer is yes, and the product is Opera.

I say “for me,” because of the way I use the Web. My browsing habits include reading a lot of sites whose primary purpose is to serve up news, opinion or information in text format. I’m out to absorb as much information as I can, as quickly as possible. I don’t care about pretty logos or snazzy animations. Just plug me into the wire and feed me from the source!

I first tried Opera earlier this year, when I was revamping my own web site. I was trying the page designs in the various versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape. I’d just read an article about Opera, so I decided to try it out as well. After just a few hours of using version 5.11, though, I knew I had something special on my hands. So I kept on using it, and being pleasantly surprised by how good it was. And a few days later I was hooked completely. At work, I still use Internet Explorer (most of the projects I work on use IE as their sole target platform), but it seems awkward and slow now, just like Netscape did when I first switched to IE.

So here is the list of things that, in my opinion, make Opera a better product than IE (in reverse order):

5) Multiple Document Interface (MDI)

Michael Marshall Smith is the author of three novels, Only Forward, Spares and One of Us, which have assured him–in Britain, at least–the status of Hot New Author. This status is quite rightly deserved. Only Forward is a true masterpiece of modern fiction, weaving a unique blend of science fiction, psychological horror, fantasy, dark humour, and genuine literary charm. He has been a bit quiet of late, but this appears to be because he is taking more time than usual over his next book, The Straw Men. (Working title, currently due some in August 2002. Check www.michaelmarshallsmith.com for updates.)

Smith has an engaging narrative voice that draws you into his books like a snake charmer hypnotising a cobra. You’re led into a world that you know is strange, but because his characters are so convincing and sufficiently comfortable with their own reality, you go along with it, thinking, yeah, this is cool, this is interesting, and then suddenly–snap. The trapdoor shuts behind you and you can’t get out. The protagonist is on a nightmare ride, and you’re right there with him.

What you make it is Smith’s first story collection, and it brings together eighteen pieces from 1988 to 1998. The stories range from humorous (“Diet Hell”) to downright disturbing (“More Tomorrow”), with several excursions into tender and deeply touching (“The Man Who Drew Cats”, and “Always”). What they all have in common, though, is Smith’s confident narrative. Whether his protagonists are witty and urbane bachelors bemoaning their lot in life, or old men sipping their beers in their favourite bar and swapping tales of old times, they are always believable. You know these people. You see them every day. You live and go to work with them.

This is exactly what makes you uncomfortable when the world in these stories suddenly takes a turn for the worse (which it does in most cases). Rather than choosing the option of supernatural horror (although in “A Place To Stay” he does his own take on vampires), Smith stays firmly with the psychological. Inside the human mind lie terrors far more upsetting than the worst creature from the dark dimensions.

One of his recurring themes is the continual questioning of reality: has the world gone mad, or have I? As in his novels, Smith explores the possibilities of this question in several of these stories. “The Owner” and “The Fracture” follow the protagonists through their descent into insanity. In “Foreign Bodies”, like in all three of his novels, he examines his characters’ reaction to the revelation of truths so hideous they’ve kept them hidden from themselves.

Another common thread running through the stories is that of (romantic) relationships gone awry. Many of his characters have been through a psychological wringer, involving painful break-ups and the inability to find or keep hold of love. Smith’s sharp wit is at its finest when he lets his twenty-something single males rant about women, work and life in general; his tenderness and compassion shines through most when he talks about love. Here is a writer with a lot to say, and I have a lot of time to listen.

If this all seems a bit heavy and deep, well, it is. This isn’t an easy read. In places it is profoundly unsettling. The first story, “More tomorrow” built up a feeling of genuine dread in my stomach, and left me feeling shocked at its end. “Always”, the second-last story, produced a lump in my throat. It took me about a week to read through the whole collection, because I had to give some stories time to sink in before I was ready to read the next. Like strong drink, it doesn’t take much to intoxicate. Take too much too quickly, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked in the head.

There are inevitably a few weaker stories here as well. “Sorted” is blunt, and covers the same ground as “More Bitter Than Death” but with much less flair. “The Dark Land”, one of the earlier stories, is fairly perfunctory in terms of its plot, but is interesting in that it seems to lay a lot of the foundation upon which the novel One Of Us is built.

On balance, though, the good stories outnumber the bad, and the excellent outnumber the merely good. I can’t give the book anything other than a top rating, but I should warn that it will not be to everybody’s taste. To draw a somewhat inaccurate analogy, in terms of the experience it provides it is far more Blair Witch than Scream: deep discomfort rather than slash ‘n splatter. Read it and be impressed.

When Joe Haldeman won the Hugo award for his novel _Forever Peace_ in 1998, a lot of people were disappointed that the book wasn’t a sequel to his 1974 Hugo and Nebula award-winning classic, _The Forever War_. Both books have a similar thematic underpinning, though, and put across a strong anti-war message. As a Vietnam veteran, Haldeman is always at his best when he writes about his “core values”.

In _Forever Free_, he does return to the same characters he left behind in _The Forever War_: William Mandella and his wife Marygay. In _The Forever War_, the main characters are soldiers, fighting battles on distant worlds. Because of relativity, whenever they travel such interstellar distances, they also hop forward through time. Each time they return to Earth hundreds of years have passed, and they find society changed almost beyond recognition. Eventually, human society evolves into a group mind known as “Man”, and the war the soldiers had been fighting ends.

Between the two books, some twenty-odd years have now passed. Mandella and Marygay have settled down on the planet Middle Finger. They have a family, and live in a peaceful farming community. Life is hard (the planet spends most of its 6-year “year” in deep winter), but peaceful. Mandella and his fellow veterans, though, believe that Man (the group mind) is keeping the old humans around as a genetic backup for the human race, in case something goes wrong with Man as a species.

To Mandella, the society is stale. His life is stale. He doesn’t have confidence in the future of Man, and wants to do something about it. And if he can’t change the society itself, then he will escape from it. He and a group of other veterans come up with a plan to borrow an ancient spaceship, crank it up to relativistic speeds, and take a short-cut to the future. They want to come back in 40,000 years’ time to see how things will pan out.

So far, so reasonable. This is a fairly logical extension to the first book, and takes the ideas forward at a gentle pace. Haldeman sets up some interesting conflicts between Mandella and Marygay, who consider the society a dystopia, and their children, who think the opposite. The group mind of Man is initially willing to go along with the whole expedition idea, but puts up resistance later; this ultimately leads to a showdown in which the veterans are forced to steal the spaceship.

…And then it all goes a bit strange.

I don’t want to give too much away about the second half of the book, but it’s like Haldeman decided he’d had enough of the original plot, and threw it away in favour of something completely different. All of the interesting questions he sets up in the first half get dropped unanswered, and the emotional conflicts get rolled back to a previous state, as if they hadn’t happened at all. The characters are the same, but they’re in the middle of a bizarre and completely unexpected adventure. This new story doesn’t depend on the original characters in any way, and could have been set in any generic SF world–no need to place it in an established and well-loved environment. He introduces not one but _two_ dei ex machina, and then doesn’t do anything with them!

I’m baffled. It’s like a head-on collision between two different novels. The characters ultimately end up walking around in a bit of a daze.

What bothers me most is that Mandella and his fellow veterans to have no apparent stake in the outcome of the second part of the book. Why did Haldeman not choose characters upon whom the outcome would have a deeper (read: “any”) impact? I wanted to see the first part of the story brought to its conclusion!

I feel like this is a waste of a sequel, and I can’t help wondering if this book was more inspired by marketing forces than a genuine desire to explore the further story of William Mandella. Haldeman is a master writer, and he has written some of the best SF in the last quarter century. (In addition to his novel Hugos, he has also won numerous awards for his short fiction.) But although this book is unquestionably well written, I found the story terribly disappointing. Perhaps I had my hopes up too high.

_The Forever War_ is a hard act to follow. I wish Haldeman had left it to stand on its own.