Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb. These are actually mysteries that take place in fannish environs. The main characters, Dr. Marian Farley and Dr. Jay Omega, are professors at the same university, she in English and he in EE. Jay has written a hard sf novel as a lark to explore some ideas he had about electromagnetic phenomena; It turns out to be publishable but to his great mortification his publisher slapped it with the title Bimbos of the Death Sun and a similarly lurid cover. Together Jay and Marian solve a couple of murders. The first book is a great romp but the second is seriously marred by McCrumb's increasingly disparaging view of fandom and fen. Overall she characterizes us as a bunch of fat oily-haired losers who have dealt with failure in the "real" world be retreating into our fantasy world. Although obviously biased, I beg to differ. It's true I first embraced fandom as a teenager because I failed at normal social life -- which is to say, I failed at mindless consumerism, vicious backstabbing popularity-calibrating, and achieving conventional handsomeness and athletic prowess. Seems to me it's not unreasonable to reject those criteria for success. And if it's true that we teenage fen were rather smug in our belief in our own superiority, well, we were hardly the only group of teens that felt that way - and many with far less evidence.

Now that I'm a teenage beyond teenaged it seems to me that my fannish friends run the gamut: many are quite successful in conventional terms both materially and socially, and are well acquainted with the salutary effects of creme rinse. And many others are fat, some with questionable hygiene. How horrible that there is a subculture where such people can go and not be completely ostracized and may even find a willing sexual partner. Just awful.

I don't see anything wrong with insisting that people get a life, I just can't agree with McCrumb's perspective that it has to be a "normal" life.

The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest by Po Bronson. This is billed as "A Silicon Valley Novel", but surprise, it's just a standard skullduggery in the boardroom story that happens to take place in silicon valley in the computer industry. All the characters are cardboard stereotypes. Amusing stereotypes, but stereotypes nevertheless. Ho hum.

The Young Witches Book 2: London Babylon by Solano Lopez and Barreiro. This is an erotic graphic novel picking up where the original Young Witches left off. Young Lillian and Agatha have just escaped from the girls' school that was actually the home of the Cult of Ishtar. They make their way to London where they're quickly imprisoned and drugged by Dr. Jekyll and forced to perform in his high-class whorehouse. Just about every famous Victorian character, fictional and historical, makes an appearance: Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, Jack the Ripper (who turns out to be Robert Louis Stevenson), young Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill, and Rose Thatcher (Margaret's mother) Very amusing and totally filthy.