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| Cover art by Vincent D. Fate (per the ISFDB) |
| FIRESTAR Michael Flynn New York: TOR, March 1997 (May 1996) |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-812-53006-3 | ||||
| ISBN 0-812-53006-3 | 885pp. | SC | $6.99 | |
| Page 23: | "She mean's 'save the world' literally." |
| Unwanted apostrophe: S/B "means". (And literally saving the world is supposed to be a bad thing? Even if that cynicism expresses doubt that it could be done, it is a cynicism founded on misunderstanding.) |
| Page 36: | "The flight was surreal, because the pilot babbling in Portuguese bore unmistakably Japanese features..." |
| Something like Alberto Fujimori, perhaps. He was born in Lima to parents who were natives of Japan. He spoke Spanish and guided Peru from 1990 until 2000, when he fled the country under charges of corruption and human rights abuses. |
| Page 52: | "At the base of the hill a flock of brown and green geese floated and honked on a wide pond." |
| I'd buy brown and green ducks, but geese? All the geese I'm familiar with are white or various shades and patterns of gray. A look at Wikipedia bears this out; even those species not in the true goose family (most found in the southern hemisphere) follow this coloring. |
| Pages 54-55: | "He took a sip and found the taste fresh and clear, with very little bitterness. Made with a fresh filter, he decided, and in a clean pot; the beans, roasted no more than five hours before grinding." |
| Barry Fast is James Bond, or at least has his discriminating taste buds. |
| Page 71: | "By measuring the displacements and knowing the declensions and right ascensions, one may..." |
| Terminology: S/B "declinations". (Declensions relate to grammar.) |
| Page 75: | "It took only a moment to open the bottom drawer of her dresser and reach under the wadded-up clothing for a bottle. [...] The icy vodka filled her mouth." |
| How does a bottle kept in a dresser drawer keep its contents icy? |
| Page 77: | "Knee-grows bused from Molly Pitcher, looking tough as broken glass in their shades and leathers..." |
| Gosh, that's clever. (Actually it is — but only in print. Which means it's wasted as speech.) |
| Page 80: | "But he couldn't back down in front of his skillets, either." |
| One meaning of "skillets", per the Urban Dictionary, is a slang term for your closest friends. |
| Page 91: | "Project Prometheus." |
| Named after the Titan of Greek mythology — as was NASA's attempt, under Sean O'Keefe, to revive nuclear rocket technology for missions to the outer planets. |
| Page 96: | "...but her timely intervention in the currency markets had forestalled an attempt by the keidenran to do very nearly that." |
| Wakaremas ka? Hai, wakaremas. This is the Japan Business Federation, since World War II considered the most conservative of Japan's three economic organizations. (Also, it's spelled "Keidanren.") |
| Page 101: | "The place is clean." |
| Of active electronic bugs, sure. I wonder if Michael Flynn knows about Forrest Mims and his 1985 work on bugging a room by means of laser beams reflected from its windows. |
| Page 129: | "[Secretaries] had solved the FTL problem and if you wanted to know what was coming down in any company, the secretaries could tell you weeks before your own boss knew." |
| FTL = "From The Leader"? |
| Page 165: | "Without the diploma, there were no jobs that would not drive her herbies." |
| The meaning of this is clear enough from context. But its provenance is not clear. The Urban Dictionary gives several definitions; none comes close. |
| Page 232: | I am not questioning your forecasts, Keith..." |
| Missing first quotation mark: S/B ""I am". |
| Page 235: | "Second star to the right, and straight on to morning." |
| I thought it was "Third star". It's from "Peter Pan," which has the instruction as "second star;" but Peter, not paying attention, goes to the third star by mistake. |
| Page 248: | "From his jacket pocket, [John E.] extracted a fountain pen, removed the cap with his lips, and began to write." |
| A man who uses a fountain pen in 1999 to take notes at a meeting is either hopelessly hidebound or extremely self-disciplined, so that he never pauses in writing with pen on paper, or shakes the instrument. |
| Page 256: | Brittany nodded. "Yes, Grandfather's influence, I suppose." |
| The first comma S/B a full stop. "Yes" replies to Barry's question about golf; the rest to Brittany's concern about Mariesa working too hard. |
| Page 265: | "Welcome to Newark, Mr. DuBois." |
| Whoops! On the previous page, the airliner is on final approach to Miami International. (And the man greeting Ned isn't what he appears to be.) Since Ned is on his way to report to VHI leadership in northern New Jersey, this is a continuity error. |
| Page 268: | Ned's three-ring gesture to Barry. |
| This doesn't mean what Barry thinks it means. |
| Page 286: | "The restaurant was fancier than any that Styx had ever seen. Bun-and-runs were the usual Carson dining-out experience. |
| A tag I'd never heard, but an apt one. |
| Page 444: | "Lozovacka, whatever the hell that was. |
| I wondered if this was real. It is. As best I can determine, it comes from the Balkans and is similar to Italian grappa (grape brandy.) It seems to be a variant name for one form of Rakija, a generic term for any of several 40- to 60-proof liqeuers (sp?) made from fruit in Serbia and surrounding nations. The Serbian connection is a subtle hint about what comes later: first Ned toasts Serbia, then he toasts Serbians. |
| Page 452: | Charlie Brown's for lunch. MacDac still around. |
| This all feels odd in 2012. Although the restaurant chain Charlie Brown's still exists on the East Coast, McDonnell Douglas (MacDac) is long gone. It merged with Boeing in 1997. |
| Page 483: | "Without João ships, without my life support, without Mariesa's marketing, there would be no point to what you are doing in the schools." |
| Missing possessive: S/B "João's ships". |
| Page 484: | "It upset her when her own inner circle did not see eye to eye. It seemed wasteful. Friction. Waste heat. Everyone should see what needed doing and just do it." |
| Here the highlighting is only for emphasis. Swoosh! |
| Page 490: | "Thousands of volts of current ran through the scrap metal..." |
| Units: S/B "amps". |
| Page 513: | "The horse rolled its eyes and shook it head back and forth." |
| Missing possessive: S/B "its". |
| Page 520: | "Yes. It's a bit of a walk from the house, but sometimes one needs the solitude." |
| Mariesa uses a contraction! |
| Page 543: | "Tables in the center of the 'pit' contained reasonably current issues of magazines like Machine Design and I.E.E.E. Transactions." |
| Two nits: First, the title(s) would start with "IEEE Transactions" (no periods); second, they are a series of journals like "IEEE Transactions on Communications" or "IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology." They are unlikely to be put out as time-fillers, even in a high-tech milieu. |
| Page 544: | "At the far end, it opened onto a flagstoned verandah." |
| Spelling? It's an accepted spelling, though "veranda" is more common. |
| Page 577: | "The terminator rolled across the Adaman Sea." |
| Spelling: S/B "Andaman". The Andaman Sea is a body of water southeast of the Bay of Bengal, and part of the Indian Ocean. |
| Page 740: | "...and he hated to ruin things what with Betsy waiting zfor the return flight back in Phoenix." |
| Spelling: S/B "for". |
| Page 752: | "One parcel was a padded manila envelope with a return address from the Jet Propulasion Laboratory in Pasadena." |
| Spelling: S/B "Jet Propulsion Laboratory". |
| Page 759: | "The hydroponics are ready," Correy Wilcox volunteered. [...] "Vasily says the tomatoes taste fine and..." |
| Sharp-shooting: It seems they've solved Tim's "tomato poison" problem in which tomatoes grown along with other crops in Space Station Freedom hydroponics experiments poisoned the others. |
| Page 776: | "A soupcon of defiance shaken like Toabasco into the stew." |
| Spelling: S/B "Tabasco". |
| Page 800: | "Did Belinda honestly expect her to remember someone from seven years ago?" |
| Why not? Everyone else does. |
| Page 802: | "So, I've surmised." |
| Remove the comma: S/B "So". The most consistent grammatical fault (if it could be called a fault) in this novel is commas placed like this: they interrupt a short sentence that should be uninterrupted. |
| Pages 831-2: | "The last time that had happened was on the orbirtal test flight with Levkin..." |
| Spelling: S/B "orbital". |
| Page 875: | Mariesa uses a fountain pen to write a personal letter. |
| I guess this is just the classy way of things; a ball-point is so declassé. |
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