Howdy All!

Been a long time since I've posted here, but I do check in every so often
to see what's going on.  At work, I have risen to a position commenserate
with my level of imcompetence and am now working dayshift Monday through
Friday.  Unfortunately, this means I am no longer working outside or
driving through the countryside in the late night or wee hours of the
morning, which had traditionally been the times I was most likely to see or
experience strange things I used to write about here.

(Oh, last weekend while giving my girlfriend Kitten a ride, she did exclaim
that we had arrived before we had left, but it turned out that we were
looking at clocks set in two different time zones.  Darn.  I was so hoping
for a witness to the "found time" thing I have experienced.)

Anyway, I write today of a book by Glen Cook called Angry Lead Skies.  It's
not your standard UFO/alien abduction book, and in fact I got halfway
through it before I realized that it was a UFO/alien abduction book.  The
book is a fantasy work set in a world where elves, dwarves, trolls, and
other creatures exist alongside of (and occasionally interbreed with)
humans.  Wizards and mages rule the world and science has not quite gotten
a foothold yet.  The primary character is a private eye named Garrett. 
This is the 10th or so book in the series so naturally there's a lot of
backstory to him and all his supporting characters.  They've had lots of
adventures and have seen lots of strange things.

So when flying balls of color start lighting up the night sky and people
start disappearing, some coming back with tales of strange interrogations
and medical examinations, nobody really seems to notice or care.  More
magic from the wizards who live up on the hill, no doubt.  But Garrett gets
involved with a case, hired to protect a young man (an eccentric inventor)
who's being visited by strange silver elves.  Except they don't really look
like elves, have heads shaped like mushrooms, big black eyes that don't
blink, no ears to speak of, and visit by materializing out of thin air, but
only when the young man is alone.  And they appear to be only one of
several groups of silver elves running around town.

But in spite of powers that can put men to sleep without permanent damage
and create illusions that don't smell of magic, our silver elves are no
match for a cynical human detective, a young rat, a 400 year dead demon,
and a couple of grolls.  (A groll is what you get when you cross a giant
with a troll.  Not a pretty picture.  They can also pick up a tree and use
a flying disc for batting practice.)

Garrett eventually gets the story.  The young man's two friends (and the
source of his inventions) are from a group that want to spread knowledge to
all other peoples, but they cracked up their flying ship on landing and are
stuck here.  In spite of being knowledgophiles, they're apparently in the
"turn the key and it goes" group when it comes to mechanical skills.  A
third silver elf is a police type who came to arrest them for stealing a
ship.  Three more silver elves came to cover up all this technology that
the other three were using in front of the natives.

Merriment ensued until Garrett managed to catch them all and make them play
nice with each other.  The groups didn't want to cooperate, but it turns
out that even in the fastest ship available in the realm, it will take many
hundreds of years to get home (Garrett's mind boggles as he didn't think
the world was that big).  They have to pool their resources to get one of
their flying ships airworthy again.  They eventually fly off, though it's
hinted that some will come back now that Garrett's tought them about this
"sex" thing.

"Subtle" isn't really in Glen Cook's vocabulary, but he did a good job
describing alien races and abductions in a way that didn't sound like he
was describing alien races and abductions.  Like a mentioned before, I got
halfway through the book before I figured it out.  Maybe I'm just dense,
but the discussions of "some mutated form of elf" and "some
kind of new
flying magic" and "powerful fetishes that can knock a man
out" made perfect
sense as just another part of this fantasy landscape right up until I
realized what those flying lights were supposed to be, after which it was
all very clear in retrospect.  Of course if you live in a world where a
stormwarden can call down a lightning strike, you're going to describe it
in magical terms when said lightning bounces off a flying saucer's defense
screen.

All in all, an enjoyable book from either the fantasy standpoint or the "we
are not alone" standpoint, and an excellent melding of the two.

Angry Lead Skies by Glen Cook
Roc
ISBN: 0451458753
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