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There's a lot going on in this version of the City of Yarra in 2007 (a local government area of Melbourne, Australia). The Melbourne Blues scene, football, freeway planning, shady developers, the Melbourne Cup, adoption and local politics all get thrown in to the mix when our main character Brick Brown (part time bartended, part time council worker) enters the archives room in the council building where she works to find the mayor dead with his pants down.

Her Uncle Baz (who's really more of a dad) has gone missing and with the help of the ex-war correspondent Mitch Mitchell and her friends she needs to unravel the weird web of politics to find him.

It sounds heavy, but it is a light romp. Some of the threads which end up being a bit loose at the end get resolved in an "oh by the way" but it was good all the same.

This is my second read of this one and I had the loose concept of how the murder was done and the key points still in my head from last time I read it.

While it's great to see Adriana Oliver and essentially get some insight into how Agatha herself felt about her work near the end of her life, the writing here isn't as vibrant as her earlier work. What Elephants Can Remember appears to be is taking some of her notes on a story that she was working on and padding it out into a novel by having the various people monologue at either Poirot or Oliver (or each other).

I think even without having read it before, it's very likely that you'll get the jist of the murder about half way through. It's a shame that it's such a poorly written novel as the murder could have been quite clever if she had have gotten to it earlier. As it is though, it's a bit of a miss.

In a retirement village, Joyce is asked a question by member (well leader, let's be honest) of the Thursday Murder Club Elizabeth about how long it would take to bleed out from a certain wound. They meet in the jigsaw room every Thursday hence the name. There she meets the tough as nails but heart of gold Ron and the ex-psychologist Ibrahim.

Together they solve cold cases. But when a murder occurs related to their retirement village it uncovers secrets that end up closer to home.

Mechanically the story alternates between Joyce's journal entries and a third person view but it does have a fairly decent pace.

The characters a very likeable and have very distinct approaches, Elizabeth has many contacts and is very observant (with a history that's very hush hush), Ron is rough around the edges, Ibrahim is more for the analysis (and I suppose the little grey cells style) and Joyce acts as our entry into the club but is one of those people who really wants everyone to like her but not in a painful way.

And with Donna and Chris in the story you also get some police procedural thrown in for good measure.

There's a lot of mysteries in here that get uncovered, though it's not one of those tales that you're expected to be able to solve it before the characters do. The ride however is an intriguing one and looking forward to what the sequel presents.

There are parts of this I delighted in, but I think I have too many issues with this one.

The story starts us with the pilot Parvis who is making a delivery run to Titan and discovers that a few people have been lost on the moon, including his mentor Pirx (of the Pirx the Pilot stories). He takes a mech out to find them but ultimately must freeze himself in a cryo pod.

Jump to the future where Eurydice is heading to make first contact with a planet. On board they've taken aboard the missing people including two pilots who have been in cryo, both of whom have names starting with P, but they don't have any more information than that. They randomly choose one to bring out of cryo, using organs from the others, but also know that the one that the bring back will have amnesia.

"Oh. So this will be important then!" I think "whether it's Pirx or Parvis will be an integral part of this story". Dear reader, let me dispel you of this notion. It's not. He never learns or if he does, he doesn't reveal it. And given that Lem mentions the fact that they are pretty similar personalities I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting. Just something I guess.

Anyway the resurected pilot picks up a book which the doctor gave him. And reads it. It's not important to the plot, but there you go. Previously one of the scientest was telling a story about El Derado. It's also tangental to the plot, but goes for pages.

And so here's my actual issue with this book. Why has it been stuffed with stories that have no impact on the rest of the story? I may have read that these were drafts of other stories Lem had lying around and had used as the basis, but in my mind he's being paid by word count here. You could argue that he's used the stories about discovery to tell us something about how man has always sought out new worlds and blundered, but I'm not entirely convinced that he achieves this even if it was his intention.

It's slog for slogs sake.

Anyway, the Eurydice is heading for a planet designated Quinta and doing so in a way that means that the will return soonish after they left Earth. Lem tackled the issue of contact with other worlds and the pointlessness of it in [b:Return From the Stars|251648|Return From the Stars|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875060l/251648.SX50.jpg|457761] and here he goes to great lengths to prove that travel to other stars in this short time period is possible. Great lengths.

Here, let's stop and grumble about how often the action in this book stops in order to drop into research paper territory. A great deal of history is laid out as to how the ships drive was created and how it's scientifically possible and I really didn't care.

Later, he goes into dissecting the arguments of the characters. Not by y'know having the characters have a discussion, no, it's in third person. Urhgh. It ends up being so dry.

So the pilot has two goals. One to remember who he is (or decide he doesn't care) and two to learn enough to be selected as the second pilot on the team that will be travelling on the smaller ship to Quinta, the Hermes, while the Eurydice stays away. Great so I'm now having to learn what he learns.

So he gets selected to go on the Hermes. Yah! We're about halfway through the book and they're still not at the planet. But spying on the planet they realise that it's full of signals and interference with each other, the planet has a ring of ice in it's atmosphere that appears to have been put up there by the locals from the sea and in orbit around the planet are many probes or satellite like things. They aim to catch one and it turns out to be biomechanical but diseased and the eventual decided upon theory is that there's a war on and that the infection was deliberate from the other side of Quinta.

The ship has an onboard computer, DEUS. And there's sort of a weird hierarchy where the captain, but the onboard computer tracks the mental health of the crew and if there's an issue with any of the crew, lets the captain and doctor know and they then need to handle it.

So what if the virus that diseased the probe that they caught infected DEUS. Eh, it doesn't happen. But DEUS often behaves weirdly.

The crew try to contact the planet with no success. Eventually they decide that the planet is ignoring them instead of not being able to understand and then start threatening them and this is where the book just entirely lost me. Because they carry out those threats, by destroying the moon.

What gets me is that it presumes that the threats could be understood and also the time limit could be understood. Which really?

They get contact, but things escalate, they send a fake Hermes down, it gets destroyed, they destroy the ice ring, get agreeement from one of the sides of the conflict to send the pilot down to check on the destroyed fake Hermes and let the Quntians know that if they don't recieve a message from the pilot every x minutes that they'll destroy the planet.

So in the last twenty pages the pilot finally gets to the planet. And he misses the second call in and the planet is destroyed by the Hermes, THE END.

What?

I just don't by the idea in the book that things would escalate like this. Imagine going to a strangers house in a less developed country, because you want to be friends with them. You knock on their door. They don't answer. So you blow up their garage. They say "Please go away" so you smash in their windows. It doesn't make sense.

And I've come to this after reading portions of [b:Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy|889430|Microworlds Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348193964l/889430.SY75.jpg|874679] where Lem pulls apart stories about first contact from [b:The War of the Worlds|8909|The War of the Worlds|H.G. Wells|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391644l/8909.SY75.jpg|3194841] to [b:Roadside Picnic|331256|Roadside Picnic|Arkady Strugatsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173812259l/331256.SY75.jpg|1243896], but I can't see how Fiasco holds with those discussions (apart from the parts where he derides science fantasy for not giving full explanations of the tech).

Now I admit that I am often more to the whimsical stories of Ijon Tichy, but I really do enjoy the more serious tales of Pirx, but this one feels off. It feels hopeless and morose. As if the future is pointless, inevitable and not worth attempting.

Where I really land on this one though is that it could have been three different and good stories. but as is, it drags strangely and doesn't mesh well together at all and I don't like it.

I'm yet to read the last Lem novel which was published after this one [b:Peace on Earth|88313|Peace on Earth|Stanisław Lem|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328874754l/88313.SY75.jpg|1271753] and as it's a Tichy novel I was keen to, but now I'm worried that I won't like it as I did this one.

I don't quite know what I think of this one. Abagail is nice enough and the foxes are charming.

I like the concept of the situation/big bad that Abagail is facing in theory maybe more than I like it in practice. I like the idea of it, but I don't think it plays out the right way. I'm trying to keep this spoiler free and I suspect that I shouldn't.

My major bugbear was two things, first I was unclear who Abagail is writing this for. Postmartin is making notes for someone (it may have been pointed out early on who for, but I may have forgotten) on Abagail's prose and this mostly feels like it's an excuse to explain Britishisms to Americans, because presumably American readers can't be bothered to google things when they hit a word that they don't know. But also to explain some youf speak which is fairly easy to decipher from context.

But it's a light quick read and expands the Rivers world somewhat, so... yeah.