As not only a bookseller, but a voracious reader, I tend to develop a passion for little known authors. Every now and then folks who are familiar only with John Grisham, Stephen King, or James Patterson want something new in their fiction, and I like to be able to point them to less well known authors, folks who tell good — great, even — stories, even though they’re not best-sellers, even though every other book isn’t being turned into a TV series or a movie.

For Sci-Fi, those authors are Jack McDevitt, and Alastair Reynolds. Yesterday, a customer was looking for a good read, so I pointed him to McDevitt’s A Talent For War, the first of his Alex Benedict series. I always have a hard time describing this book: “It’s very good,” seems barely adequate. McDevitt has a way of making the distant future connect with the present, so that it doesn’t seem alien. Futuristic technology is described simply: there’s no entire chapter devoted to how Armstrong engines work, or what an A.I. does, he communicates these imagined techs so that they’re easily understood. But science does come into play, again, described easily enough one doesn’t need to have mastered a physics class to understand them.

Alex Benedict is sort of like the Indiana Jones of the distant future, and McDevitt’s books are equal parts Philip K. Dick and Josephine Tey: a compelling mystery story told in a science-fiction setting (and if you don’t know who Josephine Tey is, check out Daughter of Time) about events in that future world’s past similar as to what the Lost Ark, and Atlantis, and Amelia Earhart mean to the people who live in this time.

A Talent for War, first of a so-far four book series (hopefully there will be a fifth), focuses on Benedict’s quest to discover the truth about Christopher Sim, a renowned war hero who two centuries earlier fought a guerrilla war against the Ashiyyur and in death rallied the independent worlds of man into one Confederation.

So I was trying to describe A Talent for War to a customer, and I told him, “Imagine that everything you knew about George Washington was false, and that the foundations of our society were based on lies. See, Sim is a Washington-like character in Benedict’s time, so…”

“So, McDevitt is saying Washington didn’t really exist?”

“Well, no, what I’m saying is Sim, in this book, is sort of a Washington-like character…”

“He chopped down a cherry tree but wouldn’t lie about it?”

“Um, they don’t go into that much detail, but I’m pretty sure Washington didn’t actually chop down a cherry tree.”

“My father told me that story, and my father’s not a liar.”

“Um, I didn’t mean to imply he was, but that story’s in a lot of the mythos about Washington, lots of people believe it even though it didn’t happen.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

At this point I just apologized, confessed that McDevitt was an evil liberal trying to rewrite history and we should burn his books and refuse to carry them (meanwhile, I’m re-reading Polaris, and just bought his new hardback), handed him a copy of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and hid in the back room for about ten minutes.

But let me just real quick plug the rest of McDevitt’s Benedict series, which, awesomely enough, he began in 1989 with A Talent for War, and then left alone for fifteen years, returning with the second book, Polaris, in 2004. Follow ups include Seeker in 2006, and The Devil’s Eye in 2009. Hopefully, there will soon be a fifth.

Oh, and by the way? His father? Total fucking liar.

A while back — possibly last fall — I was strolling through the National Zoo near dusk, when I spotted a deer hanging around the Bird House. I asked a Zoo employee, “Is that one of yours?”

“No,” he told me, continuing to inform me that there were six deer who lived wild in the Zoo, which is located in DC’s Rock Creek Park (which is twice as large as New York’s Central Park, suck it, Yankees).

Well, apparently they’re down to five:

I’m not very sad about this at all, except in that it may have traumatized some younger onlookers. Hopefully most older children and adults who saw this recognize that deer are over sized rats who destroy, destroy, destroy, and that while yes, indeed, it is sad that suburban development has encroached on their territory to the degree that they are starving, the simple fact of the matter is that there are so many goddamn deer out there that the loss of one is really no loss at all, except perhaps to the lions, who were unable to have a nice warm meal (I also say this as an individual who has, utilizing his 1998 Jeep Wrangler, and then his 2000 Toyota Celica, killed, maimed, or contributed to the death of at least six deer, thereby earning from his friends the nickname: “Jeffy, The Deer Slayer.”).

So, yeah, fuck Bambi.

Big cats for the win.