Arts & Letters

Link Dump

Arts & Letters, Culture, Link Dump, Neal Stephenson / /

I’m gonna be taking a trip to The Cabin in The Woods tonight, so time is sparse, thus some linkys for you:

  • In Defense of Microsoft Word – Aziz makes a nice argument in response to incessant whinging on the internets:

    It’s certainly true that using Word for simple text like email or blog posts is overkill, in much the same way that using a jet engine to drive your lawnmower is overkill. What’s peculiar is that rather than using simpler tools for their simpler tasks, these people have declared that the more complex and capable tool is “obsolete” and “must die”. This attitude betrays a type of phobia towards technology that I suspect has grown more prevalent as our technology interfaces have become increasingly more “dumbed down”.

    I mostly agree with Aziz. While I haven’t used Word (or a Word processor in general) in my personal life in years, I use it every day at work, and the notion that you can’t use Word to collaborate is bonkers. It may not be the best tool for that, but it’s certainly not something that needs to die. An interesting post…

  • Books: Bits vs. Atoms – Those who have enjoyed my recent bloviating about ebooks will probably get a kick out of this… better organized… take on the subject (that being said, we cover a lot of the same ground).
  • What Amazon’s ebook strategy means – Speaking of ebooks, Charlie Stross clearly lays out why Amazon is dominating the ebook market, how the publishers shot themselves in the foot by practically insisting that Amazon dominate the market, why it’s a bad situation to be in, and how publishers can take some steps in the right direction. Hint: get rid of DRM, you dummies! There’s a lot of lawsuits and wanking in the book and ebook industry right now, and it’s tempting to take sides with Amazon or the publishers or Apple or whoever, but the more I read about it, the more I think that everyone is to blame. So far, this hasn’t really impacted us consumers that much, but it certainly could. Here’s to hoping these folks get their heads bolted on straight in the near future.
  • Neal Stephenson has a hard time talking about swordplay – Normally I find “trailers” for books to be mildly embarrassing (the trailer for Stephenson’s Anathem is a particularly bad example), but this one is pretty funny. No idea how much of it will be represented in the forthcoming paperback release of The Mongoliad, but still.
  • Gabe’s PAX Post – Gabe from Penny Arcade helps run huge video game conventions that are explicitely targeted towards players (most conventions are about general technology or development, and are targeted towards journalists or developers). As one of the creators and organizers, Gabe has to deal with all sorts of crap, and he covers a few of these, including a little prank he played on a troll, and a vexing problem concerning boobies (aka the perennial Booth Babe issue). Read the whole thing, but the key graph is this:

    How about all of you that hate me get together and have your own conference. I need you to decide if half naked girls are empowered or exploited because I’m doing my fucking best here and it’s apparently always wrong. I swear to God I don’t understand how I’m supposed to know if I’m promoting the patriarchy or criminalizing the female body.

    As Steven notes, this is a cry for help. I wish I had answers, but fortunately, I’m not in Gabe’s position. I can just treat people equally and be happy with that.

That’s all for now. Also, go Flyers.

Kickstarted

2 Comments / Beer, Computers & Internet, Culture, Lists, Science Fiction / /

When the whole Kickstarter thing started, I went through a number of phases. First, it’s a neat idea and it leverages some of the stuff that makes the internet great. Second, as my systems analyst brain started chewing on it, I had some reservations… but that was shortlived as, third, some really interesting stuff started getting funded. Here are some of the ones I’m looking forward to:

  • Singularity & Co. – Save the SciFi! – Yeah, so you’ll be seeing a lot of my nerdy pursuits represented here, and this one is particularly interesting. This is a project dedicated to saving SF books that are out of print, out of circulation, and, ironically, unavailable in any sort of digital format. The Kickstarter is funding the technical solution for scanning the books as well as tracking down and securing copyright. Judging from the response (over $50,000), this is a venture that has found a huge base of support, and I’m really looking forward to discovering some of these books (some of which are from well known authors, like Arthur C. Clarke).
  • A Show With Ze Frank – One of the craziest things I’ve seen on the internet is Ze Frank’s The Show. Not just the content, which is indeed crazy, but the sheer magnitude of what he did – a video produced every weekday for an entire year. Ze Frank grew quite a following at the time, and in fact, half the fun was his interactions with the fans. Here’s to hoping that Sniff, hook, rub, power makes another appearance. And at $146 thousand, I have no idea what we’re in for. I always wondered how he kept himself going during the original show, but now at least he’ll be funded.
  • Oast House Hop Farm – And now we come to my newest obsession: beer. This is a New Jersey farm that’s seeking to convert a (very) small portion of their land into a Hop Farm. Hops in the US generally come from the west coast (Washington’s Yakima valley, in particular). In the past, that wasn’t the case, but some bad luck (blights and infestations) brought east coast hops down, then Prohibition put a nail in the coffin. The farm hopes to supply NJ brewers as well as homebrewers, so mayhaps I’ll be using some of their stuff in the future! So far, they’ve planted Cascade and Nugget hops, with Centennial and Newport coming next. I’m really curious to see how this turns out. My understanding is that it takes a few years for a hop farm to mature, and that each crop varies. I wonder how the East Coast environs will impact the hops…
  • American Beer Blogger – Despite the apparent failure of Discovery’s Brewmasters, there’s got to be room for some sort of beer television show, and famous beer blogger and author Lew Bryson wants to give it a shot. The Kickstarter is just for the pilot episode, but assuming things go well, there may be follow up efforts. I can only hope it turns out well. I enjoyed Brewmasters for what it was, but being centered on Dogfish Head limited it severely. Sam Calagione is a great, charismatic guy, but the show never really captured the amazing stuff going on in the US right now (which is amazing because it is so broad and local and a million other things Brewmasters couldn’t really highlight given its structure).

Well, there you have it. I… probably should have been linking to these before they were funded, but whatever, I’m really happy to see that all of these things will be coming. I’m still curious to see if this whole Kickstarter thing will remain sustainable, but I guess time will tell, and for now, I’m pretty happy with the stuff being funded. There are definitely a ton of other campaigns that I think are interesting, especially surrounding beer and video games, but I’m a little tight on time here, so I’ll leave it at that…

More Disgruntled, Freakish Reflections on ebooks and Readers

Arts & Letters, Computers & Internet, Disgruntled, Freakish Reflections, Science & Technology / /

While I have some pet peeves with the Kindle, I’ve mostly found it to be a good experience. That being said, there are some things I’d love to see in the future. These aren’t really complaints, as some of this stuff isn’t yet available, but there are a few opportunities afforded by the electronic nature of eBooks that would make the whole process better.

  • The Display – The electronic ink display that the basic Kindles use is fantastic… for reading text. Once you get beyond simple text, things are a little less fantastic. Things like diagrams, artwork, and photography aren’t well represented in e-ink, and even in color readers (like the iPad or Kindle Fire), there are issues with resolution and formatting that often show up in eBooks. Much of this comes down to technology and cost, both of which are improving quickly. Once stuff like IMOD displays start to deliver on their promise (low power consumption, full color, readable in sunlight, easy on the eyes, capable of supporting video, etc…), we should see a new breed of reader.

    I’m not entirely sure how well this type of display will work, at least initially. For instance, how will it compare to the iPad 3’s display? What’s the resolution like? How much will it cost? And so on. Current implementations aren’t full color, and I suspect that future iterations will go through a phase where the tech isn’t quite there yet… but I think it will be good enough to move forward. I think Amazon will most certainly jump on this technology when it becomes feasible (both from a technical and cost perspective). I’m not sure if Apple would switch though. I feel like they’d want a much more robust and established display before they committed.

  • General Metrics and Metadata – While everyone would appreciate improvements in device displays, I’m not sure how important this would be. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d love to see a lot more in the way of metadata and flexibility, both about the book and about device usage. With respect to the book itself, this gets to the whole page number issue I was whinging about in my previous post, but it’s more than that. I’d love to see a statistical analysis of what I’m reading, on both individual and collective levels.

    I’m not entirely sure what this looks like, but it doesn’t need to be rocket science. Simple Flesch-Kincaid grades seems like an easy enough place to start, and it would be pretty simple to implement. Calculating such things for my entire library (or a subset of my library), or ranking my library by grade (or similar sorting methods) would be interesting. I don’t know that this would provide a huge amount of value, but I would personally find it very illuminating and fun to play around with… and it would be very easy to implement. Individual works wouldn’t even require any processing power on the reader, it could be part of the download. Doing calculations of your collective library might be a little more complicated, but even that could probably be done in the cloud.

    Other metadata would also be interesting to view. For example, Goodreads will graph your recently read books by year of publication – a lot of analysis could be done about your collection (or a sub-grouping of your collection) of books along those lines. Groupings by decade or genre or reading level, all would be very interesting to know.

  • Personal Metrics and Metadata – Basically, I’d like to have a way to track my reading speed. For whatever reason, this is something I’m always trying to figure out for myself. I’ve never gone through the process of actually recording my reading habits and speeds because it would be tedious and manual and maybe not even all that accurate. But now that I’m reading books in an electronic format, there’s no reason why the reader couldn’t keep track of what I’m reading, when I’m reading, and how fast I’m reading. My anecdotal experience suggests that I read anywhere from 20-50 pages an hour, depending mostly on the book. As mentioned in the previous post, a lot of this has to do with the arbitrary nature of page numbers, so perhaps standardizing to a better metric (words per minute or something like that) would normalize my reading speed.

    Knowing my reading speed and graphing changes over time could be illuminating. I’ve played around a bit with speed reading software, and the results are interesting, but not drastic. In any case, one thing that would be really interesting to know when reading a book would be how much time you have left before you finish. Instead of having 200 pages, maybe you have 8 hours of reading time left.

    Combining my personal data with the general data could also yield some interesting results. Maybe I read trashy SF written before 1970 much faster than more contemporary literary fiction. Maybe I read long books faster than short books. There are a lot of possibilities here.

    There are a few catches to this whole personal metrics thing though. You’d need a way to account for breaks and interruptions. I might spend three hours reading tonight, but I’m sure I’ll take a break to get a glass of water or answer a phone call, etc… There’s not really an easy way around this, though there could be mitigating factors like when the reader goes to sleep mode or something like that. Another problem is that one device can be used by multiple people, which would require some sort of profile system. That might be fine, but it also adds a layer of complexity to the interface that I’m sure most companies would like to avoid. The biggest and most concerning potential issue is that of privacy. I’d love to see this information about myself, but would I want Amazon to have access to it? On the other hand, being able to aggregate data from all Kindles might prove interesting in its own right. Things like average reading speed, number of books read in a year, and so on. All interesting and useful info.

    This would require an openness and flexibility that Amazon has not yet demonstrated. It’s encouraging that the Kindle Fire runs a flavor of Android (an open source OS), but on the other hand, it’s a forked version that I’m sure isn’t as free (as in speech) as I’d like (and from what I know, the Fire is partially limited by its hardware). Expecting comprehensive privacy controls from Amazon seems naive.

    I’d like to think that these metrics would be desirable to a large audience of readers, but I really have no inclination what the mass market appeal would be. It’s something I’d actually like to see in a lot of other places too. Video games, for instance, provide a lot of opportunity for statistics, and some games provide a huge amount of data on your gaming habits (be it online or in a single player mode). Heck, half the fun of sports games (or sports in general) is tracking the progress of your players (particularly prospects). Other games provide a lack of depth that is most baffling. People should be playing meta-games like Fantasy Baseball, but with MLB The Show providing the data instead of real life.

  • The Gamification of Reading – Much of the above wanking about metrics could probably be summarized as a way to make reading a game. The metrics mentioned above readily lend themselves to point scores, social-app-like badges, and leaderboards. I don’t know that this would necessarily be a good thing, but it could make for an intriguing system. There’s an interesting psychology at work in systems like this, and I’d be curious to see if someone like Amazon could make reading more addictive. Assuming most people don’t try to abuse the system (though there will always be a cohort that will attempt to exploit stuff like this), it could ultimately lead to beneficial effects for individuals who “play” the game competitively with their friends. Again, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Perhaps the gamification of reading will lead to a sacrifice of comprehension in the name of speed, or other mitigating effects. Still, it would be nice to see the “gamification of everything” used for something other than a way for companies to trick customers into buying their products.

As previously mentioned, the need for improved displays is a given (and not just for ereaders). But assuming these nutty metrics (and the gamification of reading) are an appealing concept, I’d like to think that it would provide an opening for someone to challenge Amazon in the market. An open, flexible device using a non-DRMed format and tied to a common store would be very nice. Throw in some game elements, add a great display, and you’ve got something close to my ideal reader. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’re all that close just yet. Maybe in 5-10 years? Seems possible, but it’s probably more likely that Amazon will continue its dominance.

Disgruntled, Freakish Reflections on ebooks

2 Comments / Arts & Letters, Disgruntled, Freakish Reflections / /

I had this idea for a series of posts when I was just getting started on the blog where I would rant on and on about this or that subject. I even created a category for it! But then, I almost immediately neglected the category. I’m a generally amiable guy, not frequently disgruntled. Maybe freakish though. Anyway, I thought I’d revisit the concept.

So I got a Kindle for Christmas last year and have been reading as many ebooks as possible. I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, but I have some assorted thoughts, some freakish, some disgruntled, and some just plain gruntled.

  • The hardware is reasonably nice. The electronic ink display is perfect for reading. It’s a little heavy, but not much more than a typical mass-market paperback, and about on part with a medium sized trade paperback. That being said, it’s much less awkward to hold, as you don’t have to fight the binding to keep the book open. On the other hand, the touch interface isn’t quite as responsive as I’d like. Not sure if this is due to the E Ink or processor power (or perhaps a bit of both). It takes some getting used to, but it works well enough. On rare occasions I’ll accidentally flip past too many pages quickly, but that doesn’t really happen enough to call it a real issue. All in all, it’s a quality device, and I’m pretty happy with it from a hardware standpoint.
  • The interface is sparing and easy to intuitively use, with the only real exception being the aforementioned lack of responsiveness on the touchscreen, which takes some getting used to. But I do love the ability to search, highlight, and annotate my books (especially non-fiction). For years I’ve wanted to do a “CTRL F” on a book, and now I can do so easily (in the past, Google books was often helpful, though not consistent in this respect).
  • The lack of page numbers. Hoo boy, the lack of page numbers. This is the one that makes me feel like a bit of a curmudgeonly dweeb, but I reallly miss page numbers. Oh sure, half the time I’m converting page numbers to the percentage complete and the concept of one “page” is elastic and arbitrary in the extreme (for example, compare 1 page in Gravity’s Rainbow to 1 page in Harry Potter – ostensibly the same measurement, but thanks to font size, line spacing, and margins, you’d probably have to read 3-4 pages of Harry Potter to equal 1 page of Gravity’s Rainbow, and that’s just from a words on the page perspective, not a literary value or density of ideas perspective), but I like page numbers. I don’t think this really qualifies me as a luddite, but perhaps I am a bit of a crackpot. Still, I really miss page numbers, and the worst part is that on many occasions, the book will have page numbers available, they just aren’t displayed by default. What you get by default is just the percentage complete and the mystical “Location” number which kinda/sorta makes sense, but is still inferior to page numbers. Maybe this is all just a frame of reference thing and I’ll get used to it, but it’s been a few months, and neither Location or Percentage really strike the right cord with me. This is completely a perception thing. I want to feel like I’m making progress and percentage doesn’t increment often enough for that… On the other hand, the location increments too much as you read, making it hard to wrap my head around. All of this would be a moot point if Amazon would just let us modify the interface (for all I know, they do, but it’s not obvious where). I know this is an old argument and I don’t want to start a holy war here, but for crying out loud, it’s obvious that there is a segment of Kindle consumers who fucking hate location and percentage and just want page numbers, why can’t Amazon just let us choose what we want displayed?
  • Amazon sure does make it easy to purchase new books and send them to your Kindle. The issue, of course, is that I’m not locked into Amazon’s proprietary format/store. Other stores are hit and miss as to whether or not they work with the Kindle. Baen books works, and will even email the file to your Kindle for you (which is nice). But Baen books is awesome like that (leave it to the hardcore SF publisher to embrace open formats and systems – the grand majority of Bujold’s library is available for free online, but I bought from their store anyway, because I want to support them and Bujold). Google’s new bookstore doesn’t work with Kindle, nor does Barnes & Noble. So far, this hasn’t been a disaster, I just hate the notion of DRM systems and being locked down. At least Amazon seems to have made kindle readers for almost every conceivable device, so there is that. I haven’t played around enough to see how well all these different readers work, etc…
  • For the most part, I don’t really miss having a hard copy of most books. There are definitely books I plan to purchase a physical copy of in the near future (*ahem* at least a couple of these) and I suppose there is a benefit to the physical copy that you don’t get out of a digital copy, but I’m generally a pragmatic guy, and the pros seem to outweigh the cons. Steven Ray Orr makes a pretty good case for physical books, but also seems to be embracing digital copies, like me:

    Each book and every bookshelf is a biography of the owner. If you were to explore mine, a great deal would be revealed. The obvious: science fiction, Stephen King, and political theory dominate my history; and the aesthetic of a collection is more important than strict organization.1 The odd: Twilight sits upon a stack of feminist thought; at least four Bibles line the shelves, amidsts athiest manifestos and Christian scholarship; and there is an Atari 2600 gathering dust and taking up precious space.

    And then the books themselves, holding more than the author’s intended words with stories added by each reader: God Emperor of Dune is dog-earred on every third page; Twilight has been defaced, all red pen and hate; and numerous novels are bookmarked with old receipts or gum wrappers, indications of unsuccessful attempts.

    And it’s true, though I think at least half of my books are squirreled away in boxes in my basement. Still, I really love that my copy of LotR is a box set bought from the Scholastic catalog in gradeschool (and that the paper is yellowing and becoming brittle with age – Jesus, those things are going on 20-25 years old now…) and I like having some reference books and whatnot available, not to mention books from my favorite authors. Like Steven says, your books say a lot about you… and we all know it. I don’t think I consciously rearrange my shelves to make me seem like someone I’m not, but if I don’t like a book, chances are I’m not going to want to see it often and it will thus be banished to the boxes in the basement. But if I do like it, I’ll probably keep it visible.

    I haven’t gotten to a point where I’ve started buying physical books that I’ve read digitally, but apparently this happens somewhat frequently. It’s what Eric S. Raymond calls an Identity Good:

    An identity good is something people buy to express their tie to a group or category they belong to or would like to belong to. People buy The New Hacker’s Dictionary because they are, or want to be, the kind of person they think should own a copy of it.

    Interestingly, Eric is writing about how posting free copies of his books online has helped his physical book sales… in part because he tends to write books that people want to be identified with.

    I would go so far as to predict that any book (or movie, or CD) that functions as an identity good will tend to sell more rather than less after Web exposure. All three of my in-print books happen to be identity goods rather strongly, for slightly different but overlapping populations.

    Now, I do find this interesting, because I’m probably more willing to try something out that goes against my grain in a digital version. Is that because it’s then not sitting on my shelf? Maybe, and maybe the lack of physicality makes it seem like less of an investment. I’ll have to pay attention to this going forward…

  • The selection of books available on Kindle seems reasonable until you start to get obscure… and unfortunately, the obscure stuff is what I really want to get after. Some classics in various specialized fields have made their way to Kindle versions (The Mythical Man Month and Peopleware are two great, long out-of-print examples), and that’s wonderful. But there are tons of things I want to read that are out of print but unavailable on Kindle. I know that there is some work involved in digitizing books, but it’s not a huge effort – tons of folks have undertaken projects like this will plenty of success. And this is before you even get to the dumb slap-fights that Amazon is constantly getting into with the publishers. This isn’t meant to come down on one side of the issue, because everyone is to blame here, and at this point, I feel like the publishers are being a little too cagey for their own good. Especially now that you get all these rather odd situations in which the ebook costs more than the actual book itself. How does that work? It’s a naked money grab, and everyone knows it. Of course, publishers should be able to set their prices to what they want, but it’s patently absurd to claim that the exact same content somehow possesses more value when it’s published with little to no overhead (i.e. no materials, printing, etc… neeeded). Publishers make a lot more money on an ebook version, even when it’s cheaper than a paperback (and notably, most of the time, that extra profit is not making its way to the author). Most of the time, the books are priced reasonably (or at least cheaper than the print versions), but maybe publishers should be a little less money-grubbing. Again, it’s not like readers are entitled to cheaper prices on everything all the time, but that is part of the promise of digital books in the first place. It just makes no sense that an ebook would ever cost more than a physical copy (unless we’re talking about a used copy or something)… This is one issue in which I tend to agree with Nicholas Carr on, and he has some interesting ideas about the ideal consumer need:

    Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right – in tune with the universe, somehow.

    There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand – so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip.

    It’s a well thought out argument and I’d love it if that was ever implemented, but I’m not holding my breath either. It’s too much of a cash cow for publishers, who are probably struggling these days (another reason to perhaps not be too upset at ebook pricing) and won’t see the consumer delight in getting booth a physical and electronic book in a single purchase as being enough of a benefit for them…

And that about covers my initial thoughts on the subject. I guess there’s a fair share of disgruntlement above, and that is honest and true, but I also really do enjoy reading ebooks. I expect a fair amount of my reading will proceed on ebooks. If they’re available. Grumble, grumble.

Upcoming Books

Arts & Letters, Science Fiction / /

Because my book queue is not long enough*, it seems some of my favorite SF authors are releasing new novels in 2012. Yay**. Here are the most exciting ones, in order of anticipated publication:

  • The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel by Stephen King (4/24/12)- I just found out about this one… Apparently Stephen King is returning to his Dark Tower series and doing another quasi-prequel… actually ,it’s a sorta sequel to the oddly placed yet strangely compelling Wizard and Glass, a novel I now consider one of my favorites in the series. That book sorta told the origin story of Roland the Gunslinger, and this one sorta continues his early adventures. Stephen King has never been one of my favorite authors, but I’m on board for this one…
  • The Mongoliad: Book One (The Foreworld Saga) by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and others (4/24/12) – I’ve written about this experiment before, and to be sure, most of this content is already available, as it was serialized via custom apps on various mobile devices, but they’re now collecting the first completed story in a paperback… I played around with the iPhone app, but never purchased a “subscription” as the concept of serialized books does not really appeal to me (heck, I’m the guy that doesn’t catch up with TV series until the season is over), but I’d like to check out a completed story.
  • Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi (6/5/12) – I have to admit that I find the title of this sorta kitschy, but I always find myself entertained by Scalzi, and it’s not like this is an actual Star Trek novel or anything. I’m holding out hope that he’ll be able to bring something unique to the tired old red-shirt cliche.
  • Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson (8/7/12) – I have no idea what these “Remarks” are going to be, but I’m guessing this will end up being a collection of previously published writing (like his awesome, long, rambling essays in Wired). I’m hoping that it will contain at least some new stuff though. Of course, I’d love another epic essay like In the Beginning…was the Command Line, but I’m not actually expecting that…
  • Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (11/6/12) – I’ve only got one book left in Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga and was prepping for withdrawal pains, so this book will be perfectly timed to keep me addicted… Still, I’m very much looking forward to this novel, a spin-off featuring Ivan Vorpatril, one of the long-running side-characters of the series. I’m actually pretty excited about this book and I’m hoping Bujold will continue to play in the SF space in the future…

And that covers the big books I’m most excited about this year. Of course, there’s bound to be others that I’m missing, and the queue is constantly growing, but the above will probably keep me busy for a while.

* Sarcasm!

** Not sarcasm!

SF Book Review, Part 10: The One That Includes Fantasy

Science Fiction / /

While I’ve done my fair share of Science Fiction reading over the past few years, Fantasy has been relatively absent… I don’t really have much against Fantasy or anything, I just tend to prefer Science Fiction, which tends to be more grounded. That being said, I’ve recently mixed a few fantasy books into my schedule, including some longtime residents of the queue, and I think you can expect to see a little more fantasy appearing soon as well…

  • Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury – Hard to believe this is the first Bradbury I’ve ever read. I actually picked this up a while ago, reading it during Halloween season last year (after being reminded/shamed into it while posting about NPR’s top 100 SF/F books). For the most part, I enjoyed this book, and there are some really tense sequences (I particularly loved the chase scene in the library), but I ultimately found the book a bit lacking. I can see why it’s beloved, and there are certainly some great characters (the Illustrated Man is a wonderful villain) and eery overtones – carnivals are naturally scare places – but it didn’t quite connect with me the way other classics of science fiction or fantasy have in the past. This is partly due to Bradbury’s style, which I found a bit stilted, but it’s probably more due to the fantastical nature of the plot. I wonder if I’d have liked this better if I read it when I was younger. I’m glad to have read it, and I enjoyed it well enough, but I was never blown away by it.
  • Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville – Ah, finally. This book has been on my book queue (and indeed, even on my shelf) for several years (I first mentioned it on the blog in 2009, but I’d already had it for at least a year at that point). So what’s the deal with this thing? Miéville is one of the primary examples of The New Weird, a literary subgenre harkening back to the Weird fiction of yore, exemplified by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft. The notion of “Weird” being distinct from horror or fantasy is mostly due to the fact that a lot of that stuff was written before genre fiction achieved such a strict taxonomy. The “new” weird probably fits into that line too. There are elements of fantasy, horror, and even a little science fiction here, though I will say that the SF elements are little more than window dressing. Our main character, Isaac, is ostensibly a “scientist”, but Miéville’s conception of what a scientist does is… not very vigorous. For instance, Isaac’s main breakthrough in the world of science? Crisis energy… a vague form of power derived by… placing things in danger? It’s unclear, and it’s ridiculous. Fortunately, Miéville’s got a lot more going for him than against him. He’s created a wonderfully detailed setting (though I will say he tends to go overboard in his verbose descriptions of such) and some evocative, fun characters. I was a particularly big fan of the Weaver, a sorta multi-dimensional being that takes the form of a spider, regards the universe as a work of art, and speaks in an unending stream of consciousness and free verse poetry. The villains of the piece, called slake-moths (which are huge, monstrous beasts with hypnotic powers and an appetite for consciousness), are also compelling. Lots of other interesting ideas populate the world, like the Construct Council and countless other races of beings. Again, I think Miéville gets a little carried away in his description of the world, and this wankery can get a bit tiresome at times, but it’s a dense setting and I’d hope that future installments would perhaps be a little less exposition-heavy. Also, the main character of Isaac is a bit of a sad-sack, and while Miéville sets the stakes very high and manages to come up with a solid solution, there is a bit of an (intentional) downer ending. I’d call this a very good book, though it doesn’t quite strike all of my chords. There are things I love about it, and things I don’t particularly care for. Miéville has written a number of books set in this universe, and it may be something I return to at some point, but I can’t say as though I’m rushing to do so at this point.
  • The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi – This debut novel from Finnish author (and string theorist) Hannu Rajaniemi has garnered a lot of praise, and it is indeed crammed with a lot of interesting ideas. I’m not entirely sure they all coalesce into a great narrative, but then, this is also apparently the first in a trilogy (*groan*). Unlike every other book in this post, and indeed, most of my SF book posts, this book is the hardest of hard SF. Not quite Greg Egan hard SF, but close. Rajaniemi thrusts you into this unfamiliar world with no real hand-holding, forcing you to infer a lot of the concepts and ideas from minimal exposure. Most of the characters are of the post-human sort, digital beings stuck in human body shaped shells, sometimes more machine than biological. Complex interrelationships and privacy controls, augmented reality, brain-machine interfaces and the like. If you’ve read other stories along these lines, you may be comfortable, but the casual reader of SF might be a bit overwhelmed. I came down somewhere in the middle of that mixture. I was never totally lost, but I wasn’t particularly comfortable with everything either. The story itself is a little obtuse. Our main character is Jean le Flambeur (John the Gambler?), an infamous thief playing the traditional role of a trickster. He’s reasonably likeable, though he isn’t given a ton of space to shine. As the book opens, his mind is imprisoned in a weird state where it is forced to play endless variations of the prisoner’s dilemma against copies of itself and millions of others. One copy of himself is freed by a woman named Mieli, who seeks his criminal expertise. Her motivations are vague, as is her plan. There is a bit of a heist involved here, but it is again rather obtuse and difficult to piece together exactly what Mieli (or rather, the person pulling her strings) is after. There’s also a detective named Isidore Beautrelet, who is trying to piece it all together, and then there’s the tzaddik, a sorta vigilante group that is nevertheless tolerated by the authorities. The story takes place on Mars, where society has attempted to limit the endless copying of minds by instituting radical control over your personal technology stack, including even your appearance. It’s all very complicated and very interesting. Again, much of this is inferred during the course of events, and things can get a little dicey as you figure them out. Like I said, it never fully coalesced for me, but I still found it interesting enough, and I’d be curious how the sequels will read now that I’m familiar with the various concepts…
  • The Witch Watch, by Shamus Young – I’ve already mentioned this a few times on the blog, and I suppose it’s impossible for me to be unbiased as I’ve been… internet friends?… with Shamus for a while now, but I had a ton of fun with this book. Oddly, it doesn’t seem like it would be my kinda book. It’s a fantasy set in the Victorian era of England, with a little steampunk thrown in for good measure. The main character of Gilbert is a sorta zombie who doesn’t really remember how he died (though he still retains his wits). Most of these elements are not really in my wheelhouse, and yet Shamus is able to ground everything in enough reality that it all works much better than I would have expected (I will say that I bought the book without knowing anything about the plot or characters or anything). Shamus is a programmer, and so even the fantastical elements of his story operate with a certain logic and internal consistency. For instance, I often find the way magic is portrayed in fantasy as a major problem. It’s often used and abused, with little or no limitations, leading to an improbable escalation of powers that quickly grates on me. But in this novel, magic is limited by both social and natural forces. First, magic is feared and abhorred by nearly everyone. It is controlled by two main forces: the “Church” and the titular “Witch Watch” (a sorta magic-specific British detective agency). The Church is absurdly ignorant in its treatment of the problem, simply killing those it suspects of magic, with no due process. The Witch Watch take a more balanced approach, preferring to actually study what makes magic work. These social limitations on magic make for a nice buffer, and they allow Shamus to avoid getting into too many details with how magic actually works. But when he does, it’s still interesting and well considered. There are physical limitations on magic as well. There are some spells that can be cast without much preparation, but they take a great deal of energy out of the person casting the spell. So you can conjure up a big fireball, but after you do so, you’ll be pretty tired (and unable to continue). Of course, limitations are a great literary tool, as there are always ways to get around them, and that sort of contortion is always entertaining. Now, the book isn’t perfect. In particular, I found the flashbacks and epistolary sections a little distracting. Some of them serve a good purpose, though I’m not sure they required quite as prominent a placement as they received… But that is a minor problem in an otherwise entertaining and tight story. The characters are quite likeable and have a nice chemistry together. Shamus’ dry wit is in evidence here, especially when Gilbert and Alice get to trading barbs, and the book is quite easy to read. Give it a shot, if it sounds like your thing…
  • The Tale of the Wicked, by John Scalzi – Ok, so this is a bit of a cheat, as this is a short story I read in a single (short) sitting, but it was a fun space opera tale and a nice precursor to Scalzi’s forthcoming Redshirts novel. The story has to do with an AI unit stretching beyond it’s normal capabilities and is a little reminiscent of those great, paranoid old SF movies like Colossus: The Forbin Project or Demon Seed (though things never quite run as amok in Scalzi’s tale). Still, it’s a fun little story. Only available online in kindle format, it’s still just 99 cents, and was one of those impulse purchases Amazon makes so easy…

So there you have it. Next up on the reviewing front will probably be finishing off the Vorkosigan saga… I’m trying to delay that as long as possible (only 1.5 books left!), so it may be a bit, but I’m sure I won’t be able to resist (also, apparently a new one is coming in November)…

Tasting Notes – Part 5

Arts & Letters, Beer, Movies, Video Games / /

Yet another edition of Tasting Notes, a series of quick hits on a variety of topics that don’t really warrant a full post. So here’s what I’ve been watching/playing/reading/drinking lately:

Television

  • Fringe – I posted about the first couple seasons a while ago, but I’ve recently caught up with Season 3 and most of Season 4. To my mind, the show really came into its own in Season 3. What started out as unfocused and aimless has very slowly evolved into a tight, well-plotted series in season 3. I’m not sure I’d call it great, but Season 3 was a lot of fun. There are some ridiculous things about the series as a whole, and that’s still there, but it all seemed to be worked out in the third season. Season 4, on the other hand, seems to have taken a few steps backward. It’s actually very disorienting. Everything from the first three seasons is now unclear and less important. This was probably their intention, but I’m not entirely sure I like it. I mean, we’ve spent three seasons getting to know these characters, and now we’re in yet another alternate universe with the same characters, but they’re all slightly different. I’m not ready to give up on the show or anything, but it seems like the show is back on its unfocused track…
  • Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: Terriers – This is an interesting series. It was cancelled after the first season… and while I can see why (the film is almost incessantly anti-mainstream, often finishing off episodes on a down note), I did still enjoy watching the series.

Movies

  • The Secret World of Arrietty – Solid Studio Ghibli film. Not perfect, but well worth a watch and very different than typical American animated fare. Here’s my question – what’s with the title? It’s so weird and unapproachable, whereas the source material, a book called The Borrowers, seems much more appropriate and marketable. This just makes no sense to me. (I suppose one could also quibble about the term “borrowers” since that implies that the goods will be returned, which doesn’t happen either. There’s actually an interesting discussion to be had here about what constitutes theft/stealing in the world set up in this book/movie.)
  • Act of Valor – A very… strange movie. I don’t quite know what to make of this. It stars actual, active-duty Navy SEALs and… they are clearly not actors. Any scenes with dialogue are a little on the painful side, and it doesn’t help that they keep talking about their families and how they can’t wait to get back to their family and isn’t being a father great? I’d give a spoiler warning for what happens here, but it’s pretty damn obvious from, oh, the first 5 minutes in the movie what’s going to happen at the end. All that being said, the action sequences are very well done and seemingly authentic, though there are a number of scenes shot to resemble a FPS video game. For the first time ever, I think it actually works in this movie, though it’s still a little strange to see movies and video games blending together like that.
  • Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: Gambit – Classic heist film starring a very young Michael Caine as a burglar who hires Shirley MacLaine to help rob one of the richest men in the world. Caine’s got a great plan, but of course, things rarely go as planned. Or does it? Tons of twists and turns in this one; very entertaining and satisfying. Highly recommended. (Update: Well, shit, Netflix apparently took it off Instant Streaming… and they don’t even have a DVD for the thing. It is on Amazon Instant though…)

Video Games

  • Shadow of the Colossus – I finished Ico a while ago and I loved it. I’ve since moved on to the other Team Ico game, Shadow of the Colossus. I’ve actually played this before, but I never finished it. The HD remix that’s available on the PS3 now is actually quite nice, though the game still seems a bit stunted to me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got great production design and an interesting structure (basically 16 boss fights and that’s it), but some of the puzzles (i.e. how to defeat each Colossus) are a bit too obtuse, and once you figure them out, it can still be a huge pain to actually defeat your opponent. It just seems like sometimes the game is giving you busy-work just for the sake of doing so… That being said, I’m determined to actually finish the game off, and I am kinda looking forward to the next Team Ico game, which should be coming out sometime this year.
  • Upcoming Video Gamery: Mass Effect 3 came in the mail this week, and I’m greatly looking forward to it. It took me a while to get into part 2, but once I got there, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m a little intrigued by the fact that my character/team from the second game can be transferred to this third game. Not sure how dynamic that makes things, but I guess we’ll find out.
  • Other Video Gamery: I’ve played a little Soul Calibur V, and fighting games remain inscrutable for me. I can get some of the basics down, but once I get into the more advanced maneuvers/enemies, I fall apart pretty quickly, and the game doesn’t seem to do a very good job teaching you the more advanced aspects of combat. At this point, I have more fun creating custom characters than actually fighting. I also got a copy of Resistance 3, which is just another FPS with aliens and guns and big explosions and stuff. What can I say, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

Books

  • Of the eleven books posted in my last Book Queue, I’ve read 5. I’ve only got two books left in Lois McMaster Bujold’s excellent Vorkosigan Saga, and I’ve posted about some of the other books I’ve read.
  • I’m currently finishing off Shamus Young’s Witch Watch, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
  • I may end up finishing off the Vorkosigan books next, but I’m also quite looking forward to famous security wonk Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars & Outliers. It promises to be informative and level-headed look at “trust” from a security professional’s standpoint.

The Finer Things

  • I’ve had lots of great beer recently, but I’ll just link over to my beer blog rather than repeat myself here. I’ve been updating that blog much more often than I ever thought I would, and it’s been a lot of fun. Check it out!
  • I think I’ll be posting on Sunday about my next Homebrew. I had originally planned to make it an “Earl Grey” beer, but it turns out that food-grade Bergamot oil is somewhat hard to come by (most of what you can find is made for external use). I may still end up getting some flavor from a few teabags of Earl Grey, but it will probably be less prominent than originally planned. Again, more details to come.

And that’s all for now…

Taxonomy Platforms

Arts & Letters, Beer, Movies / /

The human brain is basically a giant correlation machine. Well, ok, that’s a drastic simplification, but I’ve often written about how correlation and induction play an important role in life. This is a large subject, but today I want to focus on one result of our predilection towards correlation: our tendency to develop complex taxonomies. For books and movies, we’ve got genres. For beer, we’ve got style. Retail stores have departments. You name it, chances are that there’s a complex taxonomy describing variations (you’ll notice that this post tends to consist of examples from my obsessions with movies, beer and technology, but this would all be relevant to a wide variety of subjects).

This tendency invariably leads to nerdy arguments about specific examples and where they fall within the taxonomy. Is Inglourious Basterds Science Fiction? Are comic book movies science fiction? Should we make a distinction between science fiction and science fantasy? What exactly constitutes a West Coast IPA? What do we call Black IPAs? What are the defining characteristics of a Weblog? What are some examples of the Hillbilly Horror genre? Take a trip down TV Tropes lane, and you’re guaranteed to find a comprehensive list of genres, sub-genres, and myriad conventions or cliches.

Why go to all this trouble to categorize everything? What is it about the internet that seems to magnify these discussions?

Well, the most obvious reason for such excessive categorization is that it will communicate something about the particular instance being discussed. Categorizing movies into various genres helps us determine what we’re in for when we sit down to watch a movie. Style guidelines communicate what kinds of characteristics to expect from a beer. Genres and styles provide a common ground for both creators and critics, and the reduce the pool of possibilities to a more manageable number.

Those are good things1, but they’re really only scratching the surface of why we taxonomize. Most people get frustrated by taxonomies. It seems that every genre, every style, is inadequate, especially when their favorite instance is pigeonholed into a particular category. Hence, we get the aforementioned nerdy debates on the nature of science fiction or west coast IPAs. Genres and styles are blurry along the edges, and there’s a great deal of overlap. Individual works often fit into many categories. If one were so inclined, they could make each category excessively inclusive or moderately narrow, but worrying about the blurry edges of taxonomy is kinda missing the point. In the parlance of hackers, the blurry edges of taxonomy are a feature, not a bug.

I’ve been reading Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, and he makes a fascinating observation that genres are the stacked platforms of the creative world:

For understandable reasons, we like to talk about artistic innovations in terms of the way that they break the rules, open up new doors in the adjacent possible that lesser minds never even see. But genius requires genres. Flaubert and Joyce needed the genre of the bildungsroman to contort and undermine in Sentimental Education and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dylan needed the conventions of acoustic folk to electrify the world with Highway 61 Revisited. Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them. Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world. They are almost never willed into existence by a single pioneering work. Instead, they fade into view, through a complicated set of shared signals passed between artists, each contributing different elements to the mix.

I love the description of genres fading into view, perhaps because you could say that genres never really come into full clarity. That may frustrate some, but that inherent blurriness is where taxonomies derive power and it’s what allows geniuses to create their most amazing works. And this does not just apply to art. In Brew Like a Monk, Stan Hieronymus relates an anecdote from Michael Jackson (the beer critic, not the pop star):

In one of the many stories he likes to tell about German, English and Belgian brewers, Michael Jackson first asks a German how beer is made. “Pils malt, Czech hops,” the brewer replies. Then Jackson asks the German brewer down the road the same question. “It’s the same as Fritz said. That’s how you make a Pilsener, that’s what we learn in school.”

After getting a different answer from a British brewer, Jackson turns to a Belgian brewer. “First of all, you take one ton of bat’s droppings. Then you add a black witch,” the Belgian answers. “The brewer down the road uses a white witch.” Jackson concludes with the lesson: “Belgium is a nation of tremendous individualists.”

If style guidelines for Bat Dropping Ale stated that color shouldn’t be less than 25 SRM, do you think that would have stopped the brewer down the road from using a white witch? Of course not. Style guidelines don’t limit creativity, lack of imagination does.

As Hieronymus later notes, if we didn’t make “rules,” we wouldn’t know when to break them.

That is the power of taxonomy. It gives us a place to start. It gives us the basic rules and techniques. Defining such conventions may seem limiting, but it’s actually freeing. You have to understand those conventions before you can break them or combine them properly, which can sometimes result in something inspirational and brilliant. Ironically, this seems to happen with such regularity that I’m sure many “innovations” we see today are repeats of previous revolutions. As Johnson notes, genres and style are part of a stacked platform. They’re built on top of even more basic building blocks, notably technology. Technology often recontextualizes existing taxonomies, opening them up to subtly different interpretations. The same innovative idea can be magnified and mutated into something different by technology. It’s very rare that something completely new emerges from history. It’s more likely something that has existed for a long time, but slightly tweaked to match the times. Taxonomies are platforms. They are not limiting. You build things on top of platforms, and that’s why we go to the trouble of categorizing everything we can.

1 – Nerdy fury on the internets is one thing, but for the most part this isn’t really controversial stuff. However, once you start placing taxonomies on human beings, things get a little more complicated. If one were so inclined, an interesting discussion on the nature of prejudice as it relates to the human penchant for correlation could yield interesting insights. Unfortunately, this is not a post for that more weighty (and controversial) subject.Enhanced by Zemanta

SF Book Review, Part 9: Mistressworks Edition

Science Fiction / /

So last year, someone noticed that the SF Masterworks, a series of books highlighting the classic science fiction novels, was somewhat lacking in female author representation. I’m not a big fan of identity politics and I don’t want to take this post in that direction, but one of the good things that came out of the whole meme was a site highlighting people’s favorite SF books by female authors called SF Mistressworks. I’m always on the lookout for interesting SF, so I picked a few books from their list and added a few of my own, and so here are the last five female-authored books I’ve read:

  • A Matter of Oaths, by Helen S. Wright – In the distant future, humans have spread out into space, establishing two major empires and a Guild of Webbers that run the spaceships and thus control travel and trade between the two empires. Rafe is a talented Webber (basically someone who can interface with the computers who run spaceships) who is suffering from amnesia… but this isn’t just a cliche, it’s actually an indication that Rafe is an “oath-breaker”, basically someone who has betreayed his respective empire and had their memory wiped as punishment. But, as it turns out, Rafe is more important than anyone realizes, and the two empires fight to retain him. His new crew gets caught in the middle of the fight. Wright has crafted a surprisingly dense universe here and populated it with traditional SF competent men and women that are generally a likable bunch. The worldbuilding is done mostly in the background – you pick things up as you go, rather than wading through long chapters of exposition. Sure, there are some info-dumps, but you have to put a lot of things together for yourself as well, and Wright strikes a good balance. The story itself isn’t really exceptional, but it’s a well executed space opera and well worth reading (unless you’re a homophobe, in which case you’ll be freaked out by some of the relationships in the book). The ending does feature a deus ex machina, but it fits well enough with the story, and Wright manages to wring enough suspense out of the finale. It’s not really in print anymore, but you can pick up a used copy on Amazon for a penny (alas, no kindle version either). As far as I can tell, this was Wright’s only fiction novel, which is a shame, as I’d certainly be interested in more from her…
  • Polar City Blues, by Katharine Kerr – Basically a traditional murder/mystery thriller story with a science fictional setting. Some of this setting doesn’t really work for me. Kerr’s characters all speak in a weirdly constructed version of English (for instance, a character will say something like “I no get it” instead of “I don’t get it”) that only really serves to be distracting without providing any real depth or flavor to the story. Fortunately, Kerr has crafted a complex, twisty little mystery for us, so I can give the linguistic stuff a pass. Polar City Police Chief Al Bates has a nasty problem brewing, with a psyionic killer on the loose and a trail of dead bodies in his wake. He teams up with connected smuggler Bobbie Lacey to investigate and quickly becomes enmeshed in a complicated tale of assassination, mysterious alien artifacts, and a new, unknown disease spreading throughout the city. Solidly constructed mystery with some added flavor from the science fictional elements and some neat role reversal in the book’s romantic subplot. It took a bit to get going for me, but I ended up enjoying this enough to recommend it. Unfortunately, this is another book that’s currently out of print, but again, Amazon has lots of cheap used copies. Kerr is probably more known for her Fantasy works, but this was an interesting effort.
  • Foreigner, by C. J. Cherryh – My least favorite book in this post, I found this one a bit of a slog. It starts off promisingly enough. Twice, even. But the two thrilling prologues prove to be a tease. After those exciting false starts, the story proper almost immediately bogs down. Lots of repetitive whining and miscommunication for the sake of plot (which isn’t very complicated, but it’s played that way due to the fact that everyone only says cryptic things). A user on Goodreads hit the nail on the head with his “brief fantasia that illustrates” Cherryh’s style in this book:

    Bren was extremely worried about the assassination attempt and was quite annoyed that his freedom of movement had been compromised. A worrisome Bren couldn’t believe he had to suffer an escort everywhere! “I really am awfully worried that I can’t phone home”, said Bren, as he huffily realized that his ability to buy canned meat alone was no longer possible. “This really bothers me, I can’t even leave my apartment without an escort!” notes Bren, as he paces his apartment in frustration. It was driving him crazy with annoyance and worry that not only had an assassin tried to kill him, now he couldn’t travel alone anymore. He could not leave his apartment alone. After all, an assassin had just attempted to murder him. An actual assassin! Trying to murder him! It was all so worrisome. And as if the assassination attempt wasn’t enough, now he couldn’t even leave his apartment unaccompanied. “This is really very annoying and I feel awfully compromised, so much so that I am genuinely worried,” reflected Bren.

    Which is all well and good, but the book goes on like this for a solid 200-300 pages of nothing but Bren’s whining incompetence. Things pick up towards the end of the novel, and Cherryh can craft some exciting sequences when she wants to, but she seems more interested in detailing the confusion of alien communication or politics. Which, again, would be fine, except that it’s astoundingly repetitive and boring. And I’m a guy that’s normally fascinated by this sort of thing, but Cherryh seems determined to stamp out anything interesting in the premise. Perhaps if any of her characters were likable or interesting in any way? Maybe if they didn’t spend all their time petulantly whining about their lot in life? Which is all rather weird, since Cherryh certainly has a way with words. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to have directed them towards any real purpose. A most frustrating novel. This is apparently the first in a long series of popular novels, and from what I gather, they’re better than this book, which does set up the setting which is actually rather well thought out. Unfortunately, Cherryh explores this by way of long sequences of exposition and info-dumps that don’t ever really seem relevant and are always interspersed with whining. I guess I just hate books where people whine a lot. It’s fine to whine for a while – Lois Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan frequently gets depressed or whiny – but you can’t make that the entire focus of the book. Miles always parlays his whining into action and usually success, which makes for a good story arc. The characters in Cherryh’s book just whine and whine, interesting things happen to them, then the story ends. Most disappointing.

  • The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins – I got a Kindle for Christmas and wanted to read something, and this book was free to download, so I figured I’d check out what all the fuss is about. I have to admit that the premise held little interest for me. Not only is it quite derivative (see Battle Royale, The Running Man, and a few other stories with similar premises), but it’s also set in something of a dystopia, which never excites me (and for the record, that’s my least favorite part of the other stories of this nature as well). Indeed, the worldbuilding here is distinctly lackluster. The whole purpose of “The Hunger Games” themselves makes no real sense to me, nor does the structure of the setting. On the other hand, the plot is reasonably well executed and rockets along at a fast pace. Once you get into the actual battle, the setting ceases to matter all that much, and you get a thrilling tale of survival and cat-and-mouse stalking. The action is well staged and executed, and I found myself reading at a rather fast pace. There’s a sorta romantic subplot, though it’s never really clear if it was just a ploy or not (I predict Katniss will develop a nasty case of trust issues in the sequels). It’s ultimately a fun book, though I didn’t find much depth here. I was kinda “meh” about this book in the end, and while I don’t really have any desire to read the sequels, I’ll probably watch the movies. I will say that I read it in 3 sittings, so it’s certainly not a difficult book to get through, I just had a lot of nagging questions that bothered me about the book.
  • Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold – Of course, there has to be some Bujold on the list, and this one is the ninth book in the long running Vorkosigan Saga. This installment is notable in that it’s the longest of the books I’ve read yet (clocking in at a solid 560 pages) and it’s told mostly from the perspective of a character other than Miles Vorkosigan. I won’t say who, as it’s a bit of a spoiler for the series as a whole, but this new character starts off the book as a pretty unlikeable guy. He’s even whiny. And he screws lots of things up towards the beginning of the book. But his heart’s in the right place, and unlike the characters in Foreigner, our protagonist here actually has an arc in this book, eventually even redeeming himself (reading Mirror Dance and Foreigner back-to-back really puts the latter’s issues in specific relief). I have to admit that I was surprised by a number of plot twists throughout the novel, and while the absence of Miles was a bit grating at first, I quickly became intrigued by the story as it progressed. Bujold seems to do this in a lot of her books. I often find myself thinking This can’t be right!? The story shouldn’t be going this way!, only to be consumed by what follows. I don’t know how she does it, but Bujold sure can craft a wonderful story. As the series progresses, she’s managed to make excellent use of her universe and supporting cast, which is large and diverse. You’re always happy to see certain characters pop up, and after 8 books, Bujold has a lot of background to draw from. The story of this book has to do with a botched rescue of clones, though things quickly escalate (into spoiler territory). It’s a great book, maybe in the top tier of the series, though I’d worry about reading this without the background from the previous books. At the very least, you’d have to read Brothers in Arms before this one (a lot of the books in this series have a sorta companion book, making it a series of pairs – a subject for another post, perhaps). I’ve already read the next few books in the series and with only two or so books left, I’m dreading the hole it will leave in my reading schedule…

And there you have it. I’ll probably need to do some non-SF book reviews coming up, but the SF always returns. I may end up finishing off the Vorkosigan Saga in the near future anyway…

The Book Queue, 2012 Edition

Arts & Letters, Lists, Science Fiction / /

The last list I posted, back in July 2011, had 15 books on it. I’ve made some excellent process, clearing out almost all of the “Holdovers” from previous lists, including some books that have been sitting on my shelf for literally years. The one remainder from that list is Godel, Escher, Bach, which I chose not to read due to its length (not sure if I’ll tackle it this year either, but it will remain in the queue until I do!) I’ve actually read several books that weren’t even in the queue, but I think it’s time to regroup and look ahead to what I’ll be reading in 2012. The first few books here are holdovers from the previous list, which I didn’t read for various reasons.

  • Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter: Again, not sure I want to tackle this one right away, as it’s quite the lengthy tome. And it’s not super easy reading either – it’s dense, complex stuff. I’ve actually read the first chapter or so before, and I’m virtually certain I’ll enjoy the book a great deal, but I’ve got a ton of other stuff I’d like to get through first.
  • Komarr, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity, and Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujuld – These are the last 4 books in Bujold’s long running Vorkosigan Saga, a series I cracked open last year, plowing through the first 10 installments. I’m told that these next few books are some of the most fun in the series, so I’m already looking forward to them (and dreading that I won’t be able to fall back on reading Vorkosigan novels)
  • The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge: I still want to read this (a continuation of Vinge’s loosely linked Zones of Thought books), but initial reviews of this book seem to indicate that it ends on a cliffhanger and that another novel is forthcoming. I thus won’t be reading this until I know more about when the presumed conclusion to the story will be available…
  • The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi: I actually ordered this last year, but for some strange reason, Amazon could not fulfill the order (it had something to do with my ordering of the paperback version, which is apparently nonstandard or something). I do still want to read it though (it’s appaently a SF heist story, which seems right up my alley), and now that I have a Kindle, I can probably get to this whenever I want…
  • Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale: The first in a series of crime novels by Lansdale, whom you may know from his work on Bubba Ho-Tep (a book/movie where a black JFK and an old Elvis fight a mummy in a modern-day Texas retirement home). I just never got to this last year, but I don’t see myself delaying anytime soon.
  • Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson: I really enjoyed Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, but I’ve never read any of his other stuff… until now. Or until I read this one, which is already sitting on my shelf.
  • Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris – I gave this biography of Theodore Roosevelt to my uncle as a gift a while ago, and he though I’d like it too, so now it’s in the queue. The biography apparently begins with Roosevelt’s taking office (i.e. no getting bogged down with his childhood and upraising, it just goes straight to the action). It is a long book with small type and everything, but it’s probably something I’ll get through this year.
  • Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh – I’ve actually started reading this one already, so you can see that this book queue works in mysterious ways and that I certainly won’t be reading this stuff in order. In any case, this is apparently the first in another long-running series about humans first encounter with aliens. So far, it’s quite good, though I’m a little discombobulated by how the narrative keeps jumping ahead. From what I can tell, the series gets much better as it goes…

So there’s 11 books I want to read this year. My goal is to do just as good as the 30 I read last year, if not improve on that a little. I also got a Kindle for Christmas, which means I could maybe do more reading on the go. Or not. We’ll see. I’m going to be keeping track of progress on GoodReads, so feel free to follow along or friend me or whatever.