Walking on the Moon

I recently read Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth for the first time.  This is the first time I’ve read it in prose, from a Dover Thrift edition on Google Play.  It claims to be unabridged, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the edition it’s reprinting were abridged.  It feels short-winded  compared to the version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea I read a few years ago.  I also read a Classics Illustrated adaptation years and years ago that I recollected as I went along.

For me, reading Verne is to get a glimpse at the beginnings of hard SF.  I feel like I getting an excellent lesson in the science of the day sweetened with an adventure story.  As an older reader who loves science, history, and writing that sweetener is hardly necessary, but much appreciated.  I appreciate the story from the perspective of seeing the craft with which the science and story are woven, not because of breathless anticipation of the resolution.

Surveying the science is rewarding as well.  Most of Journey is showing off the state of paleontology.  It’s very interesting to see what’s stood the test of time there and what hasn’t.  I also appreciate the extent to which Verne shows how this is a field of argumentation from limited evidence.  There are only so many fossils and the hunters get prestige out of both the finds and the theories.  Verne’s protagonists are active participants in those arguments and reap the practical benefits of success in them.  That’s as important to understanding scientific progress as the dry descriptions of the scientific method are.  That’s a great bit of medicine to wash down with a two-fisted adventure story.

Recommended, if a bit dry and tame to modern ears.

I have been trying to reconnect with major league baseball (MLB)for a while.  Baseball is  my kind of spectator sport.  It’s essentially an excuse to sit in the stands and have a few beverages and jaw about the game.  That game is paced to encourage speculation about strategy, rumination on the history, and statistical analysis of any aspect of it.  Perfect for me.

Lately, though, I’ve been noticing that there’s lots of little stuff that’s just understood about the game that I missed out on as a casual fan.  I’ve been looking for a primer that I can use to fill some of those gaps.  Something like David Benjamin’s The Joy of Sumo, but for baseball.  Zack Hample’s Watching Baseball Smarter is a cut at it.

Hample’s a hardcore fan who comes at the game from interesting angles.  He’s also published a blog and book about the best ways to freely acquire baseballs used in games.  For example, those works describe the best places and techniques for catching foul balls (I think).  He’s not just a collector, though; he’s a student of the game and enthusiast.

The good thing about Smarter is that it covers a lot of ground without getting too deep into any one thing.  That’s its limitation as well.  Hample writes intelligently about everything from the basics of fielding and positions to the statistics fans quote most often.  The stats description shows how the depth is set.  Baseball is undergoing a revolution as amateur and professional analysts are mining MLB’s vast troves of data looking to understand and predict the game better.  Smarter recognizes this without attempting to lead the fan/reader too deep into that area.  I came away with a clear impression that there’s more to know and a good description of the most commonly used stats (as in the ones an announcer would mention).

Of course, the broad coverage means that there are areas one would like to know more about that get short shrift.  I expect that there are areas I want to delve into that were completely unmentioned.  I don’t think of that as a terrible shortcoming. I came in with knowledge and ideas of what I want to know more about.  More importantly, Hample’s focuses largely match my own.  Overall I both enjoyed Smarter and learned some things.

Recommended.

There are people who will assert that Mary Sue characters are solely the product of female writers.  These people have never read a Stainless Steel Rat novel.  Harry Harrison’s Slippery Jim DiGriz only fails to fit the bill by being older.

I hadn’t read a Stainless Steel Rat novel since I was in high school, but I remembered them rather warmly. I did remember that I stopped reading them after a few because they had become formulaic. I was right.  Even with a couple decades of time off, the formula is pretty easy to spot.

It’s a shame that Harrison’s execution leaves me so cold.  There are a few fun ideas running around in here, including the basis of the series.  The idea is that in the future as authority gets more repressive and effective, criminals must similarly become more ruthless and effective to continue their trade.  The insights that we’ll always have rule-breakers and that evolution improves everything are well taken, as is the To Catch A Thief conceit that some criminals – like DiGriz – will use their skills to help society.

But, like I say, the execution leaves much to be desired.  DiGriz and his family of hyper-competent criminals are never challenged by any of the plot twists.  None of the main characters experiences the slightest self-doubt or concern about taking on a planet of corrupt officials.  No one ever breaks a sweat or really slows down to do anything but compliment DiGriz.  The rest of the family are machines, right down to having no agency.

Worse than simply being lazy writing, it undermines the main premise.  Everyone outside the DiGriz family is so ineffectual that the very idea that society bred a super-criminal is unbelievable.  If these guys are all DiGriz has to go up against, he’d never develop the super-competency that he needs.

There are a couple nice set pieces in here.  DiGriz is an atheist with a code against killing.  Harrison supports those positions simply and clearly, and it’s a welcome change from today’s bloody action heroes.  Still, overall I can’t recommend the Rat.

I hope Daniel Handler made a huge amount of money on those Lemony Snicket books, so he can continue breaking my heart with the projects he publishes under his own name.

Why We Broke Up shares a lot of setup with and many of the merits of The Basic Eight. Both capture and breathe life into the vulnerability and rush of adolescence.  Handler’s recreation of being in love and being in study hall both resound with authenticity.

To its considerable benefit, Why We Broke Up is more intimate and personal than The Basic Eight. Everyone in Why We Broke Up has real depth and motivation.  No one is a symbol or a plot device.  Or just those things.  Everyone has irredeemably bad moments and inexplicably selfless ones.  Everyone has best and worst times, and no one gets away with being words on paper.

Its a deep trifle and a moving read.

Strongly recommended.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is a sprawling, intricate novel constructed of well-crafted parts.   It is literally broken into sections that are broken up further into individual narrative bits – usually a day’s events – that interconnect to form the decades-spanning whole.  The sectioning is clear and explicit. Mitchell seems to be pointing out the parts that make up the whole.  At the same time, the whole is economical and sleek, though it didn’t feel that way as I read it.  It felt like it meandered in places – pleasantly – but on reflection there was no wasted prose.

Each section covers a different age of the world and a character. Most are told from different character’s points of view. Mitchell does an excellent job making each novelette stand on its own.  They all have a strong sense of place and time.  Each seems its own self contained work.  In addition to the strong location and point of view, each is tonally and thematically complete unto itself.  They feel like individual novels, but also link together in terms of plot and larger themes and tones.  It’s an impressive effect, this holographic fractal structure.

Bone Clocks has a significant fantasy component, complete with magic and secret societies that are largely unseen by mortals.Mitchell is such a good writer that these elements often seem unnecessary.  Several times I noticed that I preferred to escape the escapism parts and get back to the characters’ day-to-day lives. One of the characters running away from home and breaking her heart felt more important than the brushes with a secret society that led to. Mitchell’s literary skills are on vivid display there, making the prosaic more engaging than the magical.

The magic is key to the literary power and vice versa, though.  I think Clocks is ultimately more engaging and interesting for its inclusion.

Overall Clocks is a vast clockwork of ideas, passions, and interconnections that is well worth exploring and chewing on over time.

Strongly Recommended.

Tom MacCarthy’s Satin Island is a very beautiful and evocative work.  His prose captures images, ideas, interactions – many powerful moments one encounters in moving through our interconnected world – with clarity and dynamism.  Reading Satin Island is a tour of the time from an engaged guide.

What Satin Island didn’t give me was enough of a structure for those moments to cohere into something that MacCarthy wanted to tell me about.  Of course that undersells the work.  By his selection and juxtaposition of images and incidents, MacCarthy forms a whole.  I’m sure Joyceans will enjoy pulling on threads of subtext to get any message that MacCarthy is sending.

I’m not much of a Joycean.  I do like rich works of literature, but I do prefer a more explicit literary structure around it.  Many of the moments are thought provoking or plain breathtaking, so Island may be worth a trip.  But don’t tell them I sent you.

Reading Michael Faber’s Under the Skin right on the heels of Distraction highlights the range of storytelling in the SF genre.  Distraction is a high velocity romp through big ideas. Under the Skin is an almost meditative exploration of humanity.

Faber (no relation) hangs his exploration on an SF conceit that superficially is more suited for a Twilight Zone episode than a literary novel.  While I intend no disrespect to the Zone, its allegories and allusions are not often subtle.  Under the Skin starts from a premise that is right on the nose and then proceeds to challenge, undermine, and reinforce the themes opened by the trope.

He does this by committing completely to the (ludicrous) premise and constructing a flawed, damaged, unbowed, believable character and putting her through the wringer.  He keeps the action mostly centered on his main character by circumscribing her role using plot twists born of genre convention.  That effectively keeps us inside the head of his perfect outsider as she confronts our world and her own ideas.

The whole narrative hangs on his characterization, and he carries it off completely.

I’m being deliberatively vague about the particular hoary SF in question since there are mild spoilers getting to it.

Recommended.

I found a pointer to Distraction as a political thriller that was good to read in an election year.  I don’t think Distraction fits that bill particularly well – Interface does – but any excuse to read Distraction is a good one.

Distraction benefits from two related strengths of Sterling’s: he sees technical issues and societal trends with unique insight and he expresses his insight precisely and enjoyably. I found Distraction’s plot and characterization to be excuses to move the action from observation to observation and to render them for maximum effect.  That was great as I found the observations well worth the time.  A couple favorites:

You can’t trust abstract mathematics, sir; it always turns out to be practical.

The climate’s in flux now. You can’t shelter whole environments under airtight domes. Only two kinds of plants really thrive in today’s world: genetically altered crops, and really fast-moving weeds. So our world is all bamboo and kudzu now, it has nothing to do with the endangered foxglove lady’s slipper and its precious niche on some forgotten mountain. Politically, we hate admitting this to ourselves, because it means admitting the full extent of our horrible crimes against nature, but that’s ecological reality now. That’s the truth you asked me for. That is reality. Paying tons of money to preserve bits of Humpty Dumpty’s shell is strictly a pious gesture.

Country like France gets along great without science. They just munch some more fine cheese and read more Racine. But you take America without science, you got one giant Nebraska.

These are the kinds of ideas that kept bringing me back to Heinlein, and will keep me reading Sterling.  Distraction is chock full.

Recommended.

Saladin Ahmed is a great follow on twitter.  I’ve been enjoying his wit and insight in 140-character chunks for a while and decided to check out some of his longer writing. He’s been nominated for Hugos and Locus awards, which is encouraging.

Engraved On The Eye is a collection of his short SF works. His work lives up to his reputation quite nicely.  Almost all of his work is informed by his Muslim and Arab background.  When he alludes to conventions and background in those areas, one gets a feeling of authenticity.  Of course I don’t know enough about the customs in question to know if that’s because he knows what he’s talking about intimately or because he’s a confident and persuasive writer.  I don’t much care about the cause when the result is so effective.

While the local color of the works in Engraved is always worthwhile, I found I enjoyed the stories that stretched the genres to be his most interesting.  Again one gets the feeling of a writer who is stronger when he challenges himself and convention.  Several of the earlier pieces are traditional fantasy set in what I would naively call a Middle Eastern tradition.  These are certainly well executed and good fun, but his work is brighter when he’s challenging superheroic tropes or writing about duped cyborgs.

Strongly recommended.

One of the aspects of electronic books that still befuddles me at times is the inability to judge a book by its heft, production quality and other intangibles.  I get the feeling that if I had a physical copy of Steven Ruffin’s Flights of No Return, I would have expected less from it.  It has the definite feel of an overview intended for a student or newbie to an area, in this case the area being aviation crashes.

If I’ve understood its intended audience, the book itself is quite good.  Each short chapter tells the story of an aviation disaster, tragedy or mystery in sufficient detail to give the reader a flavor for the events.  In many cases, the description is compelling enough to whet the appetite to learn more.  That’s the perfect balance in my opinion.

Ruffin selects events from throughout aviation’s history, from 1800’s ballooning crashes to the 9/11 2001 horrors and beyond.  In all cases he gives a clear, concise overview of what we know, including recent updates.  It shows that we as a society continue to pick at these scabs.

Overall a diverting short book.

Recommended.