Walking on the Moon

Ted Saves The World is a novella for young adults that intentionally has the feel of a smart TV action drama.  Bryan Cohen, the author, is very up front about his goals and inspirations.  He’s writing in the vein of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Ted was originally intended as a TV pilot.

In terms of those goals, I found Ted to be very well done.  The writing is clear and engaging.  The characters are sharply drawn, and the story moves along well structurally.  Everything in the story serves the narrative and it all meshes well. This is all very promising.

It will be interesting to see if Cohen can go beyond these technical achievements and infuse his work with something unique.  Right now he’s sticking very close to his inspirations in theme, tone, and character, but Buffy already exists. There are good reasons to hope that he can begin mixing in new elements and make something completely original.  This is worth a look and keeping an eye on.

Recommended.

James Daily and Ryan Davidson have a fun idea in The Law Of Superheroes.  They take situations that arise in the comics and show how current and future US law  would apply.  Extreme hypothetical cases are a good way to understand the ramifications of any set of rules, especially the law, and it’s tough to come up with more extreme hypotheticals that comics.

The execution was a little dry for me.  I felt like too many of the problems had cut-and-dried solutions that would be helpful in getting law students to remember the principles, but that were less thrilling to the layman.  That’s not to say that the book reads like a police blotter.  There are several places where interesting aspects of the law pop out, but I think the book would benefit from a deeper look at the more interesting cases, rather than trying to survey too much of the legal landscape.

Worth a look through, especially if you are a law student or have a strong interest.

Warren Ellis has the skills and ambition to take a genre piece and lead it to uncommon places.  Gun Machine is a thriller that boasts a fabulous hook – a cop literally falls into a cathedral of guns each tied to an unsolved murder – but Ellis has more on his mind than just creeping the reader out.  He doesn’t let it get in the way of a propulsive thriller, though.  Gun Machine hits all the police thriller beats, but comes at them all from slightly askew.

So, take the cop/thriller stuff as all there.  In addition, Ellis brings us many views of New York – subjective and objective – each of which is telling part of the story that makes Gun Machine turn. He brings us larger than life characters who still have a soul, and a redemptive arc for his protagonist that is measured in realistically sized steps. Each turn of the story has some whorls that tug at the reader’s interest, but the whole machine never stops moving forward.

It isn’t perfect, of course.  For all the different perspectives that he tries to capture New York from, I did not get the feeling of being there.  Key locations feel photoshopped into place, and the place isn’t quite recognizable as either the New York I’ve visited on occasion or the fictional versions I’ve seen.  The sense of place doesn’t emerge as strongly as I was expecting.

Realistic or not (whatever that means), Ellis’s New York is the scene of a breakneck race where every turn, taken or not, offers a glimpse of fascinating possibilities.

Strongly recommended.

Dear Life is a collection of short stories from Alice Munro, one of the acknowledged masters of the form.  She is also getting old enough to wonder if each book will be her last.  Dear Life closes with a set of stories somewhere between fiction and autobiography that are closer to the facts than the others.

All of the stories display the craftsmanship and inspiration of a great writer.  Nothing is wasted.  Each story illuminates a character and a time sharply, usually caught in a key conflict. I found them quite beautiful, if a bit cool.  Some distance remains between me and them.  While some of that may be the inevitable gulf between an American man born in the 60’s as compared to Canadian women characters with another ten or twenty years of life, I think that a the tone is intentional.

The more autobiographical stories crackle more with life.  Some of this is because of their younger protagonists, but not all of it.  It’s difficult to put one’s finger on it, but there’s definitely more zip in the last few.  All of them are well worth reading though.

Recommended.

Ken Jennings is rapidly moving into that set of authors that I read and enjoy unconditionally.  He’s informative, interesting, funny, and doesn’t take himself too seriously except when it’s merited. Reading one of his books is like passing time with an old friend, except that he doesn’t laugh at your jokes.

The hook in Because I Said So! is that Jennings takes a list of rules that parents lay down for their children and see how well those rules hold up to objective assessment.  It’s kind of a Snopes for kids.  This is easy to do wrong – too much droning of facts, too much chafing about foolish rules in one’s youth, or not giving parents their due for doing their best and the whole thing would become mean spirited.  Jennings navigates around these pitfalls and produces a book that’s got a warm feel of pleasant memories that also deflates baseless platitudes.  It’s fun to read.

Strongly Recommended.

It took me quite a while to develop an opinion about Christopher Hitchens’s Arguably, a collection of his essays. My recollection was that many of the essays were book reviews for the New York Times.  These are a kind of essay unto themselves, often touching only lightly on the book under review and letting the reviewer expound their ideas at length in the service of evaluating the book.  These are most interesting to read if you have a horse in the race.  For a lot of the essays in Arguably, I did not. They’re all well written, but often turn on what I would consider minutae.

Then I got to “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” That’s a well-written, completely wrong essay.  Understanding why it irritated me was a very illuminating experience, both about these essays and persuasive essays in general.  The essay in question is as good an argument as could be constructed for the position.  Hitchens points out the job statistics about numbers of professional funny women, trots out some evolutionary justification, mixes in a few personal observations and structures it all in a way that draws the reader’s attention to where his points are strong and away from where they’re not.  It combines the techniques of a good legal argument with the rhythms of a troubadour.  I just disagree with virtually all of it.

That’s where I understood that Arguably is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s a collection of arguments – or argument starters – not a philosophy.  It’s good to remember that most opinion pieces are exactly that, and that scholarship and compositional skill do not imply one’s position is correct.

Looking at Arguably through this lens, it becomes a more interesting and less vexing experience.  There is much to like about the essays in terms of composition – and certainly in the vocabulary.  I even agree with much of what Hitchens says (that I care about anyway).  There are a lot of them here, too.

Recommended.

I read and enjoyed Halting State, so it was only a matter of time before I picked up the sequel, Rule 34. In this series, Stross writes mostly about ideas, so Rule 34 isn’t a sequel in the sense that the characters have further adventures, but in the sense  that exciting things happen in the fictional world.  It’s much more like a Foundation story in that sense.  Foundation stories are mostly puzzles wrapped up in drama, but Rule 34 is more a drama created by ideas in conflict.

While I was most impressed by how Stross takes ideas and puts them into the world, Rule 34 is an engrossing, propulsive read.  Exciting things happen to interesting characters.  It’s mostly a police procedural so there is a murder (or murders) to solve. Old lovers surface, crusty superiors are confronted, and plucky street kids get in over their heads.  Stross brings it all alive with zippy prose.  You won’t be bored with the narrative.

Beyond a snappy story, Rule 34 takes some great ideas from the minds of futurists and shows what happens when they meet the real people who give those ideas flesh.  An engineer like me might call it a cautionary tale about the perils of implementation, but who would read that?

The big ideas are big: organization of human systems around engineering principles; micromanufacturing and 3d printers; advances in pharmacology and the marginalization of the mentally ill; the global communication network, spread of memes, and thoughtcrime.  Get a bunch of futurists in a room and they’ll talk about the pleasures and perils of these things at a dry remove.  Put Stross on the case and you’ll get an international criminal syndicate and the Edinburgh Police department organized as different startup companies clashing over distributed production of backyard viagra and horrifying sex toys.  And that’s just where he starts.

The result is a great set if meshing and clashing gears that gives the reader a fresh perspective on the future, which is what I like SF to do.

Strongly Recommended.

Harry Houdini apparently liked to write about the sorts of things you would expect Harry Houdini to write about: showmanship, magicians and their ethics, and ways that the public is fooled. The Right Way To Do Wrong collects some of these writings, including excerpts from the book of the same name.

It is always fascinating to see the ways that people deceive one another, both for mutual amusement in performances and in predation.  Houdini’s success was rooted in his research and understanding of both kinds of deception that informed his practice of the harmless form.  Right Way lets him share much of that knowledge with us here in his future.

Right Way is fairly short and the brevity helps quite a bit.  My experience with books exposing or dissecting flim-flam is that they tend to be longer and more exhaustive than I care for.  Both Randi’s The Faith Healers and Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World are catalogs of deceptions.  Right Way does not organize the information it presents under guiding principles any more than the others, but its brevity means that more of the repetitive cases are dropped.

Recommended.

When I talked about Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules, I complained that the topic was not worthy of the quality of the writing and science on display.  His work has steadily been becoming more universal, while his skills as a writer and scientist have remained at their high level.  The Better Angels of Our Nature stakes out a universal claim of great importance and defends it meticulously, working from the demonstrated facts to an affirmation of the Enlightenment’s classic liberal ideals.  It’s one thing to believe that those ideals – reason, empathy, commerce – are worth affirming.  It’s another thing entirely to build an objective case that this is so.  As with any social science, there are still points to argue, but the scope and quality of Pinker’s arguments are dazzling to behold.

It is clear that Pinker is a defender of the Enlightenment and classic liberalism – though not necessarily of liberalism in modern American politics – and that he has a stake in defending that position.  He remains a meticulous seeker of truth and believer in science and statistics.  When he’s confronted with the choice between making a stronger, vaguer claim or explaining the limits of what he believes science can prove objectively, he does the latter.  It is refreshing to be written to as an adult about an interesting and important topic rather than being recruited to an ideological position.

Explaining a nuanced argument about a topic as large as human violence in a manner suitable for adults takes a lot of space.  Angels runs some 800 pages.  Pinker needs to first convince his readers of his counter intuitive thesis – that violence is declining – and then make the connections to the causes of that decline.  His arguments that there is a real decline in violence run several hundred pages and require the reader to internalize ideas from statistics and cognitive psychology.  It is to his credit that he brings in the relevant ideas from those fields comprehensibly, and is able to make a lucid case.

In a lesser writer’s hands the arguments would be opaque and unconvincing, but Pinker guides the reader through convincingly.  He does this through careful explanations of the relevant science (including lots of citations) and well-chosen examples.  His honesty is at least as great an asset as his eloquence.  He is always careful to quantify and qualify what he believes the data shows and how strong the consensus is around it. This comes off not as hedging his bets, but as being open about what humans know and can know about these inherently slippery topics.  He’s willing to admit what he doesn’t know, which makes the principles he can establish more compelling.

All that clarity and nuance, explaining the supporting evidence and context, and working through the examples takes time.  While Pinker keeps it as lively as possible, the exposition can be dry at times.  It never becomes a complete slog, but there’s a lot to get through. While I believe that the supporting evidence makes his remarkable case stronger, I also believe that if the reader gets too tied up in the details of the earlier chapters, and starts to flag, it’s worthwhile to peek ahead at Chapter 9 and see where it’s all going.

Chapter 9 is Pinker’s gentlemanly and scientific paean to Reason and Enlightenment making the world a fairer and safer place.  That song, sung in the most scientific and objective voice, is one of affection and joy for ideals that have objectively improved life for the majority of people on this Earth. Mankind collectively has slowly, in fits and starts, built a culture and collective mindset that has objectively reduced the violence and cruelty we inflict on each other, even though we barely realize it. Reading this chapter, I felt a little like one of those omniscient aliens from a SciFi B-movie must when it tells the humans that there’s hope for them yet.

Strongly Recommended.

Hello Goodbye Hello is a unique bit of fun by Craig Brown.  The idea is simple and intriguing: start with the unlikely meeting of two well known people and tell that story, then follow one of them to another meeting and describe that, then follow the new one to another meeting, and so on.  And make a circle.  It feels like a party game, and reading Hello Goodbye Hello gives that feeling of improvisation and fun.

Brown makes a couple choices that make the whole thing more compelling.  He keeps each anecdote short, which keeps the players from wearing out their welcome.  He also allows himself a fair amount of leeway.  Some of the stories are about famous people in their youth who are literally dumbstruck by encountering someone more famous.  It’s to his credit that Brown can usually make even these glancing collisions interesting.

Of course not all of these meetings are interesting.  Over the course of the book he spans English nobility, Russian composers, American movie idols, and Mark Twain. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and there were some dry stretches for me.  It doesn’t help that Brown is British, and some of the folks he includes were completely unknown to me, though from context well known in Britain.

Overall, the book keeps the feel of an interesting dinner party where everyone seems to have an interesting story to tell.  Even the tales that are about people you’ve never heard of are told with style.  There are plenty of new things to hear, even if they’re not all about the stars of the anecdotes.

Recommended.