Walking on the Moon

The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things is an essay by the estimable Bruce Sterling that promotes his perspective on pervasive computing, big data, the giant companies that promote these and the effect of it all on society.  It’s thought provoking and refreshing with plenty to turn over in the reader’s mind.  It’s also thick with snippets that went directly into my quote file.

Sterling is largely interested in current trends in public and private surveillance.  He starts by working backword to see their causes – tech drivers and economic ones – and forward to see their effects.  Many have pointed out the changing role of consumers in a system where so many “products” are free, but Sterling captures some of the driving forces particularly clearly. His perspective is both polemic and entertaining.

Not all of his essay is convincing, of course.  He’s thin on the economic forces that sustain his favorite big data companies, for example.  However, as a perspective changer and food for thought The Epic Struggle is invaluable.

Strongly recommended.

Douglas Adams warns against blowing up the Earth in chapter 1 because you’ll need it later.  This is good advice even if you’re writing an apocalyptic trilogy. MaddAdam is the last of Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic trilogy that started in Oryx and Crake, and the trilogy had kind of run out of gas for me.

MaddAdam ties up loose ends from the earlier books, fills in some details of some characters pasts, and advances the post-apocalyptic plot.  The earlier episodes had more momentum and satirical bite.  One of the joys of those books was the fairly biting look at the modern society that Crake wanted to wash away.  Atwood would skillfully extrapolate that world from this with equal parts horror and humor that made for the best satire.  MaddAdam does not extend the satire much, and it is definitely missed.

The plot of MaddAdam fills in the gaps in a character’s history, but that history doesn’t add much to the world or the plot.  One of the strengths of After The Flood is that Atwood shows us the events of Oryx and Crake from a different conceptual part of the world.  The difference in the characters’ perspectives enrich the plot and add satirical targets.  MaddAdam’s flashbacks bring few new perspectives, though plot details get filled in.  I’m glad that Atwood knows these details that make her plot more sound and consistent, but I didn’t get very excited about learning the finer points.

Atwood is one of my favorite writers and technically the writing is spectacular.  Even though I was not very impressed by MaddAdam, it is full of beautiful phrases and brilliant literary constructions.

Overall, I recommend MaddAdam for completeists, but most readers won’t get much out of it that wasn’t in Oryx and Crake and After The Flood.

As a comics fan, I’ve long been aware that the backstory of Wonder Woman was at least as interesting as the character herself and much less accessible. Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman solves the second problem, and leaves one free to look over the glorious craziness and fundamental importance of the first.

The fellow generally credited with creating Wonder Woman is William Moutlon Marston whose resume is quite remarkable in a vacuum, aand more interesting in the context that Lepore provides.  Marston was an early student of psychology and physiology as the connection between the two was beginning to be understood.  He claims to have created the lie detector and was certainly the fellow who first tried to get its evidence made admissible in trials.  He was an early feminist and proponent of women’s equality, if not superiority.  He was an unusual choice to create a comic character, but the one he created was an uncontested smash hit, selling Superman & Batman kind of numbers.  While comics fans remember many characters fondly, that kind of financial and popular success was beyond rare.

And yet, as Lepore draws out, there was more than a hint of the charlatan about Marston.  His lie detector didn’t seem to work reproducibly for people other than him, and even his successes were often inflated in his claims.  His attempt to get lie detectors made into legal and investigative tools failed as a matter of law, and quite probably was a key distraction that undermined the defense of the accused.  Worse, his claims and results are generally so unconvincing that investigators use the device as a bluff to get confessions rather than a tool to find facts.  He lectured widely partially because he was slowly failing himself out of academia, sliding down the hill from professor to lecturer and below.

He also lived in a basically polygamous arrangement with several women, all of whom contributed materially to the creation and success of Wonder Woman, and all of whom saw their contributions minimized to keep the details of their living arrangements hidden. His principles of equality of the sexes seemed to be limited by practicality.  As a result, when he died young, the core creators of Wonder Woman lost creative control quickly. Consequently, corporate profit overshadowed feminist principles – even the somewhat unusual ones of the creators – as a primary driver of plot and theme.

It’s a fascinating story that touches on many of the intellectual revolutions of the 1920’s to the 1940’s culminating in the creation of one of the most unusual and compelling characters in popular culture.  Lepore’s story follows these gripping people through their remarkable journey and can also be a jumping off point for many more historical and intellectual explorations.

If there’s a downside to Secret History, it’s that Lepore writes more like a scholar than a storyteller.  She  has her facts straight and documented, but often the people do not breathe as they could.  Fortunately these folks are largely dynamic enough that the facts speak fine.  Furthermore, just unearthing these facts is an achievement in itself.

Strongly recommended.

It took me a while to figure out  seemed out of place in William Gibson’s latest, The Peripheral. The cool stark prose was there. There’s a near future seeing, though he does do a few more hard SF tricks than most of his recent work. World spanning settings – from rural towns to high end art enclaves.  There’s nothing missing.

It took me a while to figure out that there’s something new here.  There’s some actual optimism.  Not the usual optimism one finds in a Gibson book that’s born of a few of his gentlemen losers eking a minor concession from a relentless world.  There are folks in here who are genuinely good in an almost Carl Hiaasen way whose good deeds are rewarded.

It surprised me quite a bit when I saw it.

The book as a whole is thought provoking and chock full of characters who humanize the big ideas at play.  Gibson’s always been a writer of character and atmosphere to me, and Peripheral is no exception. Everything is crisp and interesting and in the service of ideas and theme.

Good fun.

Recommended.

I generally don’t have too much to say about Brust’s Taltos novels, though I find all of them rewarding and most of them entertaining.  Hawk is a surprisingly meditative and cerebral book for a series that starts as such a lark.  This is the sort of thing that brings me back as a reader.  I liked the Sharpe’s books, but they don’t change much and you can see that my interest waned.  I was reading Gardner Bond books for a while, too, but I stopped reading them and he stopped writing them.  While some Taltos novels are similar, more the early ones  than the later ones, none of them are the same.  The tone and writing style changes and the characters develop in ways that are unusual for characters in what initially feels like a stock fantasy world.  I’ve said all that before.

Hawk finds Vlad tired of running and feeling the pull of his life getting away from him.  He spots a way that he thinks will get his pursuers, the Jhereg – his old allies in organized crime, off his back. Plotwise, Hawk is about building and executing that plan.  “Former fantasy mafioso on the run executes caper to get himself clear of the mob” is how my high-concept friends might summarize it.  And the summary is correct as far as it goes.  (And if that sounds like a book you’d read, you won’t be disappointed.)

I found Hawk more rewarding for two major reasons.  First, thematically, it’s about getting the right details right and Brust expresses that by doing it.  “Show don’t tell” is great writerly advice. Good writers do it with their plots; better writers do it with their characterization .  Brust does it with his theme.  Several times he creates affecting moments that both moved and surprised me.  I eventually realized that many of these were because Brust wrote exactly enough to make the scene work, not a word more, and avoided being flashy about that. A pleasure to read, whether you appreciate the technique or just feel the scene’s punch.

This is a nice theme to apply to the writing process and the living process.

Second, Vlad is ripening as a character.  Age and experience are changing him, and seeing an author take an established, popular character through that process is interesting.  I’d like to use a verb other than “ripening” here for variety, but I think this is what Vlad’s doing.  From the character’s perspective there’s no end state or plan to it (though Brust seems to have some handle on where he’s going) and the fundamentals of the character are guiding what happens.  And yet, we’re not quite sure where he’ll be next time.  It’s very interesting to watch that happen.

Strongly recommended.

In preparing Doctor Mütter’s Marvels, Cristin Aptowicz has taken the most important first step in writing an interesting biography – choosing an interesting subject.  Thomas Dent Mütter is a dashing, slightly eccentric physician who lived a rags-to-riches success story and left behind a respected museum that is both a curiosity and a serious boon to science.  What could go wrong from there?

Lots of things could, but none of them do.  Aptowicz writes a tight, informative book that keeps the story moving while communicating both what’s interesting about Mütter personally – his drive, skill, and compassion – and historically – his role in founding an important early medical college, pioneering plastic surgery techniques, and collecting important medical specimens.  The resulting volume is a joy to read.

There are some choices I would make differently. For example, Aptowicz spends more time making sure readers know that one of Mütter’s rivals gets his just desserts than I cared about.  These are minor differences of preference.  Marvels does a great job telling the storing of a fascinating medical pioneer.

Recommended.

This is a short book taken from and extending Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture at CMU.  Pausch died of pancreatic cancer and gave this talk as a farewell to his colleagues and family.  The lecture was very well received and turned into this book.

It’s not a very long book, but it’s too long. The first half of it gives background on how the lecture came to be and gives something of an outline of how it was given.  This is all great stuff.  It’s honest and moving.  Pausch knows he can be a stereotypical professor – egotistical, over-analytic, etc. – and still lets that voice be heard.  Behind that is someone doing everything they can to come to terms with their imminent death.

Then the padding starts.  By the time Pausch is giving out productivity hints, it’s time to put up the book.

The first half (and one assumes the lecture on-line) is well worth checking out.  Stop there.

Tales of Pirx the Pilot is a collection of short stories by a giant of SF, Stanislaw Lem.  It’s the first Lem I’ve read, and definitely held my interest in many ways.  Lem does a great job of moving the tropes of being a working pilot into an SF world.  The jargon and technology is all extrapolated, but the feel of being a line pilot is very contemporary.

“Contemporary” has a bit of a timeless connotation here.  Lem wrote most of these stories before I was born, but the rhythms of flying for hire echo through the blog posts I read today about flying for the airlines.  One can see the details and assumptions that underlie them come from the 1960’s, but the beat is clearly timeless.

The stories themselves look like pulp science fiction from afar, but when the reader engages, they turn out to be a door into another more timeless fictional tradition.  There are stories that turn on the workings of a predicted technology, but this isn’t hard SF.  There is the wonder of faraway places and other planets (or moons, anyway), but the stories are all very human.  There’s a ghost story in here, and a locked room mystery. The trappings are rockets and astronauts, but the stories are all about people who are pilots.  Or people who are long distance truckers.  Or people who are sailors on wooden ships.  Or 21st century container ships.

Pirx and his fellows are not the first ones into a new world, but the ones who make a living travelling that world and seeing the odd corners of it. Consequently these are moody universal tales of walking the mundane unknown.

Recommended.

Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys is a quirky little collection of pieces on British engineering in the late 20th and early 21st Century. I’m not a dedicated anglophile, but I found plenty to like in his lively and unusual descriptions of the men and the challenges they faced.

British engineering is an odd subject in and of itself.  There are certainly great examples of it, but as Britain’s influence and empire contracted after WWII, so did the ambition and scope of its engineering projects.  Rather than leading the world’s efforts in creating transports and munitions, British engineers work at a smaller scale.  This adds a bittersweet tone to Spufford’s tour.

In addition to the wide-sweeping historical forces, from the 1980’s on British engineers were also blown by the winds of Thatcherism.  That government believed in small government and privitization of services in all aspects of service.  Keeping the funding flowing for, say, a space exploration agency going in that climate is well nigh impossible.  Spufford calls his government out on that pretty much continually across the periods when they are in power.

This adds up to a rich tale of little known efforts – some successful, others quixotic – set against a backdrop of historical sweep and villainy.  It’s delightful reading, perhaps because being an American gives me some distance. Spufford lets the reader see the great in the small as he describes some genuinely fascinating technological tinkering.  One of the strangest chapters is the description of the Concorde SST, which mostly revolves around the economic and marketing battles fought by British Airways to keep the plane flying, rather than the tech to make it go fast.

In addition to the big picture, the book entertained me because of its British audience.  If you’re writing for Brits, you certainly use a different set of homey analogies when describing technology.  Still, it was an unexpected pleasure to reverse engineer the analogies from the technologies.

Recommended.

Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle is one of the best ghost stories I’ve read in a long time.  It’s another one of those books recommended by Jo Walton that doesn’t fit into a particular genre.  If you come at it expecting a fantasy novel set in contemporary Houston, you won’t be disappointed.  If you come looking for a character study of a young man becoming an old man among the working poor of Texas oil towns, you won’t be disappointed there either.

What is unambiguous is that William Kennedy is a haunted man.  He sees ghosts throughout the city and his life.  That’s about where the definitiveness on ghosts ends, though.  Perfect Circle is perfectly consistent whether you decide Kennedy can can see the dead or hallucinates and has an active subconscious.  But whether supernatural or chemical, the past keeps reaching out and twisting Kennedy’s life.

Stewart describes the haunting brilliantly.  Sometimes a ghost will intrude and wrench the story in new places.  Sometimes a casual observation will pull a haunted flashback out of Kennedy’s memory. And always, always, the haunted moments are real moments: a relative killed by their own foolishness, or by corporate greed, or by the failings of someone who loved them. We all get to see death and misery, and Stewart makes it explicit without robbing it of universality or power.

That probably sounds like a pretty oppressive book, but Stewart doesn’t just beat the reader down.  His protagonist is full of faults, but is a genial person to spend time with.  He’s got that whistling-past-the-graveyard sense of humor that so many outcasts adopt. It also helps that his good heart is evident early on as well.  Stewart shows us Kennedy at a dramatic time, but it’s easy to see why Kennedy has friends.

Perfect Circle is a ripping, spooky yarn with an interesting protagonist and excellent writing.

Strongly recommended.