What I’ve Been Reading
Incandescence by Greg Egan
Pretty decent hard-SF first-contact story. A lot of it details the reasoning process of figuring out the nature of movement under gravity using natural observations, and some of the experiments described I found a little difficult to visualize.
What I liked most about this story is how the two threads almost sailed right past each other. Often in first-contact stories there are two narrative threads, usually one from the “explorer” perspective and one from the “native” perspective, and at some point they meet and usually combine into one thread or two parallel threads after that. This book follows that model, except for the meeting part – basically the two threads are only joined together by one sentence near the end; no characters from either thread ever meet any characters from the other thread, but one thread still depends heavily on the other.
Halting State by Charles Stross
A pretty fun spy vs. spy mystery-thriller with a strong nerdish bent and good plot twists near the end. It had a lot of near-future Scottish slang that I couldn’t figure out, but that’s acceptable in stories where the author is making up a future regional slang.
I like how the three narrative lines were arranged in such a way that two of them almost merged to provide quick gratification of some of the end-of-chapter cliffhangers.
Stross was wrong about facial recognition software being a hard problem though.
Manta’s Gift by Timothy Zahn
Pretty much what it says on the cover: Political maneuvering between human with shadowy, presumed-evil overlords and aliens with unclear motivations in an exotic environment, with a little bit of adventure thrown in. It was a pretty decent read and kept me going from chapter to chapter.
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
A friend recommended this when I expressed an interest in learning JS, and I’m glad she did. This book makes sense out of a potentially very powerful programming language that gets a few things wrong in very confusing ways. Getting a tour of the language features from someone who can explain what’s good and what’s bad and why they’re good and bad is the perfect approach. Highly recommended.
Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury
I’ve had this book on my inbound shelf for decades. I tend to have a habit of being slow to getting around to this sort of classical science fiction, but I tend to find it rewarding to read when I get around to it.
This book was definitely rewarding; seldom have I read such a well-written story. Kingsbury manages to weave an engrossing tale of a historical event in a slightly bizarre human society on a far-flung colony world, without any narratorial exposition until the very end. It gradually expands from the very small scope of one familly, to the machinations of a few small societies, and then at the end very satisfyingly zooms out to put it all in the context of a suddenly very fascinating galactic diaspora.
I now want to read more stories set in this universe.
Lethe by Tricia Sullivan
A reasonably interesting post-apocalyptic adventure with an unusual vision of the grim meathook future. Some interesting plot devices and characters, but although the minor plot points of the ending were not predictable, the big revelation was telegraphed far ahead of time.
507 Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown
Exactly what it says on the title – patent diagrams and descriptions of 507 mechanisms for performing different kinds of transformations on mechanical power.
I’m not disappointed, but I did find some of the diagrams and descriptions difficult to follow, partially because more views would have been useful and partially due to use of opaque and archaic language.
There was one mechanism that I had a hard time believing would work, but all attempts to search for it online lead back to this book.
What I’ve Been Watching
Elysium: Disappointing second outing from Blomkamp. Great effects but pretty transparent and heavy-handed story obviously inspired by the whole “99%” thing. I liked District 9 better.
Ender’s Game: Would have made an OK TV series or movie series, but in a single movie it was far, far too condensed.
Gravity: Liked this one quite a lot. It’s a long series of highly improbably flukes of luck that lead to the main character surviving her ordeal, but aside from the luck part the rest seemed believable to me. Cinematography was great.
Interstellar: Best science fiction movie I’ve seen in a very long time. The sound mix was awful, with the music drowning out the dialogue in many places and some of the sound effects being painfully loud, but that’s pretty much my only complaint about it.
Oblivion: Meh. I’ll admit one of the plot twists did surprise me but it suffers from the same premise problem as most alien invasion flicks: Natural resources in general are easier to find out in space than to lift off a planet.
Riddick: Exactly what I expected: Vin Diesel’s “manly man” character being the same asshole he usually is, with lots of killing of people and creatures and highly improbable badassity. Disappointed in the creatures in this one – I liked the ones in Pitch Black better. Terrible movie but delivers what it promises.
The Colony: At least in this post-apocalyptic fight for survival humanity screwed up the weather directly, by building buggy weather control machines. The good guys’ quest in this flick is to find the one place where a working machine provides a habitable environment while avoiding back-stabbing cowards and a tribe of wandering cannibals. It’s mostly about people getting eaten or dying in noble self-sacrifice. Meh.
Hobbit part 3: Enjoyed it a lot, but it wasn’t quite as good as the previous two. I don’t remember the book very well as it’s been a very long time since I read it, but I think there’s enough divergence the movie should be “inspired by” the book and not “based on” it. The 3D worked, but as with the first movie the high frame rate gimmick broke immersion repeatedly – it looks less real at the higher frame rate.
The Doomsday Machine: Of course Chairman Mao would not only build a planet-buster but would also be crazy enough to use it. This one is about a last-ditch attempt to save the human race by getting a handful of men and women into space before the big one hits. The commander of the mission is an amazing asshole – basically a rapist whose intent becomes overt as soon as it becomes obvious their ship is on its own. He’s really, really, really creepy and surprisingly for the time this flick was made, it actually does admit that he is perhaps not the most upstanding person to have in command of a space mission. I feel like this one reused footage from a couple other similar movies of the time, and the ending was about as deus ex as it gets – it feels like they got to the last 30 seconds of the movie and suddenly realized they needed an ending.
After Earth: Exactly what I expected from the trailer, namely Will Smith and his son (both real and fictional) bonding through an ordeal on the hostile planet called… wait for it… Earth, and coming out of it a more functional family. Nothing wrong with the production though I was hoping for more creature effects, but I really have to wonder how much the production of this movie was intended to help the Smiths’ real-life relationship.
Automata: Liked this one a bunch. I’ll tentatively recommend this as one of the better science fiction movies of 2014. Not much I can say about it that isn’t either spoiler or covered by the synopsis.
Edge of Tomorrow: As an action flick it’s pretty good, but as science fiction it’s terrible. The main plot device is that the alien boss can rewind time, and will reset the day whenever one of its mini-bosses gets killed. OK, that’s not too bad, and the limitations on its time travel ability cover why it doesn’t just retcon its enemies out of existence. But here’s where it gets weird: The one who kills that mini-boss receives a fragment of the time control power – enough to be able to reset the day if he or she gets killed, and to remember what happened on all the previously retconned days, and to sense where the alien boss is located. I’m at a loss to explain how that’s supposed to work unless this time power is magic instead of technological.
But wait, it gets better: Somehow this time power resides in your blood, and the aliens can take it back from you by getting a sample of your blood. WTF? And then there’s this quantum physics gizmo that can partially reactivate the power after that if you jab your leg with the pointy end, because blood… what? Does Not Compute. The plot devices are so ludicrous that this movie is a flop as a science fiction.
Extraterrestrial: Straight-up UFO stuff. Teenagers, cabin in the woods, UFOs, greys, anal probes, government in cahoots with the aliens. Some blood and gore and one or two spring-loaded cats. I’ll give it credit for having the ending I thought less probable.
Hangar 10: You guise! I’ve got a GREAT IDEA!! Let’s do Blair Witch only with aliens instead of whatever was in that movie. That’s how the pitch for this one went, I’m sure. Now, I really really hate Blair Witch style shaky-cam cinematography, but even so I still watched it to the end and thought everything but the cinematography was moderately well done. There were a couple of scenes where I’m certain none of the characters could have been holding the camera, which is such an obvious flaw to look for in this sort of movie that I wouldn’t put it past some producers to add some deliberately as easter eggs. There were some surprisingly good visual effects at the end and I have to confess I didn’t fully understand what happened at the very end, but I’m OK with that – it’s usually better than exposition.
Her: Thoughtful and a good ending, but I found some of the interior romantic scenes uncomfortable. Glad I didn’t see this one with family.
In the Mouth of Madness: I’ve been on an HP Lovecraft reading binge lately and am now branching out to the few movies inspired by his works. Imagine my surprise to find one produced by John “The Thing” Carpenter! It was decent though not directly based on any of the HPL stories I’ve read. The main plot device was the idea that belief makes things real and that by inspiring enough belief, a horror fiction author could bring back the Elder Gods. Trouble with this is that the population figures quoted for this cult were below the numbers of at least three major religions, so there should have been proof of existence of their deities well in advance.
Lucy: The pain, the pain. This movie has Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman and some decent effects, and that’s about it. The entire premise of the film is based on the long- and well-debunked myth that humans only use a small portion of their brain capacity. And somehow it gets from there to full-on mind over matter; Johansson’s character seems to become a Jean Grey scale telekinetic as a result of becoming superintelligent, which to me does not naturally follow. The movie ends up being a fast-paced power fantasy. If you want a decent movie about the emergence of super-intelligent individuals, skip this one and watch…
Limitless: An effective nootropic drug turns a wannabe author into an engine of effectiveness… until other people catch on and get their own supply of the drug. Liked this one all the way through, and recommend it.
The Dunwich Horror (1970): Another Lovecraft derivative. Too much of a departure from the original plot for my liking, though some of the characters were well acted. The creature effects, while not terrible considering when they were done, were also not what I expected to see.
The Signal (2014): Pretty decent SF though I saw the big reveal plot twist coming well in advance. Young crackers are lured to a remote location thinking they’re on the trail of a competing cracker, and instead end up involved with greys and Area 51 types and have to escape captivity and being experimented on.
Transcendence (2014): Not what I expected from the trailer, and I was very disappointed in its anti-transcendence slant though of course the cynic in me expected it; how often is it we get a pro-technology, pro-humanity science fiction flick? Much of the conflict in the story could have been avoided had the main character not made a couple of mistakes that are so stupid they belie the superintelligence we’re supposed to believe of him. And the ending was poor too; I can’t buy the happily reunited transcendent couple happily hiding out in their favorite garden when they could simply have left the planet and been unconstrained.
Under the Skin (2013-A): One of the artiest movies I’ve ever seen. If you like WTF nonsensical European low-budget science fiction art films then you’ll probably like this one, though the production values are pretty good here. What I liked most about this flick is there’s no exposition at all; it’s up to us to figure out what the story is and for the most part that’s not too hard, but the start and end are unresolved. We don’t really know how these events came to be or what the significance of the ending is. I’m OK with that. Liked it, but again I’ll warn you that there’s no neat bow tie on anything here and it may be unsatisfying.
Accomplishments for 2013
I’m a couple of months late with this. Much has been going on.
A couple of years ago I decided to stop setting myself up for failure by making New Year’s resolutions. Instead I decided to review each year’s accomplishments.
2013 had only one major accomplishment, but it was a really big one: I got myself out of debt. I sold off all of my company stock, and between that and my bonus I was able to fully pay off all three of my remaining student loans, plus some lingering credit debt I had accumulated on my big road trip in 2011.
That was a great feeling!
The only other significant thing I can remember doing in 2013 is taking a week’s holiday in Calgary to attend the Pincade Expo, visit friends and tank up on the world’s most delicious hamburgers from Peter’s Drive-In, which I had been craving for a while.
What I’ve Been Reading
It has been a long time since I’ve posted one of these, and I’ve probably forgotten some things, but here goes.
I bought a Kindle last year. It’s something I’ve been interested in since they came out, but couldn’t get around to coughing up the dough until I saw a used one for sale in the classifieds at work. Discount price = quick action!
I’ve been re-reading some old favorites plus a few new things to try out the Kindle, but also still reading some real books. Overall I like the Kindle, though with the jacket on it’s a little too heavy for reading on my back. I will continue using it, but it’s not going to replace paper books any time soon.
Iain Banks: Surface Detail
A pretty straight-up Culture novel. As enjoyable as any other, and thus recommended reading. One of the two main conflicts driving the plot was the use of virtual reality hells to torment uploaded “sinners”, where sin is defined by those who design the hell and pay for the server capacity to run it.
This is something that had never occurred to me before. I always considered the obvious implementation of uploaded environments to be one of complete freedom – every individual should be free to orchestrate their private VR environment however they want, and design their perceptions of others and of the outside world however they want. I hadn’t thought of how horrible it could be if we allowed others to dictate the experience inside. We must prevent this from happening.
Kathleen Ann Goonan: Queen City Jazz
Did Not Like. It sounded interesting because it was a journey story set in a post-apocalyptic world that had been transformed by a combination of a celestial event and a flawed transformation of cities and lifeforms via nanotechnology and genetic engineering.
It ended up feeling kind of muddy in my mind. There are some stories where the descriptions of things are kind of murky, and the author (intentionally or not) does a good job of conveying the confusion and uncertainty of the protagonist, and this is one of them. I generally don’t like that.
Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, and Ringworld’s Children
I’ve read them all before, but a very long time ago and the opportunity arose. I didn’t bother re-reading Ringworld itself because I’ve read that one often enough to remember it well. The later three, though, I had mostly forgotten and quite enjoyed refreshing my memory of.
Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner: Betrayer of Worlds, Juggler of Worlds, Destroyer of Worlds, and Fate of Worlds
This five-book series (I read the first volume a while back) is probably the best of the many good cases of Niven letting other authors play in his sandbox. Together they’ve done an amzing job of knitting together many of the disparate threads from earlier Known Space novels and short stories, into one contiguous and consistent tale of what happens, when humans, Puppeteers, Pak and a young but super-intelligent species butt heads.
There’s a lot going on here. The Puppeteers, by virtue of their fundamental cowardice combined with a major technological advantage, are extremely dangerous to just about everyone. They’ve been manipulating other species, including humans, to try to head off future dangers to themselves. When they discovered that the core of the galaxy was exploding and a major radiation wavefront would be coming along in ten thousand years or so, they started fleeing the galaxy, taking their planets with them.
But now the highly intelligent and very warlike Pak are also fleeing the core explosion and catching up with the Puppeteers from behind. While ahead, a young species with an amazing capacity for learning is emerging at a rate that could prove a threat, and human interference has prevented the Puppeteers from mitigating that threat as they normally would, through sabotage or extermination.
What’s a civilization of cowards to do? Why, turn for help once again to the humans they’ve been been tweaking for luck and paranoia all this time…
I thoroughly enjoyed this series, and it’s must reading for anyone who likes the Known Space universe!
A. Merritt: The Metal Monster
A childhood favorite that I had mostly forgotten. Upon re-reading, I’m amazed at the ideas it contains. This story was first serialized in 1920, but it describes (using Vernian language) what today we would call minds in a computer substrate or natural machine intelligences, possibly including nanotechnology.
The antiquated and excessively flowery and voluminous descriptions combined with concepts that have relatively recently become common in science fiction create a delightfully clashing combination – old and new at once.
What I’ve Been Reading
Vancouver Noir by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw. This caught my eye while I was on a bookstore crawl and I bought it on impulse, mainly because it seemed to have some nice historical photos of Vancouver.
It’s pretty interesting – Vancouver has a somewhat seedy history that I was completely unaware of, but now that I’ve read it I can sort of see why some areas of the city are they way they are today. It was interesting to learn some historic events involving hotels that still stand today, and watch the evolution and motion of the downtown core.
One thing really annoyed me about this book – an apparent lack of editorial oversight. The words “discrete” and “discreet” were consistently confused in the few places they were used, and I have a feeling there were some past/present tense flip-flops going on though I didn’t pay close enough attention to explicitly note them.
Overall it was a fascinating read though, and the pictures are indeed interesting.
—–
Greg Egan: Axiomatic and Luminous
Being two short story collections, the first collected in 1995 and the second in 1998. I’ve liked all of Egan’s novels so far, but my biggest comment about these short stories is that they seem awfully formulaic. A lot of them follow the pattern of establishing a character who has some interest in the nature of mind, will or identity, then introducing a plot device that allows exploration of one of these themes, and then ending with some sort of ironic or otherwise revelatory twist that results. To be fair, this is partially symptomatic of the short story format, and since the stories were probably originally published at different times and in different fora, the similarities would not have been so apparent until they were collected.
There were a lot of good plot device concepts, such as a biofeedback device that would let you visualize your brain activity in real time, or a brain replacement that learns to be you by successive approximation over the course of decades.
There were also some bad plot devices – things that I could let slide as a concept to be explored as a story, but otherwise were pretty bad science. Like predicting the future by looking at a time-reversed image of the galaxy through a telescope. Or the claim that a simulated person could have experience during the construction of the simulation, before it was actually run – that’s just plain impossible, and the way it was written it almost seemed to be begging the existence of a supernatural “soul”.
A few of the endings were a bit predictable too, like where buying cheap knockoff products gives not quite the desired result. A couple of the stories were incomprehensible to me – I just didn’t get the point at the end – presumably because they were ones that touched on religious themes.
Some of the stories were good, and the common theme of exploring the nature of self and mind is very appealing to me, but overall I prefer Egan’s full-length novels.
—–
L.E. Modesitt, Jr.: The Eternity Artifact – Chosen because it sounded like exactly the sort of story I felt like reading at the time. Space opera with mysterious deserted alien cities to be explored and artifacts to be found and human enemies to be outwitted. The ending was not what I expected, but it wasn’t disappointing. Pretty decent read.
Modesitt chose to create a familiar political climate for this far-future story by creating a back-story involving a diaspora from Earth at a time when there were still strong national and religious groupings, so the major types of religions and political systems tended to end up controlling groups of proximate solar systems and then warring with each other the same way they did when they lived in countries instead of on entire worlds.
The author casts the descendants of Christian-like and roughly-Islamic groups as the major villain-groups of the story, which was a pleasing surprise. The secular protagonist civilization is questing after the first alien relics ever discovered, which are clearly from a much more advanced civilization, and the religious groups really don’t want this to happen, because either the relics are one of the biblical superweapons left by God or Satan, in which case they must either be secured by the righteous or sealed away forever, or they’re not, in which case Man is not God’s foremost creation – which is an idea is a major threat to the core beliefs of the pseudo-Christians especially.
—–
Robert L. Forward: Martian Rainbow – Seldom have I been so disappointed in a hard SF story. This one is unusually shallow and contrived, even for Forward, who has a tendency to produce what I call “tech demo” stories – hard SF that is even harder on the speculation and thinner on the characterization than usual. This is not to say that kind of writing is always bad – I’ve enjoyed most of Forward’s other books.
The story here is: Earth conquered by madman, Martian bases left to fend for themselves with insufficient resources, madman threatens survival of human race, Martians find self-replicating nanofactories left by original inhabitants of Mars, use them to save day for everyone and terraform Mars too.
The madman’s conquest of Earth through a cult of personality reinforced by masterful religious propaganda and political manipulation was way, way too fast and easy to be believable. Also the fact that the PR and technical wizards that enabled his rise to power were so fatally blind to his insanity. It basically boils down to “everyone loves the war hero and believes him when he says he’s God and lets him become dictator of Earth.”
The other side of it is the Martian tech that saves the day. These are mobile machines (initially mistaken for organisms) that can eat anything and manufacture almost anything, including diamond in any size and shape you want, while producing no harmful waste products. They can also produce more of themselves as needed, and multiply their computing power by linking up in a chain, and do so in order to learn human language overnight. How awfully convenient if your survival requires rapid terraforming of Mars and you also need to pull a miracle out of your ass to save Earth from destruction. But all this isn’t the part that bugs me. Many of Forward’s stories are contrived around biological or technological oddities. What bugs me is there’s no back story here. The interaction between the humans and Martians machines amounts to:
- Humans: “Here’s our language files.”
- Martians: “Hi. Excuse us while we get back to tending our plants.”
- Humans: “Hey, if you don’t mind, we could really use a hand converting your planet into something we can live on.”
- Martians: “OK.”
- Humans: “Just like that? Won’t this affect you?”
- Martians: “It’s unthinkable for us to refuse any request or interfere with your survival, and your request doesn’t contradict our masters’ orders.”
- Humans: “Where are your masters?”
- Martians: “They went away, and we’re not allowed to tell you anything about them.”
- Humans: “OK. Get to work.”
- (time passes)
- Humans: “Hey, that bunch of Martians is going to get themselves killed! We don’t want any of you dying for us!”
- Martians: “Even though we’re obviously intelligent and autonomous, we’re machines and not alive so it’s OK.”
- Humans: “Oh, carry on then.”
So basically there’s a tantalizing mention that some aliens built these extremely capable machines and then left them behind to do menial tasks, but there’s absolutely no attempt by the humans to weasel out more information about the aliens or find it by other means. There are just token gestures as to how humans are awfully nice and considerate even when in dire straits, and then the alien machines are used to bludgeon into the reader how powerful the concepts of exponential growth and molecular manufacturing are.
The ideas here could have gotten a better treatment if the book were twice as long, but it would still need these rough edges filed off.
