Category Archives: Book Review – Fiction

R.I.P., Vernor Vinge

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Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024. I am not sure it is necessary for a person to have a “favorite author”, and I might not give the same answer every day, but if pressed I might come up with Vernor Vinge. I stumbled first across his essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era around the same time I stumbled across Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us and Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. At some point I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. These four works really expanded my imagination about the range of possibilities for the future of our species and civilization, and I recommend them to others.

These works also got me interested in science fiction not just as a form of entertainment, which it certainly is, but as a way to further expand my imagination. Some science fiction is painful to read, but the best science fiction expands your imagination painlessly as you are being entertained, and Vinge was just a fantastic storyteller, maybe even the best ever. I love Rainbow’s End as much for being a great novel as for opening my eyes to what augmented reality could mean as it begins to take hold. A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are two of my absolute favorite books, and Children of the Sky is also wonderful for everyone who loves A Fire Upon the Deep. Rest in peace, Vernor Vinge.

stuff I’ve read in 2023

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This is just a grab bag. I’ve read two reasonably entertaining novels set in near futures where climate change is ravaging the world. Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock was the more entertaining of the two. Stephenson is a good storyteller and his books are easy to read. But obviously, read Snow Crash first if you never have.

I’m about half way through Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like all Robinson’s books I have read so far, this one is less entertaining but he does a good job of world building. I feel like he is trying too hard to educate me though – sometimes if I want to be educated I will go read a non-fiction book, and if I want to be entertained I will turn to fiction. Books that lie somewhere in between can be irritating.

I’ve enjoyed two mystery/action series this year. The Jack Reacher series is great escape fiction about your basic middle aged white male hero type who is good with guns and fighting, and fighting with guns. I hate violence in real life but it is hard to write entertaining stories with zero violence, so there. I don’t think I ever want to see the movie because I enjoy the book character too much. I’ve also been enjoying the Bernie Gunther series. This one is is bit dark and morally complex as it deals with a detective/policeman hero type who happens to be an involuntary reluctant Nazi. But seriously, it is good and recommended.

Speaking of dark and morally complex, I read a couple books by Octavia Butler – Kindred and Parable of the Sower. She subjects her characters to niceties like murder, rape, and slavery, and I guess you get to find out what they are made of when they respond to these situations. She is a good character developer and storyteller though and worth a read, as long as you are not already depressed going into it.

I read Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos series, which is about Greek Gods, transhumans, Greek Gods who may be transhumans, robots, Shakespeare, Proust, and robots who like Shakespeare and Proust. This is pretty crazy stuff and you have to really like Dan Simmons to like it. I am liking but not loving it. I guess I would read the Hyperion series first, if you have not read any Dan Simmons.

Actually what prompted this post was a post by Charlie Stross (contains spoilers) about his Laundry Files and New Management Series. I gobbled up the new one that came out this year, Season of Skulls, because I gobble up all his stuff as soon as I can. It’s exciting to hear Charlie mention in this post that he has plans to wrap up the Laundry Files series with two more books “because his publisher insists”. (Could George R.R. Martin sign on with this particular publisher?) If you haven’t read any of these, I would go all the way back to the beginning of the Laundry Files, and enjoy!

5 of Bill Gates’s Favorite Books

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I guess this qualifies as my first “best of” post for 2022. It’s a bit weak though. Bill Gates, instead of picking his five favorite books that came out during the year, picked five books that he recommended to somebody during the year. He picked Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the “best introduction to grownup sci-fi”, which I take to mean sci-fi books for people who don’t have enough imagine to consider reading sci-fi, but might enjoy it if they try. This is not one of my favorite sci-fi books. About all I remember is a swimming pool supposedly somewhere in the Poconos, and the audiobook reader inexplicably giving a key character supposedly from the Poconos and southern accent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an okay book, but even if I were restricting myself to Heinlein I might pick something else, like Starship Troopers, which some “serious” people have at least heard of (and to be fair, Billy G. mentions in his post). How about Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, which depicts a plausible near-future and is extremely entertaining and mind-blowing.

The only other book I’ll mention is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, which might be interesting. Still, this list don’t impress me much. I’m thinking old Billy Gates just didn’t do a lot of reading this year. Can’t he pay people to give him the Cliff’s Notes? (Considering he has more money than any particular gods, couldn’t he track down Cliff himself? Well, I looked this up and Cliff was Clifton K. Hillegass, and he died in 2001.)

Decentraland

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I always assumed that Second Life popped up in response to the novel Snow Crash, and I always thought that Second Life was a bit lame because the technology just wasn’t there yet. Second Life may still be limping along on fumes, but it has been seeming to me that the sequels to Second Life have been evolving through video games like World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc. Today I heard about a plot of virtual land being bought and sold for $2.43 million in a new (to me) one called Decentraland. This is clearly speculation at the moment, and you would expect booms and crashes. These platforms are slowly but surely creating their own marketplaces and even currencies behind the scenes. It may already be possible to create and run a business through these platforms. A big question is whether they will become interoperable at some point. I assume it is a given that they will take advantage of virtual reality technology as that continues to evolve. Another question is to what extent they will remain in the entertainment realm, as opposed to connecting to the real world economy and workplace at some point, which is where actual value would start to be created.

Philip K. Dick, Prophet of the Happy Ending

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My “summer of parallel universes” reading theme is about to come to an end. Which doesn’t mean I have to stop reading about parallel universes, it just means the meteorological, astronomical, and social season known as summer is coming to an end. I have made a significant dent on the last Dark Tower book, which is known as…The Dark Tower. I might actually finish it by Labor Day, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, this speech reminded me that Philip K. Dick had a lot to say on the subject. Not only does he have a lot to say, he at least claims to believe it or at least consider it more than just a fictional plot line. Finally, he has gathered it into something almost approaching a coherent religion, and not only that but a unifying theory of religions, complete with a (quite rosy) end times scenario.

It’s very hard to pick an excerpt that captures the essence of the speech. The whole thing really is worth a read. But here is one unsatisfactory choice:

“We in the field [of science fiction writers], of course, know this idea as the ‘alternate universe’ theme. …Let us say, just for fun, that [such alternate universes] DO exist. Then, if they do, how are they linked to each other, if in fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if they overlap, then such problems as ‘Where do they exist?’ and ‘How do you get from one to the next’ admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this… It may be that some of these superimposed worlds are passing out of existence, along the lateral time line I spoke of, and some are in the process of moving toward greater, rather than lesser, actualization. These processes would occur simultaneously and not at all in linear time. The kind of process we are talking about here is a transformation, a kind of metamorphosis, invisibly achieved. But very real. And very important…

Christ was saying over and over again that there really are many objective realms, somehow related, and somehow bridgeable by living – not dead- men, and that the most wondrous of these worlds was a just kingdom in which either He himself or God himself or both of them ruled. And he did not merely speak of a variety of ways of subjectively viewing one world; the Kingdom was and is an actual different place, at the opposite end of continua starting with slavery and utter pain. It was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along the orthogonal path. He did not merely report what lay there; he taught the method of getting there. But, the secret was lost, the Roman authority crushed it. And so we do not have it. But perhaps we can refind it, since we know that such a secret exists…

“This problem-solving by means of reprogramming variables along the linear time axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds – I have the impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how this all can be – in fact must be. Across from the Programmer-Reprogrammer sits a counterentity, whom Joseph Campbell calls the Dark Counterplayer. …The Programmer-Reprogrammer is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter; he is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the game board – our universe in space-time – the Dark Counterplayer makes a move; he sets up a reality situation. Being the Dark player, the outcome of his desires constitutes what we experience as evil: nongrowth, the power of the lie, death and the decay of forms, the prison of immutable cause and effect. …The printout which we undergo as historic events, passes through stages of a dialectical interaction, thesis and antithesis, as the forces of the two players mingle. Evidently some syntheses fall to the dark counterplayer.

Philip K. Dick, 1977

To me, this religion actually seems logically coherent with the world I am experiencing right now. Which doesn’t mean I believe it, but I would rate it as more probable than a number of others, and if I were currently shopping for a religion I might add it to my cart but not hit the check out button just yet.

Summer Reading 2021, and Donald Rumsfeld’s parallel universe

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Warning, I will mostly try to limit spoilers to things you could learn from reading the book descriptions below on Amazon, but if you are really interested in experiencing the Merchant Princes series, the Dark Tower series, or Star Trek Discovery with no prior inkling of what they are about, maybe avoid this post.

I haven’t made a summer reading post yet in 2021. And Donald Rumsfeld passed away this week. How are these two things related? Well, it seems that my summer reading theme for this year has settled on parallel universes. This happened somewhat by accident. A year or more ago, I ran out of books in Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series and turned to his Merchant Princes series without really knowing what it was about. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, so let’s just say it involves parallel universes along with stealth lessons on economics and the history of technological progress. It’s also about a Game of Thrones-esque medieval succession crisis, nuclear terrorism, and how the United States government might (over)react to an incident of nuclear terrorism. Which is where Donald Rumsfeld comes in. And I’ll leave it at that, having already said too much. I never get quite into the characters or plots in this series as much as I did the Laundry Files, but I’m still enjoying.

In my mind, the real Rumsfeld in our universe gets a lot of credit for the Iraq weapons of mass destruction lie, the Iraq invasion, and Guantanamo Bay, and more generally civilian deaths and mistreatment of prisoners of war. And almost all of it was by choice rather than necessity. What I didn’t remember, but was reminded of by this Intercept article, was his central role in the “Plan B” assessment in the 70s that produced alternative facts (aka lies) about Soviet nuclear capability and led to the huge arms buildup of the 1980s. So in my book he had a lot of blood on his hands, and took foolish risks that could have led to unimaginable consequences. I find it hard to mourn his passing.

Anyway back to happier topics in bloodless fictional universes like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Ha ha, did I say bloodless? This is Stephen King we’re talking about. I read The Stand during the 2020 Covid-19 shut down, then moved on to this for this summer. In a forward to The Stand, Stephen King talks about how he originally intended The Stand to be a sort of Lord of the Rings set in the American west. The Stand turned out to be something different, and this turns out to be more like what The Stand was meant to be early on. There’s a tower and an eye, for chrissakes. It’s pretty awesome – a wild mashup of Lord of the Rings, Clint Eastwood movies (I’m listening to the audiobook and the narrator uses a spot-on Clint Eastwood impression throughout), King Arthur, Roger Zelasny’s Amber series (which is also evident in the Merchant Princes series, but I would say more evident here), Brothers Grimm (and/or its Disney variants), the Wizard of Oz, King’s own work, and I am sure thousands of other things I am not picking up on. Like at one point, we meet a crouching tiger and a hidden dragon just a few pages apart. It might not hold together if it was written by someone other than Stephen King, but hey…

Did I mention Star Trek Discovery above? I like Star Trek – it’s a little nerdy, a little campy, the acting is not always excellent, and it’s just relaxing and fun and you don’t have to think too hard. Well, this turned out to be less campy, better acted, and more fun than I expected. There’s some martial arts action from Michelle Yeoh, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, and is now 58 years old. And there is a parallel universe angle, which I wasn’t expecting, and just slotted it right into place with my summer theme.

I’m going to run out of Merchant Princes most likely, so I might read another Amber novel. I don’t love Amber actually, but it’s just canonical so I plan to work my way through it little by little. After Labor Day, I’ll return to my usual alternating of fiction and non-fiction, and generally slower reading pace.

Saturn Run

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I just finished Saturn Run by John Sandford and “Ctein”. John Sandford is an extremely prolific author of detective books including the Prey series. His Wikipedia entry lists 31 books in that series alone, and it is not his only series. I haven’t read any of those, but I am interested after enjoying Saturn Run, which is apparently his first/only science fiction book. And who “Ctein”? Well, his Wikipedia says that…wait, I typed that before checking and now it seems that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia article. That in itself is strange. From what I can gather, he is from California, he is a photographer, and he has quite a beard. Photography and California both play a role in the book.

Anyway, this is a book about a near-future space expedition using technology that is just a little ahead of our time but easy to imagine. I really enjoyed it. It is pretty similar in these plot aspects to Delta-V by Daniel Suarez, which I also really enjoyed. The plot and characters are really good, and you can tell it is written by a first-rate thriller and mystery writer. It’s a page turner, although I listened to the audiobook and I don’t know what the audiobook equivalent of a page turner is, a battery drainer?

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

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I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

military robot dogs

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The Air Force now has robot dogs patrolling at least one base in Florida. Fun pictures here.

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubberpadded paws…

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began…

It was half across the lawn, coming from the shadows, moving with such drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence. It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red colour like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (I am not guaranteeing this download is legal. If you ever see a book lying around and you are not sure if the copyright intellectual property rights of The Man have been followed, BURN IT!!!)

what’s new with Kim Stanley Robinson

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Kim Stanley Robinson (who is a man named Kim – I covered this before) has a new book called The Ministry for the Future. In this article, Kim Stanley Robinson not only admits to being a socialist, but a “post-capitalist”. Basically, his plan is to get rid of capitalism and replace it with something much, much better. Something beautiful. And in this book, it sounds like he shows us what he thinks that could look like. It can’t be any less entertaining than Ralph Nader’s book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. (I’m just saying that was a book about serious ideas, that didn’t translate into a particularly entertaining work of fiction. Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson can occasionally be heavy on ideas and world building, and a little lighter on engaging plots and characters, at least from my perspective. He has an astonishing first-class imagination though.)

I like it when authors talk about other ideas, authors and books that have interested them. He mentions a couple real-world economic systems that could be described as post-capitalist – the Mondragon system of the Basque region (which featured in his book 2312, as I recall) and another system in Kerala, India. He mentions Robert Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Thomas More’s Utopia. He talks about a number of his own books including New York 2140, Aurora, and Red Moon. He also mentions a movie (later a TV show?) called Snowpiercer that I hadn’t heard of, but the summary sounds intriguing:

In a future where a failed climate-change experiment has killed all life except for the lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, a new class system emerges.

IMDb

In a parallel universe where I have time to read and watch dumb movies, I will get a pizza and a six pack this weekend and settle in with some of these!