Category Archives: Book Review – Fiction

Solaris

I’ve been revisiting the fantastic descriptions of the alien ocean in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and I just want to share one part of one paragraph, which I hope does not constitute a copyright violation. His paragraphs are quite long however.

…if comparisons with Earth really have to be employed – these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescances”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over a monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent format, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystallizing jelly…

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

Like I said, that is one part of one paragraph. It goes on like that for a long time. There have been a couple movies, but it really is a case where a few words are worth a thousand pictures, and whatever you picture in your mind is better than anything the most talented movie special effects person could come up with.

plague lit

Wired has an article on science fiction novels involving plagues, and over at the New Yorker is a long article from the more literary genre (Steven King appears to have breached this category!).

Wired mentions:

  • three Neal Stephenson novels: Seveneaves, Anathem, and The Fall, or, Dodge in Hell
  • The Expanse (which I have heard great things about but probably won’t read because the show has spoiled it for me)
  • Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (who I recently learned is a dude. I read the first book, and liked it, but didn’t love it enough to read the other two. It is one of those books I find myself thinking about though.)
  • Ender’s Game (big fan)
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I’ve been burned out just a bit on Heinlein, but maybe I’ll give this one a chance at some point.)
  • William Gibson. No specific books, just William Gibson. (I like that I have read William Gibson, but I don’t )

The New Yorker mentions:

  • A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, 1722. (Yes, it’s about that plague. Also know as the plague.)
  • The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826.
  • Oedipus Rex (mentions the plague apparently)
  • Angels in America (yes, AIDS counts as a plague, complete with a long incubation time, asymptomatic transmission, initial government denial and botched response, and eventual development of more effective treatments, although there is still no vaccine or absolute cure.)
  • The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, 1842.
  • The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, 1912. (sort of a sequel to the Poe story, apparently)
  • The Plague by Albert Camus, 1947. (I didn’t realize Camus was that recent, but that is just me being ignorant.)
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago, 1995. (“brilliant” according to the New Yorker, but just sounds too depressing for right now.)
  • And of course, The Stand.

The science fiction book I keep thinking about though, which is not on either list, is Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. In Robots of Dawn, life on Earth is nasty, brutish and short. But there is a race (of humans) who have moved to space, and they live hundreds of years in part by avoiding virtually all physical contact with each other. They can do this because the human population is very low on a large planet, robots do all the work, and they have excellent video conferencing facilities. Humans basically never come into close physical proximity, with the one exception that husbands and wives get together only for the purpose of making babies, which is surprising because you would think a futuristic civilization where robots do all the work would have discovered in vitro fertilization. At the very least, you could send a robot over to your wife’s place with a turkey baster full of…well, you get the idea.

I’m thinking about a 2020 summer reading theme. I don’t think I want a plague theme! I could do worse than dig into some Neal Stephenson novels I’ve missed. I could always go back and read some Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve never read The Stand, so maybe.

The Minnesota Diet

In this short story by Charlie Jane Anders, a relatively near-future (it refers to events “way back in the 2040s”) smart city is beset by supply chain problems with automated trucks that no human can seem to control. It also seems like nobody can leave. I’ll try not to spoil the plot but I’ll just list a few of the technologies woven into the story:

  • automated passenger and freight vehicles. Algorithms seem to determine who gets what in terms of food, and the government is not functional enough to step in. You can rent a car but where it can go depends on its software license.
  • jobs seem to be mostly professional tech and amorphous “business”, plus service jobs to support them. No truck drivers, construction workers, assembly line workers, etc.
  • “bioplastic” seems to be the key building material, produced by crops and/or genetically engineered fungus. Using crop land for this stuff rather than food seems to be part of the problem.
  • augmented reality goggles, but people are also still staring at screens
  • vertical farms producing maybe a sixth of the food supply. These seem to mostly or completely automated.

The title is a reference to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was a World War II-era scientific study in which people actually volunteered to (partially) starve and then test out different ways to recover. According to Wikipedia it was a diet of about 1500 calories per day consisting mostly of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni for 24 weeks. It actually doesn’t sound all that terrible to me because these are relatively filling, satisfying foods. But 24 weeks sounds like a long, long time. I think I could handle this for 24 days if I was allowed unlimited seasonings and condiments, and maybe a beer or two on Fridays.

the singularity is…boring?

I’ve read a couple near- to mid-term future books this summer that you could describe as being about the singularity. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson takes place in…well, that’s not too hard to figure out. Humanity has populated most of the solar system, and people are still people but they have various augmentations to their bodies. Artificial intelligence is around although it is not clear just how intelligent it really is. The last book I read by Robinson was Red Mars, and like that book, I find that the world (really, the entire solar system) of his imagination is breathtaking and he describes it very vividly. The passages where he describes what the world is like and how it got that way are fascinating. His actual characters and plots…less fascinating. I just couldn’t get into them or care about them.

Accelerando by Charles Stross is kind of similar. He is pretty explicit that events in his story take place in the near future, say 2030-2100. Things are far more advanced and weird in Stross’s 2050 than Robinson’s 2312. Humanity spreads out to most of the solar system during the course of the book. People have radical augmentations to their minds, and artificial intelligence is a major factor. The world building is fascinating, the passages that describe how the world is changing are fascinating, and…the characters are forgettable, and the actual plot all but incomprehensible. It’s just beyond weird. I think his purpose was just to show what it could be like if things get really weird. Don’t get me wrong, I love Charles Stross. He is an excellent story teller when he wants to be, and I think he has just purposely written a very different kind of book here. Maybe he is just showing off his imagination, which is astonishing. Actually, he writes several different kinds of books, and if I had to randomly read passages from them without prior knowledge of Charles Stross, I would never guess they could be the same author. I’m not sorry I’ve read Accelerando but I’m not sure I would recommend it as light reading.

Let’s digress briefly and talk about dudes named Kim. According to Wikipedia, Kim was a popular boys’ name in the U.S. as recently as the 1960s. I don’t know any men named Kim and I had no idea. And no less a journalistic powerhouse than the Omaha World-Herald has published an exhaustive article on the subject.

One strange common thread between 2012 and Accelerando is the idea of dismantling entire planets and using them as raw materials for enormous computers.

I also read Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan this summer. I didn’t love this book either. And I love Richard K. Morgan. He’s another author that likes to experiment with completely different writing styles and even genres.

One strange common thread between Accelerando and Market Forces is the idea of bringing back some form of dueling or trial by combat to settle disputes between corporations. It’s a strange coincidence – then again, it’s entirely possible these authors talk and occasionally bounce bizarre ideas off each other. Corporations are not people, they exist to compete with each other and only the strong and nimble survive. They don’t need to be treated the same as people.

Strangely enough, after not thinking about dueling for more than five seconds for several decades, I just listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast on dueling. It occurred to me that maybe dueling did serve one purpose in societies where people do not trust the authorities to administer justice fairly – perhaps it breaks the cycle of revenge. Normally in human societies, if someone wrongs you, a close family member or friend, and there are no civil authorities you trust to administer justice, you are honor bound to seek vengeance. The people you seek vengeance upon will then seek vengeance in return, in an escalating cycle of violence that leads to a lot of suffering and death. Maybe dueling, violent as it was, served a purpose because if your friend or family member was killed fair and square in the duel, justice was served and you were not duty bound to do anything more about it. I’m not saying this is good – the trustworthy civil authorities are the way to go. But one dead body is better than many.

I’m also reading some Agatha Christie, just because I never have. I am liking it but not loving it.

So…hooray for podcasts and boo for books I have picked so far this summer. Oh well, some summer reading binges are more fun than others.

I am actually half-seriously trying to write a novel this year. It’s hard. I just want to get my 80,000 words written down to prove to myself that I can do it. More likely, it will renew my appreciation for the people who do it all the time and are actually good at it.

Obama’s favorite books of 2018

In a Facebook post, Barrack Obama claims to have read 29 books this year. That’s impressive, even if there is some skimming involved. I guess the dude is basically retired and he probably also has some help with childcare. Good for him. No word on whether Donald Trump reread his copy of the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler even once this year.

solarpunk

What is solar punk exactly? I’m not exactly sure, but this story in Longreads describes it like this:

A new type of science fiction, solarpunk takes as its premise the idea that climate change is unavoidable and probably will be severe, but demands optimism of its writers. A 2015 essay on the genre’s political ideals and inspirations by Andrew Dana Hudson refers to solarpunk as a “speculative movement, a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.” In practice, so far this has meant a bunch of short fiction and visual art, numerous explanatory essays, and a lot of enthusiastic conversation on social media and in online communities. But those associated with it tend to hold out hope that solarpunk could be a starting point for something bigger, something that could help propel a shift away from our contemporary sense of defeatism.

The article mentions a couple short story anthologies:

haunted houses

The New York Times has a roundup of haunted house stories just in time for Halloween. I have read only two on the list – The Shining, which I liked, and Slade House, which I didn’t.

I’m not too big on horror but I occasionally dabble. Sometimes you remember where you were when you read certain books, and it happens that I read these two books in Thailand two Octobers four years apart. I like Lovecraft. I am interested in reading the “laundry series” by Charles Stross, which sounds like a mix between Men in Black and Monster Hunter International (which I also read in Thailand incidentally – traveling is when I read and Thailand is a place I travel, so there.)

James Bond

Part of my summer bucket list was to read one of the old Ian Fleming James Bond books. In the end, I read them all. They are not long and not hard to read. Here are 10 things that surprised me about the literary James Bond.

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers, in case you were thinking of wading into Ian Fleming yourself. Parents, be warned it also contains the P word. PUSSY! There, I said it and it’s out of my system. Actually, I just heard an NPR announcer say it today (talking about the Russian band Pussy Riot) and it made me laugh out loud.

  1. He does order at least one vodka martini shaken not stirred, but his favorite drink by far is bourbon. He drinks enormous quantities of the stuff. He never orders less than a double and sometimes he orders it by the tumbler or just downs it straight from the bottle. In at least one case he mixes it with coffee and takes it with him on a mission that involves climbing trees, firearms and hand-to-hand combat. He definitely drinks in part to unwind after, and sometimes during, a hard day of spying. He occasionally drinks beer or wine, but you get the idea that is just to stay hydrated between bourbons. He also drinks enormous quantities of coffee and states emphatically many times in multiple books how much he despises tea.
  2. He also smokes enormous amounts of cigarettes all day every day.
  3. Somehow, despite this lifestyle he stays in excellent physical condition. Once, it catches up to him a bit and he is ordered to detox in a health clinic for a couple weeks, which is all it takes to restore him to perfect health. This is all somewhat amusing until you learn that Ian Fleming drank and smoked heavily, leading to several heart attacks that ultimately killed him in his 50s. So viewed through that lense, it reads a little like a fantasy of someone who is not in good health but imagines an alter-ego who is. Imagine if Clark Kent downed a bottle of scotch every day, knowing that it couldn’t hurt him. Well, Ian Fleming was no Superman but James Bond sort of was.
  4. He seems most relaxed and engaged in life when he is in dangerous, risky situations that would be extremely stressful for a normal person. When he has a period of relative safety and office work, he gets depressed. This reminds me of possibly the only more famous fictional British character, Sherlock Holmes. He was similar in that he would get bored and depressed when he had a lull in between cases. Like Bond, he turned to substance abuse (cocaine in his case) to get through these periods, and like Bond, he seemed to suffer no lasting ill effects. Both also fake their deaths after defeating an arch-enemy and later resurface. Ian Fleming and Conan Doyle’s character Watson were war veterans (World War II and Afghanistan, respectively), and would have seen some serious shit in their time, which I imagine might have taken more of a toll than it took on their fictional supermen. I’m sure Fleming would have read and been influenced by Conan Doyle.
  5. Pussy Galore was a woman who preferred the company of other women, until she met James Bond… James Bond seems to have a complicated, yet simple, view of lesbians. If they are young and attractive (to men), they are okay and if they are not, they tend to be evil, especially if they prey on young women who are attractive to men.
  6. Speaking of the P word, Octopussy is an actual octopus, showing up briefly in a short story found in Fleming’s notes after his death. James Bond is mostly fearless but he has a weird phobia about octopuses, seeming to believe that they are among the most deadly sea creatures. I’ve done a little research and other than the poisonous ones in Australia, there is almost no evidence of octopuses posing any serious threat to humans, and certainly not killing them.
  7. James Bond is not a particular fan of gay men, short people, Japanese people and people with disabilities. He seems to like black people, gypsies, and Americans overall although he occasionally spouts various slurs and generalizations about them. He is not bothered when one close friend recalls raping someone. In one instance he himself is guilty of something bordering on date rape, although the woman involved does not seem concerned about it afterward. He generally treats women and people in general with respect when he encounters them one on one, however.
  8. One Bond story is a first person account of a young woman’s coming of age, including some sexual exploits, some of which involve James Bond. Perhaps Ian Fleming was bored and wanted to experiment a bit with that one.
  9. He doesn’t always get the girl. Well, usually he gets the girl, but typically only one per novel, and occasionally zero, or there is just a sense of mounting sexual tension which might lead to something offscreen.
  10. The novels are not as violent as the movies. James Bond states several times that he does not kill in cold blood. He generally kills in self defense or occasionally in revenge, and feels some regret about it. The women he sleeps with are not killed constantly like they are in the movies. The villain pretty much always dies, but not always in a violent one-on-one showdown like in the movies. Sometimes it is in a more anti-climactic way. One thing is exactly like the movies – the villains do tend to leave James Bond in “an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death,” as Dr. Evil put it in Austin Powers. They do sometimes explain why they do this – basically some mixture of sadism, ego, and over-confidence. It’s not quite convincing, but hey, these stories are fantasies in the end.

It was fun reading these books and I’m not sure why I didn’t do it sooner. Rest in peace, Ian Fleming, and long live your indestructible fictional alter ego.

more on cosmogenesis in science fiction

I figured there must be a lot of science fiction about scientists creating universes. In 15 minutes of searching I only came up with two that I didn’t know about:

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956) – In this one, people and computers are trying to figure out over many generations what to do when the universe ends. I won’t spoil the ending.

Schild’s Ladder by Greg Eagen (2002) – I think this one is about a universe accidentally created by scientists. There is a plot summary on Wikipedia but I didn’t want to read it and spoil it for myself.

A Deepness in the Sky

I just finished A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, and it was the most enjoyable book I have read in the last couple years. I’m not going to spoil the plot, but like all Vernor Vinge books it has layers upon layers with themes such as civilizations rising and falling, technological progress (and sometimes regression) with its opportunities and dangers, interactions between civilizations at different levels of technology, and at similar levels of technology but with different cultures and values. The plot unfolds over long periods of time while the characters are very real, accessible, and human, even if not all of them are actually human.