Category Archives: Book Review – Fiction

ocean on Jupiter’s moon

Here is an article called Vast underground ocean discovered on Jupiter’s largest moon. Somehow they can tell by the way the planet bulges out that there is water underneath the surface.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface.

This reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. About half that book is verbal description of an ocean on an alien planet. It doesn’t sound exciting, but I found it fascinating. This is a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words, because he describes these fantastical geometric shapes that you can picture in your mind’s eye, and yet they could never actually be drawn. It’s even more amazing that the book was written in Polish, and the version available in English is supposedly an English translation of a French translation of the original. Or maybe that has something to do with why the language is so fascinating. I wish I had a copy to pull out a good quote but I don’t have one at the moment.

what’s new with drugs

Drugs are not immune from the current wave of seemingly accelerating innovation (from Pacific Standard Magazine):

New psychoactive substances are coming out so quickly that it’s not possible to ban them fast enough to keep up, let alone police or scientifically understand them. When one substance is outlawed, another is born, just chemically distinct enough from the last one to evade its ban…

Not since the 19th century—when an earlier wave of globalization rapidly accelerated the spread of opium, cocaine, marijuana, and hazily defined “patent medicines”—has there been such a burgeoning and unregulated pharmacopeia. And by all indications, the future promises only more acceleration. Last year, a research lab at Stanford demonstrated that it’s possible to produce opioid drugs like morphine using a genetically modified form of baker’s yeast. Soon, even the production of traditional illegal drugs or illicit versions of pharmaceuticals could become a highly decentralized cottage industry, posing the same kind of regulatory challenge that the specter of 3-D printed firearms poses to the project of gun control.

In 2013, the U.N.’s World Drug Report summed up the global situation this way: “The international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon known as new psychoactive substances.” Testifying before Congress that same year, the DEA’s Joseph Rannazzisi said that his agency could not keep up with “the clandestine chemists and traffickers who quickly and easily replace newly controlled substances with new, non-controlled substances.”

New Zealand is starting to regulate recreational drugs more like food: with labeling, consumer notices, and so on. Sometimes I wonder how long this will stay a mom and pop business – once it’s legal, won’t big drug and chemical companies try to get in on the game? It’s a brave new world.

my vacation reading list

Here’s my vacation reading list, just in case anyone is interested:

The Fear Index (about a hedge fund running an automated trading algorithm – way more fun to read than it sounds)

Count Zero (the sequel to William Gibson’s Neuromancer – great dystopian technology and artificial intelligence fiction although similar to Neuromancer, he uses a lot of made-up slang, weird sentence structure, and multiple points of view that keep me from getting really absorbed in the book)

Monster Hunter International (what it sounds like – pure escape fiction, basically an updated Ghostbusters with a Walking Dead-like gun fetish, violent but lighthearted)

MaddAdam (the third and final book in Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake series)

The original I Am Legend (because why not, I seem to be on a monster kick – if I don’t get to this one, I may save it for around Halloween)

can/should machines run the world?

From “futureoflife.org“, here is a short excerpt on future directions of artificial intelligence research.

What policies could help increasingly automated societies flourish? For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee [12] explore various policies for incentivizing development of labor-intensive sectors and for using AI-generated wealth to support underemployed
populations. What are the pros and cons of interventions such as educational reform, apprenticeship programs, labor-demanding infrastructure projects, and changes to minimum wage law, tax structure, and the social safety net [26]? History provides many examples of subpopulations not needing to work for economic security, ranging from aristocrats in antiquity to many present-day citizens of Qatar. What societal structures and other factors determine whether such populations flourish? Unemployment is not the same as leisure, and there are deep links between unemployment and unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation [34, 19]; understanding what policies and norms can break these links could signifi cantly improve the median quality of life. Empirical and theoretical research on topics such as the basic income proposal could clarify our options [83, 89].

Please follow the link if you would like to see the references.

Also see The Evitable Conflict, the last story in Asimov’s I, Robot. No, not the Will Smith movie! Just put that out of your head and read the book, it’s short. Anyway, in that story humans have handed control of the global economy over to “Machines”, artificial intelligences which are supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way, and the humans are trying to figure out why not, and whether or not they should try to do anything about it. This story was written in 1950, so it should be in the public domain soon. Another great old story that is in the public domain is Forster’s The Machine Stops. In that story (from 1909!), a machine runs the entire world, and is supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way. Or, it does for awhile, but then the machine… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s free and it’s short, so give it a read!

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

This post is a must read. I did not expect anything in it. It’s hard to pick a quote because the whole thing is quotable. Anyway:

There are two main sources of bacteria that we looked at. There is a methane-digesting bacteria that you basically grow on natural gas. And then we can either eat that directly or process it or say, feed it to rats and then eat the rats. Then there’s the bacteria that we can grow directly on wood. Or on leftover mushroom waste. And so this would be taking down a tree, pulverizing it, turning it into a slurry, and then letting the bacteria go at it.

So for instance, there are bacteria that secrete sugars they then use to feed themselves. You can pull out the sugars, and eat those ourselves and leave the bacteria and the partially decaying wood pulp. And we can feed that stuff to other things. So for instance, rats digest wood to some degree, particularly after it is partially broken down that way. This makes a fairly good solution. We could feed something similar to chickens. And chicken is something maybe people would maybe be happier to eat than bacteria milkshakes.

So – we’re going to cut down all the trees, which is going to be hard because they will be frozen. Then we pulp them, feed the pulp to bacteria, then to rats, then eat the rats. Please people, let’s not let it get to this point.

It also reminded me of the yeast vats in The Caves of Steel. Also how certain yeast strains can make wheat beer taste like bananas, even though there are no bananas in there. It has occurred to me before that fungi could be a key to feeding people in a world that was photosynthetically limited for one reason or another.

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has a new book about six inventions that “got us to now”. The list he has come up with is “glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light“. I’ll put it on my short to medium term reading list, because it doesn’t sound extremely exciting to me, but I did like his first book and its focus on the “adjacent possible”. His point there was that every once in a while you might have an Einstein with major breakthroughs that seem far ahead of their time, but for the most part progress is incremental, and what seems like a breakthrough in retrospect is made possible by a series of earlier incremental steps. Digital computers are a good example – Charles Babbage and others came up with all the necessary theory to build them in the 18th century, but they would have to have been built out of gears and powered by steam. The invention of electricity, transistors, silicon chips, etc., and the building of all the infrastructure systems to support them, eventually paved the way for our laptops, smartphones, and supercomputers today.

This also reminded me of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” novel in which the British and French governments actually build the enormous computers envisioned by Babbage, and put them to various bureaucratic and nefarious purposes.

The Year of the Flood

I finally got around to reading The Year of the Flood, the second book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy. And I liked it. I remember not loving the first book, Oryx and Crake. Sometimes whether or not you love a book depends on where you are and what you are doing when you read it. Often, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I read a book I loved. And I don’t remember where I was when I read Oryx and Crake, which is a telling sign. However, I remember exactly when I read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl – 2009. And I remember thinking that Margaret Atwood lifted themes directly out of that book, only didn’t use them quite as well, so I guess I read Oryx and Crake after that. And I remember being annoyed that Atwood would not admit that the book was a work of science fiction, and that serious people were reading and positively reviewing the book who thought they were too serious for science fiction. Well, I have news – it was science fiction all along, and not only that, it’s cyberpunk. Well, I’ve decided to forgive all this. I can give her the benefit of the doubt, or else I can decide that she was paying homage to an earlier science fiction master and give her credit for that. As I’ve gotten more into science fiction, I’ve seen that done several times, obviously on purpose, and it seems to be acceptable where it might not be acceptable in another genre. So, I’ve decided since then that both books are pretty good after all, and I plan to read the third book.

In The Year of the Flood, there are themes that seem like they are taken right out of The Hunger Games. I found this interview online where Atwood says she has never heard of The Hunger Games, and forgives the author of The Hunger Games for taking her idea.

Have you had a chance to read or see The Hunger Games? The games are designed for the districts to pay back the Capitol for a past rebellion, via the lives of their children, like the heroine Katniss Everdeen. It seems to be inspired in part by elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and Year of the Flood, especially in terms of the structure of postapocalyptic society, how the disenfranchised are “chosen” for an honor that is anything but …
In kind of a game show? So, basically it’s Painball from Year of the Flood in which people are pitted against other people so other people can watch it on TV? And the origin of that of course is paintball, which is a real thing! It’s always nice to have people see the beauty of one’s ideas. I’m flattered. [Chuckles.] It sounds interesting. Some of these things go way back, mythologically. How did she end up in this position?

Because there’s a lottery, and her sister was chosen, and so she volunteers to take her place.
Shirley Jackson! How old are they?

Between the ages of 11 and 18.
Theseus and the Minotaur! Love it. And so they put these people in a very large area? It’s Painball. Same idea. If you survive, will they let you out?

I don’t want to spoil it too much for you.
That’s okay — I can guess. I haven’t written my third one yet, so whatever’s in it can’t be used in The Hunger Games.

The original Hunger Games novel was released in 2008, and The Year of the Flood in 2009. So it’s plausible that it was a coincidence and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt again. Anyway, maybe she’s right and there are only a certain number of themes and plots out there, and good fiction is all about how you apply them to your characters and your time.

The MaddAdam books present a near-future dystopian society in a very entertaining way, and I was entertained by that. I don’t think I would be giving away too much if I told you there is a collapse of industrialized, urbanized civilization in this story. You find that out in the first few pages of the first book. Then the rest of the story is really about who, how, and why that happened. The first book focuses more on consumer society and dangerous technology in the hands of amoral – in fact immoral – private corporations, while the second mixes that with a bit of climate change, habitat and species loss.

You find out pretty early what actually caused the collapse, but the more interesting part to me, which Margaret hints at but ultimately leaves to our imaginations, is how the society got to the point it was at before the crash. Any sort of representative government seems to be completely absent, but you don’t get the sense that the corporations muscled it aside through any sort of armed means. Maybe they simply starved it of resources to the point where it gave up. The entire society is designed to accumulate wealth and power at the top, but it is a bit of a puzzle how that works. The corporations themselves create new value through their research into the new technologies, but then they have to make the whole society want to buy those things from them. They have to let just enough wealth trickle down to enough people so they can spend the wealth and let it be gathered back up. So there must be a very, very large number of relatively poor people working hard to support the elite few, without realizing they are doing that. I say relatively poor because they can’t be so poor they decide to drop out of the consumer system entirely (as a few people do, which is the focus of the second book.) They can’t realize how poor they are, and they have to have a little bit of income that they can spend on all the things the corporations provide, which is everything – food, shelter, clothing, drugs, even access to reproduction. They have to believe in money, and want to accumulate money, but they have to want the products and services of the corporations so much that they never actually accumulate much money but spend it all. Of course, the corporations are exploiting not just all these people but the natural environment, so at some point that is either going to catch up to them, unless there is an accident or deliberate act to help the process along first…

Michael Graves’s linear cities

I had forgotten about this idea for long, linear cities laid out along transportation corridors.

It’s interesting. I’m a little skeptical for a few reasons. First, I can imagine it being a cold, corporate world. Who would own the buildings and transportation systems? From my little row house I can walk in many different directions and engage in many different activities on little parcels of land owned or controlled by many different entities. Would this linear city be more like living in a mall, where everything is ultimately controlled by one owner and sanitized for my protection? Also, a line is by definition a one-dimensional world – in a linear city it seems to me like I would have only two choices of direction and that sounds boring. Although the prospect of being close to a natural or agricultural landscape is intriguing. A final concern would be the capacity of the transportation system. As the city keeps getting longer indefinitely, it seems like you might come up against a finite transportation capacity and bottlenecks could develop in the system.

I’m also reminded about a couple works of science fiction, both of which are dystopian. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is laid out along “linear cities” that are definitely not cold, corporate, sanitary or mall like (or safe). They are more like trashy interstate truck stops. Paul McAuley’s Invisible Country alludes to enormous “ribbon arcologies” where most people live. They don’t have to work because they have slaves, so apparently they spend most of their time tripping on drugs and virtual reality, and don’t really go out much. So the linear city is an interesting idea, but we need to be a little cautious how it unfolds.

National Geographic on the California drought

Here is National Geographic weighing in on snowpack, drought, and climate change in the western U.S.:

As in most of the rest of the American West, fortunes depend less on how much precipitation falls from the sky than how much of it falls as snow and how long that snow stays in the mountains. Despite the occasional severe winters, western snowpacks have declined in recent decades, and key researchers expect the trend to accelerate. “Warmer winters are reducing the amount of snow stored in the mountains, and they’re causing snowpacks to melt earlier in the spring,” says Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. Shrinking snowpacks and earlier snowmelts mean—in practical terms—that the region faces a persistent and worsening drought.

They talk about the parallels with Australia, which has faced similar issues and seemingly handled them better:

Australia’s Big Dry, a decade-long drought that began around the start of this century, led at first to the same kind of political bickering heard recently in California. But after years of environmental destruction, urban water stress, and great suffering by many dryland farmers, Australian politicians—and farmers—took some serious risks. “At the peak of the drought, it became very apparent that the environment doesn’t lie,” says Mike Young, a professor at the University of Adelaide who was active in the country’s drought response. Australia reduced urban water use by investing billions in conservation, education, and efficiency improvements. Most important, it began to reform the old water allocation system, which, like California’s, had promised specific amounts of water to rights holders. The country instituted a system that guaranteed a minimum supply of water for the environment, then divided the remainder into shares that could be quickly sold and traded—or stored for the next season. Farmers fought the changes, but with a financial incentive to use less water, they soon got more creative and more efficient. Water use dropped, and though consumption has risen since the drought eased in 2010, it remains below pre-drought levels in towns and cities.

I wonder if any other cultures have ever dealt with something like this. From Wikipedia:

Ancient Pueblo peoples, Ancestral Pueblo peoples, or Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the United States, comprising southern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado.[1] They lived in a range of structures, including pit houses, pueblos, and cliff dwellings designed so that they could lift entry ladders during enemy attacks, which provided security. Archaeologists sometimes refer to the unique set of material culture remains as “Anasazi”, although the term is not preferred by contemporary Pueblo peoples and often loosely used as a name for the occupants…

After approximately 1150, North America experienced significant climatic change in the form of a 300-year drought called the Great Drought. This also led to the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization around Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia.[22] The contemporary Mississippian culture also collapsed during this period…

In this later period, the Pueblo II became more self-contained, decreasing trade and interaction with more distant communities. Southwest farmers developed irrigation techniques appropriate to seasonal rainfall, including soil and water control features such as check dams and terraces. The population of the region continued to be mobile, abandoning settlements and fields under adverse conditions. Along with the change in precipitation patterns, there was a drop in water table levels due to a different cycle unrelated to rainfall. This forced the abandonment of settlements in the more arid or over-farmed locations.[citation needed]

Evidence suggests a profound change in religion in this period. Chacoan and other structures constructed originally along astronomical alignments, and thought to have served important ceremonial purposes to the culture, were systematically dismantled. Doorways were sealed with rock and mortar. Kiva walls show marks from great fires set within them, which probably required removal of the massive roof – a task which would require significant effort. Habitations were abandoned, tribes split and divided and resettled far elsewhere.

Uh oh, so it looks like times got a little crazy, and people started burning stuff down. Hopefully we can do better than this. From what I know, this was a fairly urban, densely settled, agricultural civilization. When water got scarce, they probably just dispersed. Back then, there was a fair amount of open space to disperse in. I’m not so sure that is going to work for us, unless we are talking about spaceships.

By the way, if you happen to be interested in a story where a whole civilization goes crazy and starts burning shit down, try this:
Nightfall

By the way, this is a novel based on a short story old enough to be in the public domain, which someone has posted online here.

the cyborg moths are finally here!

Well, they’re finally here – the cyborg moth slaves. First it was cockroaches and I didn’t say much because, well, they’re cockroaches. But moths – they’re just one step from butterflies, and it just doesn’t seem like you should do this to butterflies. From butterflies the obvious next step is Paul Mcauley’s cyborg baboon-human hybrids. If you read his book of short stories The Invisible Country, it is not until about the second page that you start to think this sort of technology could raise some ethical issues.