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| 0553418629
| 9780553418620
| 0553418629
| 4.08
| 60,636
| Jun 16, 2015
| Mar 15, 2016
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really liked it
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When I was studying poetry, I attended a good number of poetry readings. Some were given by seasoned poets; others, by fresh MFA grads. The two experi
When I was studying poetry, I attended a good number of poetry readings. Some were given by seasoned poets; others, by fresh MFA grads. The two experiences are wildly different, as large a contrast as visiting DisneyWorld is from visiting the county fair. And it is the latter ones I came to prefer. The veterans’ readings were performative: they already knew where to pause, where to emphasize, where to stop and look at the audience. Maybe not consciously but it was there, ingrained from practice. By contrast, the novices’ readings were exploratory. They were much more likely to stumble over words, to jumble their cadences, to alter their tempo mid-poem. As if they were testing out their options, trying to discover which one was best. Attending such a reading felt as if I were an active member of some lyrical expedition to map out a poetical future. I bring this up because Mount Char, as a debut novel, feels much the same. I can’t specifically point to any line or character or chapter and claim, “Hey this is less polished than you might find from a more experienced author.” And yet the Library of Mount Char has a roughness to it, a thrilling sense of authorial exploration. The characters aren’t fake, but they don’t quite feel natural either. The book extends a good 25% beyond where most other novels would end. And so on. None of which is a criticism. The author was clearly not following a personal formula, but creating it. And it has a fresh plot too. Mount Char focuses on a set of adopted siblings who are training to be gods, under the tutelage of the head god himself. Not a god in the traditional sense, though. More in the sense of a run-away superintelligence, in that he acquired that knowledge that allowed him to get better at acquiring knowledge which made him better still at acquiring knowledge, a pattern that continued until he reached a state of omniscience but not omni-attention. That’s a subtle but important distinction, which I think explains why some readers describe this book as difficult or confusing. Dealing with omniscience makes it tricky to track who knows what and when do they know it. Ultimately, though, the plot and the novel structure shouldn't be too difficult to follow. The Library at Mount Char is neither post-modern, nor particularly philosophical. It's a good ol' fashioned revenge story, and like all solid revenge stories, has a nice twist or two. My one unadulterated complaint is the pitifully small scope of the setting. It’s completely dissonant with the plot’s scope. We’re talking god of the universe stuff here, yet 90% of the novel is set in a tiny suburban neighborhood. It does help add to the novel’s, um, novelty, but gives it a satirical vibe I’m not sure the author actually intended. Final conclusion: You’ll probably like it. Unless you’re a religious fundamentalist. In which case you probably won’t like it. But that’ll just leave you more time to read your holy book. Hey, win, win. ...more |
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not set
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Nov 11, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1784968544
| 9781784968540
| 1784968544
| 4.24
| 277
| unknown
| Jan 08, 2019
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liked it
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In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else. Space Marines are genetically-m In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else. Space Marines are genetically-modified, trained-from-birth super soldiers encased in power-armor and loaded to the gills with cybernetics. Their weapon of choice is the bolter, essentially an automatic grenade launcher. And they sometimes wield a sword because why not?! Swords are cool. Despite the similarities of their creation, Space Marines are not one monolithic force, oh no. They’re organized into Chapters (a good analogy would be a Roman Legion), whose battle tactics and overall philosophy can vary wildly. Seriously, there are hundreds if not thousands of different Chapters. The most righteous, jingoistic Chapter of them all are the Ultramarines. Praise the Emperor this, praise the Emperor that, and, oh, beware the Corruption of Chaos! Catechisms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, these books follow Uriel Ventris, a Captain of the Ultramarines. This hefty tome, in fact, comprises three different books, each featuring a different setting and different foe. The first book, Nightbringer, follows Uriel Ventris in his first major campaign as Captain and features Dark Eldar - basically sci-fi dark elves with a splash of Giger - as well as the Nightbringer (whoever that may be…) and your usual coterie of corrupt humans. It’s that last inclusion that elevates this first book above the others. I’m sure I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know when I say that human beings practice extreme levels of species prejudice. Only humans have souls, not animals. Only humans have free will, not animals. The vast majority of human beings will only start caring about the mass extinction event we’re currently causing when human beings start to suffer. Obviously there are exceptions but point is, human beings find human affairs most interesting and worthy of attention. That’s why in The Walking Dead, the actual walking dead merely serve as a backdrop for human conflict. Same here in Nightbringer. Yeah there’s aliens, there’s Old Gods… but the human politics and human conflicts serve as the core of the story. And the story is better for it. By contrast, the second book Warriors of Ultramar features Uriel Ventris leading a solar system defense against an invasion of Tyranids who are, basically, the Zerg (or vice versa): a Hive Mind species who use rapid and extreme genetic modification to creature ORGANIC weapons and soldiers. Here, though, human politics and conflicts do NOT serve as the core of the story. Not to say there isn’t some. It’s just not the main conflict. And the story is less compelling as a result. The last book, Dead Sky, Black Sun, involves the exodus of Uriel Ventris (and his best friend Pasanius) to a Chaos-infested HELLPLANET. Its endless descriptions of torture and body horror and such reminded me of that movie Event Horizon, as well as the original Quake games. Dead Sky, Black Sun was, by far, my least favorite book and, for the foreseeable future (indeed, perhaps forever) the last WH40K book that I’ll read. All of these books are action-packed with dialogue won’t win any awards but feels natural to the characters and description that helps expand the impressive WH40K milieu. It’s just… for this type of story, writing is not the best medium. I loathe the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words” but it’s the perfect critique of these books. Dead Sky, Black Sun, for example, contains A LOT of description… and yet I could tell you vastly more about the environs of Quake 2, a game I haven’t played in decades. Video games, film, animation - these are all much better media for telling these types of stories, in which objective description takes precedence over subjective description. In fact, that’s something a lot of authors don’t seem to grasp: good description should always be a form of characterization. An author is never going to out-describe a video game or a film. Ever. But what a novel can do that a film or video game can’t is customize the perception on the basis of the character. In a film or a video game, a tree is a tree. But in a novel, a druid or an industrialist or a peasant will look at a tree and describe it in vastly different terms. That’s huge. That’s what makes novels so great at exploring diverse mindsets and building empathy. The Chronicles of Uriel Ventris is not going to be strengthening your empathy muscles. So, yeah, it’s not capital-L Literature, but then OBVIOUSLY it isn’t. So it might seem churlish of me to make this criticism of the book. And I might agree - except I’ve also read the Eisenhorn trilogy from WH40K. Which also isn’t capital-L Literature but is nevertheless vastly superior to these because they remain FIRMLY centered on human conflict and FIRMLY anchored within the perspective of Eisenhorn himself. Every description is flavored by his own unique personality. So those books have all the action, all that fun WH40K lore and flavor… but they never lose sight of the human element either. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 25, 2020
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Oct 25, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0575081627
| 9780575081628
| 0575081627
| 3.66
| 2,194
| 2008
| May 15, 2008
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really liked it
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Un momento, por favor, while I analyze this book’s Brain Melt Rating (BMR) using my Brain Melt-O-Meter: [image] [by Bryant Arnold] Ah, yes... carry the 0 Un momento, por favor, while I analyze this book’s Brain Melt Rating (BMR) using my Brain Melt-O-Meter: [image] [by Bryant Arnold] Ah, yes... carry the 0... move the decimal place... apply the Lorentzian transformation... calculate the Rhiemannian connection... and the covariant derivative... and, ah yes, a Tensor field, wonderful wonderful…! ...Which gives Incandescence a BMR of FOUR, out of a possible FIVE. It’s not five because it's not an ACTUAL textbook on orbital mechanics and relativity. Of all the hard sci-fi books I’ve read, Incandescence takes the cake as the hardest. But only half is like that. As is all the rage these days, Greg Egan wrote this book as a split PoV narrative: The first point of view is that of Rakesh, and it features the Standard Egan Far Future Milieu, as seen in his other books like Schild’s Ladder and Diaspora. In these far future settings, you can expect the following futuristic delights: Everyone is immortal, at least in the physical sense. At worst, a person’s temporary physical body is destroyed and a new one is created using a data backup as template. Indeed, there’s no such thing as hunger or privation of any kind. You can chop the bottom 80% of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs right off. Furthermore, VR-scapes are both common and largely indistinguishable from reality. As a whole, our engineering mastery of **CURRENTLY KNOWN PHYSICS** is essentially complete. I’m a big fan of this milieu because it allows us to explore more novel conflicts than those seen in the vast majority of historical and contemporary stories. Egan’s character conflicts tend to be extremely high level self-actualization conflicts, while external conflicts usually take the form of mysteries of the universe. In this land of plenty, the vices of greed, lust, and tribalism have no real bite. I also like the optimism of the milieu. It’s not just that no one goes hungry or dies traumatically. Nor even that it’s portraying a future I haven’t the slightest confidence humanity will survive long enough to reach. It’s the entire vision of it all, the staggeringly creative glimpse of what MIGHT BE. For example, in one chapter Rakesh and his alien companion are hunting for a certain star, so they spend a couple thousand years making hundred-year leaps at the speed of light. This epic millenia long journey takes up about a paragraph. Imagine that, to have such freedom to undertake such an investigation. Anyway, that’s Rakesh’s PoV: a space archaeological journey, in which a post-human and his alien companion make their way into the hitherto-restricted inner space/bulge of the Milky Way, in search of long lost, extremely distant genetic cousins. It’s pretty neat and not at all difficult to understand. The second PoV is that of one such distant genetic cousin, Roi, a small crab-like alien who lives in a primitive civilization on an asteroid orbiting a black hole and subsisting on the energy contained within its accretion disk. [image] Roi's half of the story is all about science saving the day. In particular, it’s about these crab-people rediscovering orbital mechanics, differential geometry, and relativity, in an attempt to understand their world and hopefully avoid its destruction. It’s also pretty neat, but it is DIAMOND level of hard science. Here’s a demonstrative excerpt:
That isn’t just me picking one random difficult quote. That is the ENTIRE HALF OF THE BOOK, okay? What Egan set out to do here was to write a book that showed how an alien civilization might discover laws of physics, like SR's light-speed as the universal speed limit. Not just in summary, either, but in thorough, explicit detail. He describes the experiments, the terminology, and the machinery of calculation. I can’t stress this enough: it is basically a novelized summary of the basic ideas of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. It is hard science. Really. If you don’t know anything about physics and don’t care to know anything about physics, I cannot imagine you will enjoy Incandescence. (Also don't do as I did and read this every night just before going to sleep, when your mind is at its weakest). On the other hand, very few sci-fi novels out there do what Incandescence does. It is extremely rare to find a human-being capable of both writing novels and understanding advanced mathematics. It is even more rare for said human being to actually write a novel that makes use of such mathematical thinking because such a novel’s appeal will be limited in the extreme. So understand that Incandescence is a rare vintage that will delight those who understand and want what they are getting but whose unique flavors will fall afoul of your typical sci-fi palate. **************** SOME (basic) HARD SCIENCE HELP TO GET YOU STARTED: Roi's people use their own specialized jargon for spatial directions, which is fair but can get distracting. But basically: sard-garm; shomal-junub; and rarb-sharq are your three pairs of spatial dimensions. Sard-garm is basically longitude; shomal-junub is basically latitude; and rarb-sharq is basically altitude. Or just realize they represent -+ x, y, and z. I originally considered Roi's asteroid akin to a moon or planet, in that the most important source of gravity relative to their perspective is the gravity from the moon/planet itself. This is not the case. Instead, it's best to consider the asteroid as akin to a space station (or an asteroid, derp). For any person on these celestial bodies, the gravity of the asteroid itself is unimportant relative to the gravity caused by the larger object around which the asteroid is orbiting So the 'null line' represents an arc from this larger orbit (and thus any object will be in 'weightless' free-fall at the null line). Later in the novel, they switch from symbolic solving to numerical methods. This is necessary since they're calculating a two or three-body problem, which is basically impossible to solve symbolically. ******************** ALSO SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!: Many readers state these PoVs never actually link up. Even though Rakesh’s crab-people are orbiting a neutron star and Roi’s crab-people are orbiting a black hole, this is not true. Roi’s PoV is millions of years before Rakesh’s. Roi and her people eventually become the ‘Aloof.’ The last chapter strongly hints at that fate. ...more |
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not set
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Aug 31, 2020
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Aug 31, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 1597801747
| 9781597801744
| 1597801747
| 3.47
| 1,269
| Sep 15, 2010
| Sep 15, 2010
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liked it
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Zendegi is the book equivalent of Michael Jordan quitting basketball to play AA baseball. It’s not that MJ was bad at baseball. It’s just that he was
Zendegi is the book equivalent of Michael Jordan quitting basketball to play AA baseball. It’s not that MJ was bad at baseball. It’s just that he was extraordinary at basketball. Greg Egan is my favorite science fiction author. No other author I’ve read comes anywhere close to his ability to explore fabulous science ideas at their utmost imaginative limits while retaining a sense of plausibility. In my Diaspora review, I wrote: “Reading it brought into my mind a sense of wonder and of sheer visceral infinity that I hadn’t felt for years.” In my Schild’s Ladder review, I wrote: “An Egan work is an exceedingly rare, utterly beautiful combination of a child’s wonder and a scientist’s rigor.” Unfortunately, I can’t write anything like that about Zendegi. Instead of exploring grand sci-fi ideas, Zendegi tells the near-future stories of an Iranian programmer/scientist and an Australian ex-pat journalist in Iran. The first half of the story is largely about Iranian history & politics (viva la شورش!), which I found interesting enough. But it almost entirely lacks any sci-fi elements. It’s only in the second half that we get some sci-fi, in particular the titular Zendegi, a VR platform, and the Iranian programmer’s attempts to map the human brain to create more human AI. Zendegi also contains a strong flavor of Futurism (see Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near), and Egan adopts a fairly critical tone towards those elements. These are the type of people who go on calorie restrictive diets and hack their own genes in order to extend their lives long enough to take part in what they believe is an imminent immortality, brought on by a boot-strapped Artificial Super-Intelligence. I don’t share such optimism myself, but I do admire them for it. It was nice to see a Futurist character, which I don't think I've ever come across before. Compared to Egan’s other novels, Zendegi is much more character-centric, with family and political conflict given equal ink as the (for me, at least) more interesting ethical and technological conflicts. It’s not that Zendegi is a bad book. It has its flaws, in particular a wildly anti-climactic ending that doesn’t seem to resolve much of anything. But it’s not a bad book. It’s just… Egan’s other books are extraordinary, and this one isn’t. But I get it. I understand why Egan wrote this book, really. It's boring being the master in a certain domain. You want to try new things. And I also get that if I walk into a Barnes & Nobles, there will be ZERO Egan novels, which is disheartening, if not surprising. As I wrote in my Schild’s Ladder review, 40% of American adults are incapable of answering the math question: “Suppose a liter of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a liter of cola, how much would you pay?” By comparison, consider this paragraph from Diaspora: “This solution [of a wormhole] has positive mass. In fact, if GR [General Relativity] held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzchild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well.” How many will be able to make sense of that? So yeah I understand Egan’s desire to write something that veers away from hard sci-fi and toward simpler writing styles and certain cultural flavors that tend to get the attention of modern awards (and, therefore, book buyers). However, I assume that I’m not alone in reading Egan because I’m looking for that certain grand hard sci-fi experience. So I appreciated Zendegi’s focus on Iranian culture, about which I know very little. And I appreciated Zendegi’s more intimate, human-sized tragedies. It’s just… I can get that stuff from plenty of other authors who are, frankly, better at it. Which leaves Zendegi in a weird place, and I can’t see myself recommending it to anyone. If you're intrigued by my claims of Egan as the greatest sci-fi writer and not overly intimidated by the hard sci-fi elements, I'd direct you toward Diaspora or Permutation City. But if you're not intrigued or are intimidated, I don't think you'd like Zendegi either. So, um, yeah. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Aug 13, 2020
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Aug 12, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0765325950
| 9780765325952
| 0765325950
| 4.57
| 148,274
| Jan 08, 2013
| Jan 08, 2013
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liked it
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I waited several weeks after finishing this book before I gave it a review; I wanted to explore just how much the WoT world had woven its roots into m
I waited several weeks after finishing this book before I gave it a review; I wanted to explore just how much the WoT world had woven its roots into me. Would I miss the characters, the world? Would I feel that strange sense of distance and isolation - what I’ve begun to call the “premonition of death” - that I’ve felt before, after finishing a long series? “Premonition of death,” heh. Not a positive emotion one might think. And yet, it is. Well, I didn’t feel it with Wheel of Time. I haven’t missed its worlds or its characters. I haven’t felt as I’ve lost friends and family. Which is why, even though I enjoyed the whole experience, I would probably give this book 3 stars. Despite re-reading the entire 14 books within the span of only a few months, I’ve found it easy to move on. This is in contrast to many other reading experiences which have stuck with me - such as the first three books of Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series. Now don’t get me wrong: this book is competently written and rife with action. The Tarmon Gai’don - final battle - chapter is longer than most normal books, coming in at something like 100,000 words. And I think Sanderson did as good a job as could be expected, with a few exceptions (such as the dramatic illogic of Verin’s final machinations and the Moiraine+Thom romance). But Sanderson is not Jordan. In his foreword for book 12, Sanderson says that his style is not Jordan’s style, and he wouldn’t even try to mimic it. Nevertheless, wrote Sanderson, we should think of the characters as maintaining consistent souls. In fact, I consider the opposite to be true and not just of the characters but the entire book: they possess similar appearances - names, descriptions, motivations, quirks, story arcs - but have different souls, evoking different subconscious feelings. Again, I’m not trying to blame Sanderson. For starters, Jordan simply wasn’t a choice to finish out the series, and I can’t think of another writer I might’ve chosen to finish it. But that doesn’t change the reality, for me, that the swap in authors resulted in a soul-rift, if you will. Even if I weren’t consciously aware of it, the deeper recesses of my mind felt the difference, and I lost much of my deeper emotional connection to the series. [Alternatively, however, the fault might easily just lie with Jordan himself, whose style and world-building were rather heavy-handed and thus more artificial; he himself said that his role in the WoT series was that of an “Old-Testament God.”] That said, the series as a whole remains a triumph of creation, and I do not regret my re-reading of the series in the slightest. It was, especially, a great reading choice for the times we live in: let Chaos reign. Table Of Contents Reviews: 1] Eye of the World: The Re-read Begins 2] The Great Hunt: An In-Universe Review 3] The Dragon Reborn: Some Harsh Criticism 4] The Shadows Reborn: The Characters All Hate Each Other 5] The Fires of Heaven: I Hate Nynaeve 6] Lord of Chaos: An Essay on Leadership in WoT 7] A Crown of Swords: Mid-series Slump 8] Path of Daggers: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Wheel 9] Winter's Heart: In Which I Have an Epiphany about Structure 10] Crossroads of Twilight: An Essay on Power, Freedom, & Corruption 11] Knife of Dreams: A Tribute to Robert Jordan 12] The Gathering Storm: A Contrast Between Sanderson & Jordan 13] Towers of Midnight: Special Series Text Adventure Review #2 ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 03, 2020
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Jul 28, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0061054232
| 9780061054235
| 0061054232
| 3.91
| 5,786
| 1992
| Jan 01, 1995
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really liked it
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An Egan novel, I’ve learned, follows a particular structure. It begins, like every other novel, by establishing the setting and characters and their a
An Egan novel, I’ve learned, follows a particular structure. It begins, like every other novel, by establishing the setting and characters and their aspiration & motivations. Usual stuff. Nothing crazy. Just ease the reader in, a normal sci-fi novel, nothing to worry- SUPER. EGAN. MODE. [image] -and then it unleashes the math and science THUNDERSTEM! Egan lets loose with the true sci-fi aspect, building a wild ride out of an imaginative extrapolation of some major science idea. Same story with Quarantine, technically Egan’s second published novel, but typically considered his actual debut. The novel starts out as a detective / mystery novel, in which the main character - an ex-cop turned private investigator - is hired to find the whereabouts of a mentally retarded adult woman who somehow managed to escape her caretaking facility. Which occurs roughly 30 years after a giant black hole-esque “bubble” surrounded the solar system, cutting us off from the rest of the universe. That is, the titular quarantine. While lacking the stylistic flair of a Hammett or Chandler, all the trappings are there. A brave, if stoic, protagonist. A seemingly simple case that turns out to be not so simple at all. A mysterious and/or uncooperative client. Etc, etc. As someone who loves noir detective (and indeed wrote a novel in that style), I found this part to be satisfactory. But I wouldn’t call it great. But then the joy of an Egan novel isn’t its first half. It’s the second half’s Super Egan Mode, where his imagination truly shines. Which I’m now going to talk about, so… ***SPOILER WARNING*** The sci-fi premise of Quarantine relates to the observation problem of quantum mechanics. In QM, quantum particles are treated as probability waves that only “collapse” to a particular real state when observed. Which is a problem because we have no idea about the actual physical mechanism of collapse or observation. Assuming that collapse even occurs and isn’t merely some sort of mathematical artifact. And what counts as an observation anyway? As John Bell quipped, “Was the wave function waiting to jump for thousands of million years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer for some high qualified measurer - with a PhD?” Quarantine posits that the universe actually began in a perpetually uncollapsed state and that uncollapsed intelligent beings evolved within this universe. Which… well, I’d never considered that and it’s difficult to imagine, but doesn’t seem impossible? If the quantum world can exist in a largely uncollapsed state, why couldn’t our macro world? I mean, “micro” and “macro” are arbitrary, human-centric distinctions - who’s to say that our “micro” world isn’t some other species’ “macro” world, and vice versa? Well, regardless, mammals on Earth evolved neural structures capable of initiating a collapse. Which is problematic for the rest of the universe and those “uncollapsed” intelligent beings & civilizations. When we look to the stars, we collapse them into only those configurations which would cause us to see what we see. Which isn’t terrible - that leaves a lot of leeway, especially when you consider we’ve yet to directly observe dark matter or dark energy - over 95% of the universe. But as our instruments advance, we increase both the depth and breadth of our observations and destroy yet more possibilities. Hence… the Quarantine imposed on us. The main character actually gains the ability to turn off the collapse-inducing part of his brain and (crucially) the ability to change the probabilities/weight of the various possibilities. Thus he can choose WHICH potential state ends up being the real “collapsed” one. But even then it’s not really “he” doing the choosing but this sort of meta uncollapsed congolomeration of infinite versions of himself, a point of view that we never get to see first-hand. To actually write such a perspective requires a bit of narrative flubbing - you get this conceit where what we, the reader, are reading represents only a sort of retroactive memory of the actual chosen “collapsed” state. But we also go down a lot of dead ends, in the sense that we end up reading the perspective of one version of the protagonist who actually ends up not being the “real” one. It’s a clever bit of dramatic irony. Reminded me of The Demolished Man, which involves the main character misreading a secret code that the reader is perfectly capable of noticing. And much of the protagonist’s angst over whether he would turn out to be the “real” one reminded me of the character Angier in the film The Prestige, when he said: “It took courage... it took courage to climb into that machine every night... not knowing... if I'd be the man in the box... or the prestige.” Now, all throughout this second half, I had this strong sense that it didn’t quite all add up, but I was never able to consciously articulate what it was. It seems ludicrous that our world could be stable - that, for example, this book review would somehow collapse to the exact same words for every single reader at every single time - if it were constantly fluctuating between collapsed and uncollapsed states. And yet, in a sense, that’s how our world already is. We may look at a lawn-mower, for example, and it will appear completely solid and unchanging. But that isn’t the case. It’s just, from our macro perspective, we don’t really care about individual quantum particles. It doesn’t matter if every second a billion electrons tunnel out of their voltage wells to escape their atomic prisons because there’s a trillion trillion that don’t, enough to maintain the illusion. But there’s a difference between that and an entire macro object - a whole person - collapsing into extremely unlikely configurations. As Egan wrote in his essay on the matter, decoherence (essentially, external elements interfering with an “isolated” quantum system) would ruin the whole thing. Well, however the chips of reality may fall, it’s a fascinating thought-provoking read. But be warned: it is incredibly, though subtly, bleak. In contrast to my experience with other Egan novels, spending the time to ponder Quarantine left me feeling depressed. Because, despite all the ludicrous, wild events of the novel, the final line is: “It all adds up to normalcy.” And he’s exactly right. Wonder and magic can feel as powerful and fiery as blazing stars, but in the grand scheme of life, they’re ultimately only microscopic pinpricks of light in a vast and overwhelming void of normalcy. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 20, 2020
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Jul 20, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0765325942
| 9780765325945
| 0765325942
| 4.47
| 162,086
| Nov 02, 2010
| Nov 02, 2010
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really liked it
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>>load PatternTxtAdv.brv Loading… 25%… 50%… 75%… 100% Riding Soudhov’sheen, you crest the hill and the grand city of Tar Valon comes into view, its Whit >>load PatternTxtAdv.brv Loading… 25%… 50%… 75%… 100% Riding Soudhov’sheen, you crest the hill and the grand city of Tar Valon comes into view, its White Tower piercing the sky, an ivory spear crafted of humanity’s ambition. >>grasp saidin Saidin flowing into you is as a painter’s brush sweeping across a grey world, filling it with color and life. >>look tower Your vision enhanced, you now notice the holes and black soot scarring the White Tower from the recent Seanchan attack. You must be careful. Aes Sedai will be alert, and they may not take kindly to a male channeler in their midst, for all that you’re here at their Amyrlin’s request. With Aes Sedai, there are always factions within factions. >>equip disguise You slide from Soudhov’sheen’s back and retrieve your saddle bags. First you store your sword and dragon pins in a small pouch, next to a folded parchment. Then you remove your black coat and don a brown travel-cloak, worn but well-made. You consider your heron-mark blade, but before you can wrap it up, it hisses to you in its sharp, raspy voice: “Ssssheep-brained dung-sswallop, what yous be about? What if yous be attacked? You keeps me out, bessst does.” It offers a sibilant chortle. “‘Ssssides, I’m thirsty.” >>ignore sword You decide to pay heed to your sword’s wisdom and keep it at your side. You even go so far as to loosen it in its sheath. Just in case. >>move Tar Valon You remount Soudhov’sheen and make your way down toward the outlying villages. Gloom and despair have etched a dark weariness upon the villagers’ faces. Ghosts walking the land, bubbles of evil springing forth, the Pattern itself under threat. “They doesss feel it,” your sword cackles gleefully. “The Dark One’sss touch, upon us all.” The bridge guards give you - and your heron-mark blade - a hard look, but they let you pass unmolested. Many stone-masons and other workers crowd the bridges. >>move Noble Trolloc You steer Soudhov’sheen away from the tower and into the section of Tar Valon called mierdillar, the ocean of stone, or more colloquially, stone beach. Here, the Ogier masons crafted the streets to resemble sand, an illusion so convincing you keep expecting Soudhov’sheen to stumble. But he remains as steady as always and you soon find yourself before an inn sculpted in the shape of a giant sea shell. The tavern’s signage eschews the sea theme, however, and instead depicts a horned creature - a trolloc? - seated in a thinking pose. >>enter Noble Trolloc You hand Soudhov’sheen to a shockingly ugly stable-boy and enter the tavern. The common room is largely empty: a trio of soldiers dice at one table and two merchant folk engage in a heated discussion at another, both positioned to be as far as possible from a corner booth occupied by a smooth-faced Aes Sedai wearing a red dress. “Let’ssss drink her blood,” hisses your sword. “Crimsssson, like her Ajah.” >>signal innkeep You surreptitiously signal the innkeep, a large man with a generous helping of chins, with the agreed-upon sign: Thumb and fore-finger joined into a circle, other three fingers raised like spines. “Ah, my man,” says the innkeep. “You must be the surveyor, I requested? Come, the stonework to be repaired is out in the garden.” He exits out a back door. >>follow innkeep Careful not to look at the Aes Sedai, you closely follow the innkeep out into a walled garden behind the tavern. He leads you past a dense row of hedges, beyond which you find a weathered stone pylon etched with ancient runes. A Portal Stone. The innkeep knuckles his forehead in a salute. “ I will make sure the Aes Sedai does not disturb you. May Light prevail, Asha’man.” He returns to his tavern. >>look parchment You retrieve the parchment from your coin pouch. The Lord Dragon himself gave it to you, along with one final mysterious command: “Protect the Creator.” You unfold the parchment to reveal a charcoal sketching of a strange symbol, a circle etched with unfamiliar lines. A world map, perhaps, but if so, one with unrecognizable continents. >>look stone Strange symbols cover the stone; some, vaguely familiar, but most, illegible. With some effort you locate a match of the parchment’s symbol. >>channel stone Knowledge of the necessary weave arrives from deep within, and you thread saidin into a complex pattern. As soon as the weave settles on the stone, the world twists - or, rather, it is you that twists, as the Pattern weaves your soul thread in and out of distant parts of Itself. You skim across tens and hundreds and thousands of possible lives, each leaving not memories but emotional imprints. In those lives in which you tilled the ground, you knew the peace of growth mixed with the anxiety of nature’s unpredictability. In other lives, you traversed the land as a merchant or a bard and knew the excitement of exploration and discovery. Others still contain a wonder at magical technologies: horseless wagons, metal birds, and ideas crafted of light itself, transmitted instantly from one mind to another. After a brief eternity, your soul thread snaps taut as the Pattern ejects you from possibility into reality, into a silvery metallic tunnel filled with glowing windows. Seated at a table nearby is a horned trolloc. “Trolloc!” screams your sword, “Killsssssss!!!” >>unsheath sword Your sword practically leaps into your hand. >>sf: boar trolloc Using the thrusting sword-form The Boar Rushed Downhill, you dash toward the trolloc, aiming to spear it through the neck before it can move. The trolloc scrambles to its feet, but it’s not nearly quick enough... ADMIN: sheath sword ...and suddenly your hand is empty; your sword, returned to its sheath. “Trolloc channeler!” screams your sword. “Killssssss!!!” >>grasp saidin You reach and find… nothing. No, not nothing. Saidin isn’t gone but so distant it might as well be. Grasping it is like trying to drink water from a river on the other side of a mountain. “Goodness gracious,” says the horned trolloc. “Bit aggressive, aren’t we?” “Trolloc pacifist!” screams your sword. “Ki--” ADMIN: mute insanity The voice in your mind ends; with silence comes clarity… and a hint of loneliness. “Indeed, never know what we have til it’s gone,” muses the horned trolloc before taking off down the tunnel, its shadow shortening and lengthening as it passes by massive glowing windows. “Come, I will take you to where you need to be.” >>follow trolloc You follow the trolloc several paces back, your hand on your blade, for all the good it’ll do you. Without saidin, without the voice of your sword, you feel hollow, somehow. >>look windows The glowing windows all reveal what is clearly the same village, with the same red-tiled inn. Yet each window depicts a wildly different surrounding. In one, the inn has been fortified with spiked barricades; another, dead trollocs have been piled in front; and yet a third shows that same inn surrounded by large stone buildings, a sudden reversal of its position from patriarch to ancient grandfather. The trolloc stops suddenly. “You’ve taken note of the chapter windows, I see. Master craftsmanship, don’t you think? Far from crystalline transmittance. Look closely and the distortion and warping are obvious. Yet...” It places a hand upon the window. “What rich texture, like ancient hand-blown crown glass. Watching the evolution of your world through these chapter windows has been an interesting exploration. Yes, yes it has.” The Lord Dragon said nothing of a horned trolloc who spouts nonsense, but it possesses a power neither Saidin nor Saidar. Could it be the True Power the Dark One is said to grant? You keep silent, content to see where its rambling leads. “Like all journeys,” speaks the trolloc, “this one’s had its mountains and vales. But it may be that I’ve enjoyed the vales the most. Many journeys have that peculiar nostalgia, don’t they? What is onerous in the moment can become, in retrospect, something to be missed. There is a secret to the universe there, I’m sure, but I dare not risk its mystique with banal translation.” Without ceasing its rambling, the trolloc continues toward a shining iron door at the end of the hallway. “Yes, the vales have been interesting. The characters - the women in particular - have an acidity that can be hard to stomach in such high density and quantity.” The trolloc chuckles. “I think perhaps you Asha’man may feel that way about your Aes Sedai counterparts as well. Oh, and the words, the descriptions, the sentences, the paragraphs, the world building, the winds of a windbag. Well-meant, but windy nonetheless. They go on and on and on, over the hills, through the leaves of the trees of the forests, across waters both still and rapid -- and right off a cliff. And still they go on.” “But that is where the texture comes from, you see? Your world’s Glazier has succeeded admirably in his windows, in a way that so many others fail to do. Too many obsessed with polishing all rough edges from their work. Smooth and shiny are as attractive as they are forgettable. The perfect days of perfect peace pass through the hourglasses of our lives as forgotten bits of sand.” The trolloc stops and stares out one of the windows. Snow has fallen upon the quaint inn, blanketing it in a bland white void. A farmboy chases a squirrel, which hops agilely upon the snow and easily avoids him. Without comment, the trolloc continues on. You follow, until at last you arrive before the metal door. With a sudden ding! it opens, revealing a small room armored with bright metal walls. “Your mission awaits inside,” says the horned trolloc. >>move room After entering the room, the doors behind you begin to magically close on their own. Could this entire room be some sort of Ter’angreal? “And best of luck with the sword,” says the trolloc, just as the doors draw shut. ADMIN: unmute insanity “--before it ssssshuts. And gone.” Your sword combines a sniff and a sigh. “Shhhadows and blood and assshhes, you gooosse-brained fool, you let it essscape.” >>ignore sword You give your sword a fond pat on its hilt. Good to have it back. Though the metal room possesses no windows, a sense of shifting weight betrays movement. At first, it merely ascends, but as the ride continues, it begins to move forward and back, left and right, in and out, and other movements, extra dimensional-transversals for which you possess no language. Until, at last, the movement begins to slow. “Darknessss approaches!” says your sword. “And I thirst!” You know without trying that Saidin remains out of reach. The other Asha’man mocked you for the effort you put into your sword-work. “Who do you think you are, the Dragon Reborn?” they asked. You wonder, what would they be saying now? >unsheath sword You take your sword into your hand. The metal door slides open instantly, and you have but moments to take in the scene. A huge Myrddral, swathed in shadows and black garb, has its sword raised, about to strike the back of a large bearded man seated at a large desk before a small glowing window. >>sf: lion myrddraal Using your fastest attack, The Lion Springs, you leap at the Myrddraal, which whirls to parry your blow. The large beaded man stumbles away as a second blade appears in the Myrddraal’s other hand, and it snarls, “Die, Asha’man!” “Fan!” shouts your sword. >>sf: fan myrddraal The Myrddraal attacks with attacks nearly too fast for you to individually parry, so you Unfold the Fan, making a series of large sweeping strikes to knock the Myddraal’s attacks aside. “Moon!” shouts your sword. “Then Lotus!” >>sf: moon myrddraal Just as the Myrddraal changes its slashes into a double pierce aimed at your heart, you adopt the form Arc of the Moon, morphing one of your sweeps mid-strike into a twirling pivot, striking at your foe as you whirl around the Myrddraal’s attack. With a spurt of black blood, its hand falls to the ground, the sword clattering beside it. >>sf: lotus myrddraal Unfazed, the Myrddraal turns instantly with a deadly slash aimed at your midsection. But your reverse strike of Lotus Closes Its Blossom has already arrived, parting the Myrddraal’s head from shoulders in a clean strike. >>sf: grapevine myrddraal You turn your sword down and across, removing the Myrddraal’s other arm. Its second sword clatters to the ground, shortly followed by the Myrddraal, convulsing harmlessly in death. “Sssssslain,” hisses your sword in satisfaction. >>sheath sword You flick the Myrddraal’s black blood from your sword before you slide it into its sheath. The bearded man, huddled behind his desk, stands now that the Myrddraal is dead. As he does he gives a grunt of pain and presses his hand to his chest, above his heart. His hand comes away bloody. “So,” says the bearded man, “My own Tarmon Gai’don begins.” He holds his hand up as you begin to move forward. “There is nothing you can do. I’ll be fine… for a time. Just as Saidin is distant here, so too is the Dark One’s touch. Thank you for saving me, but it is time for you to return. I have Creation to do.” He sits back at his desk, before the glowing window, and begins tapping away at it. >>exit room You return into the strange metal-armored Ter’angreal room, whose doors again magically close. After a series of otherworldly movements, the doors open onto the garden behind the Noble Trolloc inn and you immediately step out. >>grasp saidin The life-blood of Creation flows into you, filling you with vibrancy and magic. The flowers and ivies in the garden around you, the scents on the air, even the stone blocks of the tavern seem to gain an aura of vitality, a liveliness pregnant with wonder. “Issss good to be home,” hisses your sword. Yes, it is. ---- >>Load ThreeBodProbTxtAdv.brv ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 07, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 076532802X
| 9780765328021
| 076532802X
| 3.83
| 10,963
| Aug 26, 2014
| Aug 26, 2014
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really liked it
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Despite (…or because?) some strong thematic disagreements, I'm happy to give Echopraxia four stars. While it's not without flaw, it's bold, experiment
Despite (…or because?) some strong thematic disagreements, I'm happy to give Echopraxia four stars. While it's not without flaw, it's bold, experimental, courageous, honest, intelligent, and, above all, thought-provoking. After Blindsight and now Echopraxia, I can say Peter Watts is shaping up to be one of my favorite hard sci-fi authors; he is to neuroscience and psychology what my favorite sci-fi author, Greg Egan, is to physics and mathematics. Echopraxia follows the journey of baseline non-posthuman “roach” Daniel Bruks, who gets entangled with a deadly vampire and a quasi-religious science order of posthumans as they journey to the sun in search of a message that may have come from the aliens in Blindsight. But Echopraxia isn’t really a sequel of Blindsight, so much as a mirror journey: one, a forge of heat that transmutes human to inhuman; the other, a forge of cold that transmutes inhuman to human. One, a king on puppet strings; another, a prisoner holding the puppet strings. One, an exploration of consciousness; the other, of free will. Even their narrators, despite being dissimilar characters, mirror each other in interesting ways. It’d be imprecise to call them both unreliable narrators. My experience is that ‘unreliable narrators’ might be better described as ‘deceptive narrators,’ in that the author/narrator is purposefully, often annoyingly, withholding information or manipulating the reader to achieve a “gotcha” effect (see: Fight Club). Not the case with Blindsight’s Siri & Echopraxia’s Daniel. It’s less that they’re unreliable and more that Watts does a very good job of limiting the PoV. The characters only see and hear they they see and hear. They only know what they know, especially true in the case of Daniel Bruks: he is not posthuman but many of the characters around him are. So he simply can’t understand the minds of vastly more intelligent beings. Nor, in fact, can we. This among other factors can make Echopraxia a challenging read. Some of that is fair game. It’s a book of highly complex ideas which, by definition, make for more challenging reading material. But some felt more an issue with muddy writing or overzealous editing. I know of at least one instance (because Watts admitted to it) where he accidentally edited out a key clue. And I personally found some of his descriptions, especially with regard to the spaceship on which most of the novel is set, a little difficult to parse. But even that criticism isn’t really meant as much of a criticism. Your own tastes may vary, but if I engage with a piece of media and come away feeling like I fully and clearly understood it, then I’m bored. I mean, what’s the fun in fully understanding something? Where’s the growth, where’s the mystery? Above all, though, it's important to understand Echopraxia is as much a philosophical text as it is a story. Much more so than Blindsight, which was itself quite philosophical. That may not be your thing. But if it is, chances are high you'll enjoy Echopraxia. That much for the book review. What follows are two mini essays: one an actual criticism about religion in Echopraxia (and a rebuttal of several of its characters’ arguments), followed by a defense of Free Will. ~~~ One of the major themes of Echopraxia is faith/religion and its relation to science. I earlier mentioned the quasi-religious science order of post-humans, the Bicameral Order. Basically they’ve rewired their brains into a hive-mind / distributed intelligence network. Because the part they’ve rewired is closely tied with the “religious” part of the brain, they often engage in “religious” behavior, like speaking in tongues. Because these characters are essentially incomprehensible to Daniel Bruks, we don’t get much direct interaction with them. Instead, Daniel debates with their human translator, who often talks about “having faith,” about the pros and cons of science and religion. Unfortunately, I found the notion of the Bicameral Order’s religiosity unconvincing. It felt more tacked on than anything else, a fact the author himself admits in his notes: “In hindsight, it is apparent that describing the Bicamerals as a religious order is a little misleading…” The problem for me is I make a very large distinction between ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion.’ As Sam Harris - as die-hard an atheist as you can find - has said: an atheist can have as spiritual or transcendent an experience as a theist. So I’d disagree that there exist “religious” centers of the brain because to me (and most theists I’ve talked with) the word religion implies organized religion. Y’know, spirituality guided by a church and a doctrine. But the Bicameral Order doesn’t have a doctrine, so when their translator kept uttering, “have faith,” I kept thinking, “have faith in what?” What’s more, while I always enjoy a good religion vs. science discussion, it’s hard to actually find a good one. I don’t think Echopraxia’s debates qualify either. Let’s unpack some aspects of its science vs. religion debate: In Bruk's and translator’s discussions, we encounter the oft-repeated notion that science is actually a form of religion. The translator mentions how science may be empirical - but aren’t scientists just taking it on faith their senses are accurately reporting the truth? Another related claim she makes is that physics requires a tenet of “faith” that physics rules are constant across both time and space. The simple rebuttal is that comparing science to religion is a categorical error. It’s like suggesting drinking a glass of orange juice is the same as squeezing an orange to make juice. Science and religion are opposite processes. Science is NOT a body of knowledge - it is a method (skeptical inquiry, often enforced with a logical positivist philosophy) that LEADS to a body of knowledge. Religion, however, is a body of knowledge (a dogma) that LEADS to a method (prayer, meditation, codes of ethics, etc). This is why science leads to new discoveries, but religion does not. That is not religion’s purpose. To give the more advanced rebuttal, I’m going to talk about Descartes and Hume. One of the most famous phrases in philosophy is Descartes’ cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Descartes considered this phrase the foundation of Truth. Everything else - the world around us as reported by our potentially faulty senses - could be deceptions, but cogito ergo sum is unquestionable Truth. Cogito ergo sum is stupid. As is the claim that science requires “faith” that our senses report back the Truth. Science doesn’t give two shits about Truth. Science is interested in using the evidence of our senses to predict what our senses will next encounter. So it doesn’t matter if our senses are being deceived; it doesn’t matter if we’re in a simulation or a giant’s dream. The world of senses is our reality, and science deals with reality, not some shadowy Platonic Truth. As for the notion that science takes it on faith that physics is constant in both time and space… A: It only holds that stance because so far, it hasn’t been falsified. It’s an empirical stance, not a faith-based stance. B: Even if physics is not constant in time and space, so what? To dig a little deeper, let’s talk Scottish philosopher David Hume and his widely misunderstood problem of induction. I’m especially guilty. I learned the problem of induction long before I actually studied Hume, so I spent years and years thinking I understood something that I most certainly did not. The problem of induction is this: the only way to prove the validity of induction (drawing specific conclusions from a general rule) is to invoke induction itself. Specifically, you must invoke the general rule that general rules are unchanging. See the problem? It’s like defining happiness as “the state of being happy.” Now when I first learned this, I interpreted it as an attack on science. Science rests on the foundation that induction is a valid methodology for making predictions. We collect a bunch of data, use inductive reasoning to form a general rule, then we use deductive reasoning with that newly formed rule to make predictions of the future! But the problem of induction seems to suggest that this ISN’T a valid approach. Ergo, attack on science. But then I actually studied Hume, and I found I had misunderstood his intentions entirely. Hume was a critic of religion. A strong one. His point with the problem of induction wasn’t an attack on empiricism but rather an attack on the notion of a pure, unchanging Truth. His point was that even if we somehow found such a Truth, we couldn’t even be certain that Truth would stay True. That’s really what the problem of induction states: the very idea of an absolute or ultimate Truth is logically incoherent. So, yes, many science methodologies include the assumption that physics is unchanging. But this isn’t part of the core methodology of science. If we discover that some aspects of cosmology can be explained by non-constant physics, guess what? Science will adopt that. That’s not faith, it’s empiricism. ~~~ I’m a huge proponent of free will for reasons both pragmatic and aesthetic. I love love love the topic of free will. K-pop fangirls got nothin’ on me when it comes to free will, and I’ve just been waiting for an excuse to write about it some more. And tada, Peter Watts delivers! In both Blindsight and Echopraxia, free will is a major theme, and its non-existence is a core assumption underlying both books. In his notes for Echopraxia he writes: “Neurons do not fire spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli; therefore brains cannot act spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli (Footnote: Yes there may be random elements - quantum flickers that introduce unpredictability in one’s behavior - but slaving your decisions to a dice roll doesn’t make you free) … The switch cannot flip itself. QED [Free will obviously does not exist].” He even calls it a “farce.” Oh boy. I disagree on so many levels. Where to begin? [A] Neurons only fire in response to external stimuli? External to what? The neuron itself? Maybe but definitely not external to the body. I mean, what causes neurons to fire when we’re dreaming? Why do people in sensory deprivation tanks hallucinate? If I sit in a room and meditate, why are my thoughts constantly changing, despite external stimuli remaining largely constant? Why do amputees feel phantom pain? No, it’s absolutely clear that neurons can cause other neurons to fire. In fact, with few exceptions, ONLY body neurons can cause brain neurons to fire. The brain itself does not contain any transducers to convert physical signal to electrical signal; the eyes, ears, skin, etc do all of that. So neurons only fire in response to external stimuli? In the absence of some strange situation, brain neurons are almost entirely switched by the BODY ITSELF. [B] Re: quantum flickers & dice rolls. Physics and free will is a tricky thing. If free will exists in physics, it will always appear as indeterminism, as a “dice roll.” By definition. If it were deterministic, it would be enslaved by some causal chain, and it wouldn’t really be free would it? [C] Still, I think Watts is correct when he writes, “slaving yourself to a dice roll doesn’t [give you free will],” but I’d retort he has improperly defined the “you” in that statement. Why wouldn’t the “you” INCLUDE those quantum flickers, those dice rolls? Shouldn’t it? How could there be a coherent and complete definition of “you” that doesn’t include your subconscious, your body, and those quantum effects essential for their functioning? If we don’t include those, then what’s the difference between a corpse and a person? But I would go even further, radically further, in my definition of "you." There’s a famous Zen Buddhist koan (riddle) that asks, “What is the sound of a one-handed clap?” Do you know the answer? Don’t think physically. Consider Buddhist doctrine. The answer is, of course, that a one-handed clap makes no sound. It’s impossible. But what does that mean? Other equivalent answers might be “peace” or “nirvana” or “enlightenment” or “unity.” But Zen koans aren’t about the answers. They’re thinking tools. In this case, the riddle is meant as a reflection on the Buddhist idea that there is no separation between the Self and the Universe. The literal definition of nirvana is “blown out”; enlightenment occurs when you extinguish the illusion of Self. A two-handed clap - which is loud and violent - arises when two different parts of the same body strike each other. When, say, two people - part of the community, the same humanity, the same ecosystem, the same universe - do violence against each other. But if they were to understand themselves as individual neurons within the same Over-Mind, why would they do violence against each other? They would understand that violence against anyone else is violence against oneself. [By the way, this doesn’t necessarily dictate a doctrine of non-violence, but rather that violence should be committed only in accordance with utilitarian aims]. That’s the problem I find with most people’s - including Peter Watts’ - conceptions of free will: their definition of the “you” in the statement “you don’t have free will.” They’re mentally setting up a metaphor in which the universe/physics is a prison and we are all separate entities - prisoners - trapped within. But this separation is nonsense. Human beings are not unnatural but part of nature. We are not within the universe, we are a part of the universe. We are not independent beings separate from a boundless God, we must by definition be internal components of a boundless God. The quantum particles in our brains are not puppets dancing to the strings of quantum fields, they themselves are authors of those fields. In other words, you are not a “slave” to a dice roll, you include those very dice rolls. The question isn’t, Do you possess free will? Rather it is, does the universe possess free will? If it does, then so do you. If it doesn’t, then neither do you. As for the answer to that question, I’m genuinely unsure. But as I wrote earlier, I suspect that indeterminism and other fundamental limits on knowledge are manifestations of a free will baked within the very fabric of reality. I mean, we KNOW we possess will. We can have a hunger for a hamburger and act on that hunger. That’s will. It’s just whether our acting on that hunger is according to a script written internally or externally - whether it’s “free” or not. And since our (or at least my) best understanding of quantum mechanics suggests that we don’t live in a clockwork universe… if that doesn’t add up to free will, then what would? ...more |
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Feb 27, 2020
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Feb 27, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 9780356509044
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| 4.19
| 20,996
| Aug 28, 2018
| Aug 30, 2018
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liked it
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Notes are private!
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Nov 18, 2019
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Dec 05, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0316332828
| 9780316332828
| B071KZ2DPB
| 4.37
| 74,410
| Dec 05, 2017
| Dec 05, 2017
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liked it
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Possibly my favorite animation studio is TRIGGER - they made two of my favorite animes: Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill (and the first half of Darling
Possibly my favorite animation studio is TRIGGER - they made two of my favorite animes: Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill (and the first half of Darling in the FRANXX). Rather than play coy, these two and a half series embrace the absurdity and sexuality implicit in the genre. I appreciate that honesty, the lack of pretension, in the simplest, most primal parts of my soul. But I’m even more impressed by how their second halves make radical departures from their first halves. Gurren Lagann in particular escalates its scope in a way that I think I’ve only ever seen matched once: Greg Egan’s Diaspora. Which begins in the solar system and ends in the 269 quadrillionth dimension. I bring this up because, following books 3 & 4, Abaddon’s Gate & Cibola Burn, I thought The Expanse was poised to undergo a similar transformation. The first trilogy is set firmly in the solar system and centers around tribal politics and faction warfare. But then the Protomolecule Ring Gate opens up thousands of new planets. Cibola Burn, then, is set on an alien planet and explored new themes like ecological contamination as well as providing our first look into the xeno-culture of the protomolecule’s makers. Cool! I thought. We’re going to get something new and the scope will expand from one star system to thousands! Human civilization will no longer be a solar empire, but a galactic one! No. Wrong. Completely wrong. Books 5 and 6 brought us back into the same ol’ solar system. Seriously, there is not a SINGLE scene in a new star system. And it was the same ol’ plot with the same ol’ factions: belters vs inners, with the usual belter vs belter inner-squabbling. But these books maintained the series’ consistent quality, so I powered through with hopes the last trilogy (books 7 to 9) of The Expanse would undergo my desired transformation Wrong again. The players may have shifted - Laconia vs. Union - and the oppressors may have become the oppressed, but it all amounts to the same story that’s already been told twice before. It’s a real shame. S.A. Corey had a choice: they could play it safe and tell the same story that made their first books a success and therefore guarantee at least a lesser success. Or they could have taken a risk and tried something new. Well, consciously or not, they chose to play it safe, and the results are as expected. Persepolis Rising is as good a read as the others. In fact, it might well be the best written of them all. They’ve certainly honed their formula. But I’m giving it 3 stars because I’ve only just begun the final trilogy, and it already feels like old news. That said, I enjoy a couple unique aspects of this one. For starters, it begins with a 30 year time jump, meaning the crew have gotten old. Seeing how your favorite characters deal with aging is not something you see in sci-fi too often. Unfortunately, the aging feels largely superficial: old man Amos still acts just the same as young man Amos, while Holden still displays the same youthful impetuousness and false sense of invincibility he did at the beginning of the series. So a mixed bag, on that aspect. But I’ve also begun to appreciate just how many great lines The Expanse contains. The quality of the series’ writing gets overshadowed by its genre trappings and the pace and tension of its plotting, but really this book hides much humble wisdom. I wish I’d marked them, so I could share. Whoops. But there is one I’ve been contemplating in particular, that I might share: Naomi is pondering her life and remembers something an Imam said to her once: “I am a human being. And therefore anything that can happen to a human being can happen to me.” Its simplicity reminds me of another favorite quote of mine, from KJ Parker’s Engineer Trilogy: “The easiest way to do something is properly.” It’s an utterly obvious statement, and yet in a way it’s not. My experience is that most people make their lives hard on themselves because they don’t do things properly. They become blinded by short-term considerations. Same with this quote. It seems obvious and simple, yet it is profound for all of that. It speaks to this inner, subconscious bias that we all have, that we are somehow special, that the universe pays special attention to our perspective because, indeed, the only way we see the universe is through that perspective. And yet we are not special and the Universe does not care. Our journey through existence is no more privileged than any other human being’s. Rather, we are more alike than we are different. Of all the ways in which we may be classified - by gender or age or ethnicity or religion belief or reading habits - the most important and most telling is assuredly that we are each a human being and not a tree or a toaster or a toad. But I began to appreciate this quote especially when I was on a run the other day. Just as I was about to turn on and head home, I had an epiphany: I realized the flip-side was also true. Because I am a human being and so is everyone else, then anything that can happen to me can also happen to someone else. This notion that any transformation I’ve undergone is a transformation that others can also… it matters a lot, to me. For example, I was raised as a Christian, but after studying the faith and philosophy, I’ve rejected it strongly.Yet I find myself rarely explaining how and why such a transformation came about because I never really believed anyone else was capable of it. Or, as another example, I’ve begun making changes to my life to do my part in battling climate change: I’ve reduced the amount of meat I consume; I donate heavily toward funding renewable energy programs; I minimize my electricity & gas usage; etc. Unfortunately, I do all this not because I think it’ll make a difference but because I believe it’s the right thing to do. That is, my motivations are deontological, rather than consequentialist. But after my epiphany, my optimism has increased. I am not special. Anything that has happened to me can happen to other human beings. So if I am willing to make sacrifices, if I am willing to undergo radical transformations in my beliefs, then other human beings will too. So my three-star rating of this book notwithstanding, The Expanse fulfills my dual criteria for a great book: it both entertains and enlightens. I am genuinely looking forward to finishing out the series. It’s been a good journey. ...more |
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Nov 27, 2019
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Nov 27, 2019
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ebook
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| 4.22
| 111,596
| Jun 17, 2014
| Jun 17, 2014
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really liked it
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So, I’m an expert in human stupidity. As a teacher, understanding failures of intelligence is my bread n butter. And boy o boy, there are just so many
So, I’m an expert in human stupidity. As a teacher, understanding failures of intelligence is my bread n butter. And boy o boy, there are just so many different ways to be stupid. Cognitive biases are my favorites. Confirmation bias & the Dunning-Kruger effect are basically the mottos of the information age. Easy to find sources to confirm your beliefs, easy to spend 5 minutes on a Wikipedia article and suddenly bam! You’re an expert! Because most of my students are sleep-deprived zombies with a craving for brains social media, I also see a lot of attentional short circuiting. Some people are genuinely so tired or so overstimulated that they truly cannot afford to spend the mental energy on complex thinking. You can decently counter the above two, but I’m not sure anyone is safe from memory stupidity. Proactive and retroactive interference and other memory issues arise from the nature of how neurons wire to form memories. And then there are the social stupidities. I’m not sure how many times I’ve cited tribalism and all its associated idiocy in my various reviews, but I know it’s a lot. It’s certainly a prime feature of The Expanse. Cibola Burn is no different. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Cibola Burn is largely a book about people making stupid decisions. As much as I enjoyed it overall, I often felt like I was watching a bad zombie/horror film. It’s like… what is the worst decision you could possibly make in this situation? Okay, yeah, do that one. If this were funny, I’d almost call it a comedy of errors: The protomolecule ring has opened gates to thousands of habitable planets full of alien technology that could probably kill humanity accidentally… so what’s stupid people gonna do? Gonna wait for probes and scientists to make sure it’s safe? Obviously… NOT! GOGOGO GO GO GO COLONIZE! So some Belters make themselves a colony that they call Ilus. Cept some Inner corporation gets an official charter to colonize it instead. But it’s like, what the hell is that about? There’s already a colony there you stupid government + corporation. Made up of people who hate Inners. I WONDER HOW THEY’LL RESPOND IF YOU FLY IN AND TRY TO TAKE OVER. And really WHY BOTHER? Cos hey hey hey now I know this might seem crazy but here’s an idea. There’s an ENTIRE planet to colonize. What if you start a colony somewhere else on that planet? Actually there’s an entire alien wormhole system FULL of planets. What if you start a colony… on a different planet?! Obviously we’ll NOT do that! GGOGOGO GO GO GO! FIGHT OVER THIS ONE PIECE OF LAND! GO GO GO GOGO EVERYBODY DIE. kcool. So, surprise, the first act of the Ilusian colonists is to blow up their own space port. Which they mess up and also accidentally destroy the shuttle filled with their new corporate neighbors. So… tribal war? Yep tribal war. And the entire plot continues in this vein. It’s all, Oh hey these people are coming over to kill us and we know they’re coming over to kill us. Let’s try to talk real friendly with them for the next fifteen minutes! La la la -- OH SNAP THEY’VE GOTTEN TOO CLOSE! And then, Oh hey this incredibly horrible thing just happened and this guy Holden is gonna go try to save us. You know what we should do? We should STOP HIM! Pfffftttt I had this uncle, and he once talked about how he tried to read Lord of the Rings but couldn’t get through it because “bad things just kept happening over and over.” At the time, I was unimpressed by his reasoning. But since then I’ve had to admit… he’s not wrong. I mean, I think that’s a dumb reason to not read Lord of the Rings. But he’s not wrong about the basic nature of humanity’s story-telling framework. Bad shit happens over and over. Maybe some good stuff in between. Maybe it ends with some good stuff. But mostly it’s an unhinged roller coaster. Which, y’know, isn’t an inaccurate depiction of humanity. Human beings frame their lives and their histories in terms of conflict. So whatever. I’m not complaining about that. I’ve found some semblance of peace with that reality. But in fiction there’s conflict that feels natural and conflict that feels contrived, and of all seven Expanse books I’ve read so far, this one has felt the most artificial. I mean, hell, the characters themselves are constantly commenting on how stupid everything is. My whole spiel about why fight over this one piece of land? That’s basically verbatim from Holden. Which amuses me terribly. I always laugh when people know they’re doing something dumb… but they do it anyway because of all stupidities, none is more powerful than the stupidity of routine and momentum. So, yeah, I feel strongly about this obviously, and it was a bit annoying. But outside of that, this might be my favorite Expanse book. First off, I believe it's Holden’s best book, by a considerable margin. I mean, Holden’s the most annoying member of the Rocinate and not by accident. The writers wrote him to be impetuous and naive, constantly making messes that other people have to clean up. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him sanctimonious or self-righteous, but he’s close, at least early in the series. There’s no question he’s trying to do the right thing. He’s often just not very good at it. Cibola Burn is when he starts to change. Early on in the book, Holden is coming down to Ilus and is like, “Yeah let’s not bring our armor or any heavy weapons. There’ll be no violence.” To which Amos responds, “Yeah boss you may want to rethink that, considering how things tend to go for us.” Holden ponders for a moment and then says, “Yeah, you know, you may be right.” I was like WHAT?! Can it be that Holden is finally learning?! Which is a little sad. I’m essentially celebrating that someone who strives to practice non-violence as much as possible is beginning to concede its necessity. That’s depressing. But humanity is a violent species. Consider video games. Not all of them are centered around violence but MOST of them are. We practice violence FOR ENTERTAINMENT. Pretending like that’s not true doesn’t do anyone any favors. So I appreciated how Holden has begun to mellow and feel a little more down-to-earth. He’s still an idealist for sure, but I’m okay with that. I find that most sci-fi heroes tend to be pragmatists because science itself is a pragmatic way of thinking. The Expanse does a good job of making Holden (and the crew of Rocinate) the right blend of competence and conscientiousness. But the main reason Cibola Burn more than any other Expanse book is because it’s the most alien. It’s almost entirely set on an alien planet, filled with xenobiology, hinting at the protomolecule alien civilization, and with AI/Ghost Miller giving a voice to an alien perspective. That alien mystery has been one of the big draws of The Expanse, and I thought Cibola Burn represented a shift in that direction. Turns out I was wrong, unfortunately, as books 5, 6, and 7 return to the same ol’ human-vs-human tribalistic strife with almost zero exploration of alien elements. But Cibola Burn was made for a nice refreshing change of pace, especially in hindsight. As of writing this review, I haven’t read book 8 and book 9 is not yet out, but here’s to hoping they finally bring us face-to-face with the protomolecule aliens - and those who wiped them out. ...more |
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Oct 2019
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Oct 30, 2019
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Hardcover
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| B00O7X626W
| 4.44
| 100,271
| Jun 02, 2015
| Jun 02, 2015
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liked it
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Sep 26, 2019
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Nov 05, 2019
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Sep 26, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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| 0316129070
| 4.27
| 135,779
| Jun 04, 2013
| Jun 04, 2013
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liked it
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Abaddon’s Gate was a fun space adventure about human beings being human beings - stupid and tribalistic - even when a crazy alien wormhole gate is try
Abaddon’s Gate was a fun space adventure about human beings being human beings - stupid and tribalistic - even when a crazy alien wormhole gate is trying to kill them. Which is basically what the entire series is about. People being dumb, even though some alien stuff is trying to kill them. Actually, when you get right down to it, if you replace alien stuff with nature stuff, that’s basically the entire story of humanity. Classic! I have mixed feelings about the book. On one hand, in contrast to the TV series, it’s the most superior. On the other hand, it’s my least favorite of the first three books. But that’s probably my fault. First, the dramatic pull of the first half of the book comes from the mystery of The Ring. What is it? What is its purpose? Is it a danger? But, having already watched the show, I already knew these answers. Without that mystery, the beginning of the book was slooooow going. Second, I was simply not a fan of half of the points of view. Like earlier books, chapters cycle among different PoVs. In Abaddon’s Gate, we get four: Holden is the same as usual. I’m not necessarily a fan of Holden himself, so much as a fan of Holden & crew. The package deal of Amos, Alex, Naomi, and Holden is always enjoyable to read and, by this point, we’re all basically honorary crew members of the Rocinate. In addition, Holden spends the book exploring the mysteries of the gate, which is great fun and opens a big space opera mystery that I’m looking forward to exploring in future books. I can’t say more for risk of spoiling, but I love sci-fi mysteries and this one is a Fermi classic: Where the hell are all the aliens? Bull is the Earth-born security chief on the OPA battleship The Behemoth. His PoV contains heavy political drama and power struggles, which I find fun to read. His pragmatic, consequentialist morality meshes well with my own, which made empathizing with Bull rather easy. So another good PoV. But these next two… Melba is Clarissa Mao, daughter of the now disgraced Jules Pierre-Mao, the corporate villain of the first books. Her PoV is heavy on emotional introspection, as she goes about trying to destroy James Holden’s life because she’s upset he busted her criminal, psychopathic daddy. Boofuckinghoo. Cry me a river, I want to go kayaking. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I just couldn’t sympathize with a spoiled girl working through her daddy issues by lying and murdering and hurting innocent people and then getting all upset about it after-the-fact. Every time her PoV came up, I groaned. Eughh. Anna Volovodov is a Methodist pastor who visits the Ring as a member of a cultural entourage. I vastly preferred Anna’s PoV over Melba’s, but Anna’s didn’t sit well with me either. My issues are two-fold: 1] I don’t care about family drama and “but think of the children” type motivations and concerns are completely lost on me. 2]I’m a very devout agnostic (I didn’t start that way…), who’s heavily studied theology and philosophy. I’ll spare you my thoughts about the first point, except to say that much of Anna’s emotional angst revolves around her family, which she has left behind. For my own reasons, I didn’t care. Your mileage may vary, depending on your own interest in family drama and/or children as a motivation. As for the latter point, Anna is a pastor and acts like it. Now she’s not a fanatic, for sure. But that didn’t make her sanctimonious self-righteousness any less off-putting. She’s always talking about forgive and forget, and in God’s eyes all people are equal and yadda yadda. And every time I listen to a person - fictional or real - go on in such a vein, I’m like, Did you read the same Bible I did? Because in the Bible I read, for every act of forgiveness, there’s something like that time God summoned a bear to murder 30 children because they called his prophet Elijah some mean names. And for every line about all children being equal in God’s eyes, there’s some massacre of the Gentiles. And again maybe I’m just a bad person, but I don’t care to listen to people invoke the greatness of an entity whose actions are essentially those of a mass shooter, except on a grand scale. I mean, the dude included a torture chamber when he designed the universe. Let’s not kid ourselves here, God is a tyrant. Which isn’t to say I found Anna’s viewpoint unrealistic or poorly written. If you’re inclined towards religion or at least not as fed up of it as I am, you might enjoy her PoV. But I’m not inclined, and I am fed up, and I didn’t enjoy her PoV. As an ex-Christian who has spent hours studying philosophy and religion, there wasn’t anything here to advance my grasp of the religious mindset. With one exception, but it took me about 500 words to explain that exception… which was too many words, so I deleted it from the draft. But if you’re interested in having a discussion about faith, leave me a comment [But beware if you interpret ‘discussion’ as ‘argument’: if you’re going to argue religion with me then at the bare minimum, you should know off-hand what the ‘cosmological argument’ is. That is, if you have to look it up, then we’re simply not in the same philosophical weight class, and an argument between us will be a waste of time for us both.]. So between PoV issues and some pacing turbulence, Abaddon’s Gate was an uneven read, for me. That said, this book was vastly superior to the TV show. It’s that damn budget. There’s a lengthy drawn out conflict between two groups fighting for control of the Behemoth. It takes up the final third of the book, and there’s some serious battles between the two groups. It’s great action fun. But in the TV series, it’s like… one episode, and it feels more like a family tiff than an actual war. That’s not necessarily a criticism of the TV series; that’s just the nature of the beast. With limited funding, you can only have so many sets, that you film on over and over, which will naturally create a more limited feel. The book is simply more expansive than the TV series. … … Expansive. The Expanse. Yeah. I’ll see my way out now. ...more |
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not set
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Sep 25, 2019
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Sep 25, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1841499900
| 9781841499901
| 1841499900
| 4.38
| 160,578
| Jun 07, 2012
| Jun 26, 2012
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really liked it
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Part II of Erik's The Expanse Review: Should you read the book or watch the show - or both? I watched the show first, before I'd ever even heard of the Part II of Erik's The Expanse Review: Should you read the book or watch the show - or both? I watched the show first, before I'd ever even heard of the books. Then, about a year or two after finishing Season 3 (and before S4 came out), I started reading the books, simultaneously with which I rewatched the show. Which has been an interesting experience, to say the least. Reason to Watch the Show [1] It is incredibly faithful to the books. Not just in character, dialogue, plot, but even the cinematography itself. As I wrote in my Leviathan Wakes review, the books strive for realism. So does the show! For example, it’s been quite entertaining to watch the camera work they employ in order to create a sense of disorientation within zero g environments. It’s rather skillfully done. [2] Many elements of space opera work better in an audio-visual medium. For example, space battles. You just can’t write that exciting of a space battle because, from the character’s PoV, there really isn’t that much going on. They’re mostly sitting in a sealed tin can, letting AI systems shoot down missiles and make evasive manuevers. Unless those systems fail. And then it’s just curtain fall. But the camera is free from such PoV constraints. It can zoom outside the ship and provide a much more visceral, tactile feel to everything going on. [3] The show creates a better sense of place in many settings. Ceres Station is a stand-out, as it’s hard to get a feel of the place from the books. Are the walls made of plastic or steel or rock? How does the light feel in the station? Bright, dim, artificial, natural, warm, cold? You know all those details the author simply must by pass to avoid becoming mired in excess description. As much as I loathe the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words," it absolutely holds true when it comes to setting. Infected Eros in particular demonstrates this. The words “blue fireflies” simply can’t compete with seeing the thing itself. [4] Amos as psychopath is much better done in the show - at least by comparison with the first two books. I’m fascinated by the notion of the “good psychopath,” and I’m pleased as plum the show actually explores this aspect of Amos’ character. [5] Jared Harris as Anderson Dawes. [image] In the first two books at least, he’s a relatively minor character. But on the screen, his presence is huge, and the difference it makes is huge. The OPA in the books is *shrug* whatever. But with Anderson Dawes to serve as its avatar, the OPA just feels so much more real. I mean, when he tells the story of murdering his own sister... This isn’t a knock on the other actors, who all do fine jobs, but Jared Harris is legendary in everything he does. Reasons to Read the Book [1] Novel is king of characterization. In fact, I love writing, so you’ll have to forgive me if I talk tradecraft for a moment here. Because modern fiction is mostly written from 1st person or 3rd person limited PoV, description itself is a form of characterization. A druid, a siege engineer, a boat builder, a farmer, or a tired wandering vagrant will all describe the exact same tree in vastly different ways. But if you put a tree on a screen, you’re only going to get one description: what your eyes are telling your brain. That’s why novel is the king of characterization and of empathy and why I loathe the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words." Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but they are blind to the soul. Words, however, are windows into it. Anyway all this is especially the case regarding Detective Miller’s character. He’s just way better in the book than in the show because there’s so much internal monologue and conflict. In the book, he’s a sad, lonely man, whose obsession with Julie Mao makes a lot more sense, as he builds her up as a lighthouse, the sole anchor he has in the storm of existence. Praxidike Meng’s character is similar. He’s externally such a quiet, reserved character, that access to the inner monologue makes all the difference. In fact, this is basically true of all TV right? It’s basically extrovert or bust and in that vein... [2] Reading the book simultaneous with watching the show was highly illuminating. The characters in the TV version are wayyyy more immature. By which I mean, wayyy more dramatic. Doing this simultaneous read / watch suddenly made American adults make a lot more sense to me. No wonder so many of them act like melodramatic teens all the time. That’s how adults on TV behave. In the book, the core crew of Alex, Amos, Naomi, and Holden almost immediately gel. Sure there’s the occasional friction - usually for very good reasons - but for the most part, they have much bigger concerns, like not getting blown up. But in the show, OH MY GOD. The personal melodrama is dialed up to eleven. Constant bickering, power struggles, macho chest beating. It’s unreal. Almost every character is 100% more of an asshole. I get it. Social drama, man. Makes entertainment world go around. But boy is it obnoxious. [3] Words are cheap. Modern special effects are not. Case in point would be Bobby’s battle on Ganymede. On the show, it basically doesn’t happen. But it is a serious battle in the books, complete with a giant mech! So like, damn, I hope Amazon uses some of their blood money to give the show the funding it needs to maintain fidelity to the book, even in these costly parts. -- When it’s all said and done, I’d choose the book over the show. While The Expanse is one of the best space sci-fi shows ever made, and I think it’s great… I can count on one hand the number of movies or shows that are superior to their books. Losing characters' interiority is too much. And that ramped up melodrama... Meh. Still, if you like space sci-fi, it’s one of the best series, on both screen and page. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 2019
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Sep 01, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1841499889
| 9781841499888
| 1841499889
| 4.31
| 278,728
| Jun 02, 2011
| Jun 02, 2011
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really liked it
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It’s a space adventure, with politics, heroism, and mad science - that takes pains to be scientifically accurate. Simulated gravity is created by engi
It’s a space adventure, with politics, heroism, and mad science - that takes pains to be scientifically accurate. Simulated gravity is created by engine thrust, without which mag-boots are necessary to walk. Ships have no magic shields. They have, at best, point defense cannons - high rate of fire projectile weapons - that can shoot down torpedoes but do a whole lot of nothing against railguns. Carelessness is just as dangerous as enemy combatants; in space, an improperly sealed helmet will kill just as readily as a missile. This aspiration to realism is important. I’ve seen science fiction divided up in a lot of ways: hard sci-fi vs soft sci-fi, sometimes called science sci-fi vs social sci-fi. Or split up into sub-genres like cyberpunk, military, space opera. Or, more recently, split along political lines (eugh), “leftist” sci-fi and “right-wing” sci-fi. Myself, I divide sci-fi on the basis of the author’s approach to reality: On one side of sci-fi are authors like Greg Egan, Ted Chiang, and Ursula K. Le Guin. They believe in grounding their science fiction in reality: real linguistics, real mathematics, real economics, real psychology, real humanity. On the other side of sci-fi are authors like Robert Heinlein, Ann Leckie, and Yoon Ha Lee. Reality to them is not something to ground their fiction in, it is something they *create* with their fiction. And if you read my reviews of the above, it’s pretty clear which type of author I prefer (and why)… Well, S.A. Corey (aka Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck) belongs on my preferred side, the authors who seek to ground their stories in reality. And while yes it’s neat they strive for realistic space flight and fight, it’s more important in that it’s representative of their approach to EVERYTHING. They also want realistic characters. A logical, hole-free plot. Accurate (I almost said ‘sensible’ hah!) political machinations. I like this. As a teenager, I considered phrases like “the truth will set you free” to be empty cliches, but now as an adult and a teacher, living in the Putin-era of misinformation, in which any inconvenient fact can be readily dismissed as “fake news”, I’ve come to understand the absolute necessity of truth. So it matters to me that Leviathan Wakes strives for honesty in character, plot, and physics. But don’t think that means it’s boring either. It is a Space Adventure, in the Tolkien sense, as a battle between the good parts of humanity and the evil parts. Generosity vs Greed. Compassion vs Cruelty. Tolerance vs Tribalism. Navigated by characters that are *gasp* actually decent people. Really, you should read it. Or... should you watch the TV show?! Next up on my Caliban's War review! ...more |
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not set
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Sep 2019
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Sep 01, 2019
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Paperback
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| 006107344X
| 9780061073441
| 006107344X
| 3.94
| 3,832
| 2002
| Jan 01, 2004
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really liked it
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So this is my third Egan and everything I wrote in my first two reviews, Diaspora and Permutation City, remains true of this one. Seriously, I put a l
So this is my third Egan and everything I wrote in my first two reviews, Diaspora and Permutation City, remains true of this one. Seriously, I put a lot of love into both those reviews, so you should go read them if you’re interested. But here’s a quick recap anyway. I consider Greg Egan the best science fiction writer alive today. He grounds his stories in real (or almost real) science and mathematics, yet they remain incredibly imaginative. An Egan work is an exceedingly rare, utterly beautiful combination of a child’s wonder and a scientist’s rigor. So when I go to my local Barnes and Noble and discover that they stock ZERO Egan books? It tells me that humanity has not yet reached childhood’s end. We’d rather read fairy tales and angsty social dramas. Now, about Schild’s Ladder specifically: It’s a story in the mode of The Modern Prometheus (Frankenstein). A scientist makes a huge mistake because she doesn’t fully understand the forces she’s dealing with. This results in a monster. And must one become monstrous in order to survive the monster? It’s not a huge spoiler here to say that the “monster” of Schild’s Ladder is vacuum decay. Chances are, you don’t know what that is. Here’s an analogy. Consider a half-filled bath tub. Float a small boat on the water, if you wish. Even if the boat swirls around, the water itself is stable, yes? If I splash the water, I may destroy the boat, but the water itself quickly restores to a stable state. But suppose I take a hammer and smash a hole in the bottom of the tub! The water’s no longer stable and will begin draining through the hole, where it will achieve some new stability with whatever is down there. Exchange the water for the energy of the universe, the little boat with normal matter, and the bathtub itself with vacuum and you now have a basic understanding of vacuum decay. It’s possible that our universe’s vacuum state is a false vacuum: it’s only locally stable. If something were to create a new vacuum which is even more stable, the energy of the universe would flow into this new state. In the process, the universe as we know it would be remade and all of us utterly destroyed. So, yeah, just about the worst disaster imaginable, and a nicely dramatic event around which to write a sci-fi story. Overall, I liked Schild’s Ladder a lot. But I liked it a lot less than Diaspora or Permutation City. If you’re new to Egan, I very strongly recommend you go to one of those other first, probably Permutation City. All of Egan’s books are hard sci-fi. And I do mean hard. I’m not a professional physicist or mathematician, but this year I decided to teach myself tensor calculus / differential geometry / general relativity. For fun. So I’m no stranger to difficult math or science concepts. Even so, there were parts of this book that I struggled with (to be fair, my QM-fu is relatively weak). While I found aspects of Diaspora and Permutation City challenging, I never felt like the hard math / science in them was gratuitous. It was always necessary to tell the story. That wasn’t the case with Schild’s Ladder, at least not at my level of understanding. Sometimes, I felt confronted with unnecessarily technical details or descriptions. Take this passage for example:
I understand what’s going on here, but it’s a bit heavy (“flung off at a tangent”, “arc of rotation”, “dropping from the zenith in front of him”) for what really ought to be a simple description. The book is rife with technical framing like this. Hell, even the title itself felt tacked-on. Schild’s Ladder (the math term, not the book) deals with the concept of parallel transport. Parallelism is a relatively straight-forward notion for lines on a flat piece of paper: you can draw two lines and say they’re parallel if they have the same slope or if they “never intersect.” But parallelism is far messier when dealing with higher dimensions and curves. Hence the notion of parallel transport, a way to “move” a vector around a curved surface. Such mathematical machinery is necessary to deal with space-time as fourth-dimensional geometry. Well, Schild’s Ladder is a technique to achieve parallel transport, and it’s a super cool idea that I hadn’t encountered before. I’m glad I learned it, but I don’t really understand what it has to do with the novel itself. Sure, Egan explains Schild’s Ladder within the context of a flashback, in which the main character is a child talking to his father, worrying about how he can be certain that he’s still “the same person” even as he ages. I get the idea, the metaphor, and the theme… but it’s pretty much out of the blue. And after it’s explained, it’s never again brought up. That’s what I mean by the hard sci-fi concepts feeling much more gratuitous. There’s also some pacing issues. There’s a very clear point in Schild’s Ladder when it transforms into Super Egan mode. Before that, yeah it was interesting. But after, it’s like OH MAN YES! I DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON, BUT I LOVE IT ANYWAY. That’s why I read Egan, for those moments of superhuman imagination. I’m also a huge fan of the Egan milieu. It’s like how, hrm, like how when you pick up a Philip K. Dick you know to expect certain features of the setting: telepaths / empaths? Yep, pretty common. Precognition too. Sentient or AI appliances / doors / etc? Weirdly often. Mutants? Oh yeah. Invasive advertising? All the time! These aren’t core plot features, they’re often just there. Like PKD took it for granted those would be features of the future, or of HIS future, anyway. Well Egan has a similar standard milieu. All three books I’ve read feature characters who were born and raised in purely digital form - who are often in contrast with those who purposefully choose to remain ‘embodied.’ Egan’s future sees math and science fluency as standard features of future humans. That’s a far cry from our current position. Right now, in the US, roughly 40% of adults are unable to answer simple math questions, like, Suppose a liter of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a liter of cola, how much would you pay? 40%. Tragic. In Egan’s future, though, love letters are written in the language of theoretical mathematics. And basic societal problems like starvation or child labor or slavery? Non-existent. Extinct for so long they no longer even register. It’s weird to say, given how his milieu is often set against the backdrop of galactic-scale disaster, but the Egan future is an optimistic one. It’s a future of more freedom, more knowledge, less suffering, a future in which human beings no longer need waste their energy and lives on trivial tasks like making sure they or their children don’t starve to death. Instead, we have the time and energy to confront the true wonders and mysteries of the universe, and to actualize our selves to their fullest potential. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, with the bottom 90% permanently and effortlessly satisfied. That’s another reason why I'm such a fan of Egan. In contrast to the vast majority of fiction, his works offer a mature humanity, one not trapped in petty drama. I’ve grown sick, maybe even literally, of dealing with immature adults who have strong opinions supported only by strong ignorance, whose hearts drown in rage and greed and tribalism and respond only to drama. It’s nice to be free of it, even for a few brief moments, to see a plausible vision of human beings that resemble what we mean when we speak of the virtuous “humanity.” Staring down the barrel of climate catastrophe, watching in slow motion the suicidal trajectory of a bullet aimed at the heart of human civilization, I need that. Even if I suspect they’ll never come true, it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in my dreams of a humanity that has finally managed to grow up. ...more |
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Aug 13, 2019
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| 4.12
| 6,839
| Jun 12, 2018
| Jun 12, 2018
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it was ok
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Yell and Back Again, a Scientist’s Review There’s a scene in The Two Towers when Treebeard comes across a clear-cut forest. The sight stops him dead in Yell and Back Again, a Scientist’s Review There’s a scene in The Two Towers when Treebeard comes across a clear-cut forest. The sight stops him dead in his tracks, and he stares at it in disbelief. When he realizes Saruman is responsible, he utters, “A wizard should know better!” Well, I encountered a passage in Revenant Gun that elicited an almost identical reaction from me, except it ended with, “A mathematician should know better!” I was genuinely disturbed. What was Yoon Ha Lee thinking when he wrote it? Why didn’t he fix it during the editing stage? Did he really believe no one would notice it? Is it possible he doesn’t understand its absurdity? Regardless of the answers [see note at bottom of review], I knew this passage had to be the central focus of my review because it is symptomatic of everything I find wrong with this book, with this trilogy, and with a certain style of currently popular spec fic. Here’s the passage, which describes an infamous weapon of mass destruction. It is mostly correct, until we get to the final (bolded) sentence: Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower's effect was painfully affected by the linearization. Pushdug búbhosh! Painfully affected by the linearization? Bwahahaha. That's nonsense that transcends mere techno-babble. It's a categorical error like: If you make sure to eat your vegetables, you will grow as big and strong as triangles. The victim was killed by 2+2 = 4. The Bohr model of the atom involves electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting a star. Those within the blast radius of an atomic bomb are painfully affected by the Bohr model. Even given Yoon Ha Lee’s fictional universe, in which formation geometries and strict adherence to calendars can create ‘exotic effects’ like shields and immortality, it doesn’t make sense. Those effects are created by physical actions - soldiers moving into certain patterns or ritualistic torture. No one can be physically affected by linearization because it is not a physical action. It is an abstract mathematical tool of approximation. And sure, big whoop, some sci-fi writer tossed in some techno-babble that happens to be a little more nonsensical than usual. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that Yoon Ha Lee studied mathematics and math teaching at Cornell and Stanford. A mathematician should know better! What’s more, it can’t be accidental. The passage is the ONLY writing in the entire trilogy that even remotely resembles actual math or physics. So why’d he write something he should have known was nonsense? Why not spend the 60 seconds to make it sensible? A few words would make all the difference, something like, “painfully affected by a scrambling of the local space-time geometry.” Honestly, it’s mind boggling. I just could not fathom how he could be so careless with his choice of words… but then something came to me, something that clarified not just this passage, but also Yoon Ha Lee’s writing style and the spec-fic movement to which he belongs (see also my review for Ancillary Mercy) and even something fundamental about the gender & sexuality conflict underway. I realized Yoon Ha Lee was treating that relatively exotic math term ‘linearization’ like a neologism, a made-up word whose meaning he gets to assign. And of course, why wouldn’t he? He shows a propensity for using such neologisms throughout the whole series. His space vessels aren’t ‘ships’ but ‘moths.’ His light fixtures aren’t lamps but ‘candlevines.’ And so on. ***LIGHTBULB MOMENT*** See I found the book dreadfully dull. The characters interacted with each other - often intimately - and yet never managed to form relationships. Events are written dramatically, but the drama felt hollow and forced. Indeed, the reading experience was like watching someone try to light wet wood on fire. Lots of sparks but no fire, no warmth, no radiance. But I understand why now. Yoon Ha Lee believes more strongly in the power of words than I do. Words are not merely descriptive; they possess the power to forge reality. Linearization can cause “blood to leak from every pore in the body”? Sure, why not. And if that’s true, then it is not necessary to develop plot and conflict to craft genuine emotion. Instead, an author need only offer emotional cues to tell the reader what to feel. But I disagree. Consider friendship. The friends that strive together, grow together. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee’s relationship is such an enduring and powerful example of friendship because they go through so much together. Frodo and Sam are attacked by spirit ghosts, betrayed by Boromir, hunted by orcs, stalked by a paranoid schizophrenic, captured by a giant spider, all while traversing through miserable, hostile environments. It’s exhausting. I don’t remember if Tolkien ever explicitly tells us they have a great friendship, but it’d be insulting if he did. That Samwise kept going shows us everything we need to know about their friendship. But here, in Revenant Gun, we’ve got all these relationships that I found empty and emotionless because the characters face so little together. High General Brezan gets married to Andan Tseya. What do they go through? What’s their Shelob experience? *shrug* As I wrote in my Raven Strategm review, the SUM TOTAL of their time together is literally them just flying around on a garden ship, having boring sex. They don’t fight anything. They don’t overcome anything. They don’t fail anything. Shuos Leader Mikodez is friends with his assistant Zehun. What do they go through? Assassination attempts? Government coups? No. They have meetings, where they eat cookies and name kittens. Jedao and one of his closest subordinates, Commander Talaw, share maybe 20 lines of dialogue together. Cheris is sorta friends with this servitor (robot) who pilots her ship. What do they go through together? Does either sacrifice anything for the other? Provide comfort to the other in a dark time? No, nothing. And yet the author writes so many scenes as if these relationships have any emotional strength whatsoever. But they don’t. So the whole reading experience was this bizarre experience of an author trying to offer emotional cues and me going, Uhhh, no? Like, I’m sitting there reading the final pages where Jedao is freaking out over Commander Talaw, and I’m thinking, What the hell? Did I miss something? Was there more than 20 lines of dialogue shared between them? Nope. *sigh* Really, that’s how I feel about Jedao’s entire characterization in this book. A big sigh. So a man who once murdered 1 million+ people in order to achieve a political objective is now concerned about harming a few more thousand? After having his psyche reconstructed by a completely amoral psychopathic genius who specifically revived him in order to get him to kill people? What? Is this supposed to make sense? But again, it’s that painfully affected by linearization writ large. And because nothing bad ever comes from delving too greedily or too deep, let me dig even more, into the minefield that is Gender. So, gender fluidity is a major theme of this trilogy. I earlier mentioned General Brezan? He has a ‘womanform’ but identifies as male, and he is marrying a man who became a woman. Indeed, the book probably has more transgenders than cisgenders. Yoon Ha Lee himself (according to his wikipedia) is transgender. Which is fine, but it makes for fascinating pondering: Could there be a connection between this style and gender fluidity? Indeed I believe there is! When you get right down to it, the relationship between language and reality is at the very core of the gender conflict that’s currently happening in many parts of the world: Those in favor of gender fluidity make a big distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex.’ Sex refers to biological characteristics. Put simply, if a person has XX sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘female sex’ while if a person has XY sex chromosomes, that person is of the ‘male sex.’ Gender, however, is a social construct. Gender is fluid. There is no requirement that gender and sex match. A person should be free to choose gender. Opponents of gender fluidity make no such distinction. So transgenderism is a categorical error from such a perspective. Claims of transgender (from the opponents' PoV) would be like if I walked up to you and pointed at a wall that was white and said, “That wall is black.” And you said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s white.” And I said, “No, it’s white and if you don’t call it white, you’re a colorist asshole.” Now I’m torn. I’m sympathetic to the non-extremists on both sides. On one hand, I once set out to give a clear, mathematical definition of ethical good, and I discovered that freedom is largely synonymous with good. So the freedom to define ourselves however we like is not only beautiful but essential to moral society. What’s more, transgenderism is the first crest of the wave of transhumanism, which is the future of our species. On the other hand… I’m the type of person who endeavored to create a mathematical definition for ethical good. So, yeah, I like my terms to be defined as precisely as possible. In my experience, most arguments arise because people are speaking past each other, using the same words but with different meanings. So I’m made uneasy by this notion that we’re going to take these terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ which could have really clear definitions (XY genes) or (XX genes) and then purposefully make them more vague. We know the result will be conflict because the conflict is already here. This is why I often say mathematics is the language of peace and perhaps you can now appreciate why the initial passage angered me so. Yoon Ha Lee used the language of precision and peace to tell what amounts to a lie, for no good reason. But it’s not surprising to me because the whole book is written this way, and it’s not surprising to me that Yoon Ha Lee wrote it that way. To liberate gender from the chains of biological definition is to assert the primacy of language. And in a way, Yoon Ha Lee is only doing what all authors attempt to do: to transmute abstract words into true and genuine feelings. To trick the reader into thinking a fictional character - a golem of ink and paper - is a real person who can be hurt, or loved, whose tragedies and triumphs constitute genuine humanity. And, yet, such a perspective taken to the extreme reminds me of the rise and fall of the Númenóreans, that Tolkien empire of Men who sought to challenge the Gods. One must be careful not to become too divorced from reality. To merely claim drama, character, or love without grounding it in real humanity and carefully constructed plot structure is to risk those emotions ringing hollow and false. That is is exactly what happened with me. I felt like Yoon Ha Lee was trying to hypnotize me into caring. Just as he tried to grant authenticity and verisimilitude to his ‘threshold winnower’ weapon by tossing around some math terms, it felt like he tried to grant emotional stakes by simply claiming they were there. Have characters have sex and then voila, they are emotionally connected! Have people spend time together without actually overcoming anything and then voila, they must be friends and comrades! But no… that is not the way my mind and my heart interface with literature. I don’t care if authors write about the real or the unreal. But they need to tell the truth of humanity and truth of their reality in the language of our reality. Which also means that if you’re going to use math terms in your science fiction, then, please, use them correctly. [Edit/note: Some time after writing this review, I discovered that Yoon Ha Lee gives an acknowledgment to Peter Berman for "helping with the mathematics of the threshold winnower." Which leads me believe that Yoon Ha Lee didn't actually know better and wrote that line in good faith.] ...more |
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Jul 07, 2019
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Jul 19, 2019
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Jul 07, 2019
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| 1781085374
| 9781781085370
| 1781085374
| 4.10
| 9,227
| Jun 13, 2017
| Jun 13, 2017
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it was ok
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WARNING: SECOND BOOK SLUMP ALERT. I’m having flashbacks of the Ancillary series all over again. No, no, NO! You can’t make me relive that, you can’t,
WARNING: SECOND BOOK SLUMP ALERT. I’m having flashbacks of the Ancillary series all over again. No, no, NO! You can’t make me relive that, you can’t, I won’t, NO! Hey, hey, calm down there self, calm down, it’s not that bad. *pats self on back* There, there. Have a juice box. Pomegranate. Yummy. And good for prostate cancer. Maybe a cookie too. Yes, a cookie will make it all right. And remember, it’s just a book. Whew, got a little nonplussed there. Funny word that, nonplussed, bit of an autoantonym, actually. It means you’re so disturbed that you act totally calm and bemused. Kind of like if you take a Lovecraftian horror response - insanity in the face of incomprehensibility - and sprinkled some glitter on it. That’s nonplussed. That’s how this book makes me feel. It’s like I encountered one of the Elder Gods, but the Elder God was My Little Pony. Ha ha okay I jest. Kinda. Actually, specifically, the Elder God is this aesthetic/style that’s become popular - or at least award winning - in sci-fi and fantasy lately. If I had to describe this aesthetic in one word, it’d be, hmm, self-righteousness. A broad term, but I think it’s pretty good. It is this utter confidence that you are on the righteous path and that anyone who disputes you is wrong and evil. And incompetent. Best throw that in there too. Now I’m not a big fan of self-righteousness as a personality trait. In fact, I’m pretty sure most evil is committed by self-righteous people. They’re doing evil for their children’s sake, or for God, or for posterity, or etc. You know how it is. Self-righteousness as a writing style isn’t that bad, but it has plenty of problems of its own, the exploration of which will involve spoilers. Consider that your spoiler warning. See, in fiction, conflict is the heart of plot. No conflict? No plot. And the problem with the self-righteous aesthetic - regardless of the underlying ideology - is that it doesn’t leave room for the protagonists to doubt themselves. No internal conflict. And because competency is so closely tied with morality, it doesn’t leave much room for failure either. No external conflict. Where does that leave us? A book without much plot. So I finished Raven Strategm about a week ago and if you asked me to describe to you the plot, I would honestly struggle to do so. Really. But here we go, I’m going to try: Jedao/Cheris alters the calendar of the Hexarchate Empire. What’s missing from that summary? Any conflict, any struggle, any doubt. Because there is none. Which is why we don’t even get her PoV, because there wasn’t even anything to write there. Instead here’s the main PoVs we get: General Khiruev has the best plot of the three since we have an early element of internal conflict, and she’s commanding the swarm trying to fight an enemy invader. So there’s actual conflict in this PoV. But it’s not well done. The internal conflict is neatly resolved “off page” for the most part. And resolution of the external conflict largely involves Jedao/Cheris arriving at the last minute and saying, “Oh hey, do this magical manuever and everything will work out!” Psychopathic (except…not? I don’t know, the book doesn’t have a strong grasp of non-conformist psychology, despite most characters being written as such) Brezan gets arrested, plays patty-cake with a couple of spy-types, randomly gets promoted to High General in what may be the worst plan I’ve ever seen, flies around on the spaceship version of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel while having boring passionless sex, and then immediately fails his mission. He did all this because… *pauses* …wait a second, why exactly did he do any of this? Honestly, I don’t know. Shuos Hexarch Mikodez sits at his desk, eats cookies, and takes care of a green onion…? I mean, I LIKE this guy BUT FOR THE LOVE OF PLOT, SHOW HIM DOING SOMETHING. I DON’T CARE ABOUT HIM HAVING SEX WITH HIS TWIN BROTHER AND EATING SWEETS. LESS MASTICATION, MORE MACHINATION. And you can be sure that there’s no counter-perspective to the anti-establishment themes present in this book (and in all such novels of the self-righteous aesthetic). Not that I’m suggesting we shouldn’t shatter an empire that employs formalized torture, but there’s also good reasons not to start a civil war? Surely someone might bring some of them up, maybe? As part of an actual argument, not just some throwaway line easily dismissed? Maybe even a PoV from a good person ON THE OTHER SIDE? Because those do exist. Or at least some examples of the supposed good guys directly harming innocents with their war mongering and anarchy - as at least the first book had? Even better: develop an actual character so there’s a real sense of loss and complexity when they fall as a result of the “good” guys?! But such complexities will not be countenanced by the self-righteous aesthetic, which cannot accept any validity of the opposing perspective. While the Ninefox Gambit and Revenant Gun do a much better job of avoiding the worst pitfalls of this aesthetic, Raven Strategm is a prime example of it. For me at least, that made the reading experience tedious. In fact, it was tedious enough that, if you asked me to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down for the whole series, I’d have to give it a thumbs down. It’s… frustrating that this is the path sci-fi & fantasy has taken. I’m all for politics and philosophy and gender explorations to be part of sci-fi, and I keep picking up these highly decorated books expecting such. But then it’s simply not there. The politics, philosophy, and so on are not interrogative, but declarative. They’re not explorations, they’re pronouncements of righteousness, without even a plot to make them fun to read. ...more |
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Jul 07, 2019
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| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
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really liked it
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Erik’s how-to guide for reading and appreciating Ninefox Gambit: 1) The genre is fantasy sci-fi, not hard sci-fi. You'll come across many a math-jargon Erik’s how-to guide for reading and appreciating Ninefox Gambit: 1) The genre is fantasy sci-fi, not hard sci-fi. You'll come across many a math-jargon -- e.g. “As the world faded toward black, the grid informed her that she should proceed by a particular series of approximations. She authorized the computation and added some constraints designed to speed the exploration of likely solutions.” -- but they are entirely meaningless. So when the author writes statements like, “The combination of formation geometry and Kel discipline allowed them to channel exotic effects, from heat lances to force shields,” it’s important to realize these exotic effects are magic spells, not applied mathematics. In fact, the magic system here is actually less systematic than that of many fantasy series, though the idea is pretty neat: all of these exotic effects rely on the citizens’ adherence to the empire’s calendar. The idea is that having enough people hold certain beliefs and observing certain rituals generates the capacity to do magic. If that sounds strongly metaphorical… yeah, more on that later. Point is, Ninefox Gambit offers a fairly rare vintage of genre: the fantasy space opera. While star wars is, for sure, science fantasy, it’s more character-centric hero’s journey than civilization-centric space opera. Rather the best comparison would be Dune. I don’t think Ninefox Gambit is in the same ballpark, but it’s definitely a similar sport. So if you liked Dune or like the idea of fantasy space opera in general, you may want to give Ninefox Gambit a read. 2) Much of the reception of this book reminds me of a famous Henry Kissinger quote: “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” One of the major reasons I chose to read this book was because of how many reviews complained about the book’s difficulty. Ooo, I thought, complexity! Mathematics! Maybe some actual political science and economics. Philosophy, even?! And wrapped in a sparkling bow of some technical prose? Me likey!! Bwahahaha. In hindsight, hilarity: So many of the reviews citing this book’s “difficulty” involved the reader blaming him/herself for not being able to “understand” or “appreciate” the supposed complexity of Nine Fox Gambit. I mean, it did win several awards and was nominated for both a hugo and a nebula! It’s a celebrity! So if you struggle to appreciate it, it must be your fault, right…? Nope! First off, the Hugos and Nebulas are now more about politics than they are about quality. I wouldn’t say that Ninefox Gambit didn’t deserve its Hugo and Nebula nominations - in fact, I’m totally okay with them. But I can promise you that its anti-imperialist and gender fluidity themes played no small part. Which isn’t to suggest these awards shouldn’t be about political or ideological matters, but it’s best to understand what they are and what they are not. Second off, Nine Fox Gambit is absolutely terrible when it comes to description. POP QUIZ FOR THOSE WHO HAVE READ THIS: What do the exotic effects of a formation look like? What does a bannermoth look like? What does the fortress of scattered needles look like? What does its ‘invariant ice’ shields look like? What does it feel like to use a FTL moth drive? How big is a servitor? And what the hell is a - I’m too lazy to find the exact term - a snakelamp? A vinelamp? A snakelight? If you’re going to invent made-up terms to help your world-building, at least back them up with description. Otherwise, just say “lamp.” Because right now I’m holding a psychocin bomb and if I trigger it, the world is going to enter a cinder void. And none of us want to be in a cinder void. Not you, not me, and definitely not any snakelamps. So it's best to realize the descriptions suck. Don’t bash your head against them. You just have to suffer through them until you gain enough familiarity with the terminology that it becomes casual. “Bannermoth” yeah, that’s like a medium sized space ship. It doesn’t really shoot things so much as manuevers into formations that cause (or stop) boom boom. Got it. 3) The whole novel and its world are a giant metaphor for the power of conformity, although if you don’t mind, I’m going to call it the momentum of conformity. In fact, indulge me a digression. Some time ago, while writing a short story called “The City of Wishes” about a Persian detective and his golem partner, I had an epiphany. There are three forces that guide each person’s life: desire; fear; and routine. Desire is a force that attracts, fear is a force that repels, while routine is the momentum of the path itself. The epiphany I had is that routine is far more potent than either fear or desire. Humanity’s utter impotence in the face of climate change reveals the truth of this statement. Even faced with the fear of our entire species’ extinction and the desire to see our children have a future in which to thrive, so few us are able to overcome the momentum of our routine. Eat less meat? Use less electricity? Stop using our car and take public transportation instead? Make lifestyle choices that minimize our material consumption? Vote against our preferred party? No, the power of routine is too great. Well, the magic system of Ninefox Gambit is that exact idea, applied on the Empire level, which I think is great. The magical exotic calendrical effects rise from conformity, belief, and, above all, routine. The core plot is, therefore, an exploration of the question, How do you alter this? It’s hard enough to alter your own routine, how difficult is it to alter the routine of an entire empire? The answer, should you choose to read this, is that it takes a lot of death, misery, and destruction. And vinelights. Gonna need you some vinelamps. ...more |
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Jul 02, 2019
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Jul 02, 2019
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| 0804137250
| 9780804137256
| 0804137250
| 3.55
| 122,169
| Jul 14, 2015
| Jul 14, 2015
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liked it
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Ernest Cline’s Armada tells a story very much in the same vein as his first book, Ready Player One: a super geeky young man who’s a bit unbalanced soc
Ernest Cline’s Armada tells a story very much in the same vein as his first book, Ready Player One: a super geeky young man who’s a bit unbalanced socially and emotionally is obsessed with something and pursues it relentlessly. In this case, the young man’s name is Zack Lightman, and he’s obsessed with gaming and with his father, who died when he was just a baby. But as the result of some global thingermajigger happening, the young man’s geekiness and obsession transform from something worthless and shameful into something valuable and precious. Let me say I very badly want to give this book a 5 star glowing review. I love what Cline did in RP1, and I love what he’s trying to do here: celebrate geek culture. He wants to show geek culture at its best, how fandom and pop-culture can unite disparate peoples and ideologies. You may be Chinese, and I may be America, but hey we can still totally blast some aliens together in a game. And I like how Cline depicts youthful romance, that delicious sense of liberation in finding a person who shares your geeky interests and appreciates your nerdy obsessions. The Spielberg-geist is strong in Cline’s books; they capture that same feeling of youthful adventure. There is all of that and at times reading Armada was an exuberant experience. If I didn’t have RP1 to compare this with, I might stop there. Unfortunately, RP1 does exist, and Armada is simply an inferior creation in essentially every way. First, Armada’s pop culture references too often verge on the gratuitous. In RP1, pop culture was a core element of the plot. Protagonist Wade Watts needed pop culture to solve the puzzles, and even when he didn’t, the pop culture most often served as a form of camaraderie between the characters. But here? Pop culture only vaguely connects to the plot. What’s more, the pop culture allusions arise primarily in Zach’s internal thoughts. For example, instead of thinking, “This was a trying time,” Zach might instead think, “This was my own personal kobayashi maru.” One or two of these, okay sure, but, especially early in the book, it was every other line. I felt like I was being pandered to, and it was annoying. Second, the timespan of Armada’s plot is problematic. From the first to the last page, maybe two days of time elapse. With so little time to work with, the author failed to provide enough space for the characters and their relationships to grow. In RP1, I bought into the Wade & Art3mis romance because there was time for it to evolve and bloom into something meaningful. Here, though, Zach meets his love interest, and their connection is a cheap sort of magic. Honestly, I don’t even remember her name, as they barely spend any time around each other. I mean, seriously, they have like fifteen minutes of actual face-to-face contact and only a handful of communications after that. Because of this, the romance lacks authenticity. It becomes just another plot element. Which is eugh. Don’t relegate romance to a plot device, that’s just… don’t do that. Don’t cheapen romance, don't cheapen love. Third, Armada lacks the depth of RP1. Now, RP1’s detractors would laugh at that statement: “bwaha, that wish fulfillment had depth?!” Well, I’d disagree. I thought RP1 did a good job exploring the nature of social media, anonymity, and virtual relationships. For example, I get tired of people railing against how the anonymity of the internet is this terrible thing that enables trolls. RP1 showed how, yes, it can be bad, but it can also be a form of freedom, as it grants the ability to present yourself exactly as you’d like. That need not be a bad thing. Armada, on the other hand, focuses on gaming and gamer culture, without every providing much insight. For example, I’m a gamer, and I’ve been one a long time. I owned and played a sega genesis and the original NES! And you know what this has done to my mind? I see everything as a system. Language is a system, wine tasting is a system, politics is a system. This very book review is a system, in which I progress from general to specific, in which I tailor the level of vocab to fit a certain audience, in which I carefully balance personal revelation and objective commentary, etc. On one hand, this has trained me to be systematic in understanding and adapting to all sorts of situations and mental frameworks. On the other hand, it removes much of the mystique of life. When everything you encounter is a system to be figured out, mystery vanishes. Faith vanishes. Sublimity vanishes. Alas, while the author clearly understands and appreciates gamer culture, Armada never offers us any sort of deeper insight into it - a missed opportunity, I think, given the increasing popularity of games. In short, Armada is an inferior imitation of Cline's (first?) book Ready Player One. If you haven’t read either and want to read one, you should absolutely start with RP1. That said, I like the unadulterated enthusiasm with which Cline approaches geekdom, and I remain excited to see what he comes up with next. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 24, 2019
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Jun 24, 2019
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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Nov 11, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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| 4.24
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liked it
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Oct 25, 2020
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Oct 25, 2020
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| 3.66
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really liked it
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Aug 31, 2020
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Aug 31, 2020
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| 3.47
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liked it
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Aug 13, 2020
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Aug 12, 2020
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| 4.57
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liked it
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Jun 03, 2020
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Jul 28, 2020
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| 3.91
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really liked it
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Jul 20, 2020
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Jul 20, 2020
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| 4.47
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really liked it
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Jul 07, 2020
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Jul 07, 2020
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Feb 27, 2020
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Feb 27, 2020
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| 4.19
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liked it
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Nov 18, 2019
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Dec 05, 2019
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| 4.37
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liked it
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Nov 27, 2019
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Nov 27, 2019
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| 4.22
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really liked it
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Oct 2019
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Oct 30, 2019
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| 4.44
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liked it
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Nov 05, 2019
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Sep 26, 2019
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| 4.27
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liked it
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Sep 25, 2019
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Sep 25, 2019
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| 4.38
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really liked it
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Sep 2019
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Sep 01, 2019
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| 4.31
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really liked it
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Sep 2019
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Sep 01, 2019
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Aug 13, 2019
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Aug 13, 2019
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| 4.12
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it was ok
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Jul 19, 2019
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Jul 07, 2019
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| 4.10
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it was ok
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Jul 07, 2019
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Jul 07, 2019
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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not set
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Jul 02, 2019
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| 3.55
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liked it
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Jun 24, 2019
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Jun 24, 2019
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