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| 038561926X
| 9780385619264
| 4.18
| 59,676
| 2011
| Oct 13, 2011
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liked it
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Sam Vimes really can never steer you wrong. If you take anything else away from this book, take that. Vimes has always been one of my favorite characte Sam Vimes really can never steer you wrong. If you take anything else away from this book, take that. Vimes has always been one of my favorite characters mainly because he embodies a lot of the qualities that I really love. From the beginning, way back in Guards! Guards! he shows that redemption is possible. He starts as a washed-up copper who's lost his will to be what he was meant to be. The night watch is a laughable institution, without the respect of anyone in the city. Over the course of the book, he begins to remember what it is that made him want to be a copper in the first place, and his long road to becoming a better person begins. In subsequent books, Vines is constantly tested, and that's one very important constant to his character – he's always struggling not to become the bad man that he could be. He knows that there is a bully, a blackguard, a murderer hidden deep down inside him, and it's a struggle not to let that person out. He uses the Law as a touchstone to remind himself of why he can't let that part of himself show, but it's hard sometimes. It's very hard indeed. It's harder still when he's in a place where the law is more… fluid than it is in his city of Ankh-Morpork. Where he is not immediately respected and obeyed by the high and the low. And when the crime he's investigating isn't technically a crime, but really should be. Vimes' wife, Sybil, has insisted that the family take a vacation out to her ancestral estates. It would be good for Vimes' health, she thinks, and she could be right. He has a high-pressure job, and while Sybil is an outstandingly supportive spouse in every respect, she also worries for her husband. What's more, they have a young son to take care of, and he does need to see his daddy as often as he can. So it's off to the countryside, a place where they do things differently. It's a place where there's always someone watching you, even if you don't know they're there. It's a place where things are done in black and white, where the differences between the high class and the low stand out in sharp relief. It's a place where the law is whatever a self-appointed group of magistrates say it is, and that law all too often bends to serve their whim. It would be hard enough with the retired old lords, the lippy pub proprietor, the arrogant blacksmith, and the lady who writes wildly popular children's books about poo – when goblins get involved, the whole thing gets worse. Goblins, of course, are considered one step below vermin. They're ugly, they stink, they steal, and they're good for nothing at all. Even the goblins know that they're no good, so it'll be hard to convince anyone to care about them. The problem is, someone kills a goblin in order to frame Vimes for another murder entirely. When Vimes starts to look into the goblin's death, the thread he pulls eventually leads to a long and sordid history of slaughter, theft, and terror that only he can untangle. If he survives, of course. Let me get the good parts out of the way first. I enjoyed this book, but by now that's not really a surprise. It has a good mystery, some fun action sequences, and covers some interesting topics that are good for heavy thinking. For example, Vimes – ever the egalitarian – has a hard time believing that he is more valuable than, say, a housemaid. The maids at the Ramkin estates are exceedingly deferential to him, as are all the servants, and that sets his teeth on edge, and I can understand that. But if something happens to a chambermaid, few people will shed a tear. If something happens to Vimes, it's very possible that nations will go to war. It's hard to deal with people thinking that you're somehow above them. I had a hard time with it when I started teaching – students treated me like I was someone important, and I wanted to say, "No, really I'm not!" But to them, I am. I'm the Guy Who Knows Things. I'm the Guy Who Grades Them. I judge them and I am part of the class of people who holds their future in its hands. They've been taught from their first day of kindergarten that teachers are to be treated with respect, regardless of whether that respect has been earned. The reverse of that is also addressed. What causes us to treat others with contempt, and what can it lead us to do? In this book, the goblins are pests, and not considered "people" in the same way that Dwarves and Trolls and Humans are. But the goblins sing and make music; they have a complex language and religion. They marry and have children and mourn their dead. Objectively, they're as sapient as any human. But "everyone knows" they're worthless. So, a lot of this book is about value, and what it means to be "worth" something to others. It deals with issues of class and law, and presents an interesting parable. The problem I have with it is that I didn't particularly like how it was written. And I feel really, really horrible for saying that. As you probably know, Pratchett is faced with Alzheimer's disease, and it's already taking its toll on him. This book was written with speech recognition software, and the difference in style is highly noticeable. There never used to be a whole lot of long speeches in Discworld novels. Much of the real side-splitting humor was provided from the narration [1] or from the razor-sharp dialogue between characters. Speeches were usually reserved for key moments in the story, giving them a much greater impact. This book, however, is full of speeches. Vimes makes speeches that go on for nearly two pages, his wife makes speeches, Willikins makes speeches – even the Patrician, one of the most laconic characters in the series, makes these long, drawn-out speeches, and it feels just wrong. Like Pratchett is writing new characters who are similar, but not identical to the ones we've come to love after so long. I suspect – but cannot confirm – that this is due to the way he's writing. Using speech recognition to write a novel means that the writer is, in effect, dictating his novel, and writing is very different from dictating. We can speak in ways that sound great when they're coming out of our mouth, but the same thing pasted to a page falls flat, especially when the speech is given to a character not known for making speeches. What's more, the speeches are rarely punctuated with any kind of narrative description of what anyone is doing during the speech. The result is that there's no picture in your head during the speech – it's just Vimes standing there talking for a couple of pages, and it feels different. It feels… wrong. Like I said, I feel terrible picking on that, because if my choice is Terry not writing any more books or Terry using speaking software, I would happily choose the latter. And I understand why he can't just sit down at his computer anymore and type the way he used to. Certain facts are unavoidable, no matter how terrible they are, and one of those unavoidable facts is that Terry can't write the way he used to. The new way will inevitably result in a change in style, much as if a master of the acoustic guitar picked up an electric and started playing. They're two different instruments, and one cannot be made to sound like the other. Terry's working with a new instrument now, and I suppose it'll take me a while before I can get used to it. Also, it's entirely probable that the entire story was written to set up a pun in the last line. Again, I can't prove anything… That aside, though, it's a good story, and it has a great deal to say about the inherent worth of people, which is something we all ought to give thought to from time to time. ------------------- "That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know, I suspect we'll never know." - Sam Vimes, Snuff --- [1] And the footnotes, of course. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 16, 2011
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Dec 16, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 045146379X
| 9780451463791
| 045146379X
| 4.25
| 100,589
| Jul 26, 2011
| Jul 26, 2011
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really liked it
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**spoiler alert** Hell's Bells count: 27 In the acknowledgment section of the book, where Butcher very kindly thanks all the people who helped it come **spoiler alert** Hell's Bells count: 27 In the acknowledgment section of the book, where Butcher very kindly thanks all the people who helped it come into existence, he clarifies something very important: the end of the last book, Changes, was not a cliffhanger. Absolutely not, no matter that it really, really looked like one, smelled like one and felt like one. After all, in that last scene, Dresden is on a boat, and then shot through the chest by a sniper of some sort. He drops into the cold waters of the lake and sinks and, as far as we know, dies. In order for it to be a cliffhanger, then, Butcher would have to reveal at the beginning of this book how Dresden got out of such a terrible situation. Maybe he could call on some last reserve of magic or be saved by merpeople or something, but the strictures of the cliffhanger would demand that Dresden, once the next book began, not be dead but saved by some unexpected, yet still believable, means. So, yes, Butcher is right - it's not a cliffhanger. Dresden is, indeed, dead. He did not escape, he was not rescued. He is dead. Now in most series (comic books excluded, of course), the death of the main character would be something of an impediment to continuing the series. But The Dresden Files is not most series, and Harry Dresden is not most main characters. He has done too much and is far too important to be allowed to do a silly little thing like die. Harry Dresden is necessary to a great number of plans and schemes by a great number of people. What's more, his death wasn't exactly fair, insofar as such a thing is possible. And so he is brought back by the Powers That Be in order to balance the scales and set things right, which is ultimately what Harry Dresden has been doing all along. He's to go back to Chicago and find his murderer, lest terrible things happen to those he loves. The catch, of course, is that he has to come back as a ghost. This is a problem for many reasons, not the least of which is that doing a murder investigation is substantially easier when you have, well, substance. It's hard to punch someone in the face when your fists just go right through them. So Dresden first has to figure out how to make himself known to the living world, in addition to coming to grips with his limitations as an untethered spiritual entity. Once he's figured that part out, he has to not only solve his own murder, but keep a body-hopping necromancer from becoming indescribably powerful, save the only man who knows how to deal with being a ghost, try to redeem a bunch of street kids who are under the influence of a minor sorcerer, and figure out what to do with the real mess he made when he died. You see, Harry's death, and the events that led up to it, created a power vacuum - not only in Chicago, but all over the world. With the destruction of the Red Court of vampires, the magical rulers of the world are fighting tooth and nail over land and resources, and what has mostly resulted from that is bloodshed. Forces all over the world are converging on Red Court territory, each one determined to claim what they can. In Chicago, the news of Harry Dresden's death invited all sorts of new power players into the city, who were previously smart enough to stay out. Harry never truly understood the reputation he had until he sees what his friends have to do to match it and keep the city safe. Now that the Great and Powerful Harry Dresden is out of the picture, a newer and more terrible protector has emerged to keep away those who would do the city and its inhabitants harm. The Ragged Lady is all that stands in the way of the Chicago that Harry knew being overrun. Mix in the Faerie, a new group called the Formor, the mob, and a few representatives of the afterlife, and you have a confusing and volatile situation. Which is pretty much where Harry Dresden is most at home. As with the other Dresden Files books, this is a lot of fun to read, mainly because it looks at Harry and his friends from a new point of view – the outside. In the six months that he's been "away," the people he loves have had to go on without him, and even in that short time they have become different. They have had to make choices that they wouldn't have made while he was there, and they certainly don't interact with him the same way they once did. Harry has to re-learn who these people are, with the understanding that his decisions did not change their lives for the better. In addition, we learn more about Harry's past and what made him the way he is, and we finally see him start to think about whether being the person he is is really a good thing all the time. He excels in showy violence, hitting first and asking questions later, without taking a more nuanced view of the situation. Well, now he can't hit, at least not in the ways that he's used to. He has to look at his old ways in a new light and figure out how to get what he wants through other means. Really, if you've read this far in the series, you'll enjoy this one. Butcher continues to do a good job in giving us what we want, while at the same time showing us things that are truly unexpected. There are some wonderful moments in the book, a few exposition-heavy moments while Harry is filled in on the situation, and a good mystery to be solved. Enjoy. -------------------------- Death should be a learning experience, after all, or what's the point? - Leanansidhe, Ghost Story ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 04, 2011
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Aug 23, 2011
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385529953
| 9780385529952
| 0385529953
| 4.16
| 9,458
| Sep 21, 2010
| Nov 02, 2010
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it was amazing
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This book made me want to get rip-roaring drunk, set a banker on fire, and kick a member of Congress square in the nuts, preferably from a running sta
This book made me want to get rip-roaring drunk, set a banker on fire, and kick a member of Congress square in the nuts, preferably from a running start. It put me one step closer to finally realizing my dream of living somewhere in the wilderness like the Unibomber (although without all the Unibombing). It took all of my already cynical ideas about how America works, patted them on the head and said, “You’re just adorable,” and then proceeded to tell me that Santa Claus is not only dead, but that his body was stuffed, covered in rhinestones and sold to the CEO of Goldman-Sachs to use as a towel rack in his guest bathroom. Much like The Great Derangement, wherein Taibbi explains how Americans have built new realities for themselves based on their politics, this book really seems to be aimed right at me. My natural distrust of the government and especially of business makes me a natural reader for this kind of thing, and that sets off my bias alarms. So keep that in mind – I’m probably having a hard time evaluating Taibbi and his claims fairly, in that I think they’re all absolutely correct. They may not be, but that’s how they felt as I read the book. Taibbi’s premise is disturbingly simple: the American political and economic system is set up to reward lying, cheating and grift. From the fraudsters who convinced poor families to take out loans on McMansions to the Great Greenspan himself, our economic engine has been running for years on an unstable fuel of high-octane mendacity. Every now and then, there is a hitch – the tech bubble of the late 90s, the housing crash, the oil price spike of 2008, the Great Financial Meltdown – but the engine keeps going. What’s more, the people who caused the bubbles and crashes manage to skate clear of damage and punishment, rewarded by lawmakers who are beholden to them. It’s a self-corrupting system that values short-term profit over long-term stability, and it’s probably going to be the ruin of us all. The mortgage fiasco is well-described here. Taibbi takes us from the bottom of the financial food chain – a low-income homeowner who thought he was getting a great chance for a home of his own, and follows the chain of deceit up and up and up, from the mortgage broker who sold the deal (and, incidentally both lied about his client’s credit score and got him an adjustable mortgage in order to garner a higher finder’s fee) to the banks that put all these rotten mortgages together, to the insurance companies and financial institutions that bought them, sold them and traded them. All across the board, they lied about what they had and made sure that they passed their rotten goods off to some other poor sucker before the whole thing went wrong. And when it did, it was like some horrible chain of dominoes that started with people who discovered they couldn’t pay $1,500 a month for their home, and ended with the failure of banks that had ruled the financial sector for decades. What’s more, the US government let this happen. Under the guise of being “pro-business,” politicians have been loosening restrictions and adjusting interest rates for decades under the willful delusion that the free market can manage itself just fine. Under the direction of Ayn Rand disciples such as Alan Greenspan, the power of the government to manage corrupt banks and insurance companies is about as impressive as an elementary school crossing guard. They wanted business free of its regulatory fetters, and that’s what they got. What everyone else got, of course, was screwed. Another example: during 2008, Taibbi noticed something weird. Gas prices were skyrocketing, but supply was keeping pace with demand. There were no lines at gas stations like there had been in the 70s, when OPEC refused to sell us oil. If you wanted to fill up, you could, as long as you were willing to pay a price that went up moments before you pulled into the station. Even people with the barest understanding of economics understands supply and demand – if the supply is lower than the demand, the price goes up, and vice versa. But here, neither the supply of gasoline nor the overall demand for it changed, yet prices were shooting up past $4 a gallon. What, as they say, the HELL was going on? Our politicians – especially the ones battling for the White House – had pat answers ready for the cameras. Obama blamed the Evil Oil Companies and wasteful SUV drivers. McCain blamed anti-drilling legislation and environmental regulation. Everybody blamed China for its accelerating growth. All of that, as it turns out, was misleading at best, bullshit at worst. The answer: oil speculation, the use of commodities futures to make a ton of money by driving the price of oil ever higher. Futures were originally intended to provide a safety net for buyers and sellers of commodities, so that neither one would lose too badly if supply or demand shifted unexpectedly. But a way was found to exploit this system, for profiteers to buy and sell massive amounts of stuff to each other, raising their profits to obscene levels. While a few clever people on Wall Street were getting rich through oil money, thousands of regular people were getting boned. The higher price of gas meant people with long commutes had to quit jobs and leave schools, which put them in ever-deepening financial straits. The price of oil has a very real effect on lives, but that was all ignored so that some high rollers could get rich. The close ties between the banking sector and the US government were what allowed this to happen, after decades of “pro-business” deregulation. The health care overhaul, the sale of American cities to foreign investors, the collapse of the stock market and the erasure of untold billions of dollars of savings and investments are all given a close, angry look in this book, and Taibbi does a good job at making it understandable to those of us who aren’t really good with the intricacies of the financial sector. He takes his time, breaking down each scam into its component parts, and makes sure you can see every piece of the puzzle as he puts it together. But what he also does – and I don’t think this is necessarily intentional – is paint a picture of hopelessness. At least, that’s how I saw it. The “great vampire squid” of the financial sector (a metaphor he used specifically with Goldman-Sachs) is inextricably attached to our government and the people who run it, sucking the blood out of the country that we thought we had. The more you see the connections, the more it seems like that squid simply cannot be removed and will never be sated. What’s more, our elected officials are doing a brilliant job at convincing the American people that removing the squid is not necessary. The Tea Party chants its simplistic message that the Constitution is all the law we need, and our leaders smile and nod and watch the money come in. Lawmakers rail against the evil of “earmarks” right up until the day they get elected, and then make sure they reward the people who got them into office. Every time someone tries to loosen the tentacles a bit, they’re attacked as anti-business or anti-capitalist or just out and out socialist, and they’re either shamed or threatened into submission. They tell us that it’s all really complicated, and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it – here’s another season of Jersey Shore. And the American people? We are, after all, the holders of sovereignty for the country – what about us? We’re idiots. We don’t want to spend the time necessary to understand a problem as ridiculously complex as the fraud that’s being perpetrated in our names, and the leaders we elected aren’t at all interested in making sure we’re educated. We’re instantly distracted by the new shiny thing and forget what happened only a few months ago thanks to smooth talking fraudsters who want us upset about gay marriage and Mexicans in our schools. We trust a media that needs us to be angry, but only just angry enough to keep watching. We’re tied up with businesses that see us as nothing more than a resource to be exploited. When the whole thing finally becomes unsustainable, when that final bill becomes due, they will slip away in the night with the wealth of nations in their pockets, leaving the rest of us to kill each other over refrigerator boxes and dogmeat. See? Told you this book made me angry…. ----------------------------------------- “This story is the ultimate example of American’s biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely complex and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it – who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems. We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can’t, because, well, they’re scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it.” - Matt Taibbi, Griftopia ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 2011
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Aug 03, 2011
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Aug 01, 2011
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B0013TX70M
| 3.94
| 3,594
| May 06, 2008
| unknown
|
really liked it
|
There is an essential flaw in human nature that makes us think we're special. It used to make us think that we were literally the center of the univer
There is an essential flaw in human nature that makes us think we're special. It used to make us think that we were literally the center of the universe, which it turns out we aren't. It makes us think that we're all going to grow up to be movie stars and astronauts, which we aren't; our children are all brilliant and well-behaved, which they aren't; and that God is on our side, which It isn't. Oddly enough, though, there is one place where this boundless optimism is flipped on its head. Every generation is absolutely convinced that this is the nadir of human accomplishment, that we are well and truly screwed and that there has never been a more messed-up, terrible time to live. The past was better, we think, and we look back on the days gone by as a golden age when things were simpler and no one had the kind of troubles that we have today. Of course, that's not true. We are healthier, freer, and generally better off than generations before us, who were healthier, freer, and generally better off than the ones before them, and so on. While things certainly aren't perfect, they're not nearly as bad as we like to think that they are. If people were able to look at their world with an unjaundiced eye and a fair heart, we would realize that and maybe start living our lives accordingly. Of course, if we were able to do that, then Matt Taibbi wouldn't be able to sell his books. To be fair, the first decade of this century was messed up on a grand scale. Not the same way the 60s were, or the 30s, or the 1860s, but truly twisted and burdensome in their own special way. We had been attacked, seemingly out of nowhere, by a shadowy cabal of extremists who managed to make a laughingstock of our supposed invulnerability. We reacted by flipping out and invading the wrong country and passing reams of knee-jerk legislation designed to chip away at civil liberties wherever they could. Our government, when it wasn't handing us lies that were about as transparent as a window where the glass has been removed and replaced with nothing but pure, spring-fresh air, was telling us that there was nothing to see here and that the best way to get involved was to go shopping. And if you did have to get involved, you'd better be with us. Because we know who's against us. The tehrists. Overseeing all of this was a simplistic frat boy idiot manchild of a President and the band of Washington technocrats who had been itching to bomb the hell out of the Middle East since the 70s. The media, for its part, was playing along, doing what it was told, and making sure that the people, with whom sovereign power resides in the United States, had no way of knowing what its government was actually doing at any given time. Americans had been lied to over and over again for decades, starting with the post-ironic age of advertising (which Taibbi pinpoints as the Joe Isuzu ads) up to the utterly unswallowable "They hate us for our freedoms" line that we were supposed to believe when it slid, wet, horrible and putrescent from the mouth of George W. Bush. And then, if you raised your hand and asked questions about the story you were expected to buy into, people turned around and accused you of being a faithless traitor. So what are people to do when they can't trust the narrative that their leaders are giving them? Why, they turn inward, of course, and build their own narrative. Their own bubble, as it were - a space within which everything makes sense. Everything can be explained, people can be trusted, and all the rules work. It is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders, but that's okay because outsiders are the whole reason the bubble exists in the first place. As Taibbi discovers, there is far more in common between the far right hyper-Christians and the far left conspiracists than you might expect, and that there are far more of them than you really want to know. This book is basically two interwoven parts, with a few interludes to keep the story on track. In one part, Taibbi goes down to Texas, uses a fake name and gets involved with a Megachurch in San Antonio. He joins the church to find out what brings these people together in a time when the government and the media can't be relied upon, and what attracts people to a live of fundamentalist Christianity in the first place. He goes to meetings where demons are cast out, to small group discussions in beautiful Texan homes, and listens to people explain why it is that they've given their lives to Christ, something that Taibbi would never do himself, were he not researching a book. He also finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of the 9/11 Truth movement, a group that believes that - to varying degrees - the Bush administration bears some of the blame for the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. Some believe they knew about it but chose to do nothing, so that they would have a reason to launch their war against Iraq. Others believe that they directly caused the attacks, mining the collapsed buildings and aiming the aircraft. The more elaborate theories involve holograms, missiles and a conspiracy of silence that is continually upheld by thousands of otherwise loyal Americans. Much like the fundamentalist Christianity, Taibbi immerses himself in Truther culture, trying to find out what it is that keeps them going, even when they - like the Christians - have no real evidence to support what they believe. Even moreso for the Truthers, there is actually a lot of logical, circumstantial and physical evidence that outright debunks their theories, but they soldier on anyway, utterly convinced that they are the only ones in America who haven't surrendered to the lies of the political and media machines. So what do these two groups have in common, and what do they say about America? American politics are, generally, about Us versus Them. All politics, really, but we do it really well. The parties in power do their best to say that they stand for Us against Them, regardless of which party you vote with, but it's become increasingly evident that the parties in power are not really for Us - they're for Themselves. They push the same canned platitudes and wedge the same minor issues every election cycle with the sole purpose of keeping their jobs, and that is finally becoming evident to the public. Rather than governing, which is ostensibly their jobs, Our Representatives in Congress are doing what they can to help themselves, their parties and their friends, and this is more and more evident the closer you look. To have them then turn around and say, without a trace of irony, that they're doing their best for the country they love, that they actually care about the concerns of the voter, is enough to make even the most optimistic Pollyanna turn into a Grade-A cynic. But rather than rising up as one and kicking the bastards out, the public turned inwards and went into their bubbles. If the game we're playing is Us versus Them, then let's do it right. Now we're not just one group of people with a certain set of political views, we are the anointed of God or, depending on where you are, the only intelligent people ina world of sheep. And who are They? They are not just corrupt politicians. They are agents of Satan, sent to bring about the end of the world. They are power-hungry chessmasters, bent on ruling with an iron fist. It's a world view that makes sense to the people who have chosen to live in it, more sense than the "real" world does. Now this book was written back in 2006 and a lot has happened since then, so it is very much a book of its time. Since then, we have seen our political theater change in many interesting ways, not the least of which is the Tea Party, which is kind of the coming-out party for a lot of the people who felt they had been left out of the discussion for so long. They've had their chance to incubate in the churches and on the internet, and now they're out in force and ready to change the way politics works. Whether they will ultimately be successful is still up for argument, but so far, well... They're kind of freaking me out. The take-home message from the book is this: There have been far worse times to be in the United States, and our nation has seen its way through far greater trials. But each one is different, born of different causes and with different effects, and we do not have the benefit of being able to look back and see how everything works out. It is much easier these days to find people you agree with and isolate yourself with them, and every time Congress or the President or the Media lets us down, it's more and more tempting to do so. But that way lies madness. The madness of an evangelical movement that is anticipating the end of days, the madness of a conspiracy of vast and perfect proportions. The answer is not to isolate ourselves with the like-minded but to seek out those with whom we disagree and make sure that we're all living in the same world, no matter what it's like. Rather than dividing ourselves into two giant camps of Us and Them, pointed and aimed by people whose only interest is in seeing us rip each other to shreds, maybe we can finally see what it is that unifies everyone. Once we can do that, once we can fight the derangement, perhaps we can see our way to making our country into the one we want it to be. ------------------------------------------- "Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins." - Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 29, 2011
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Aug 01, 2011
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0812550757
| 9780812550757
| 0812550757
| 4.10
| 259,479
| Mar 1986
| Aug 15, 1994
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it was amazing
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In his introduction to the book, Card says that the main reason he wrote his most famous book - Ender's Game - was so that he would one day be able to
In his introduction to the book, Card says that the main reason he wrote his most famous book - Ender's Game - was so that he would one day be able to write this. I think this is something that probably happens a lot to authors. They get a Big Idea in their head, something with great depth and complexity and meaning, and quickly discover that they don't actually know what they're writing about yet. There's too much to say, there's too much that even the author doesn't know yet, and to go forward from that state of ignorance will result in what is, ultimately, an inferior narrative. Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead, comes to the human colony Lusitania in order to speak the death of a local man, Marcão. While given the same reverence and privileges as priests, Speakers are not the same. Their job is to learn about the dead, to understand who they were and who they wanted to be, and then tell the truth as plainly and as clearly as possible. They do not give eulogies, where they try to paint the dead in as good a light as possible. They reveal who this person was, and in the process try to help those left behind understand them. It's a calling that requires an insightful mind, great empathy for others, and the ability to tell the truth despite how hard that truth may be to hear. As a Speaker for the Dead, Andrew Wiggin is very good at his job. It was he who was the first Speaker, who wrote a text that is as revered as the Bible - The Hive Queen and the Hegemon - in order to understand how humankind could kill the only other intelligent species it had ever encountered. The book reveals who the Buggers were and why they attacked humanity. It tells how their understanding of what it means to be intelligent led to a century of warfare and, ultimately, their own destruction. The book also reveals humanity, the dreams and fears that it faced when it met the Buggers. And it tries to understand why humans were so afraid that they took one of their own - a little boy named Ender - and turned him into the greatest monster in human history. The Xenocide. The one who destroyed an entire alien race. This book changed the way humankind saw the universe, and themselves. With the Buggers gone, but their technology still available, humans expanded out to a hundred worlds. Though their starships could only go just under the speed of light, the ansible provided instant communication between the stars. It formed a communications network that held the Starways Congress together and allowed humanity to become a multi-system species. Ender - Andrew - is ultimately responsible for all of this, and is therefore the linchpin of this entire universe. In order to write this book, to understand the culture and the history and the politics that would be necessary to write Speaker for the Dead, Card first had to understand who Ender was. So, with the blessing of his publishers, he was able to turn Ender's Game into a full-length novel. Once that was done, he was able to turn back to this book and craft it into what it has become. The colony of Lusitania is a small place, a group of Catholic settlers who live in a small and insular town. They have all the troubles that any new world would have, except for two that make it truly unique. The first is the descolada, a virus that nearly destroyed the colony and, thousands of years before, life on the planet. This illness literally unzips and recombines your DNA, ravaging your body utterly. If not for the dying work of the colony's two great xenobiologists, everyone would have died. As it turned out, Gusto and Cida were the last to die, leaving their sad, strange daughter Novinha behind. Even that wouldn't be enough to make Lusitania a truly remarkable place. No, for that, we must introduce the Piggies - the third intelligent life form known to exist in the universe. They're small, look like little pig-men, and are indisputably intelligent. They learn quickly, even despite the law forbidding xenologists from influencing their development, and present humanity with an important chance: the last time we encountered an alien intelligence, we obliterated it. Let's not do that again. This becomes harder, however, when the Piggies kill two of the xenologists in what appear to be a horrifyingly painful method. Now it looks like humanity may have to revert to type again, and that there truly is no way that humans can share the same space with other intelligences. Into all this steps Ender. His years of lightspeed travel have kept him young while three thousand years have passed, and he has wandered from world to world to speak for the dead. Now he is on Lusitania to speak for Marcão, an investigation that will lead him to uncover secrets kept for decades, and to once again change the way humans understand their universe. There's really so much to say about this book that it's hard to decide what to leave out and what to keep in. For one thing, Card is trying to write a very different kind of science fiction story. In his introduction, he says that a lot of fiction is adolescent in nature, science fiction especially. It's about adventure, about people seeing a way out of their conventional lives and going off alone. It's about being freed from responsibility and living a fast and crazy life. When that loneliness of adventure finally becomes too much, the hero settles down, but that's usually the last chapter of the book, if ever. Card wanted to go the opposite way, to take a lonely adventurer and show him trying desperately to become responsible, to become a member of a community. In class, where I'm teaching Ender's Game, we've identified isolation as being one of the overriding themes of the novel. Ender is constantly taken away from those he loves or held apart from others. In the end, he becomes a solo wanderer. Even more than that, he is made into a monster, a name on par with Lucifer itself. He is virtually thrown out of humanity, and it is only because no one knows who he really is that he can travel unmolested. So we're seeing Ender in that stage where the loneliness and the wandering have become an unbearable burden to him, and all he wants is a place to belong. But as a Speaker, as a man speaking a death that could completely upend the lives of everyone in the colony, he has his work cut out for him. There is also the element of redemption. In his years of travel, Ender has carried a very special package with him - the cocoon of the last Bugger hive queen. In exchange for her story, he promised that he would find a home for her, a place for her to rebuild her vast family. And on Lusitania, there is that chance. But first he has to save the Piggies, to prevent them from suffering the fate of the Buggers at the hand of a fearful and suspicious Humanity. If Ender can do this, perhaps he can make up for the horror that he unknowingly perpetrated. There's a lot going on in this book, to say the least. It's a great book, better in many ways than Ender's Game. It is more complex and adult and difficult, with moments of true emotion, a well-built socio-political system befitting a species that spans hundreds of worlds, and addressing the needs for changes in culture, politics and even language that would arise from the need to define relationships between worlds and between species. Fundamentally, though, this book is about what the Speaker for the Dead does best - understanding. It's about how we deal with The Other, even when that Other is completely alien to us. Humans and Buggers, Humans and Piggies - hell, Humans and Humans, we have a hard time understanding people who are not like us. We find it very difficult to look at the world from their point of view and to see the world through their eyes. Understanding what they love and fear, what they value and honor, or what they abhor - and more importantly, understanding what they see in you and how they understand you - is the best and surest road to making peace with those who are different from yourself. And that's a lesson that is valuable for all of us. --------------------------------------------- "No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins." - Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead ...more |
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it was amazing
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Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass on what it knows and learns. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant based on the slimmest of clues. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, able to put together reasoned, logical arguments, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over and over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving hell out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is usually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. after 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were afraid, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. So they died. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the hell away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in nature and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. Your brain thinks that your child will be taken from you the moment you look away, and all the reasoning in the world won't change its mind. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic Clusterthing has shown, when you have people who are good with numbers deliberately exploiting this flaw in order to profit. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. With enough will power, even you can overcome great fear. Sorry. Nerd moment there. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there creepy child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, there are many parts of the country where your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. The fact is that we have it damn good compared to our ancestors. We live longer, we live better, even in parts of the world that are still developing, and it looks like the future will progress that way. But we still insist on needing to be afraid, even as we have less and less to actually fear. So put down the newspaper, turn off the 24-hour news, and take some time to figure out what is actually a threat. Give that bored teenager something to do with his time and let the caveman go back to his cave. -------------------------------------------------- "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear ...more |
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really liked it
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(If you want, I'll give you one marshmallow now. If you read through the whole review, however, I'll give you two. Ready? Let's go!) Do you have proble (If you want, I'll give you one marshmallow now. If you read through the whole review, however, I'll give you two. Ready? Let's go!) Do you have problems? Of course you have problems. We all have problems. Maybe you want to land a new job, or lose weight or finish a project you're working on. Maybe you find that you procrastinate too much, or you don't get along with people, or you can't be creative. Maybe you just want to be happy, you poor, sad little person. These are the kinds of problems that have spawned an entire industry of books - the Self Help genre. Go to your local bookstore and look around. There are countless books that tell you how you can make yourself better through positive thinking, creative visualization, listening to Mozart or joining up with groups. They'll tell you that if you want to find romance, you should look for an opposite, you should play hard to get, or you should plan a perfectly romantic evening. They'll cite ancient wisdom or have countless testimonials from people who have tried their methods, and almost all of them have one thing in common: they don't work. The self-help genre rests on a foundation of common sense ideas, things that sound like they should work, rather than an understanding of how the human mind actually does work. Often, much to our chagrin, our minds don't follow the rules, and we fail. Take positive thinking, for example. The general gist of positive thinking is that you should never allow a negative thought to enter your mind. If one pops up, just push it away and focus on the positive. Quick experiment: I want you, for the next minute, to not - I repeat not - think of a pink hippopotamus. Ready? GO! (Waiting... waiting... waiting...) How'd you do? I don't know about you, but my pink hippo is rather contentedly sitting on my sofa right now. The fact is, the more we try not to think of something, the harder it is to not think about it. You then end up obsessing over the thing you're trying not to think of, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first place! It's an idea that sounds like it should work, but it doesn't, and that's what Wiseman has collected in this book. Wiseman is a psychologist from the UK, and he has a particular interest not only in the science of self-help, but also magic, optical illusions and the paranormal. In other words, he's very good at knowing how we humans fool ourselves. And boy, do we know how to fool ourselves. We want to believe that humans are rational creatures, intelligently designed to make the best decisions. We spent years studying the world around us, trying to figure out how to motivate ourselves and others, and operating under the assumption that we know what our brains are doing at any give time. Problem is, we don't. We have no idea what our brains are doing while we're trying to get things done. The good news is that there's are entire branches of psychology that are doing their damndest to figure it out. Wiseman combed through the literature, looking at scientific studies on human psychology and behavior to try and find simple, clear and effective ways of making your life better. The bonus is that many of these things can be done in under a minute. Some of the things he presents are so simple that you don't want to believe they'd work. For example, do you want to be a little more cheerful, to have a brighter outlook on life and be generally more pleasant to be around? Go get a pencil and hold it with your teeth, making sure your lips don't touch the pencil. Your mouth will basically be making a grin, which will have a positive impact on your mood. Seriously. While you're at it, sit up straight, use more expressive gestures when you talk, and try to use a wider range of pitch in your speech. Your body and mind are hooked up in such a way that your body can tell your mind what it's feeling. So if you have a grin on your face, and you're talking in an animated and upbeat way, your brain will think, "Well, these are all physical conditions that are associated with happiness, so... I guess I must be happy." You can use the same trick on a first date. Instead of a nice, placid picnic in the park or a boat ride on the river, go to an amusement park and hit the roller coaster together. The fear and excitement will make your date's heart beat faster, breathe harder, and generally be more excited. These are also physical reactions to being attracted to someone, and your brain really can't tell the difference very well. It feels your heart pounding, your blood rushing, your adrenaline flowing, and it thinks, "Huh. I guess I must really like this person." So, once you get off that ride, you have a little window of opportunity to increase the attraction you have for each other. Now let's say you're angry about something. I mean, you're hitting George Constanza levels here, and all you want to do is just hit something. There is a way of thinking that says you should go hit your pillow. Or go to the gym and do some work on the heavy bag, punching your anger away. If you live far enough away from others, maybe you could do some primal screaming or something. It makes sense, right? You have to let your anger out somewhere, right? Wrong. Studies have shown that kicking and screaming and beating up your pillow will make you more aggressive and irritable, not less. It's like trying to put out a fire with a bucket of gasoline. What you should do, then, is to look for the benefits to your experience. Researchers asked subjects to think about a painful and unpleasant incident in their lives and to focus on their anger. Another group was asked to instead focus on the benefits - they had learned an important lesson, had become an emotionally stronger person, or had otherwise changed for the better. When questioned later, the second group turned out to be much less angry than the first, and to be more likely to forgive the person who had hurt them. Okay, one more - you want to be creative, right? We all want that. So, should you brainstorm with your colleagues? Focus on the creative task at hand? Listen to Mozart? No, no and no, although there's really never any reason not to listen to Mozart. Again, research has shown that people tend to work less hard in groups than they do on their own. Being in a group makes you lazier, so if you want to get good ideas from a whole bunch of people, have them work alone first. You'll get more and better ideas that way. As for focusing on the problem at hand, other studies have shown that the best thing to do is to distract yourself with something totally unrelated so that your unconscious mind can get some work done. Work on a puzzle, draw a picture, think of a hundred ways to use a brick - anything but the problem you're trying to solve. Then, when you come back to the problem, you're more likely to generate better ideas. As for the Mozart, it turns out that listening to Mozart does make you slightly more creative and intelligent.... for about fifteen minutes. Neither you nor your baby will become a genius if you listen to Wolfie's music every day. What's actually more effective is modern art - especially art that breaks our expectations. In one study, two groups were given a creativity task. One was seated in a room with a large print that featured twelve dark green crosses on a light green background. The other had almost an identical picture, except that one of the crosses was yellow, and they came up with the more creative ideas. Why should this be? The idea is that the impression of unconventionality, of a pattern being broken, may be enough to stimulate our own creativity. Now it won't turn you into DaVinci or anything like that, but it should help at least a little. And that's what this book is - lots of little ideas that are designed to help you out. Put a mirror in your kitchen, put a baby photograph in your wallet, buy small gifts for no reason. Put a plant on your desk, start keeping a journal, and don't praise your kids for how clever they are - praise them for the work they've done. Everything Wiseman puts in this book is a small thing, a little effort, but when put together they add up. Even if you don't really need a lot of alteration to your life - maybe you're as happy as happy can be - it's still a fascinating look into how our mids work, and the different ways that they can be hacked. (Good work! Here are your marshmallows!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Now if you take part in a study and the researchers explain that they need your telephone number in case of a hard-disk failure, they are up to something." - Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds ...more |
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it was amazing
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Once upon a time, there was a man named H. Beam Piper, and he wrote a series of books that began with Little Fuzzy, a tale of space-going humans who h
Once upon a time, there was a man named H. Beam Piper, and he wrote a series of books that began with Little Fuzzy, a tale of space-going humans who have to learn to live on a world with an adorably cute, yet sentient, species. While I haven't read these books, my research tells me that they're the type of fun, optimistic science fiction that is so emblematic of the early 60s. They dealt not only with the issues of human expansion into space, but with what it means to be an intelligent, sentient species. Given that we only have one case study - us - that definition will necessarily be narrow, and challenged. Humans have trouble relating with other humans who live only a six hour drive away, after all. Being able to relate to a non-human sentience that evolved on another planet will be a massive philosophical undertaking. In 2010, John Scalzi announced on his blog that he had done a "reboot" of Piper's work, revisiting the characters, themes and world that Piper had created and seeing what he could do with them. He did this partly because it seemed like a good idea, but also because it was something that hadn't been done before in literature. If you're a fan of science fiction, you know that stories from the visual media - TV and movies especially - get rebooted from time to time. The most notable recent examples are "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica," and include shows like "Smallville" and the most recent run of Batman movies. If you read comics, you know this happens all the time as well, in ways big and small. Characters like Green Lantern, Thor, and the Fantastic Four are fundamentally the same as when they were created, but have evolved in ways their creators may have never expected. In all of these examples, the fundamental core of each story is kept from the original - the world, the characters, the themes - and given new life. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and Scalzi felt that Piper's world was good enough and interesting enough that it deserved to be re-introduced to a modern audience who might not otherwise know about it. So, just for fun, he started writing Fuzzy Nation, a book that uses the characters and ideas from Little Fuzzy, the first of Piper's books, and builds an entirely new story out of them. What resulted was a story that he thought was good enough to let out into the wild, and so - with the help of some intellectual property law and the blessing of Piper's estate - he published Fuzzy Nation in 2011. As I said, I haven't read the original Piper books, but they're half as much fun to read as this one was, then I have to pick them up. In the future, humankind has expanded out into space, as we so often do. With us, we have taken that peculiarly human trait, naked avarice, and brought it with us. The Zarathustra Corporation (ZaraCorp for short) is one of the leaders in exploiting and extracting usable resources from a planet. They've cornered the market on Sunstones - a decorative rock that glows with its wearer's body heat and makes diamonds look like beach pebbles - and turned the ravaging of worlds into an art. A horribly environmentally destructive art. Jack Holloway is a contract surveyor, a former trial lawyer, and not a very nice man. He helps ZaraCorp search for Sunstones on the hostile world of Zara XXIII, with the help of Carl, a dog with a fondness for explosions. Holloway finds seams of Sunstone and gets his cut of the money. It's a nice enough arrangement out on a backwater world, and it doesn't get complicated until he (and Carl) discover a Sunstone deposit that could fill the company's coffers for decades. At the same time, he encounters a curious form of life - or rather, it encounters him. Small, bipedal, intensely curious and undeniably clever, the Fuzzies (as Jack names them) seem to be truly remarkable animals. It is not until the ZaraCorp field biologist (and Jack's former girlfriend), Janice Wangai, suggests that they might be sentient that things get truly complicated. After all, Colonial law is very clear on what companies like ZaraCorp are and are not allowed to do on each planet they run, and "ravaging the world of another sentient species" is pretty much at the top of their Do Not list. It soon becomes a race to save the Fuzzies from ZaraCorp and its army of lawyers. If they win, the Fuzzies will have a planet on which they can grow and thrive. If ZaraCorp wins, they'll have nothing by the least useful bits of dirt and shrubbery left. Holloway has to do a good thing but he has to do it his way - a way that rarely has him acting like a good man. The first thing I thought when I finished this, actually, was, "I needed that." My reading choices for a while have been kind of heavy, or at least not a whole lot of fun to read. Good, yes, but not fun. I know this because I find myself doing things that aren't reading - listening to podcasts, reading through articles I've saved on Instapaper, going through old columns at Cracked.com, things like that. With this book, though, there was none of that stalling. I read it every chance I could and blew through the whole thing in two days. So let that be take-home lesson number one: this book is fun to read. And while it is an adventure, it does hit on some interesting and contemporary topics, not the least of which is the question of how ethically a corporation should be expected to behave. ZaraCorp, like any company, has a primary mission to make money, especially as the company is publicly traded. They have to get money to those stockholders who have invested in them so that they can make more money to exploit more resources. And that’s a point that Scalzi has made in his own blog: “I think the majority [of] corporations act logically and rationally and in a manner consistent with the general reason for their existence,” he writes. “And the reason most corporations exist — and most large multinational corporations in particular — is simple: To maximize shareholder value.” In Fuzzy Nation, he takes this to the place where corporate rational self-interest turns bad. You see, it is perfectly possible for a corporation to achieve its goal while still being environmentally responsible or socially conscious. In other words, to fulfill its responsibility to the shareholders without violating the ethical or moral codes of the people who actually make up those groups. But there are those who are all too willing to put the fiduciary responsibility of the corporation above the ethical responsibilities of people, and that’s where the Evil Corporation comes in. ZaraCorp fits this to a T. They see nothing but profits in Zara XXIII, and if the Fuzzies stand in their way – sentient or not – they will do whatever is necessary to eliminate them while at the same time doing their level best to stay within the legal bounds prescribed by the Colonial Authority. Or not to get caught crossing them, at least. In the end, this becomes about why we do what we do, and how we project those reasons onto other people. ZaraCorp is motivated by untempered greed, and assumes that Holloway will be too. Holloway is interested in himself, but finds himself needing to be interested in other people. The motivations of the Fuzzies, for most of the book, is unclear, but they too have to learn the difference between what they think other people want and what they really want. It’s a fast, tight book that is great fun to read, has characters that you like, even if they’re despicable, and has some moments of wonderful emotion that come around the corner and hit you like a hammer. It’s part philosophical adventure, part legal thriller, and part sarcastic comedy, verging on satire. Books like this are why I keep coming back to Scalzi. “…with all due respect for your considerable skills and intellect, the fact of the matter is that you have absolutely no clue what it is I want out of this.” – Jack Holloway, Fuzzy Nation ...more |
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Jun 22, 2011
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Jun 25, 2011
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1401309275
| 9781401309275
| 1401309275
| 4.12
| 14,325
| 2006
| Jan 27, 2009
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really liked it
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This review is acceptable to the forces of Light. - The Night Watch This review is acceptable to the forces of Darkness. - The Day Watch When I finished This review is acceptable to the forces of Light. - The Night Watch This review is acceptable to the forces of Darkness. - The Day Watch When I finished The Twilight Watch a couple of years ago, I thought that was it. Night, Day, Twilight, done. But when I announced that I would be doing the Night Watch trilogy as my end-of-month podcast, I got several emails from listeners who were quick to correct me. The series is not a trilogy, they said, but rather a tetralogy (okay, no one actually used this term). There is a fourth book out there, and I had no idea it existed! Thanks to modern technology, I was able to get the final (as far as I know) book, The Last Watch on my Kindle and get myself up to speed. Much like the previous volumes, this one is divided into three novellas, which all tie together into a greater plot. In the first, we are once again introduced to Anton Gorodetsky, an agent of the Moscow Night Watch. Due to the event s of the last book, Anton is now a Higher Other, having been elevated by the use of the fuaran a mystical book that can create or raise Others. His abilities are far beyond most, and that makes his responsibilities that much greater. He is assigned by his boss, Gesar, to investigate a mysterious killing in Edinburgh, Scotland. A young man, the son of a Russian magnate, has been murdered, and it looks for all the world like a vampire – a Dark Other – has done the deed. The pact between the Dark and the Light expressly forbids such actions, and the violation of treaty could lead to terrible consequences for all. Problem is, the Day Watch has no idea who or what killed the young man, and they're just as hot to find the killer as Anton is. And of course, the clues don't add up. The method of the murder doesn't fit the M.O. of your standard vampire, and the place where the murder occurred – a horror funhouse in the middle of the city – has its own mysterious properties as well. Anton knows he's on the right track, though, when someone tries to kill him, and he ends up fighting his way through the Twilight to get his answers. What he finds, however, is evidence that the mythical Merlin had left something in Edinburgh for safekeeping. Something truly terrible, no matter whose hands it fell into. In the second story, Anton is sent out to Uzbekistan to find one of the greatest Others who had ever lived, a man by the name of Rustam. Almost a legend among Others, Rustam is probably the only one who can come even close to figuring out what Merlin hid, and why. But he won't be easy to find. Anton not only has to deal with the Watches of Samarkand – which are far less efficient and well-staffed as others in Europe – but there's still someone out to kill him. This time, though, they're using ensorcelled humans to do the job, something that is also expressly forbidden. It soon becomes clear that there is a small conspiracy of very powerful Others – one Dark, one Light, and an Inquisitor, who serves neither – who are trying to recover the artifact that Merlin left behind. Their reasons are unknown, but they're willing to destroy anyone who poses a threat to them. Including, of course, Anton. It is in the third story where the whole plan finally comes together. That three-person conspiracy is determined to get their hands on Merlin's power, to collapse the Twilight and fundamentally change the world. If they have to kidnap Anton and threaten Moscow with a nuclear warhead to do it, then so be it. Their ends are, in their minds, wholly justified. It is up to Anton and his allies to avert this tragedy and see to it that the power they seek is never wielded by anyone ever again. As with the other books, the great supernatural action hides a greater exploration of the fundamental differences between right and wrong, good and evil. As terrible as the Last Watch are, they are doing what they believe to be right, and even Anton can come to understand their motives at one point. But they way they go about it, through dark magic and darker murder, doesn't nearly justify their aim. And so we see that evil done in the pursuit of good merely produces more evil. Depending, of course, on how you define "evil." What's more, there's quite a bit of metafiction in this book. It's clear that Lukyanenko is a fan of fantasy – he references Tolkien and Pratchett, just to name a couple of great authors. But he also knows the tropes of fantasy that have survived for so long, and makes sure his characters know them as well. When words are written on the walls, when people go in search of a great object of power or an unwinnable quest, chances are that one of the characters has read something like it in a fantasy book. At one point, when talking about how there are Others who would like to rule the world, the Inquisitor Edgar notes that it's what people really want. It's why fantasy is so much more popular than science fiction, he claims, because everyone dreams of being the magician or wielding the magic sword. It all makes sense, in a way that science fiction doesn't. Anton, of course, doesn't buy this, noting that most people who live in a Medieval Thaumocracy would be just like the peasants of long ago – poor, dirty, and dead by forty. So even in a world where magic is very real and very important, the characters know the difference between fantasy and reality in a way that we can relate to. I just find that fascinating. It's good fun, and a nice way to close out a very imaginative series. It's exciting and heartbreaking and funny – with a nice hat-tip to the Night Watch movie thrown in near the beginning. What's more, it's a well-built magical system and society that allows for a great variety of stories and characters. Honestly, I would love to see Lukyanenko expand on this universe, or even open it up for others to play in. ------------------------------------------------ "There is very much in the world that is bad. But usually the attempt to defeat evil engenders more evil. I advise you to do good; that is the only way to win the victory!" - Rustam, The Last Watch ------------------------------------------------ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 18, 2011
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Jun 19, 2011
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Paperback
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| 1905177763
| 9781905177769
| B004C44BEG
| 3.82
| 1,141
| 1956
| unknown
|
really liked it
|
You're a good person, right? Of course you are, I never doubted it for a moment. We all like to think were good people - fair, honest, generous, all t
You're a good person, right? Of course you are, I never doubted it for a moment. We all like to think were good people - fair, honest, generous, all that. Very few people, if asked, would say, "Well, I'm a right bastard and I don't care who knows it!" So imagine that you - a good person - do something bad. Genuinely bad. You cheat on your spouse. You lie to a friend. You steal from your boss. You commit an act which, if someone else did it, you would roundly condemn them, forcing them into public shame and ignominy. What kind of heel, what kind of cad, what kind of a bastard would do such a thing? Well, you, as it turns out. Now you have a problem. The vision of you that you carry in your head - the good, honest, kind, humble (let's not forget humble) person - directly conflicts with the nasty, dishonest thing that you have just done. They're grossly dissonant views, and there is no room for both of them in your head. So what do you do? Your first option is to reduce your opinion of yourself. Maybe you're not that good a person. Maybe you are a bit of a dick. Maybe, when it comes right down to it, you're just a jerk who knows how to hide it. That right there is some painful truth, and very few people are willing to face up to it. So you turn to your other option: justify what you did. The spouse you cheated on? Well, maybe if they paid a little more attention to you,you wouldn't have to do it. The friend you lied to? Well, was he honest about that "business trip" that made him miss your annual Memorial Day Meatapalooza Barbecue? Hell, no. He was "in the hospital," visiting "his sick mother." As for work, well if your boss actually paid you what you were worth, you wouldn't need to steal from the register. You rationalize what just happened, which allows you to not only move on with your life, but paves the way for similar actions in the future, making it that much easier to cheat, lie, and steal the next time. Welcome to cognitive dissonance. The classical view of humankind was that we were, ultimately, rational animals. That if you show a person sufficient evidence, that person will alter his opinion accordingly. So, under that model, our Imaginary You (tm) would admit to your inherent badness when confronted with the evidence if your misdeeds. In the 20th century, however, psychologists were noticing that this wasn't true at all. In fact, in a lot of cases the direct disconfirmation of a belief merely made that belief stronger. Show a smoker data on how dangerous cigarettes are, and she'll tell you that they help her relax, or they only take off the bad years at the end. Show a climate change denier data on the warming of the planet, and you know who you'll hear from only minutes after the first snowfall of the season. Humans, as it turned out, were a lot less rational than we had suspected. By being able to hold two thoughts in our minds that are mutually incompatible, we set ourselves up for mental disaster, and the only way out is to fool ourselves. In the mid 1950s, the authors of this book were looking into this phenomenon, especially as it applied to groups and millennialism – the belief that the world is rapidly in danger of ending. They looked at various historical examples, such as the early Christian church, who believed that Jesus' return was right around the corner, the Anabaptists of the 16th century, the followers of Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th century and the Millerites of the nineteenth. They all believed that the end of the world was at hand, they all collected groups of followers who believed wholeheartedly that they were right, and they were all, without exception, wrong. Despite that, not only were they not swayed from their beliefs, they actually became more convinced that they were, ultimately, right. What could account for such patently irrational behavior? Festinger and his partners believed they knew what it was, and set out five simple conditions under which the phenomenon could arise. In brief: 1. The believer must believe implicitly and that belief must have an effect on how he or she behaves. 2. The believer must have committed him or herself to the belief, performing actions that are difficult or impossible to undo. For example, giving away all their money, quitting their job, etc. 3. The belief must be specific, related to the real world, and able to be proven unequivocally wrong. 4. Evidence disconfirming the belief must occur, must be undeniable, and must be recognized by the believer 5. (and most important) The believer must have social support for his or her belief system. Under these conditions, Festinger hypothesized, not only would a person persist in their belief, but they would become more convinced, and likely try to convert more followers. After all, if more people believe that you're right, then maybe you are. But how to test it out? Their best cases, after all, were at least a hundred years gone, and time travel hadn't been invented yet. Fortunately, they got wind of a group of UFO believers who held that the earth was going to be ravaged by floods and that aliens would rescue the faithful to make them the new enlightened rulers of the species. Led by a woman out of Chicago who was receiving messages through automatic writing, this group held that the event would take place before dawn on December 21, 1954. Knowing a good chance when they saw one, Festinger and his colleagues managed to infiltrate the group and observe their progress, attitudes and beliefs up to, during, and after the event that never happened. In the book, they go through the timeline and touch on all the major players – names changed to protect the innocent, of course – and watched to see if their hypothesis would hold. Would the media-shy Mrs. Keech do an about-face once the disaster didn't show? What would happen to people like Dr. Armstrong, who sacrificed his job and his good name in order to assure that he would be picked up by the aliens? How would the group handle predictions that never came true, follow orders that never worked out, and rationalize this fundamentally irrational behavior? The study does have some fairly glaring flaws, which the authors themselves point out in the epilogue. For one, they had barely enough time to get involved with the group, and gaining entry was a matter of brute force more than finesse. For another, it was almost impossible not to influence the group. Observers were taken as believers, and expected to act as such. Acting undercover, they couldn't record meetings or, in many cases, take notes until after the fact. Any meeting with the academics had to be carefully arranged so as not to blow their cover, and the long hours, erratic schedule and generally high tension of the group made being an academic double agent very difficult indeed. Despite that, Festinger and his group present a textbook case of group cognitive dissonance that follows the pattern they expected it to. Believers who met all five criteria were much more likely to seek out new believers than the ones who, for example, were not with the group when the world didn't end. Of course, the reason I picked up the book was because of the May 21, 2011 Rapture prediction by Harold Camping. He had the Rapture scheduled down to the minute, and had attracted followers who met the initial criteria set out by Festinger more than fifty years ago. Sure enough, when the Big Day came and went, Camping and his followers kept to the script. They saw that the Rapture hadn't come, then revised their predictions and went out looking for people to convince. More interestingly, though, is how this can apply to other group dynamics. It can be applied to political parties, regional differences, racial differences, bigotry of every flavor and color. It can be connected to celebrity worship and religious fervor, to economic theories, institutional groupthink and scientific biases. Almost any common belief that can gather a crowd is an open invitation to Festinger's five criteria. Lovers of organic food. Adherents to market capitalism, homeopathy, religions of every size and shape. The antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Klansmen, environmentalists, educators.... The list is endless. What slowly dawned on me the day after I originally wrote this review was the implications of the Internet on Point Five (the need for social support). Let's say it's 1956, and you have a favorite political candidate. For our purposes, let's call her, I dunno, Kara Whelan. You really believe she is a good candidate, and you've spent a good deal of time and energy supporting her. Maybe you've tried to convince friends and family – perhaps encountering resistance, maybe had a few arguments - donated money, or even worked on her campaign in the belief that she is smart and capable, thus fulfilling the first three of Festinger's requirements. Then she says or does something that is breathtakingly stupid, thereby disconfirming your opinion of her. Point four. In the 1950s, it might have been harder to find people to commiserate with. In the book's case study, people who were away from the group when the flood didn't happen almost invariably gave up on their belief and went back to their lives. Being cut off, or only having access by phone just wasn't enough to keep their belief supported. So, our 1956 person might read the paper, think, "Holy cow, Kara Whelan is dumber than a box of dead ducklings," and have no one around to help fight against that realization. But here in the 21st century, that kind of support is just a click away. You can go to the Kara Whelan website or supporters' forum and talk to dozens of people who are all busy rationalizing the boneheaded thing she just said and finding reasons why it actually makes her a stronger candidate. The Internet makes it easier to find support for whatever you believe, no matter how untethered to reality it may be, and it allows these beliefs to survive and propagate in a way that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. Working together, your fellow supporters can elevate your belief and trash those who disagree, generating an internal logic that confirms your belief despite evidence to the contrary. If Mrs. Keech had had a website, this would have been a very different story. So what does this do for us, other than make us skeptical of anything that more than five people believe at a time? Just that: it keeps us skeptical. When you know what to look for, you can figure out who is likely to be persuaded by reason and who is not. You know who is a valid source of information and who is not. You know who you want to trust, and who you do not. Most importantly, it allows you to check yourself, to see if you're being as skeptical as you should be. None of us are exempt from this little psychological phenomenon, but we are all equipped with the ability to deal with it properly. Let Mrs. Keech and her UFO cult serve as an object lesson. ------------------------------------------------------ "When you stop and think of it, it seems rather cruel to drown all these people just to teach them a lesson, doesn't it? The way to teach people a lesson, or the way to educate people is to educate them slowly; you can't educate them with one big jolt. And it seems rather silly to drown people and hope to educate them in the astral life. It doesn't seem very logical, does it?" "Fred Purden", in When Prophecy Fails ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2011
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Jun 03, 2011
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Kindle Edition
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| 0520261992
| 9780520261990
| 0520261992
| 4.23
| 593
| Apr 01, 2010
| May 05, 2010
|
liked it
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Moffett knew from a young age that he wanted to be a field biologist – traveling the world in search of the most interesting animals he could find. An
Moffett knew from a young age that he wanted to be a field biologist – traveling the world in search of the most interesting animals he could find. And ever since his childhood, he’s had an abiding interest in ants. And who could blame him? There are thousands of species of ants, found all around the world, and once you get down and really look at them, they display some amazing behaviors. They communicate through a series of smells, functioning almost as a group organism to take care of the nest, forage for food, and move from place to place. Some species of ants live their whole lives without touching the ground, while others ravage the ground they walk on, devouring everything in their paths. Ants are nature’s workhorses, utterly communistic in their behavior and presenting a model of order that humans should envy. We follow Moffett as he travels around the world to find the most interesting representatives of ant-dom. In India, he found the marauder ant, a vicious species of ant that goes on raids to find food near its nest. Connected by a complex system of trails, the marauder sends out every able-bodied ant it can muster, from the tiny workers to the (comparatively) giant soldier ants. They find, subdue, and dismember their prey with frightening efficiency, and carry it back to the nest, all without a leader to give them instructions or make sure they’re going the right way. Each ant just knows what her job is, and just does it. In that way, the ant super-organism takes care of itself. In Africa, he hunts the famous African army ant, a species that is famous for its terrifying raids and voracious appetites. They swarm out around their nest, devouring anything in their path, sometimes raiding other nests for food and larvae. When army ants come, the lucky prey gets out of the way. Ants are not confined to the ground, of course. The weaver ant is a tree-borne species that has mastered its domain with harshness and efficiency. The Amazon ant kidnaps pupae from neighboring nests and raises the young ants as their slaves. The leafcutter ant invented agriculture fifty million years before humanity even walked the earth, and the Argentine ant lives in supercolonies that cover hundreds of square kilometers and engage in violent, no-quarters war with each other. The sheer variety of ants on this planet is astounding, and Moffett shows an unstoppable enthusiasm for the little critters. What’s more, he’s an outstanding photographer, who has developed his technique and equipment to be able to get some remarkable shots of these tiny, tiny creatures in action. The hardcover edition that I have is printed on nice, glossy paper, pretty much in order to showcase Moffett’s photographic work, which he has regularly done for National Geographic Magazine. What’s more, he continually seeks to find connections between ants and humans, who have more similarities than one might expect. We both live in large, complex societies, where individuals take on specific roles that often last that individual’s lifetimes. We engage in wars, slavery, and varied communal activities that benefit both the individual and the society at the same time. Like us, the ants build highways and infrastructure, communicate over distances, tend gardens, hold territory, plan for the future and learn from the past. And they started doing all this thousands of millennia before we even thought about standing upright. We are not the same as ants, of course – ants are unmoved by things such as status, greed, or ambition, but their instinctual dedication to the greater good of their colony is probably something that we could use a good dose of. For all that, however, I don’t think this was the right ant book for me. Written by a person who truly loves ants, I think that would be the best kind of person to read it. I don’t have a particular fondness for the little buggers, and there were a lot of times where I had to stop and start over, or where I found myself looking for anything else to do rather than continue reading, which is never a good sign. It isn’t Moffett’s fault, I think. He put a lot of work and detail into this book, assuming that the reader would find ants just as fascinating as he does. And I don’t. Oh sure – I find them fascinating in abstract, but not quite fascinating enough to get into the down-and-dirty details about how they construct trunk trails out of their nests, or the exact division of labor that exists between one class of ant and another. I’m not sure what I thought the book would be when I saw Moffett on The Colbert Report, but it wasn’t quite enough for me to sit down and devour the way I hoped it would be. If you like ants – or you know someone who does – this is a great book, and it gives an excellent insight into what it means to be a field biologist (lots of staying in one place, apparently). For anyone who really loves insects in general, and ants in particular, this book will be a welcome addition to their bookshelf. --------------------------------------- “Is [an ant] intelligent? To my way of thinking, yes. We know a worker can evaluate the living space, ceiling height, entry dimensions, cleanliness, and illumination of a potential new home for her colony – a masterly feat, considering that she’s a roving speck with no pen, paper, or calculator.” - Mark Moffett, Adventures Among Ants ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 29, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765326353
| 9780765326355
| 0765326353
| 4.66
| 531,036
| Aug 31, 2010
| Aug 31, 2010
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it was amazing
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There are times when I hate having grown up to be a fantasy fan. Most of the time it’s when I pick up a book that seems promising – maybe because it’s
There are times when I hate having grown up to be a fantasy fan. Most of the time it’s when I pick up a book that seems promising – maybe because it’s from a familiar author, or because you heard from a friend of a friend that it was good – but it turns out to be disappointing. Stock characters, old and tired plotlines, and a world that’s basically Tolkien with some greasepaint and false noses added on. Given the number of people who write fantasy, the odds of coming across a truly interesting world with compelling characters and a story that has some surprises is difficult indeed. Fortunately, it looks like Sanderson has managed to pull it off. The world of Roshar is a strange and tempestuous place. The seasons come and go in unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing with them great highstorms that are so powerful that even the plants of this world have evolved ways to hide from them. It is a world filled with spirits, ubiquitous beings called spren, which pop up for almost any reason. There are the spren of nature – windspren, firespren, rotspren, riverspren and the like. There are spren that seem attracted to humans, like alespren, gloryspren, anticipationspren and logicspren. No one really knows what they are or why they exist, but they are everywhere in this world. The greatest kingdom in Roshar is that of Alethkar, which is barely a nation at all. A loosely bound alliance of ten high princes, the people of Alethkar are a hostile, ambitious, violent folk whose first and greatest love is battle and winning. Since the assassination of their king by the savage Parshendi, they have been involved in a seemingly endless siege of revenge on the great Shattered Plains. The greatest warriors of Alethkar – or any nation – are those who wield the amazing shardblades. Swords that seem to condense out of mist, the shardblades can cut through anything, though if they cut through a person their effects are a little more subtle. A warrior armed with a shardblade, wearing shardplate armor, can use the incredible power of stormlight to achieve feats that no normal man could survive. Bound within glowing gemstones and restored by the howling winds of the highstorms, stormlight is Roshar’s greatest treasure. Within this world we follow an ensemble cast which, while adhering to certain fantasy archetypes, still is made interesting and worth watching. Dalinar, the brother to the dead Alethi king, is searching for a way to hold together the weak nation that his brother formed. He has been learning of the old ways, the teachings of the vanished and reviled Knights Radiant, in the hopes that they can help hold his people together. On the other end of Alethi society is Kaladin. Once a promising young surgeon, Kaladin joined the army in hopes of being able to fight on the Shattered Plains. He made it there, but not as a soldier – as a member of a bridge crew, one of the most expendable resources in the entire war. He became the lowest of the low, forced to find a reason to stay alive. In a city far from the fighting, young Shallan Davar has fought to become the ward of the great heretic scholar Jasnah Kholin. While she has ostensibly come to learn from the woman, her true purpose is to steal Jasnah’s soulcaster, a device which, if used properly, can turn something into something else – stone into smoke, glass into blood, a man into fire. With this, Shallan hopes to revive her family’s flagging fortunes after the death of her father. What she discovers with Jasnah, of course, is far, far more. Then there’s Szeth-son-son-Vallano, truthless of Shinovar. Poor, poor Szeth. From a race of people known for their peaceful and easygoing natures, Szeth is the most powerful assassin the world has seen. He can harness the stormlight to manipulate gravity, making him able to do the impossible while he uses his shardblade to cut down anyone in his way. In truth, though, Szeth wishes only one thing – to find someone who is good enough to kill him, and end his tormented life. As you may have guessed, it’s a complicated tale, and Sanderson doesn’t hold to this whole “Give the reader time to get used to it” style of writing. If you’re not paying attention from the beginning, you are likely to be very, very lost within the first chapter or so. But once everything settles down, the story turns into a fast-paced, multi-leveled adventure that takes place in a world that is imaginative and fascinating. The characters are enthralling, too, with many levels and – most importantly – flaws. While Kaladin is a brilliant organizer and leader, he has to fight continually against the despair of realizing what his life has come to. The easy thing would be to allow himself to die, but he knows he can’t let himself do that. Dalinar, plagued by visions of what might be Roshar’s ancient past, is fighting centuries of Alethi martial tradition by trying to bring the high princes together and end the war, rather than allowing it to go on. He’s pulled between the love of his nephew, the king, and his frustration that the king won’t be strong enough to do what needs doing. Shallan, who left her home with a clear purpose, is finding that nothing was what she thought it would be. Jasnah isn’t an evil woman, despite being a heretic, and her plan to steal the soulcaster becomes less and less certain the more she learns. All of these characters are at the front edge of thousands of years of history, much of it shrouded in uncertainty – legendary Knights Radiant who fought Voidbringers before giving up their duty and turning against mankind. What actually happened is unknown, and perhaps won’t ever be known. But the effects of those events echo to the present day, causing problems which our characters will eventually have to deal with. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to Sanderson is that when I finished the book, I immediately went back to the first page and started reading again. There are very few books that have inspired me thus, but this one did – especially after the cascading Big Reveals at the end, which explain a lot, and cast a new light on a whole lot more. What’s more, I found myself wishing that I had access to an animation studio while I read the action scenes. Fights can be hard to do in written form – there’s a tendency to either describe too much or too little, and very often the reader gets slowed down trying to visualize what’s happening in the story. Sanderson is very, very good at writing action, something I first noticed in Towers of Midnight. Even when Szeth is hopping from floor to ceiling to wall, flinging people around like toys, the action was very clear in my mind’s eye, and it’s something I would love to see animated, if not done in live action. And yes, to get back to why I hate being a fantasy reader sometimes, it is the first book in a series, which means I’m likely to be following it for quite some time. There’s nothing truly wrong with that – there are plenty of series that I've followed in my day – but I never look forward to the waiting game that you have to play as the author works on the next book. To be fair, though, Sanderson is busy right now finishing up my favorite series, The Wheel of Time, so I think I can give him a little latitude. In any case, if you’re looking for a dense, fun new series to read, definitely pick this up. I plan on getting into some of his other books, mainly in order to have something to do while I wait for the next one of these. -------------------------------------- “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.” - Hoid, The Way of Kings ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 20, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 0316051640
| 9780316051644
| 0316051640
| 3.93
| 52,408
| 2010
| Jul 12, 2010
|
really liked it
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One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray's The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the ph
One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray's The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the physical universe. "Everything you can drop on your foot," as he says. In it, he provides wonderful pictures and descriptions of the elements that we know, arranged as they would be in the periodic table. It's a gorgeous book, one that everyone should have - especially if you have children. If you want your kids to become interested in science and investigating the world around them, you could do far worse than to have this book on your shelves. Eventually, though, they'll be old enough and canny enough to ask, "Well, how do we know all this? Where did we find these things, and how? And why are they in this order?" That's the point where you hand them The Disappearing Spoon, sit back, and let Sam Kean take over. The story of the elements, and our understanding of them, is governed just as much by personality as by p-shells, as much by competition as by charge, as much by ego as by electrons. While the elements themselves don't pay any attention to human affairs, the quest to understand the building blocks of matter have sent us to the hearts of stars, the depths of the earth and, for various reasons, Ytterby, Sweden. [1] Kean starts with how he got into the elements, with a story that would horrify modern-day parents: mercury. When he was a kid, his mother would collect the mercury from broken thermometers and keep it in a little bottle on a high shelf. If they were lucky, she would let her children play with it for a while, swirling it around and watching while this shiny liquid metal split apart and fused back together perfectly, never leaving a bit of itself behind. It was a metal that flowed like water, and it was fascinating. If he had known at that age that ancient alchemists thought there were spirits living in mercury, he would not have been surprised. Keeping an eye out for mercury, he learned that modern scientists are able to follow the expedition of Lewis and Clark using mercury. The explorers carried with them a good quantity of Dr. Benjamin Rush's Bilious Pills, a "cure" for any illness that mainly contained mercury chloride. It was vile stuff, poisoning everyone who took it, but without an FDA around to stop this kind of nonsense, Rush made plenty of money. It probably didn't hurt his credibility that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In any case, he gave samples to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their latrine sites can still be found today by the unusually high levels of mercury that were deposited there as the men's bodies tried to get rid of the heavy metal as quickly as possible. Mercury also taught Kean about mythology - the Roman god of communication, modeled on the Greek message-bearer. It taught him etymology - the chemical symbol for mercury is Hg, which is derived from the Latin hydragyrum, which means "silver water." It informed him on literature, especially the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland, who was based on the poor crazies who used to breathe in the fumes of mercury while setting felt for their hats. This one weird, eerie element was a door into so many other topics that he figured there must be others. And so he started work on this book, a collection of histories and tales, gossip and hearsay, all centered around the 118 physical elements that make up our universe. "As we know," he writes, "90 percent of particles in the universe are hydrogen, and the other 10 percent are helium. Everything else, including six million billion billion kilos of earth, is a cosmic rounding error." Within that rounding error, though, some amazing things have been found. In the 19th century, the Russian Dimitri Mendeleev examined the common properties of different elements and was able to sort the elements in such a way that took advantage of their similarities. The violent alkalies along the far left, which will explode if given half a chance, and their cousins, the halogens on the far right, some of the most reactive elements in nature. Separating them are the noble gasses, which don't react with anything unless pushed to extremes. Without knowing about electron shells and the weird quantum things that happen on the atomic level, Mendeleev managed to put together a table so good that he was able to leave gaps in it that corresponded to elements that hadn't yet been found. And by telling the world that these gaps existed, the race to isolate and discover the elements was on. Kean's book is a great look at the way science works on a human level. How the search for high-quality porcelain led to the discovery of an entire class of elements, how Marie Curie would get into trouble by dragging her (male) colleagues into dark closets to show them how radium glowed, how nitrogen kills with kindness and lithium quiets an unsettled mind. The competition to not only find these elements but to name them and find uses for them has driven science forward in all fields, from geology to neurology, for the last two hundred years. Those 118 squares on the periodic table have driven men to travel the world, to create economic and political empires, to love, to hate, and to murder. If this kind of thing were taught in high school chemistry class, there would probably be a lot more kids interested in science as a career. The book is very readable, even if it does drift from time to time into more technical areas. One of my colleagues, who doesn't have an extensive background in science, said she was a little slowed down by talk of electron shells and quantum jumps, which I guess were not aided by Kean's elevator similes. But it did get her asking the right questions - how do we know atoms exist if we can't see them? How can we be sure that what is in this book is true? Those are the questions that Kean tries to answer in the book, but it's also the kind of book that may bring up more questions. It's "gateway science," one of those books that pulls away the cold, rational veneer of the scientist and his or her endeavors, and shows what an exciting, weird, messy and dramatic place science can be. What's more, it shows how science is deeply ingrained not only into our technology, but our language, history and politics. An understanding of science, even at an amateur level, is a wonderful way to open your eyes to the great, complex and bizarre world in which we live. ----------------------------------------------------------- "We eat and breathe the periodic table; people bet and lose huge sums on it; philosophers use it to probe the meaning of science; it poisons people; it spawns wars. Between hydrogen at the top left and the man-made impossibilities lurking along the bottom, you can find bubbles, bombs, money, alchemy, petty politics, history, poison, crime, and love. Even some science." - Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon ------------------------------------------------------------ [1] The town has the distinct honor of having four elements named after it: yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb), and erbium (Er). What has your hometown got? ...more |
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You should know by now that if there's one thing I'm really looking forward to it's the end of the world. I don't know why, really. Maybe it's for tha
You should know by now that if there's one thing I'm really looking forward to it's the end of the world. I don't know why, really. Maybe it's for that feeling that all bets are off, all bonds are broken and you can remake yourself in any image you want. Maybe I really believe that I'll be one of the heroes of the story, who make it through the End Times not only alive but victorious. Maybe I just long to see the world scythed clean of humanity and restarted so the squid can have a go at running things, I have no idea. For whatever reason, I have a soft spot for armageddon stories. Whether it's Good Omens, The Stand, Swan Song, Crisis on Infinite Earths, or any other story that promises the destruction of a world, I'm all over it. I can't know if they're good, but I'll at least be willing to give them a shot. So when I saw this, I thought to myself, "I must have this book." The book is based on an organizational system that has gained some popularity in recent years: The Periodic Table of X, wherein X is whatever topic you want to focus on. It was originally designed to accommodate the natural elements, but if you have a hundred or so items, you can probably make your own periodic table to sort through them. You've got the Periodic Table of Typefaces, the Periodic Table of Beer Styles, the Periodic Table of Superheroes, and even - prepare to have your mind blown - the Periodic Table of Periodic Tables of Things. You never had it so good, Mendeleev.... This book is based on the Periodic Catastrophic, a listing of the many, many ways that the world can end. As with the "real" periodic table, this one is well-organized to keep the apocalypses in line. There are the Acts of God, Don't Mess With Nature, Universally Doomed, and It Was Like That When I Got Here, among other distinctions. Each disaster gets a couple of pages with a succinct explanation and an interesting or humorous illustration. Some of my favorites include: Four Horsemen Motto: Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Direct from the Bible, the Four Horsemen of Conquest, War, Famine and Death will one day roll across the Earth, bringing down everyone in their paths. "Everyone," of course meaning everyone. You don't know when they'll come, but you'll sure know when they get here. Make sure you have your bags packed. Ecosystem, if only for the picture of the panda strapped to a knife-throwing target. Those pandas have had a free ride for long enough, if you ask me.... Food Chain Collapse - this is one that I find pretty plausible, as far as some of these entries go. We all get mushy and sentimental about the whales and the dolphins, but what about the krill and shrimp and sardines? Without them, we run the very great risk of destroying an entire food chain just to have something to snack on during brunch. The Gulf Stream Collapse is another one that kind of worries me, and it's my favorite card to play whenever someone comes out with, "Look at all this snow! So much for global warming!" canard. In a nutshell: The gulf stream brings warm water up from the Caribbean to the North Atlantic, which results in a rise in temperature for most of Europe. As polar freshwater ice caps and glaciers melt, all that cold fresh water will mix with the salt water, which could have the effect of pushing the upper end of the gulf stream south. This would mean a substantial temperature drop in Europe, and a general planetwide climate crisis up to and including a new mini-ice age. Grey Goo is always fun, too. If we manage to build self-replicating nanomachines, which use the atoms around them to build copies of themselves, what's to stop them from just ripping apart every solid object they see? If they don't know when to stop eating and replicating, they could devour most of the world in pretty short order. Nasty, huh? And of course there are sure-fire world-enders like The Death of the Universe, Sun (the death of) and the Collapse of Causality, the inevitable result of the invention of time travel. It's an amusing book, with some educational points to make. Strictly speaking, not every one of the scenarios that it depicts has to do with the end of the world. Some of them, like volcanoes, earthquakes, and pandemics, are just natural disasters rather than planet-killers. Others, like obesity and an aging society, are more aimed at problems facing the human race that may inconvenience us, but probably won't destroy us. And then there are the ones that I suspect were put in just to fill space - in The Solar System , Horne suggests that Jupiter could one day turn itself into a second sun, with disastrous consequences. But that won't happen - Jupiter is much too small to initiate fusion in its core. The same with Supernova - he suggests that Betelgeuse could go up (and it will), bathing us in gamma rays after "crossing millions of light years" to get to us. But Betelgeuse is only 640 light years away - much closer than "millions," but much too far to hurt us when it goes. So it's not so much that the scenarios are implausible - like Alien Invasion or Paradox or Satan, but that they're inaccurately implausible. It makes me wonder what other facts he fudged or guessed on just for the sake of making something sound scarier than it is. It's got some good tongue-in-cheek humor, and is a clever reminder of all the ways that things can go wrong in this big world of ours. The pictures are very nice, often funny, and good companions to the text, which features helpful hints for surviving each scenario, as well as a guess as to when you should start to panic. All too many of them are labeled "too late." An interesting note: there is a lot of British English in the book that may surprise readers of American English, such as myself. I had never encountered the adjective moreish (meaning so tasty that you want more of it) until I read this book and am forced to assume it's a British coinage. Also, some of the puns only work if you know the British pronunciation of words. Unlike the editors of Harry Potter, though, these guys did not bow to our American prejudices and re-edit the book. Kudos to them. So, these are the ways the world ends. Now you know. --------------------------------------------------------- "The only thing worse than a vengeful God is a fickle one." - Richard Horne, A is for Armageddon ...more |
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| Dec 30, 2004
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Everybody loves a good team-up. No matter who your favorite hero is, whether in the realm of sports, music, science, writing, art - you get a secret t
Everybody loves a good team-up. No matter who your favorite hero is, whether in the realm of sports, music, science, writing, art - you get a secret thrill from the idea of what they could achieve if they worked together. Sometimes it's brilliant, like when Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett teamed up to do Good Omens. Sometimes it's inspiring, like the pop music wonder that was "We Are the World." Sometimes it's overwhelming, like the 1992 Olympic basketball Dream Team. Sometimes it's Damn Yankees, and the less said about that, the better. Regardless, we all love to play that game of "What if," pairing together not only the greatest talents we know, but sometimes the greatest talents in history. What if Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton could have studied the universe together? What if we could get Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy together to work on the problems facing the nation? What if Kurt Kobain and Jimi Hendrix were able to cut an album together? The team-ups are endless, and most of the time they're impossible. Fortunately, that's where fiction steps in. The Justice League was created by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky over at DC Comics back in 1960. The idea was to take the greatest heroes the company had in their library and team them up to fight battles that no one hero could face alone - Starro the Conquerer being the first among them, and thereafter many more. Aliens, mad scientists, evil kings, vengeful gods, all those who attempted to conquer, destroy, or devour the Earth were stopped by the League. Though the membership roster has changed many times over the years, as has the style of the books, the League has been a fixture in the DC Comics universe for more than forty years. As Stan Lee tells the story, the publisher of DC Comics, Jack Liebowitz, bragged over a round of golf to the owner of Marvel, Martin Goodman, about how well his new Justice League title was selling. After the game, Goodman called Lee and told him to create a hero team to compete. Stan's imagination provided him with the Fantastic Four, and a comic book arms race had begun. Lee produced hero after hero for Marvel, conveniently housing most of them in New York City. From there, it made sense to have them get together to fight even greater menaces. With the pencils of comic book legend Jack Kirby, Lee created The Avengers, the mightiest hero team of the Marvel universe. They too have undergone a lot of changes in the last four decades, but they remain the elite team of heroes to which every costumed adventurer aspires. Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Martian Manhunter.... Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man, Hulk [1], the Wasp, Hawkeye.... These are names that every comic book fan should know, and deep down inside we all wonder: what would it be like if they could get together? What's more, what kind of foe would require the combined might of two of the greatest hero teams in comic book history? It could only be something on a monumental scale, something that endangers the existences of both universes. Something like... Krona. If you're a long-time reader, you might remember that name. Krona was the reason for the Crisis on Infinite Earths - his obsession with seeing the beginning of the universe led to the fissioning of that universe into a nigh-infinite number of parallel ones. It was only after a titanic series of battles that the singular universe was put right, and Krona was transformed into pure energy and banished for his crimes. Or so we thought. Obsessive to the core, Krona figured out how to escape his universe and started again on his quest to understand the beginning of all things, even if it meant destroying every single universe that defied him. Eventually he came to meet the Grandmaster, an immortal on the Marvel side whose limitless existence drove him to play cosmic games of chance with whatever other great powers he encountered. He knew someone who could possibly answer Krona's questions - the planet-devourer Galactus - and challenged him to a contest: the greatest heroes of each universe would compete to gather items of power. If the DC team won, Krona would leave and search elsewhere. If Marvel's team won, it would bring ultimate destruction to both cosmoses. And so the teams met, and like all good superhero team-ups, it started with a fight. Something about the two worlds put the visitors on edge, and both Superman and Captain America were willing to pound their opposite numbers into the dirt if need be. Fortunately, as in all good hero team-ups, their differences were put aside in favor of battling Krona and saving both of their universes from utter annihilation. It's a vast story, both in time and space, and manages to bring together pretty much everyone who has ever been part of the two teams, both in terms of the heroes that made them up and the villains they fought. Yet it feels fairly intimate - these aren't two whole universes that are battling for survival, but two teams, who manage to mesh together surprisingly well. A lot of the credit for this, of course, has to go to the writer, Kurt Busiek, who had the unenviable task of penning a story that made the best - and fairest - use of both teams. After all, never underestimate the partisan fans, the ones who would be utterly incensed by Superman beating Thor, or the idea that Captain America could possibly be Batman's equal in hand-to-hand combat. I'm sure there were people on both sides of the publishing divide who were keeping very careful account of which team came off "better" in this fight, but that's not the way this book was meant to be read. Busiek's mission was to create a threat that could only be contained by both teams together, which means that neither team by itself was enough to win, which means that you should shut up already about whether or not Superman should have been able to use Thor's hammer, dammit. Even for all the care that went into writing this story, it never would have worked without an artist capable of handling that many characters and making sure they all looked their best. When you have a universe-spanning epic with a cast of far-too-many, there's only one person you can call: George Pérez. Not only can he handle a chaotic battle scene, making every hero look... well... heroic, hes just as good at the casualness of a Christmas party, or the masks-off teamwork that is involved in trying to build a reality-piercing spaceship. Whether facing off against great cosmic powers or chatting next to the coffee urn, Pérez knows how to make these people look damn good. There's just no one else like him. With outstanding colors by Tom Smith, I could just read this book for the artwork alone. What I also found interesting was a look at how the two worlds are fundamentally different in not only their stories but their very makeup. The Flash can't run in the Marvel Universe because the Speed Force doesn't exist, while the Scarlet Witch's powers are multiplied to dangerous levels in the DC Universe thanks to the strength of the Lords of Chaos. The differences in the geography and the sizes of the Earths, the type of energy they receive from their suns, the fundamental forces that hold their universes together are a huge obstacle to getting the teams to work together, and as far as I know it is the first attempt to "scientifically" delineate how they are different. There is also a bit of sociological analysis, too. Each team first notices how differently heroes are treated in their opposite worlds. The heroes of the Marvel Universe are tolerated, but not entirely trusted. The non-powered citizenry tend to be more afraid of superheroes, especially the mutants, and so the ability of groups like the Avengers to effect positive change on their world is limited. To Superman, this looks like Marvel's heroes aren't bothering to make their world better, but only remaining satisfied to hold the status quo. On the DC side, heroes are beloved. Superman is a planet-wide hero, Wonder Woman is an ambassador of peace, and the people of Central City have built an entire museum to honor the Flash. These people revere their heroes as both celebrities and saviors, something that Captain America views as a step towards fascism - costumed gods with their pet people ready to do what they say. Neither viewpoint is entirely right, but they do reflect a fundamental difference in the way each company approaches its storytelling. To put that editorial decision in front of the characters was an interesting choice, and allowing them to come to their own judgments was fun - if a little unnerving - to read. All in all, JLA/Avengers is a truly great team-up story, one that should make the fans on both sides happy for a while. ------------------------------------------------------ "Neural chaff. Hypnotic lights. Pre-programmed skills. Try fighting the Wehrmacht, mister - it teaches you focus!" Captain America to Prometheus, JLA/Avengers [1] Hulk gets almost no screen time in the story, which is very disappointing. I'm sure there are reasons for this.... ...more |
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It ain't easy being Super. You might be a hero, like Fatale. She is the latest in cyborg technology - a woman who was nearly destroyed in a freak accid It ain't easy being Super. You might be a hero, like Fatale. She is the latest in cyborg technology - a woman who was nearly destroyed in a freak accident, rebuilt by a mysterious corporation and made into the perfect living weapon. She is fast, she's strong, and for a while she was one of the U.S. government's best operatives. But now she's on her own, and life is tough as a cyborg. You have parts to deal with, the need to keep your power source going, and of course it's hard to enjoy a night out when everyone keeps staring at the half-metal woman in the booth near the window. Fatale wants to be a hero, though, and the re-formation of the Champions is just what she needs. If she can prove herself to this team, she can find a new purpose to her life. If not a hero, you could be a villain. Doctor Impossible has certainly lived up to his name. In his many years of villainy he has come up with just about every nefarious scheme an evil, quasi-invulnerable genius can cook up in his twisted, malevolent brain. He's been to the past and the future, he's swapped brains with the greatest heroes of his age, he's escaped from inescapable prisons more than once. Of all the would-be conquerors on Earth, Impossible is the one who would be voted most likely to succeed. And yet he isn't happy. His life isn't what he thought it would be, and it doesn't take a genius to see that Doctor Impossible has a few problems that even his great genius cannot solve. When Impossible breaks out of prison - again - the Champions re-form to hunt him down. With old and new members joining together to keep the flame of heroism alive in their world, the Champions are determined to find Impossible and shut him down for good. The only problem is that the person who has always succeeded against Impossible, a hero who calls himself CoreFire, is missing. Without him, their chances are greatly diminished. Against an evil genius like Impossible, who can defeat the team armed with little more than his wits and a false tooth, you want to throw everything you can at him. What's more, the internal tensions pulling at the Champions may defeat them before Doctor Impossible even gets the chance to try. This book, like so many other modern renditions of super-heroes, has its roots in Alan Moore's Watchmen. While he was not the first to make his superheroes less than super, he was certainly the best, and his work is well-remembered for that. After Moore was done, it was hard to think of superheroes as entirely pure, good and noble. We could see the tensions between them, the neuroses that drive them to do what they do, and we began to understand that our heroes were just like us, only moreso. Ever since then, writers have been trying to de-super the superheroes and make them into regular people who just happen to be able to shoot lasers out of their eyes, break the laws of thermodynamics, or bend steel in their bare hands. Grossman has taken full advantage of the work that has gone before him in this novel. The story is told from the alternating perspectives of Doctor Impossible and Fatale, and proceeds to deconstruct both the heroes and the villains in visceral, raw detail. What is it like to be a cyborg, something halfway between human and superhuman? And how can you join a team like the Champions, a team of legends among legends, and feel up to the task? What happens when you realize that the heroes you looked up to are just as human as you are? Or at least, as you used to be. On the other side, what makes a villain what he is? What happened to Doctor Impossible that put him on the ever-unfulfilled path to world domination? Was he destined for it, or was it a series of choices, insignificant at the time, that led him to where he was? How did his genius get turned to evil, and what, if anything, keeps him going? The problem with deconstructing superheroes is that once you've deconstructed them, there's really nothing left. Being a superhero is a fundamentally irrational career choice. Watchmen hinted pretty heavily at this, since all the heroes in the story had been pretty well messed up by their days in tights. There are so many problems that crop up once the spandex and mask are put on that you may find it's not worth the effort. Legal issues, financial problems, time constraints and unstable relationships aside, what does this choice say about your state of mind? What kind of person can take up the job of costumed hero and stay sane? When you come right down to it, even if you have superpowers there are so many other ways you can use them that are less risky and more beneficial to humanity than getting into fistfights that destroy city blocks. The same goes for villainy. So often you see bad guys with technology that is honestly amazing in its scope - Captain Cold's freeze ray, for example, would make him rich if he patented it and licensed derivative technologies. Much richer than if he ever succeeded at using it to rob jewelry stores. Doctor Doom builds machines that are so far beyond current science that he could rule his own country - oh wait, he does - instead of single-mindedly trying to destroy Reed Richards. Lex Luthor would be grinding his teeth in envy over the power that Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or even Rush Limbaugh have. And none of them have a would-be Kryptonian conqueror to spur them on, either. That's the secret heart of superhero stories - they rest on fundamentally irrational choices. Take away those urges to help or harm and you are left with simple absurdity. And that's kind of where this book falls down. There's plenty of navel-gazing and deconstruction going on in this story, from all angles. Between Fatale and Doctor Impossible, they pretty much reason away any good reasons for getting into the game as a hero or villain, and yet - there they are. Impossible is the worse of the two, really. His narration shows him to be an insightful, intelligent, and fairly well-grounded man who probably could become one of the most powerful men on earth through conventional means. And yet, even knowing that it's probably a waste of time, he continues with his grand scheme - in this case, gravitationally manipulating the distance between the moon and the Earth so as to hold the Earth hostage. He knows he's going to lose. He knows there are better ways to be effectively evil that don't involve a metahuman punch to the face. He knows when he's acting in a stereotypically villainous way. And yet he persists, usually in the most cliched way possible. He spouts comic-book-villain monologues and even has an island fortress from which he operates. Neither Fatale nor Impossible - nor any of the other good or bad guys we meet - seem especially happy doing what they're doing. And what's more, they know they're not happy. Doctor Impossible even goes so far as to state it explicitly during his moment of triumph - "For a second, I find myself at the fulcrum point of creation. God I'm so unhappy." Well, if you're such a genius, perhaps you would be able to make better choices than this. Therein lies the paradox of this book. The more human you try to make these characters, the less believable their story becomes. You can't be both human and superhuman at the same time - it takes a very skilled writer to pull that trick off, and I don't think Grossman is there yet. He tells an entertaining story, full of pretty much every comic book trope you can think of, which entertained me to no end. The problem is that by the time you get to the finale the unstable foundation of the story starts to show. How much you'll enjoy the story depends on how good you are at filtering out the deconstruction that's going on, which means missing the point of the whole book – that the only way to really enjoy superheroes is to accept them at face value and avoid deconstructing them. So yeah, good luck with that. ---------------------------------------------------- "When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else." - Dr. Impossible, Soon I Will Be Invincible ---------------------------------------------------- ...more |
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If you had asked me, back in 1988 or so, - when I was a Trek fan who hadn't quite figured out the real reason I liked seeing Wesley Crusher on screen
If you had asked me, back in 1988 or so, - when I was a Trek fan who hadn't quite figured out the real reason I liked seeing Wesley Crusher on screen - what Wil Wheaton was doing at any given time, it would have sounded like a completely irrational question. How should I know? He's probably doing whatever it is actors do in their free time, which my mind generally rendered as some sort of eternal cocktail party where all the famous people knew each other and none of them would be caught dead with a prole such as myself. And this isn't just Wheaton - the idea that I could know what any of my favorite creative people were up to at any given moment was just impossible back then. It was just a fact of life. I am over here, and they are over there, and the chances of our two spheres of reality intersecting were precisely nil. They were members of America's elect, and I was, well, me. Now it's the future, and we have connected our lives online to an extent that would have been almost unfathomable twenty years ago. Wheaton has greatly expanded his creative repertoire, and I am an Internationally Famous Podcaster and Book Reviewer. [1] For those who have access to it, the internet has democratized creativity in many ways. People who otherwise might have gone unnoticed in the world now have a chance to shine, and the daily workings of the famous are laid bare to everyone with a Twitter account. Suddenly we can see that these people aren't as special as we thought they were - they're not living the eternal cocktail party of the gods. They're working and juggling their careers and their families. They're getting upset about politics and worrying about paying the bills. They're having great ideas that never quite work out and massaging small ideas until they bloom. The creative process is now open to everyone, and the potential for your work to be noticed is that much greater. Of course, the caveat is that your creative work has to be that much better. If you're a short fiction writer, for example, you no longer have to shop around for agents and wait for the big publishing companies to take on your book. You can publish it by yourself and see what happens. But if that's the route you've chosen to take, then you'd better be damn good. There are a whole lot of fish in that pond, and you're only going to end up on the internet's dinner table if you are big, juicy and succulent. Okay, I don't know where that particular metaphor came from. Nothing to see here. Move along. Wil Wheaton is definitely one of those big, succulent fish. He's got his years of work in film and TV to support him, and he has become one of the stars of the 21st-century internet. As of this writing, he has over 1.7 million Twitter followers and runs a very successful blog. He's a darling of the summer convention season and probably the TV guest star that I most look forward to seeing. He makes a living writing and blogging and acting, has a gorgeous wife and two sons that have turned out to be fine young men. So, with all that, why should he be scared to publish this book, his first collection of short fiction? After all, it's a limited print run, and if it fails then so what? It's not like this will be the end of the Vast Wheaton Empire, right? Why should this be so important to him? It's because he understands the new dynamic between the creator and the consumer. He understands that his creative work must live or die on its own merits, and not just because it's Wil Wheaton putting his name on the cover. He knows that he's no better than anyone else who loves his craft and puts it out for the world to see. The Day After and Other Stories is a very short collection of four stories that Wheaton has written - his first published collection of fiction. The title story takes its name from the movie of the same title, and is an exploration into what it might be like to be a survivor of the end of the world. Tim, a young man just out of high school, is living among the dead. The walking dead, that is. Zombies have taken over everything, and he and a few people from his town are holed up in a high school gym in the hopes that things might someday get better soon. Of course, they won't. Tim knows that, the girl he loves, Erica, knows that - everybody knows that. But they have to try and hold on anyway, because there's nothing else they can do. "Room 302" is a bit of flash fiction, inspired by a photograph. Most of it is a pretty straightforward analysis of a mediocre photo, and an explanation of why it can't be used in a news paper. Fine, a nice scene and some good dialogue - with a creepy twist at the end that, much like "The Day After," makes me wish there was more story to read. Wheaton tells us that "The Language Barrier" was inspired by a real event - overhearing a couple of ladies having a heated conversation in a mixture of Russian and English. In the story, the conversation is exactly that, but the eavesdropper, Mike, does what we wish we all might be able to do - he steps in and says what most needs to be said. It's one of those moments where l'esprit d'escalier is beaten to the punch. Finally, "Poor Places" rose from Wheaton's love of poker. I never was able to get into poker, probably because I am really risk-averse when it comes to money, but there was a time in the mid-Aughts where poker was the trendiest game to be had. In this story, a couple of players in their local Hollywood bar proceed to fleece some tourists in a back-room poker parlor. It's probably the weakest of the four stories, but I grant that not knowing poker lingo really doesn't help. All in all, they're four good stories. Wheaton has a good ear for dialogue and a way of making characters sound believable, even if the plot structure is a little weak in points, or the narration tries to carry more weight than it can bear. Probably because it is the longest of the stories, "The Day After" is the most guilty of this - Tim is described by other characters as "kind of an asshole," but his actions don't really match that so much. He complains a lot, sure, but who wouldn't be a bit bitchy after human civilization has gone to the zombies? When he's told it's his time to fill the generator, he goes. When the girl he's crushing on offers a bit of apocalypse-sex, he considers turning it down, the way he did when they were in high school to protect her reputation. We don't see the guy that the other characters do, which makes me wonder what else we're not seeing. Internal conflict is a great hook upon which to hang a story, but the conflict between others' view of him and his view of himself isn't developed nearly as well as it should be. In addition, his internal narrative tells us things that would be better shown, and overall the whole thing could stand to be tightened up. I also have some questions regarding the gas can (a full one left next to the generator? Who would have left that there?) and their discovery of Alvin (the guy camped out only about twenty feet from the school gym and never noticed that there were survivors living in there?) While interesting, adding a mini-quest to the story - get gas, then fill the generator - would have been fun, and the dead guy just served to heighten the sense of loneliness that was already there. A sense that was about to be mitigated once they got back into the gym with the other survivors. It's nitpicking, but sometimes that just has to be done.... All that said, it looks like the beginning of a much longer story, albeit a bleak one, which I hope he works on more. [2] If you haven't bought this, you're probably out of luck - the print run lasted for a very brief window of time, but I reckon an electronic version of it will be up at some point. If it is, scrape a few bucks together and pick it up. It's a quick read, and I feel like it'll be something to hold on to if Wheaton decides to pursue more fiction. If he does, I'm sure he will approach it with the same honesty and humility that he had when he released this book, which means that I'll certainly be willing to pick it up. --------------------------------------------------------------- "I'm terrified that nobody's going to like it, but the goal isn't to be perfect; the goal is to be creative. I'm going to keep saying that until I don't feel like I'm going to throw up." - Wil Wheaton, from his blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Source: Me [2] When I was in college, my creative writing teacher told me exactly that - the short story I had written was actually the beginning of a novel. The whole thing immediately dried up under my fingers and turned to dust, and the novel he thought I was writing never came to be. I hope Mr. Wheaton is made of sterner stuff than I was. ...more |
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not set
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Jan 22, 2011
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Jan 22, 2011
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Paperback
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| 044101268X
| 9780441012688
| 044101268X
| 4.13
| 109,663
| Oct 05, 2004
| Jun 28, 2005
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it was ok
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Codex Alera 1: Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher As you probably have noticed by now, I am a huge fan of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The books Codex Alera 1: Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher As you probably have noticed by now, I am a huge fan of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The books are fun reads - fast-paced, gritty and realistic, while still maintaining that a tarnished patina of fantasy about them. They have a great narrative voice and I could read them the same way I eat a bag of Doritos - all in one sitting, unsure of how it happened, but with less orange Cheez (tm) on my fingers. I know for a fact that as long as Jim Butcher continues to write The Dresden Files, I will continue reading them. At a certain point, I became aware of his Codex Alera series, mainly because he talked about them in author's notes in the backs of the latest few Dresden paperbacks. I didn't really read through the notes, usually because I was far too impatient to get into the next book, but I knew they were out there and that I would, sooner or later, have to read them. I also knew that they would be a different beast from what I was used to. This series is Butcher's real baby, as he tells us. From his childhood, Butcher was fascinated with high fantasy, the kinds of epic journeys that were made famous by people like Tolkien and Eddings, Zelazny, Brooks, and Weis and Hickman, to name a few. So, when he decided that he wanted to be a writer, it was on that kind of world-spanning, epic fantasy that he set his sights. He found what a lot of young writers find - that this kind of fiction is viciously hard to do well, and is really suitable only for writers who have either mutant-level innate talent or who have spent many, many years honing their skills. Out of the process of working on his craft, of course, Butcher gave birth to Harry Dresden, which has certainly made the world a better place, but he never forgot his dream of writing an epic fantasy series. After much hard work, and what was no doubt a series of terrifying decisions to let it go public, Butcher published The Codex Alera, his contribution to the Sword-and-Sorcery genre. It introduces us to the nation of Alera, an old and massive country build on swords, intrigue, and the strange talent possessed by most people to shape and control the very elements themselves. Within the very earth itself, in water and air and fire, trees and metal and stone, there are furies - spirit beings that can bend these elements to their will. The furies, in turn, link to a human, who gives them direction and purpose. A human in control of a fury is a force to be reckoned with, whether they are just bending a water fury to tell if someone is telling the truth, or compelling an earth fury to raise great walls in defense of a population. Most everyone has one or two furies at their command, and some of them have more. Young Tavi, living in the frontier region of Calderon, has none. Despite his disadvantage, however, Tavi is surrounded by good people. He's been raised by his uncle, Bernard, who is the leader of their community at Bernardholt, and Bernard's sister, Isana. Like all people on the edges of empire, the people of Bernardholt have learned to be tough and live without the security of armies or the support of central government. They take care of their own matters, thankyouverymuch, and don't need a lot of interference from the rest of Aleran political society. Unfortunately, of course, what they want doesn't really matter. They soon find themselves at the heart of a violent coup, a plan to overrun the empire and topple its leaders. With the help of the inhuman Marat, the traitors to the First Lord are willing to sacrifice everything in order to save what they believe are the best parts of their nation. Of all the themes that kind of got lost in this book, that last one is the one I wish had gotten more play - that sometimes people do horrible things for reasons that they believe are not only defensible, but actually good. The main antagonist, a man with the hilariously ironic name of Fidelias, starts out as a wonderfully conflicted character. He tricks his apprentice, the Cursor Amara, into traveling with him to the rebel camp. He makes an attempt to convert her to his way of thinking, and when she rejects a place in his coup, he reverts to Villain Pastiche - the former teacher who is very, very disappointed with his student, to the point where he just has to kill her so she won't give away the plan. Fidelias travels with a sword-happy knight, Aldrick, who is almost invincibly good at what he does, and the knight's lady-friend, a semi-psychotic water-crafter named Odiana. It's kind of unfortunate, really - I really wanted to be uncertain as to whether Fidelias and his crew were actually good guys, but I was pretty much convinced of their alignment within a few chapters. If I had one wish for this book, it would be that Butcher had kept me wondering throughout the book. I mean, it's not impossible that the First Lord was deserving of being toppled, and that Amara had given her loyalties to the wrong man, but I stopped questioning that pretty quickly once Fidelias reached mustache-twirling levels. In general, there were some parts of the story that I really liked, some that left me cold, and a lot that had me playing "Spot The Fantasy Trope" drinking game. Some of the best scenes were fast-paced and full of action, scenes that Butcher has always been good at. Whether it's Tavi being chased by giant, heat-seeking spiders, or an all-out assault on a semi-impregnable fortress, Butcher does a very good job at controlling the action and making sure the reader knows what is going on where. On the other hand, a lot of the narration itself, especially in the beginning, is way too talky. Probably one of the hardest things for any epic fantasy writer to do is to introduce his or her world to the reader in a way that is not only clear, but that also makes sense from within the story. Often characters spell out details of history and culture that they already know, and really don't need to recap. It would be as though I called my friend back in the United States and said, "As you know, President Obama, who was democratically elected by the people -" "Yes," my friend says, "in a process that was established over two hundred years ago!" "Indeed," I say. "President Obama - who is African-American - is thought be some to be Muslim!" "But he isn't! He is a Christian!" "That's right, a follower of that ancient religion founded on the teachings of Jesus Christ...." It would be weird. But writers do this all the time, especially in Fantasy and Science Fiction. And you have to feel a little sorry for them - they have all this information to give us, and no natural way to do it, because the residents of that world already know it. That's why so many epic fantasies (this one included) tend to start in backwater, isolated regions, where people haven't seen a tax collector in generations, and why the protagonists tend to be young, working-class people. They are the only ones who would need this kind of history recap. It's one of the most common ways of filling the audience in, from Lord of the Rings to The Wheel of Time to Star Wars, and Butcher is not an exception. There is a lot of potential here, though, shining through all the weight that the first book of a fantasy series always has to bear. There's a complicated political system that we have barely begun to explore, and the way that people and furies interact is shown to be very flexible and creative. As we follow Tavi through the rest of the books, we'll get to see how someone without the ability to call on a fury might make his way in the world. Incidentally, that is a place where I have to give Butcher credit. I seriously expected Tavi to finally gain his furycrafting powers in a big way at some point in the book, but he never did. For all intents and purposes, Tavi is a cripple in this world, and that is going to be a serious obstacle in his future endeavors. It looks like Butcher's going to allow the boy to stay disabled, which makes for a far more interesting character in the end. Anyway, out of loyalty to an author I really like, and in the hopes that he will be able to break the shackles of the Fantasy Formula, I will continue with this series. Don't disappoint me, Jim.... ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Two days ago, I had a lot more sense...." - Tavi, Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher ----------------------------------------------------------------- ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 21, 2011
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Jan 22, 2011
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Paperback
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| 045146365X
| 9780451463654
| 045146365X
| 4.25
| 55,512
| Oct 26, 2010
| Oct 26, 2010
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really liked it
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"Hell's Bells" count: 14 There's a reason that clichés become clichés. That's because, no matter how much we may hate them, they concisely describe som "Hell's Bells" count: 14 There's a reason that clichés become clichés. That's because, no matter how much we may hate them, they concisely describe some feature of human existence that is common to us all. The reason everyone uses them is because they're just so... right, and there's really no need for us to come up with something else. It's like saying, "Yes, I could use a screwdriver to put together my new IKEA desk, but everyone does that. I'm going to invent my own, completely new tool instead." So we use clichés, no matter how much we don't want to, because there's no reason not to. Having said that: Reading this collection of Dresden Files stories is like visiting with an old friend. One of those people you've known for ages, never get to see often enough, and always know you'll spend a good time with. From the moment you start reading, you know where you are, you know who you're dealing with, and you're ready to jump right into the story without a whole lot of character building, exposition, and the nuisance of trying to decide if this is something you'll like to read. If you're picking up Side Jobs, odds are that you already know The Dresden Files, and odds are that you'll really enjoy these stories. Most of them have been published before, in one form or another, but if you don't follow the various anthologies that are put out from time to time, these'll be new to you. They're not especially necessary to understand the overall series plot, but they do help to flesh out some characters and ideas that have already been presented – and hand us a few new ones as well.. The first story, "A Restoration of Faith," is a little rough, as Butcher himself admits. In the introduction to the story, he tells us that it was written when he was still in school, before he had really built up his writing chops and figured out his voice. And it does show, but in a kind of amusing way. As if, to continue on with our cliché of the day, you got to see the high school photos and videos of a friend you've only known in adulthood. It's a little awkward and a bit weird, but you can see the person he would one day become. In the same way, we get a glimpse of the young Harry Dresden, just getting his start as a private investigator. Working with Ragged Angel Investigations to get his license, Harry finds himself in one of his classic intractable positions: find a little girl whose parents don't particularly want her found. To make it more fun, she doesn't really want to be found either. The story looks at what Harry does and why he does it, and how no matter how dark the world gets, he sees himself as a person born to hold a light in the darkness. He saves the girl, of course, with his classic nick-of-time timing, and the story ends with the introduction of Karrin Murphy and a rather punny ending. It's not really the Harry Dresden that we know, but we can see the Harry Dresden that he will become. The other stories are good fun, too. In "It's My Birthday, Too," a story written for an anthology with a birthday theme, Harry sees the worlds of fantasy and reality collide. Violently, as usual. His brother Thomas has a birthday, and Harry has so few opportunities to do "normal" things - like celebrate birthdays - that he's determined to see that his brother gets his present. He tracks Thomas down to a shopping mall which, after hours, plays host to a LARP club. For those of you not in the know, LARP is Live-Action Role-Playing, wherein people like I was a decade ago dress up in costumes and pretend to be vampires and werewolves and wizards and things. When done well, it's good fun, and it's a great way to put on another personality for a few hours. Unfortunately for this group, their session gets interrupted by some real vampires. Drulinda, of the Black Court, is out for some social revenge against her former peers, and she's willing to kill everyone she finds in order to get it. Harry and Thomas work to bring her down, of course, while also bringing the rest of the mall down at the same time. In "Day Off," Harry tries to take a little bit of time for himself. With no cases to work, no calls from the Chicago police, and no official duties with the White Council, he is intent on having just one day to be somewhat normal - sleep late, go out with a girl, that kind of thing. Of course, things don't work out that way, because he's Harry Dresden. Instead, he ends up with a group of wannabe wizards who think they can take him on, a couple of bespelled, amorous werewolves, and an apprentice who is only moments away from blowing herself up. It's good fun, and reminiscent of Dante in Clerks, who laments that he's not even supposed to be there. "The Warrior" is, in many ways, a response to the readers who thought that Michael Carpenter got kind of a raw deal at the end of Small Favor. Michael had been a Knight of the Cross, a literal warrior of God, who had helped Harry fight the forces of evil many, many times. He's very different from Harry in many ways, but their differences work well together. What's more, Michael is a genuinely good man, of the Atticus Finch variety. He is honest, dedicated, and devoted to his friends, his family and his duty. That's why, when he was nearly killed at the end of Small Favor and forced to give up his position as a Knight, a lot of readers were upset. Why? Well, because horrible things aren't supposed to happen to people as good as Michael, and yet they had. What's more, without his strength and his sword, it was hard to see how he could continue the work that he so obviously loved. This story, then, is all about how the battle to make the world a better place isn't always about the big fights and battles against entities of indescribable evil. It's also about small gestures, about stopping to talk to someone when no one else will. It's about a word or a gesture or a joke, and the way that these little things can have huge effects later. Michael may not be swinging a sword around anymore, but we know that he is still part of the fight. Two stories that really stood out were "Backup" and "Aftermath," mainly because they were told from the point of view of someone who wasn't Harry Dresden. In "Backup," we get a story told by his brother, Thomas. A vampire of the White Court, Thomas feeds off emotion, rather than blood. This doesn't make him any less dangerous, of course. More dangerous, actually, in that so many of his potential victims give themselves to him willingly. but Thomas is trying his best to stay on the side of Good. Through his eyes, we not only get to see Harry from a new point of view, but we also get to see a lot more of a world that Harry never gets to see. Because of who he is, Harry will never really get a good look at the inner workings of the White Court and the Oblivion War – a concept that is fascinating and frustrating, because we know that Harry can never get involved in it. By telling a story through Thomas, Butcher expands the universe of The Dresden Files and makes it even more interesting. The other non-Harry story is "Aftermath," which takes place after the most recent novel, Changes. Told from the point of view of Harry's oldest friend, Karrin Murphy, it's a look at what's happened in Chicago in the hours after Harry's disappearance (and presumed death). Without him (and without the now-destroyed Red Court of vampires), there is a huge power vacuum just waiting to be filled. Whether it's the mafia or mermen, the absence of Harry Dresden is an opportunity for many. Murphy gets involved in the hunt for special people, anyone with a trace of magical nature, who are to be used for their power. Without Harry to rely on, she has to use her own knowledge and resources to save her friends. At the same time, she has to face the reality that Harry is gone, maybe dead, and that is more terrifying than all the monsters that might try to take over the city. It's a great collection of tales, one that's quick to get through. If you're just itching for the new book to come out, this should hold you over for a little while. ------------------------------------------------------ Harry Dresden. Saving the world, one act of random destruction at a time." - Jim Butcher, "The Warrior" ------------------------------------------------------ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 05, 2011
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Jan 06, 2011
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| 4.18
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liked it
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Dec 16, 2011
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Dec 16, 2011
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| 4.25
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really liked it
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Aug 04, 2011
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Aug 23, 2011
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| 4.16
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it was amazing
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Aug 03, 2011
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Aug 01, 2011
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Jul 29, 2011
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Aug 01, 2011
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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Jul 20, 2011
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Jul 23, 2011
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| 4.16
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not set
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Jul 18, 2011
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Jul 13, 2011
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Jul 17, 2011
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Jul 02, 2011
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Jul 02, 2011
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| 4.14
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it was amazing
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Jun 22, 2011
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Jun 25, 2011
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| 4.12
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really liked it
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Jun 18, 2011
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Jun 19, 2011
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| 3.82
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really liked it
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Jun 2011
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Jun 03, 2011
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| 4.23
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liked it
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Mar 29, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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| 4.66
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it was amazing
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Mar 20, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Feb 14, 2011
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Mar 13, 2011
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| 3.44
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liked it
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Feb 14, 2011
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Feb 19, 2011
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| 4.01
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liked it
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Feb 08, 2011
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Feb 13, 2011
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| 3.67
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liked it
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Jan 27, 2011
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Feb 10, 2011
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| 3.79
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liked it
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Jan 22, 2011
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Jan 22, 2011
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| 4.13
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it was ok
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Jan 21, 2011
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Jan 22, 2011
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| 4.25
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really liked it
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Jan 05, 2011
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Jan 06, 2011
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