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| 1101904224
| 9781101904220
| 1101904224
| 4.14
| 541,993
| Jul 26, 2016
| Jul 26, 2016
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really liked it
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Are you happy? So ask the characters of each other and themselves at key moments throughout the story. And while the story has a sci-fi wrapping, it’s Are you happy? So ask the characters of each other and themselves at key moments throughout the story. And while the story has a sci-fi wrapping, it’s this eternal, human question that serves as the story’s heart. So let’s talk about it! I’m not going to pretend I have THE definition of happiness, but I have A definition of happiness that I think is pretty good: That, at the present moment, you have something in your life more precious than anything else you could even imagine. For most people, this will be the relationship with their children or other loved ones, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be an object - a dream house, say - or even an experience - a religious conversion that could not have been more profound. Now, combine this precious with at least an implicit understanding of chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and/or quantum mechanics - that is, the realization that even the most apparently minute change in the past could have resulted in drastic changes in the present. And now you know happiness: Because you will have no regrets. You will have total acceptance. Because no matter what horrible things happened to you or the world in the past, no matter how suboptimal the choices and outcomes of your life up to this present moment, you wouldn’t risk a single change because you understand that to do so would risk the existence of your precious. That is happiness, that is contentment, the Gollum-reference notwithstanding. But here’s the rub: happiness can only ever be fragile because that precious thing can be so easily taken from you, either by your own mistake or cruel reality. The child can die. The wonderful spouse can divorce you. The house can be destroyed by a hurricane because you built it too close to the beach. The religious conversion can be poisoned when you discover that your church has aided and abetted pedophile priests. I myself once knew such happiness, and not even that long ago. I rescued a dog that meant the world to me. Hey, look, you can even see a picture of us in my profile and his silhouette is in my dev studio’s logo. I knew the happiness of waking up every day, being perfectly content with all the decisions of my life because any change, even the smallest change, would have meant that Atlas and I were not together. I had to be dating the woman who had to say, “We’re adopting a dog or else.” COVID had to happen to isolate us enough that she issued that ultimatum. I HAD to go to the animal shelter on that ONE day, at that EXACT moment, to get Atlas. He was only there for a day or two, he wasn’t even officially registered yet. It had to be then. So literally any change in my life - and there’s been some bad mojo in my life, let me tell you - was unacceptable. My dog Atlas died in an accident at a young age - and so total acceptance has become total regret. But getting to Dark Matter finally: That whole arc is basically the arc of Dark Matter, except this ‘butterfly effect’ discussion is made concrete by the inclusion of the Many-World Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the notion that waveform collapse represents the branching of the universe into a multi-verse. All that COULD happen DOES happen…a giant tree, Yggdrasill if you will, of all the permutations of reality. Our universe is but a single branch of that. But what if you could explore the other branches…? The sci-fi here is really just a means to an end. It doesn’t get much more advanced than the paragraph I just wrote. So if you’re interested in a deeper sci-fi exploration of MWI, I would point you towards Greg Egan’s Permutation City, which compared to this book (in terms of the sci-fi elements) is like a Claude Monet painting versus a kindergartener’s crayon drawing. But that isn’t a criticism of Dark Matter, which ultimately doesn’t particularly care about the science-fiction elements. They really are just the means to an end, that end being the aforementioned question: Are you happy? and the related question: Do you ponder much the ‘paths not taken’ and regret not choosing the other fork? Specifically in Dark Matter, it’s the character of Jason Dessen, a man who MIGHT have become an acclaimed physicist but instead chose to have a family, who explores this question. It’s a good story. I read it in a single evening. Your preferences may vary but when I read novels, I need a good story first and foremost. Without a good story, without a character or two I can root for (or against), a novel is just a worse version of some other type of text. It’s a worse version of a non-fiction exploration of interpretations of quantum mechanics. It’s a worse version of a philosophical text exploring the meaning of life. As I said, however, the book does center first and foremost on telling this story of Jason Dressen, and all the other sci-fi gooey is just extra filling to add spice and flavor. I don’t think a book will ever be anyone’s precious, I don’t think it alone can constitute that bulwark against regret, but this is still one of the good ones and a worthy read. ...more |
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1
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not set
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not set
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Aug 25, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B01K910ELE
| 3.92
| 5,136
| Jun 1986
| unknown
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really liked it
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So Covid led me to an interesting epiphany, what I call the Scalar Edge (or others call the ‘Tyranny of Scales problem’) because I like fancy-sounding
So Covid led me to an interesting epiphany, what I call the Scalar Edge (or others call the ‘Tyranny of Scales problem’) because I like fancy-sounding names: That there exists a fundamental conflict between the macroscopic ‘freedom’ and microscopic ‘freedom’ within a given system. Which… read the intro to my Leviathan Falls review. Well, after recently reading a cyberpunk pairing - the rather lackluster Shockwave Rider and this much more excellent fare - I had a related epiphany, which is that the Scalar Edge lies at the heart of cyberpunk. Some form of authority - governmental or, more usually, corporate - seeks to maximize the macroscopic ‘freedom’ of society by repressing the microscopic ‘freedom’ of the individual. To the corpo-suits, this is progress and a requisite for achieving maximal economic and technological progress and control. The cyberpunk, then, is a libertarian hero who wishes the opposite. Viewed thusly, Hardwired is a prototypical cyberpunk novel. In space around the Earth exist the Orbitals, powerful corporations who have beaten Earth and its denizens into the dust. Those on the surface, the poor bastards, the dregs of humanity are ever looking upward and seeking to join the Orbitals in their space heaven. Hardwired follows two protagonists: Cowboy, a smuggler who once used jets (‘deltas’) to smuggle goods across a fractured States of America and now uses high-speed tanks (‘panzers’) to do the same. Which he does by directly interfacing (‘facing’) with the vehicle’s control and sensor systems using cybernetic implants. His sections reminded me heavily of the anime film Redline (which if you’ve never seen, you really should because it is gloriously absurd). Cowboy is pretty cool… …but it’s the other protagonist Sarah - who has a cybernetic snake-weapon coiled down her throat - that I would consider the true cyberpunk hero. Cowboy ain’t a punk. He’s too wealthy and too buoyant for that. Sarah, though… she has clawed her way out of the gutter and carries that reality as a badge of both pride and shame in her every thought and every gesture. In fact, that’s the major conflict between Sarah and Cowboy, in that Sarah is a realist and Cowboy is an idealist. This book’s journey is really that of Sarah, who, by the end, has learned to look to the sky not with bitter envy but with something akin to… let’s not say hope, for I am uncertain that such a word exists in the cyberpunk lexicon but rather… an ambition to vengeance. By book’s end, she understands that though the greed and corruption of mankind can never truly be overthrown, it can on occasion be curtailed - and the opportunity to do such is enough to consider one’s life well-lived. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 30, 2023
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Jul 30, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0345467175
| 9780345467171
| 0345467175
| 3.92
| 4,105
| 1975
| Mar 01, 1995
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it was ok
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So… a bit dumb. One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong c So… a bit dumb. One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong conclusion and says, “Oh I really overthought that one.” You… overthought it? You made a mistake because you thought too deeply about it? Unless your name is David Foster Wallace or Socrates, it seems unlikely. So here’s what actually happened: You thought poorly, and that is why you were mistaken. Well, the Shockwave Rider is the book equivalent of “I overthought that one.” It is the novelization of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It thinks it is incredibly smart. It is, in fact, quite dumb. Here’s what happens: There’s this guy who is INCREDIBLY SMART, which we know because the book tells us so. Often. Well this super incredibly smart person gets recruited into a secret school for training super smart people to become future leaders. He gets upset when he realizes that people are mostly amoral bobble-heads and goes rogue. Which involves him running around playing an extended game of charades, using a super secret internet code that lets him alter his identity as needed. So he’s a weird cult leader one moment, then a super-star programmer the next. However, he encounters a MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL! Yes indeedy we have an MPDG and not in the self-aware ironic deconstructive sense. So, of course inspired by our good little MPDG, the protagonist realizes the emptiness of his life and decides to do something MEANINGFUL. This aspiration reaches its apex point when he encounters a LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA, whose primary service to society is a form of non-responsive therapy! But alas the Evil Government catches up to him (note: no spoiler here, the whole book’s framing is that our protagonist is being interrogated in a government prison). And the Evil Government decides it hates that libertarian utopia and wants to destroy it! Because the Evil Government just cannot stand not having control over everything. But then computer virus! Happy the end. There’s a lot of jibber jabber in this book on academic topics like intelligence vs wisdom or the means of proper governance or the sociological effects of the erosion of community, but there’s practically zero reference, either explicit or implicit, to any of humanity’s works on the matter. Like you’d THINK that maybe there’d be some reference to the many theories of intelligence that the psychological community has created. But nope. Nothing. The result is not particularly enlightening or interesting to read. It’s like… you know when someone who knows nothing about a particular problem drastically underestimates its complexity and offers facile solutions? Like someone who says, “Well you can solve homelessness by building more houses, right? There you go, problem solved.” Or, “Oh our education system has a lot of troubles. Let’s just privatize it and the market will sort it out.” That’s what the whole book feels like. Every discussion, every discursion, is sophomoric – and there’s A LOT of them. Such digressions from the narrative really are the meat of the book. So there’s that. Which would be more palatable if the book had any sort of style to it. But despite ostensibly being a ‘cyberpunk’ novel, it is about as far from punk as I can imagine. Better to call it a ‘cryptobro’ novel: a frat boy who thinks he’s a geek and wants to be a geek but is not a geek and does not, in fact, actually want to be a geek. Replace geek with ‘cyberpunk’ in that sentence and you have a decent summary of The Shockwave Rider. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 27, 2023
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Jul 27, 2023
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 4.15
| 253,525
| May 02, 2017
| May 02, 2017
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liked it
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A Snickers candy-bar has three things going for it: it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, and it’s only 1.86 oz. Cause you know that saying, too much of a good th
A Snickers candy-bar has three things going for it: it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, and it’s only 1.86 oz. Cause you know that saying, too much of a good thing is a bad thing? With Snickers, it’s more like too much of a bad thing is, uh, still a bad thing… but in small quantities, eh, not so bad, takes the edge off at least. That more or less summarizes how I feel about these murder-bot diaries: the protagonist (self-named “Murderbot”) is a bit crunchy and a bit sweet, and it’s good that these are novellas and not full length novels. Just like a Snickers bar, they’re real easy to consume, and I don’t want to undervalue that. Reading each in one sitting is a great way to spend the afternoon. And to give more substantive praise, probably the best part of these novellas is the way they extend corporate dystopia into the realm of space exploration. The Murderbot begins its life as a “SecBot,” a security/protection android that its company REQUIRES for exploration/survey groups to qualify for insurance (and also lets the company steal data…). While corporate dystopia is nothing new to sci-fi, this more intimate boots-on-the-ground perspective feels fresh within the context of space exploration. However, these are otherwise absolute junk food. These are books heavily featuring robots and AI and hacking, written by someone who KNOWS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT ANY OF THAT. You know that amazingly absurd 1995 film, Hackers? That’s about the level of accuracy of hacking/robotics/AI in this book. In writing, we have this phrase “write what you know.” I hate that phrase. I despise it utterly. Please, writers, don’t restrict yourself to “what you know.” Please use your empathy to write from perspectives not your own. Please depict worlds beyond what we currently know. But do your research. I’m not asking for a textbook on encryption or cyber-sec. But if you’ve written a quarter of a million words in which “hacking” is the primary method by which your protagonist resolves conflicts and you never use basic terminology like “firewall” or “encryption” (much less sophisticated jargon like “sanitizing input” or “air-gap”) then your story is probably bullshit, isn’t it? In that respect, I find it a bit disturbing that people nominated and then awarded these books for not just one Hugo but FOUR. MORE ACTUALLY! They wanted to give MORE! AND two Nebulas. That's like giving the story equivalent of a MCDONALD’S the “best restaurant award.” For better or worse, the field of science fiction literature is now dominated by people who have only the most tenuous grasp of actual science, technology, mathematics, and philosophy. Also, as a final and related note, each of these books is like $20. I’m sorry but what? You’re charging steak-dinner prices for a candy bar. Ironic, considering this is a book set against a backdrop of corporate greed. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 29, 2022
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Sep 29, 2022
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ebook
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| 0061474096
| 9780061474095
| 0061474096
| 4.17
| 72,092
| Sep 09, 2008
| Sep 09, 2008
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it was amazing
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Just to come right out with it, this is probably my favorite book. It made me feel homesick for a home that exists only in the imagination. It’s about Just to come right out with it, this is probably my favorite book. It made me feel homesick for a home that exists only in the imagination. It’s about philosopher-mathematician-scientist monks. It’s about Plato’s allegory of the cave and his world of forms. It’s about the power of ritual. It’s about the conflict between dogma and skepticism. It’s about the love affair between human beings and ideas. It’s about the beauty of the human mind, unchained from economic bondage. If you’ve read any of my reviews, it should be clear why this appeals to me. Philosopher-scientist-mathematician monk? Yeah that’s everything I aspire to be. If a daemon appeared before me and offered me the chance to be reborn within the world of Anathem, to become a mathematician-monk within the Mathic world, I would take it without hesitation. I love to explore the works of philosophers, scientists, and artists - because these are people whose thoughts have escaped the drudgery of the economic present. Like everyone else, they must abide by this economic reality, this need to dwell in a daily mundanity, to fulfill animalistic needs for shelter, food, and community. But their minds manage, on occasion, to pierce that veil and transcend into higher realms. They can see worlds that do not exist but could exist, if time or physics or color or geometry or genetics were different. As the Buddha wrote, life is dissatisfying. I sometimes liken it to a fog of darkness which can feel impossible to understand or navigate. Well these philosophers and scientists and artists create works that serve as beacons of light that grant both clarity and warmth. Or as the character Orolo advises: “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.” And while Anathem has a fun sci-fi (though better to call it phi-fi) plot, the surface narrative is ultimately only a staging ground from which to explore larger, grander questions. How do philosophers and scientists and artists come up with their ideas? What differentiates a good idea from a bad one? How can we tell? What is the ideal world or system in which to cultivate such thoughts and thinkers? What is the thinkers’/scientists’/artists’ relationship, both their responsibility and their expected recompense, with the unreflective majority? Is the point of existence corporeal or cognitive? Roughly mid-way through Anathem, the protagonist Erasmus has an epiphany that I believe serves as the keystone for the entire novel. In a discussion with his extramuros (i.e. not one belonging to the mathic world) sister, he talks about how much more advanced their basic machines could be, if the mathic world were allowed to improve them. His sister counters that she wouldn’t like that… because the machines would be too advanced for her to understand. From this, Erasmus has a major epiphany - he generalizes their discussion to the pursuit and communication of ALL knowledge. He asks himself in despair, “What is the point of pursuing and gaining complicated knowledge if no one else will be unable to understand or appreciate it?” In considering that question, avoid any temptations to consider the technological/economic applications of knowledge. For example, suppose we were considering building a solar system sized particle accelerator to gain better knowledge about the quantum world - knowledge that, by the way, only the 0.00001% of humanity with the necessary mathematical background will actually grasp. However, suppose we were somehow absolutely certain it wouldn't help us advance our technology or economy one bit. Should we undertake such an endeavor? That question and the ways in which we might think about answering it is basically what Anathem is all about. As is my life's pursuit. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 05, 2022
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Sep 05, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0316332879
| 9780316332873
| 0316332879
| 4.57
| 67,831
| Mar 26, 2019
| Mar 26, 2019
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it was amazing
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The style of this review brought to you by Mordin Solus. Wonder, wondrous, awe. Let’s talk about it, let’s chat, k let’s go: My previous book, Soldier o The style of this review brought to you by Mordin Solus. Wonder, wondrous, awe. Let’s talk about it, let’s chat, k let’s go: My previous book, Soldier of Mist, took me 3-4 months to read. Fantasy novel. Complex. Bit of a bore. Didn’t even finish. Then Tiamat’s Wrath, I burn through in less than a week. Speedy like a hedgehog or a roadrunner. Or a particle of light. So huge contrast in reading time. Kinda disturbing. Why? Why one book drew me in, and another did not? Complicated answer: plot structure, issues with protagonist passivity, obfuscation, one is a story, the other… a fog. But don’t really care about that. Not this time. No, this time, care about WONDER. Big difference in WONDER with these two books. Soldier of Mist: no wonder, no curiosity, no transcendence. Protagonist Latro meets a beautiful nymph in the woods. “Hi. Wanna make out?” he says. More or less. Meets the goddess DEMETER in her temple: “Hi. Wanna make out?” Where’s the wonder, where’s the awe? This is intentional, to ground mythology, strip its mythos, transmute into grittier reality. But why? To what end? Transmute Gold into Lead. Success doesn’t look like success, looks like failure. Then I read Tiamat’s Wrath. Great contrast in wonder. Like cloudy sky to infinite blue. One sky tells us to hide, hunker down. The other beckons, promises adventure. Want to go explore. In final two books, we explore. Who are the Protomolecule Engineers? Who are their adversaries? How do they function? What do they want? Mysteries. Fun to explore: A solar system, with no planets but a giant diamond. A history gem? Library of the ancients? Crystallized consciousness? Yes. Or a neutron star, nearly brimming over. On the cusp of collapse. A whisper, a breath, an iota more, then devastation. Ponder the beings with such Physical mastery. Like Gods - or Demons. Or creatures moving through the void. Shadows stalking like lions through electric and magnetic fields, rending ships and people. How do we stop them? First, we must know how they do it. To conquer, first you understand. And once you understand, do you still wish to conquer? So science and peace are brothers. All this Wonder is like a Bedouin cistern, unsealed before a wanderer’s thirst. Disturbing to discover I had become so parched. Makes me think. Where did all the Wonder go? Is it age? A factor, yes, but prosaic. What else? Many contributors, many thieves. But I’m thinking… social media, internet. It can entertain, educate, enlighten even. But can it inspire? Can it draw forth Wonder? I posit no, it cannot. Content, a problem. Mostly low effort, low density of quality per consumption. Like candy. Easy to consume, minimal nutrition. Sometimes even negative nutrition. But more than that, a flaw inherent in the medium, in delivery of content. Tiny visual screens, weak audio drivers, no smell, no touch, no taste, flat prioriception. Delivery of information without experience of information. Like a prisoner looking out his barred window. Prison negative connotations but prison feels safe. Prison cell a controlled environment. But Wonder comes from being surrounded by frightening novelty: standing on the Moon, not looking at it through an eyepiece. Such is provenance and pursuit of skilled story-telling. Tricks your brain, displaces the senses. Simulation constructed of and perceived through linguistic interface, transports you to a new time, new place, into new minds. S.A. Corey, that two-headed beast, is a skilled story-teller. Drama, yes. Suspense, yes. Conflict, yes. But those are easy, cheap, and therefore common. Wonder is rare and priceless and, at the summit of our vertiginous being, it is everything. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 21, 2022
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Jun 21, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0812558154
| 9780812558159
| 0812558154
| 3.94
| 3,842
| 1986
| Jan 01, 1987
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it was ok
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In creative writing, we have these words or phrases that we call “distance words” because they create distance between the reader and the narrative. U
In creative writing, we have these words or phrases that we call “distance words” because they create distance between the reader and the narrative. Usually “distance words” are sensory words, but they can also be words related to mental or emotional states. For example, “I believe tacos are tasty” unnecessarily begins with “I believe.” I could, rather, write “Tacos are tasty” and the fact of it being my belief/opinion is implicit. As another example, I might write, “Bob stood on top of the cliff and looked out. He saw a wave of red-eyed bugs swarming toward him.” The “looked out” and especially the “he saw” are distance words/phrasing. I can instead write, “A wave of red-eyed bugs swarmed towards Bob’s position on top of the cliff.” This is not just a matter of concision, though that is a great boon. Fiction that’s poorly written with too much distance phrasing feels artificial; readers can struggle with empathizing with the characters or losing themselves in the story. The same result can occur from certain structures. H.P. Lovecraft, for example, loved using Frame Narratives. The first-hand witness rarely narrates his tales; it’s always like, my neighbor told me this story, which the sheriff told him. You might argue that such framing is necessary, given the actual first-hand witnesses usually end up insane or dead. You’d be wrong. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, a character narrating a story (even in past tense) does not imply that character is narrating from some future point and therefore must be alive / sane. Now I actually like HP Lovecraft, but that’s IN SPITE of the Frame Narrative. Because I DESPISE frame narratives. Reading a Frame Narrative feels, to me at least, like watching other people play sports. Or watching other people play video games. Or reading other people’s plot summaries. Or watching a cooking show. I find all of these mind-numbingly boring. I want to play the sports and the video game and discover the plot and do the cooking MYSELF. I don’t want to be a passive spectator watching some other person do the thing. I want to spend my life DOING stuff. Now, getting to the point, I love Gene Wolfe’s New Sun quartet. In my review, I wrote that I could call no other sci-fi book its superior. Soldier of Mist shares a lot of commonalities with those books: they’re complex hero journeys that can be hard to follow, in part because the word usage is highly colloquial, in the sense that they use the words their society might use, not the words we would use. For example, in these books set in Ancient Greece, protagonist Latro (and others) use the phrase “Rope-Makers” for the Spartans and call the city of Athens the city of “Thought.” I love complexity, and I love authenticity. Too much of our media is designed for the lowest common denominator, and I feel myself getting dumber every year. So I SHOULD like Soldier of Mist. UNFORTUNATELY, Soldier of Mist is a frame narrative. Latro, the protagonist, loses his memory every day, so he writes his experiences on a scroll. The book we’re reading therefore is not actually Latro’s experiences. It’s the scroll. It’d be like, in the film Memento, if the camera didn’t exist outside of Guy Pearce’s character’s perspective. Rather, this would be like if his character wrote a script about his own life, and that’s the movie we got. …which, okay, actually that sounds kinda cool, like Adaptation with a dash of amnesia, But here, in Soldier of Mist? Not so interesting. Here, we get a lot of annoying repetition. Every other chapter, Latro tells us that he has lost his memory and therefore he must write in his scroll every day. And oh who’s this slave girl, Io? Sure, Latro, summarize what she told you about your relationships and your quest, for the umpteenth time. But worse, it just completely drains any tension from the narrative. It’s not just that we know Latro will survive anything we’re reading about. That would be obvious anyway. It’s that, subconsciously, there’s no immediacy. It’s the difference between hearing someone talk about seeing a ghost in a creepy old abandoned house… and being in that creepy old house yourself and thinking you see a ghost. No comparison. Mild amusement vs haunted. So SIGH. I’ve been trying to read these first two books for like four months. I did finish the first one and start on the second (Soldier of Arete). And I can SEE the brilliance in them. Like I’m watching some master chef on a cooking show and I can SEE the brilliance and skill. But what does that have to do with me? Without any cognitive or emotional engagement, it might as well all be happening on some distant alien planet, a million light years away. So it is with Soldier of Mist. This unnecessary gimmick of having Latro narrate to us via a scroll more or less killed my engagement. Also, it doesn’t help that Latro’s loss of memory causes him to lose any real agency as a character. At its simplest, the story is about a violent, mentally handicapped man being led around by a series of baby-sitters. That some are DIVINE babysitters doesn’t change this fundamental dynamic. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 18, 2022
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Jun 18, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1250768721
| 9781250768728
| 1250768721
| 4.11
| 17,920
| Nov 16, 2021
| Nov 16, 2021
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it was amazing
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Elder Race is a glorious specimen of the Scientia Ficta species; it is a Platonic Ideal of the Science Fiction novella. So I’m a sort of sci-fi alchemi Elder Race is a glorious specimen of the Scientia Ficta species; it is a Platonic Ideal of the Science Fiction novella. So I’m a sort of sci-fi alchemist, seeking in my reviews to distill science fiction down to its purest essence. A frivolous pursuit perhaps, but I believe that seeking and understanding ground truths is the foundation for all personal and cultural growth. So, if I’m going to read and review sci-fi, then I want to know, What is science fiction? What is its essence? In general, sci-fi has a huge emphasis on technology, such that in many people’s minds, the essence of science fiction is laser swords and rocket ships, much like the essence of fantasy is knights and wizards and dragons, while books without either are something else. But - and this is a major theme of the Elder Race - technology is really just nature, captured in some cultural framework. Is the sun a piece of technology? Probably not. But a fusion reactor is. Why? Because a fusion reactor is controlled to serve some cultural purpose. So science fiction - even hard sci-fi - isn’t really about technology or science. It’s about the relationship between technology and culture. What types of cultures create what technologies? And then, once created, how does that technology change that culture? Which is why Harry Potter - which often explores the relationship between magic and magician culture - is more sci-fi than Star Wars, which focuses more on the heroic adventure. So I consider Elder Race the ideal science-fiction story because this technology-culture relationship forms the very core of the protagonists' interactions: It’s a split narrative, told from two perspectives, the first of Lynesse the princess from a human colony that’s technologically and culturally regressed into a medieval state. The second perspective is that of Elder Nyr, an anthropologist from a second-wave of space exploration sent out to study the first-wave of human colonization. The two meet because the princess seeks the help of Elder Nyr (a “sorcerer” in her mind) in dealing with the threat of a “demon” invasion. The princess’s narrative is fine, but it’s the anthropologist’s perspective that makes this tale. It’s so rich, with so many wonderful layers. Nyr’s primary conflict is that, as an anthropologist, he doesn’t want to interfere with the culture that he’s observing. That he did so in the past (and that he does so now) is a huge regret for him. So he tries to play his role as a “sorcerer” without contaminating the culture with his own perspectives. But he’s incredibly depressed and lonely and often wonders why he even bothers. Who will even read his anthropological reports? From what he can tell, everyone on the original Earth is dead. They haven’t contacted him in centuries. So he’s constantly activating a mental system called DCS that allows him to distance himself from his own feelings, to avoid being paralyzed by anxiety and depression. But - and this is a minor spoiler - he does eventually reach a point at which he’s had enough and just wants to tell Lynesse the truth of it all. And the chapter that follows is simply awesome. It offers side-by-side paragraphs. One is in Elder Nyr’s “language” while the other is Lynesse’s “language.” Both English of course but, for example, Elder Nyr’s “Your ancestors came from outer space on generation arks” gets translated into “Your people came from boats that sailed the sea of stars.” And that’s the cultural framework I’m talking about. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but I now find that misses the mark. It’s not about ‘sufficiently advanced’ but rather ‘sufficiently inexplicable.’ If I use that definition of magic, then Elder Race contains not just the joys of linguistics and psychology, but even a bit of magic too. Unequivocal recommendation. Simply a delightful reading experience. ...more |
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| 3.60
| 216,091
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| Jun 30, 1992
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A good book is like a Trojan horse. And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf. Rather, I mean a good book must function A good book is like a Trojan horse. And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf. Rather, I mean a good book must function like a Trojan horse. It needs some exterior elements that make us want to open the gates of our minds and invite it in. An interesting plot. Some thrill. Some suspense. A character or two to root for. Humor works too. Maybe great worldbuilding. Even unique voice can sometimes do it. Y’know, something that makes the novel FUN and ENJOYABLE to read. But once the novel has gotten inside, it needs to deploy some hidden depths. Maybe a critique of free will. Or an exploration of non-standard pathologies. Or an analysis of the self-destructive nature of imperialism. Something that makes the novel WORTH reading, something to challenge and expand the reader’s mind. If a novel fails at either task, then it’s not worth reading. Which, unfortunately, includes most novels. It’s challenging to find an author with both skillsets. Philip K. Dick is one such author. But Man in the High Castle is not one such book. I don’t want to say that Man in the High Castle has no plot. It does. Stuff happens. Characters have arcs. But none of it is compelling or interesting. Which isn’t surprising, given what we know about how PKD developed this book’s plot. Famously, he was guided by the I Ching (aka fortune-telling). To give him credit, here’s exactly what he wrote: “I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book.” The characters cast the I Ching maybe 10 times throughout the whole book? And of course PKD used his writerly skills to translate the vague lines into plot. In a D&D game, the dice rolls don’t create the story, the DM (and players) do. So I don’t think it’d be fair to say the plot was written randomly. But I do think the mere fact that he opted to use the I Ching AT ALL tells us something about whether PKD had a strong plot in mind when crafting this book. Obviously, he didn’t. Or he wouldn’t have used the I Ching, right? And it shows. There’s 4 or 5 points of view, and there’s some ostensible connections between them. But for the most part, they don’t intersect.. Neither are the character arcs themselves particularly dynamic. That much for the entertaining exterior. But what about the book’s hidden depths? Not particularly good either. As I cited in my review of his Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, PKD is interested in two questions: “what is real?” and “what constitutes the authentic human being?” In other words, ontology. Does Man in the High Castle help us answer these questions? No more than, say, Lord of the Rings does. Because while, yes, this book takes place in an alternate history in which the Axis won WW2, it contains the least explicit and implicit exploration of ontology of any PKD book I’ve read. Probably why it won the Hugo - because it’s one of his simplest and least strange books. So the book isn’t terrible. There’s some good lines. I enjoyed the characters’ musings on race and the cognitive dissonant racism that many characters have toward their Japanese conquerors. The overall alternative history conceit is cool. It’s just, every other PKD book I’ve read is better than this one. So… yeah. Go read one of them instead. Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, etc. ...more |
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| 0756402514
| 3.92
| 10,393
| Feb 01, 1994
| Dec 07, 2004
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it was ok
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I should've read the negative reviews. This book - which I read almost right after my (failed) attempt to read Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy - has led m I should've read the negative reviews. This book - which I read almost right after my (failed) attempt to read Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy - has led me to two important realizations: #1: Female sci-fi + fantasy authors tend to have a much greater amount of interiority (e.g. internal monologue / narration) than do male authors. #2: I hate excess internal narration. Don't get me wrong. I agree with Socrates/Plato, who wrote "the unexamined life is not worth living", though I would clarify it as something like, "The unexamined life is a life followed, not a life chosen." So I believe human beings who don't maintain a healthy internal dialogue with themselves are, if not stupid, at least mostly drone-like. But there's a marked difference between healthy introspection and a neurotic spiral of nth-order thinking about thinking about thinking. And it's my experience that any writing style that heavily relies on internal narration falls into the latter. It's always neurotic internal narration. It's always thinking that arrests rather than galvanizes action. I'd even go so far as to claim that too much internal dialogue represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing/novel medium. It's TELLING the reader the character's thoughts instead of SHOWING us the thoughts by action, voice, and description. And being told, instead of being shown, is boring. Which is my also my summary: boring. Book starts off great but then falls into this morass of internal thoughts of a diplomat who's actually terrible at being a diplomat. Incompetence is tedious in the best circumstances. Here, trapped in the thoughts of the incompetent, it's just plain awful. ...more |
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| 4.12
| 9,030
| May 1980
| Feb 29, 2000
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Essentially, pure science fiction. It's about how life might arise on the surface of a neutron star and how that civilization might evolve. That's it. Essentially, pure science fiction. It's about how life might arise on the surface of a neutron star and how that civilization might evolve. That's it. The end. It doesn't arbitrarily shoehorn in modern elements of the political conversation. It doesn't try to wax poetical with lyrical prose. Hell, it doesn't really even have character arcs in the typical sense. Nor much suspense, for that matter. It's been called hard sci-fi, but I can't say I agree, at least not in the sense of "hard" sci-fi being "hard to understand." I don't think there's any explicit math and a minimum of explicit science. Rather we might say it's all "based on science." Overall, I give it 3 stars, simply because this is not the first book I've read that follows the evolution of an alien civilization. My favorite sci-fi author - Greg Egan - has several books (Incandescence, Diaspora, Orthogonal Series) that do much the same. Compared to those books, Dragon's Egg is like a child's crayon drawing compared to a van Gogh painting. Or, perhaps a better analogy, is that Dragon's Egg feels like the cliff-notes version, whereas Egan gets into the scientific, social, and mathematical nitty-gritty detail. That said, my experience is that an extremely limited number of people can appreciate an Egan book. This one, while still more difficult than your average novel, is vastly more approachable and therefore much more appropriate for your typical sci-fi reader. It's not about what you're capable of understanding, though; it's about what you're capable of enjoying. Not everyone - even if they understand it - enjoys a book that is heavy on technical detail. If that's you, Dragon's Egg might be the better read. ...more |
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| Mar 1996
| Apr 2015
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it was ok
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Didn't finish this one. In my original review of book one, I had three main criticisms: inorganic romance that felt forced and undeveloped, too much in Didn't finish this one. In my original review of book one, I had three main criticisms: inorganic romance that felt forced and undeveloped, too much interiority that led to glacial pacing, and a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy that led to Fitz being best understood as a gestapo-in-grooming. But I pushed on to this one until I encountered all three issues back-to-back-to-back. And that was all she wrote. This is one of those books that simply fails for people who strongly skew non-conformist. It really only works if you buy into the sympathetic perspective the author pushes for Fitz. But I'm a non-conformist, and I don't. It's not enough to claim there's a romance. It's not enough to claim Fitz is largely virtuous. I need it shown and proven. I need to be able, with my own cognizance, to decide that Fitz is virtuous. But he isn't. He's a spineless lapdog of a corrupt monarchy. ...more |
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| 9780553573398
| 055357339X
| 4.18
| 335,721
| May 1995
| Mar 01, 1996
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it was ok
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In a word, underwhelming. When I originally drafted this review, I launched into a detailed technical explanation, but the book has so many problems th In a word, underwhelming. When I originally drafted this review, I launched into a detailed technical explanation, but the book has so many problems that the explanation grew into a behemoth. And I wasn’t being picky either. I’m talking fundamental Creative Writing 101 stuff here: the setting is a feudal, patriarchal, iron-age pseudo-England with a hereditary monarchy. It could not be more generic. The major external threat (the “red ships”) never gets a single scene, while Fitz’s primary romantic relationship is also largely developed via summary. In other words, basic issues with show vs. tell. Fitz’s lack of any concrete desires or goals compounds with overmuch interiority to kill the pacing. Indeed, a general excess of passivity and even incompetence drags the story like a broken anchor. Certainly I expected more than ZERO assassinations from the Assassin’s Apprentice. Not to mention that, if you take a step back out of Fitz’s narrow perspective and ponder the plot and these characters in a larger sense, you realize that Fitz is actually a villainous character, being trained as a sort of KGB agent to prop up a failed, corrupt government, thereby prolonging the suffering of all its citizens. Loyalty to corruption is not a virtue but a vice. But I decided none of that matters. Not really. It misses the forest for the trees. What really matters is the end result, the overall effect these problems and this story creates. The book’s zeitgeist, if you will. Now I don’t want to claim you can’t enjoy this story. Clearly a lot of people do. Hell, I did enough to carry on to the next book. But even in positive reviews, you can find a common thread, which is an admission that this is a rather bleak book. None of the reviews, however, used the word that I think best captures the book’s mood: joyless. By that, I mean it lacks that spark of wonder I consider the keystone of speculative fiction. You can argue about fantasy vs sci-fi and all that but what unifies them both - and contrasts them with a genre like Magical Realism - is an electric thread of wonder, this imagination of what might be or could be or will be. With one exception, this book lacks that wonder. There are positive emotions and positive elements - but never joy, never the spark of wonder. Not just because of the content but because of the narrative structure. For example, Fitz’s is a childhood with few friends - but even that wild gang of street children who might be called friends gets few (if any) actual scenes. It gets a summarized montage. That’s standard modus operandi for this book: summarize the happy events, but explore the unhappy ones in lovingly detailed scenes. Even the one truly wondrous element of this book - a magic "system" (sarcasm air-quotes) called the Wit that allows Fitz to communicate with animals - gets turned into a weapon. It’s treated as a shameful thing and the animals that Fitz bonds with are used by the author as plot elements (what my writing partner used to call “sacrificial lambs”) to generate conflict and pathos. The entire exercise feels like a missed opportunity. We have a book in a genre that is peak wonder set in that time in the character’s life - childhood - that is also peak wonder. You’d think such a book would have at least SOME light, SOME spark. But it doesn’t. I’m not asking for Chronicles of Narnia, I’m not saying this should be a children’s book. Stephen King’s IT, for example, is definitely not a children’s book, yet its exploration of childhood is glorious with wonder, even in the midst of abject horror. Ultimately, Assassin’s Apprentice reminds me of The Goblin Emperor, which is also mostly at court and mostly dealing with court intrigue and mostly focused on interiority. But the kindness in SOME (not all, doesn’t need to be all) characters in The Goblin Emperor gave it that spark of warmth and wonder that I keep talking about. As a result, I compared that book to a warm chocolate cake, drizzled with caramel, with a side of slowly melting ice cream. If I were to compare Assassin’s Apprentice to a food, I’d say it’s similar to plain white rice. It’s a decent meal, it’s certainly edible, even nutritious. But that’s all it is, it’s not a meal worth savoring, not a meal that will remind you of the wonder of childhood, when so many meals promised new horizons of flavor and experience. Or, in a word, underwhelming. ...more |
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| 0575105712
| 9780575105713
| 0575105712
| 3.96
| 914
| Aug 26, 2012
| Aug 26, 2012
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| 4.07
| 735
| Nov 21, 2013
| Aug 05, 2014
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really liked it
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I time-traveled once. Literally, if not quite in the Hollywood sense of whirring machines and flashing lights. One day, while I was teaching, I travel
I time-traveled once. Literally, if not quite in the Hollywood sense of whirring machines and flashing lights. One day, while I was teaching, I traveled back in time about two hours. Smoothly, with no sensorial discontinuity (I wasn’t in the middle of talking or anything like that). The mechanical watch I had with me broke - which may lead the more skeptical to believe I merely lost track of time. Except my notebook, filled with detailed notes and time-stamped records of these past two hours, had traveled with me. Surprised, I queried my students if the same had happened to them. It hadn’t, and they thought I was joking. It’s an irony - I won’t say strange one because it’s obvious in hindsight - that arguably the most interesting thing that will ever happen in my life also turned out to be one of the dullest. I had to repeat those same two hours (while of course only being paid for them once), which weren’t particularly exciting the first time around. I of course tried to use my foreknowledge to improve my teaching. I already knew *exactly* where my students would stumble, the questions they would ask, the problems they would miss. But I was able to change very little. Which, if you have much experience teaching, should not be too surprising. First of all, a veteran teacher already knows the problems and ideas that different types of minds will struggle with. Changing the probability from 90% to 100% doesn’t do much. Second, teaching is not about transmitting knowledge from teacher to student, it’s about guiding the student into their own understanding. Minds are built from the inside-out. So what if I know the questions they ask? Answering them before they ask actually hurts their learning process by short-circuiting their own involvement in the process. But I digress. My primary point is that knowledge plays a much smaller role in both personal and civilization-level advancement than most people credit. To some, knowledge is literally the ONLY metric of advancement. But, short of a definition of knowledge so wide as to be universal, this simply isn’t the case. Take climate change for example. We already possess the scientific and technical know-how to reduce our carbon emissions. Solar power is already more cost-efficient than any other form of large-scale power generation. Extremely good electric and hybrid cars exist. But we lack the political and economical will, discipline, and maturity to evolve our electrical habits, both personal and communal. This third and final book in the Orthogonal trilogy is in large part about this question of knowledge’s power, especially knowledge from the future. Thanks to the special physics of the Orthogonal universe, the engineers of the Mountain develop a camera that can see light from the future. Which they shortly use to develop a messaging system able to receive messages from their future selves. Thus is the core conflict of Arrows of Time. Half of the citizens of the mountain strongly oppose such a system, for they believe it will have detrimental effects to their psychology and sense of free will [see Ted Chiang’s short story “What’s Expected of Us” for a short but incisive take on this]. The other half believe these messages from their future could prove pivotal to the survival of their mission. After all, couldn’t they receive a warning about a near-miss from a meteor strike, thus precipitating a course change that will make that near-miss (as opposed to being struck) a reality? As that last question presages, any time you deal with time travel and fore-knowledge, you’ll swiftly find yourself in the Swamp of Destiny (and free will and determinism and etc), and Egan does not shy away. Of course he doesn’t, he’s Greg Egan! In fact, he double-downs; another big chunk of the book involves a journey to a planet from the orthogonal cluster - that is a planet whose ‘arrow of time’ (i.e. entropy direction) is flipped from theirs. If you’ve ever seen the film Tenet, it’s basically that, with better science and consistency. If you haven’t then strange things happen like dust from the planet gets into their spaceship BEFORE it even lands on the planet (because from the “perspective” of the planet and its dust, the ship isn’t landing… but leaving). I won’t pretend a super clear understanding of the physics explored in this book. My own personal intuition is that interaction between matter with opposing arrows of time would result in mutual annihilation, like in a matter-antimatter reaction. Indeed in some Formalisms (Feynman/Wheeler’s as opposed to the more popular Hamiltonian), anti-matter IS time-reversed matter. But in this book and in more popular physics, this symmetry is rejected. Anti-matter and time-reversed matter are different. Overall, I found this third book the most satisfying and Egan-like. The first book suffers because large chunks of it must be spent exploring the mundane realities of the Orthogonal universe and the civilization that we’re following. Yalda - the protagonist of the first book - does science not because she has some end-goal or purpose but simply out of curiosity. This makes it inherently less dramatic and interesting than the scientific explorations of these latter two books, in which science must save their entire civilization or fix some more immediate problem (such as women dying in order to give birth). What’s more, the science of the first book is elementary in nature - the most basic ideas of atoms/electrons (“luxagens”) and light. Different in the Orthogonal universe and thus harder to understand but still ultimately at the high-school chemistry/physics level. Whereas the science in this last book is more cutting edge, more speculative and therefore interesting, to me at least. Even so, even though I did like this third book best, I wouldn’t change any of what I wrote in my review of the first book. The whole series is still an astounding creation, a display of genius so far beyond the achievements of most sci-fi authors as to render Egan’s books a genre of their own. But for that same reason, they’re also incredibly niche. Just look at the reviews here on GR: how many demonstrate a technical appreciation or comprehension of the Orthogonal universe? So my conclusion is much the same. Read it, if everything I’ve written sounds like something enjoyable, but also understand that the process of reading an Egan differs greatly from the process of reading most novels. You shouldn’t expect to easily and clearly understand every sentence, diagram, and idea. But you don’t need to, either. Instead, I’ve come to consider Egan a sort of Scientific Shakespeare. Just as I can appreciate the beauty and lyricism of the Bard’s writing without perfectly understanding every single line, so too can I enjoy the beauty and lyricism of Egan’s science, even when I’ve become lost, like an Alice in Scienceland. ...more |
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| 0575095113
| 9780575095113
| 0575095113
| 3.65
| 2,257
| Jun 21, 2011
| Sep 15, 2011
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liked it
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I’m fascinated by the celebrity of painting. Most children leave elementary school able to recognize names like Van Gogh or Da Vinci but are wholly un
I’m fascinated by the celebrity of painting. Most children leave elementary school able to recognize names like Van Gogh or Da Vinci but are wholly unfamiliar with other names like Faraday, Turing, Laozi, Kant, Saladin, Tolkien, or so on and so forth. Why is that? What is the obsession with Renaissance-era painters to explain this disconnect between their relatively minute historical importance and their fame? I’m sure I don’t know the answer, but in many ways it mirrors the personal experience of viewing a painting. For the average person, there’s… really not much to it. Of all aesthetic experiences, I believe painting possesses the largest disparity between the creating and viewing experiences. Take even the most famous paintings - Starry Night or the Scream or the Mona Lisa - and how long will your average person linger in front of it at a museum? A minute? Nope. For the Mona Lisa, it’s an average of 15 seconds. Ultimately, paintings don’t offer much interactivity. They don’t have much content, visual or otherwise. I doubt I’m alone in finding painting museums boring. And yet I can still appreciate these works’ artistic heft, the weight of effort that went into their creation. The artist’s entire life, the thousands of paintings to finally reach masterpiece level. Those are my feelings, more or less, towards Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy. What literally god-like genius must it take to imagine a universe with physics radically different than our own, populate it with a suitable intelligent life, and then chart a course for how that life will discover and manipulate the laws of the universe around them. And Egan does that! It’s got competing theories, political factions pushing their own theories, cross-discipline paradigm shifts as a result of breakthroughs, dead end ideas… and sometimes those dead ends make a comeback to turn out to be the correct theory! It is genius. I cannot overstate that. It is genius. I’ve read sci-fi with alien species, of course, and alternate dimensions and such. But they have ALWAYS been primarily qualitative, never quantitative to any real degree. Most science fiction is really just futuristic fantasy. Greg Egan puts the science back in science fiction. BUT - and this is a big BUT - the actual experience of reading the Orthogonal trilogy is awkward and dissatisfying. At this point, I’ve read almost every novel Egan has written. Except for his out-of-print debut novel, Orthogonal trilogy are my last three. So I know well Egan’s modus operandi. Basically, he writes science thrillers: a civilization-level catastrophe occurs or looms - vacuum decay in Schild’s Ladder, a quantum rewriting virus in Terenesia, a drought in Dichronauts, etc - and in response, science must save the day! Which essentially means the protagonists must better understand the universe because what is science but the process of understanding? His early novels - Quarantine in 1992 up to Schild’s Ladder in 2002 - take place in our universe and feature human or post-human protagonists. Incandescence in 2008 bridges his early and later novels, as it is set in our universe and one of the protagonists is post-human BUT the other is quite alien. Then his most recent novels - this Orthogonal trilogy in 2011 and Dichronauts in 2017 - not only feature non-humanoid protagonists… they’re also set in entirely different universes, with different laws of physics! Orthogonal’s physics change is small but fundamental: In our universe, in the ‘metric’ of GR’s spacetime, we treat space distances as positive but time distances as negative. If you’ve ever encountered time dilation in your sci-fi or studies, then you know what this negative sign means: travelers moving at extreme speeds will age LESS than those who do NOT take detours through time. In the Orthogonal universe, time distance is ALSO positive, which means time dilation occurs in the opposite direction: the travelers will age much MORE than those who remain at home. This is, in fact, the core plot, though it takes like half of the first book (which is otherwise rather boring milieu / slice-of-life stuff) to get there: The (essentially) anti-matter half of the Orthogonal’s universe has looped back around and will soon collide with the normal matter half. In order to avert this cosmic catastrophe, the protagonists launch a generational ship travelling at extreme speeds so that its travelers can improve the state of their science, come up with some way to save the rest of the civilization, and eventually turn around and do so. So Egan’s standard MO of a science thriller, which I quite enjoy. The problem is that the small alteration of a negative to positive sign in the metric doesn’t just invert time dilation, it changes EVERYTHING. No universal light speed, so stars in the night sky are no longer pinpricks of light but rainbows. And the release of light actually INCREASES energy, so plants/crops now emit light, rather than absorb it. And so on and so forth. It changes so much that I don’t even know what it changes. For example, I’m almost done with book two at the point of writing this review, and the scientists have just about discovered Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (aka degeneracy pressure) to help explain why gravity doesn’t turn ALL solids into black holes. But I’m like… is PEP even valid anymore? And there wouldn’t really be ‘black holes’ would there? There could be gravity wells that only trap SOME of the colors of light but not others. And… sigh… I really don’t have the time, energy, or expertise to explore a new physics rabbit-hole every other page. Which breaks the reading experience of a science mystery/thriller. The way thrillers - and most other genres - work is by generating expectations. Consciously or not, the reader makes guesses about what’s going to happen next and feels compelled to keep reading to discover how those guesses match up with reality. That’s part of what makes humans more intelligent than other animals - our hypothesis engine. But how can you make expectations when dealing with a universe SO UTTERLY ALIEN to our own? Like HALF of this book is science explanations, but they’re largely opaque even to a science freak like me because I have no idea which assumptions/knowledge I’m allowed to employ in understanding them. In my Diaspora review, I referenced a strange sadness, in which I considered it one of the greatest sci-fi books I’ve ever read but would recommend it to almost no one. Orthogonal is even worse. This review saddens and disquiets me. The books are an incredible work of genius. Truly, truly genius. But I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone I know, not even myself. The one optimism I have to cheer me up, though, is the thought that Egan might well go the way of van Gogh: obscure and unappreciated in his own time. But a future, more capable, more enlightened humanity will better able to understand and appreciate his accomplishment. So cheers! Here’s to hoping we overcome our own planetary catastrophe and make it that far. ...more |
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| 0061057274
| 0061057274
| 3.86
| 2,655
| 1995
| Feb 1998
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really liked it
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I love the idea that we live in a simulation. Problem is, it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about it. Experience has taught me that when I wri
I love the idea that we live in a simulation. Problem is, it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about it. Experience has taught me that when I write/say, “our universe is a simulation,” other people’s minds go to a much different (and sillier) place than mine. They tend to picture a giant row of supercomputers - or maybe even a planetary computer - and think, “Ah, our universe is being run as software on something like that.” And to be completely fair, it’s kinda like, well what else does it mean that our universe is a simulation? But when I use that phrase, what I really mean is something like, “If I were to design a simulated universe to achieve some aim, it would look remarkably similar to ours.” For example: 1] Classical computer architecture use several data highways (called a ‘bus’) that handle data transfer between the computer’s different parts. For example, the FSB (Front-side Bus) controls data transfer between the CPU and the memory. It’s extremely important that all these elements maintain synchronicity with each other. While the CPU and memory can (and do) run faster than the FSB, the bus-speed is the speed limit of any data transfer between the two. The universe also has a speed limit of information transfer between different systems: the speed of light. Which is important, just as it is with the system bus. A universe without a constant speed for information transfer would have serious problems with synchronicity and causality. 2] Graphical rendering engines all have various techniques to deal with changing Level-Of-Detail (LOD). For example, if the camera/player is close to trees, those trees might be rendered in full detail with a million polygons. If, however, the trees are very far away, they might be rendered as a “billboard” - a 2d picture - with no geometry whatsoever. Engines do this in order to lessen computational workloads. If the trees are so far away that the player can’t even tell the difference between a simple billboard and fully rendered geometry… then why tax the system with unnecessary rendering? Likewise, one of the enduring problems of quantum mechanics is that the universe appears to obey different rules at different scales, and we struggle to understand this quantum-classical boundary. Why is it that electrons obey quantum superposition - they exist in multiple locations simultaneously - but that macroscopic objects, like a computer screen or a table, do not? Well, if you start from the assumption that the universe is a simulation, such a boundary makes perfect sense in terms of LOD. If the universe follows a path of maximal computational efficiency (either because it was designed that way or because extrema are naturally more stable), you would want to render objects only at an observable LOD. It would be far too computationally intensive to fully render every quantum particle in the universe. Indeed, at that point, you don’t really have a “simulation.” You just have… the universe. Instead, you would just render at the LOD to match the perspective of some set of privileged observers. 3] Computer systems have a maximum rendering thoroughput. For example, the new PS5 has a teraflop rating of 10.28. That means it can perform 10.28 trillion math operations per second. So let’s say you’re playing a game and you’re doing something graphically simple, like sitting in a large plain room. The geometry, effects, etc might demand only .17 trillion operations per frame. Since the PS5 can do 10.28 trillion per second, it’s able to render about 60 frames per second. But suppose you filled your virtual room with objects and explosions and wild physics. Now the various rendering systems demand 1.3 trillion operations per frame. By the same calculation, the PS5 can only render 10 frames per second. In other words, time is relative between you - sitting outside the tv/computer system - and the simulated scene within the computer. The more complex the scene, the greater the time dilation. That is similar to how time works in our universe too. If you compare a clock near an area with a high energy density, such as a neutron star or a black hole or even the Earth, with a clock near an area with low energy density, you’ll find that clocks in high density areas run more slowly. And so on and so forth. But, um, yeah, I should probably get to the actual book review: You’ll note, throughout the above discussion, I was rather God-agnostic. Accepting the universe as a simulation has minimal relation to religion. It might speak to the Intelligent Designer’s method - or it might just be that stability and computational efficiency naturally go hand-in-hand. Regardless, in Distress, the universe SHOULD be thought of in terms of informational topology, designed by and driven toward an Omega Point. The Omega Point, if you’re ignorant of the term, takes a view opposite of the Deist’s: God did not create the universe so much as the universe creates God. In Distress, this Omega Point is the first being to grasp a coherent, consistent Theory of Everything, a physics theory that unifies all scales. That’s basically the setting: a journalist goes to a newly grown island-nation (created by stolen biotechnology) in order to cover a physics conference in which some prominent physicists present and discuss their new Theories of Everything. What follows is a lot of religious, scientific, and political shenanigans. Honestly, I found that core narrative and core sci-fi conceit relatively lackluster. Not terrible but not up to Egan’s best. I sometimes talk about Egan novels having a “super Egan mode” in which he fully embraces his book’s main sci-fi conceit and goes wild. Never happens here. But - moreso than any other Egan novel - this book has some of my favorite discussions. I’ve always maintained that Egan, despite being a hard sci-fi writer, has great insight into humanity, and this novel demonstrates it. One of my favorite discussions involves a news-story the journalist covers, about a group of adults with mild autism, who wish to undergo brain surgery to make themselves MORE autistic. There’s just great line after great line in the whole discussion: What’s the most patronizing thing you can offer to do for people you disagree with, or don’t understand? […] Heal them.and What’s the most intellectually lazy way you can think of, to try to win an argument? […] To say your opponent lacks humanity.and Once there was a burgeoning ego, a growing sense of self in the foreground of every action, how was it prevented from overshadowing everything else? […] The answer is, evolution invented intimacy. Intimacy makes it possible to attach some, or all, of the compelling qualities associated with the ego - the model of the self - to models of other people. A pleasure reinforced by sex, but not restricted to the act, like orgasm. And not even restricted to sexual partners, in humans. Intimacy is just the belief - rewarded by the brain - that you know the people you live in almost the same fashion as you know yourself. My other favorite discussion occurs between the protagonist and a friend, worth quoting in its entirety: He said, “No one grows up. That’s one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don’t want to be in… and they make the best of it. But don’t try to tell me it’s some kind of … glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It’s not.” I don’t necessarily agree with all that, but the pragmatic and moral consequences of the conflict between acceptance and rebellion are something I’ve pondered a long time. Ever since I studied Nietzsche’s “will to power,” practically a direct refutation of Stoicism. Which is to say, I read in order to learn, to have my thoughts provoked, if not titillated. And in that respect, Distress has served this reader well. ...more |
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Jan 06, 2021
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Jan 06, 2021
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 4.28
| 94,714
| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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it was amazing
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Story-for-story, Ted Chiang is the most award-winning sci-fi writer of all time. No one else even comes close. Part of it is due to his simple, yet el Story-for-story, Ted Chiang is the most award-winning sci-fi writer of all time. No one else even comes close. Part of it is due to his simple, yet elegant writing style. Another part is due to his ability to take complex ideas and reframe them in a way that makes them easier to enjoy and understand. But I think his most important trait is that he doesn’t moralize. He has no interest in telling the reader WHAT conclusion to draw. Rather, his stories are arenas of thought, in which you are invited to challenge your thinking and draw your own conclusions. Like a good magician, Chiang provides the wonder but not the explanation. What follows are meant for post-reading ponderance. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate One part Arabian Nights, another part Canterbury Tales, a third part Back to The Future made for such a delightful cocktail. Time travel stories that concern themselves with the actual logic and causality of time travel invariably arrive at the same conclusion: Maintaining coherence in the face of backwards time travel requires the past to be immutable and destiny to be fixed. Such is the case here in Merchant and Alchemist’s Gate. As the Alchemist says, “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.” But Chiang (via the Merchant) makes the interesting point that even if you cannot alter the past, you can nevertheless alter your understanding of it. We have a tendency to learn from experience but to then place that experience in stasis in our memory. Yet, days or decades hence, we might revisit our memories and experiences and revise our understanding of them. Indeed, failure to do so is to risk ossification. I am reminded of perhaps the most important lesson I ever learned from literature, from Anne Rice’s Interview of a Vampire: How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value.To become fixated upon the past, to never revise your understanding of it but to instead worship at the Janusian altar of nostalgia and regret, is to voluntarily incarcerate yourself into such a madhouse. Exhalation One day I was bored, so I invented Erik's Law, connecting people running cars in parking lots to Fermi's Paradox. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is such an ugly name for what is, basically, the core flow of the universe: order goes to chaos. You can create local pockets of order, but you can only do so by stealing from another reservoir of order. In our case, that reservoir is mostly the sun. Eventually, though, there will be no more reservoirs and the Universe will know Heat Death. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize it’s a mistake to limit the 2nd Law to only large-scale non-intelligent systems. It can provide great insight into human affairs. The daily struggle to maintain a sense of peace, the cycle of fallen civilizations, climate change, Fermi’s paradox - it’s all related to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Unfortunately, the 2nd Law is wrapped up in all these technical terms - entropy, free energy, heat - that can make it hard to understand. That’s the genius of Exhalation: by reframing the 2nd Law in terms of air and air pressure, with a universe trapped in an air-tight dome, populated by robots whose brains are powered by air, Chiang grants novelty and clarity to the idea. The story ends on an optimistic note, as our robot-scientist narrator makes peace with the doom of his civilization. It’s a feeling that we are all going to become increasingly familiar with, as climate change continues to ramp up in the face of our ineffectual response. Many of us will liken it to the acceptance of our own individual deaths - we all know our time here is limited. This is just that, on the civilization level. The religious will, of course, embrace their doomsday prophecies and find comfort in those self-deceptions. Others will rage against the dying of the light, finding value and purpose in the struggle, even if it is futile. There is so much more to Exhalation, of course. The scientist dissecting his own brain to discover the secrets of the universe is a fun metaphor. And the realization that our “self” is not the brain or the body but rather a transient electro-chemical pattern contained within. And that line equating the Big Bang to a great initial Exhalation. Wonderful, wonderful. What's Expected of Us This very short story asks the question, “Is a belief in free will necessary for the functioning of society?” It’s not a philosophical question but rather a psychological one. Chiang answers this question with a massive YES. In the story, people are demonstrated the non-existence of free will with a simple device: a button that lights up BEFORE you press it. And try as they might, there’s no way around it. People can never fool it. Over-time this degrades everyone’s sense of responsibility and agency, such that large swathes of the population enter an apathetic malaise. The story’s solution - which comes in the form of a message from the future - is simply “pretend.” That’s where the story falls apart for me. It’s so Western-centric, embracing a strongly individualistic worldview in which every person is an island, ultimately isolated in the universe/ocean. But there is another solution, encoded in the famous Zen koan "What is the sound of a one-handed clap?": stop thinking of yourself as entirely separate from the world and universe around you. A button that lights up before I press it would prove no problem for me because I don’t consider that button as entirely separate from me. Yes, of course, I have a body distinguishable from that button - but it’s not so sharply different in terms of things like free will, determinism, electric and magnetic fields, flows of knowledge and entropy, the weft and weave of the Universe. So my view wouldn't simply be that I am pushing a button; rather, by doing so, I am freely participating in the pre-pushing powering of the light. That I am unable to push the button without also participating in the pre-pushing powering of the light represents no more a loss of my free will than does the fact that I cannot randomly decide to ignore gravity and leap into space. If you’re interested, I write in much greater depth about this view of free will in the bottom third of my Echopraxia review. Lifecycle of Software Objects In one of sci-fi’s most famous memes, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy involves a super AI whose answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” is the number “42.” But we might substitute that “42” with something like “to be happy” with minimal loss of vagueness. Douglas Adams didn’t do that because it’s too subtly absurd - too many people wouldn’t get the joke. I bring this up because I’m pretty sure our interactions with future AI will be similar: “Dear Oracle Super AI, how do we save the world from climate change?” CALCULATING… BEEP BOOP BEEP. ANSWER: “Stop using fossil fuels.” Oh, right. We already knew that. In fact, we already know the answers to most societal ills. It’s not the knowledge we lack. It’s the collective will and/or flexibility and/or selflessness to actually put that knowledge into practice. In a way, that’s what the Lifecycle of Software Objects is all about: how to create the holy grail of AI: a generalized human-esque intelligence. But as this story gets into… we don’t actually want that, do we? We want a generalized intelligence that is NOT human-esque, so we don’t have to give it human rights. We want one we can put to work in factories and banks and so on, without having to treat it as a human employee. We want intelligent slaves who won't object to their slavery. And if we did want a human-esque generalized AI? Well, why? We already have a human-esque generalized intelligence... humans, lol. If this more subtle, realistic approach to AI is new to you, you'll probably like this story more than I did. Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny Don’t take this story literally. That’s true of every Ted Chiang story, which are rich in allegory and metaphor, so I don’t know why I was so dead-set on reading this one literally. But I did, and I missed the point. In this story, a Victorian semi-mad scientist creates a mechanical automaton to serve as his child’s nanny. Years later, the son ends up doing something similar. But the story isn’t meant as a machine-version of Tarzan. Rather, it’s exploring the idea that the environment in which children are raised tends to become their preference. That’s where that old joke that people tend to marry their mother/father comes from. Or, less humorously, why so many children raised by abusive parents can end up with abusive partners too. More particularly to this topic, it asks us to consider the fact that today’s children are, at least in part, being raised by the “machines” of screens and social media. What will that mean for their future? Even before the pandemic, face-to-face interaction was already dwindling. I had a long running joke with my girlfriend that every time we went out to eat, you could always find a family or a set of friends who basically never interacted but instead looked at their phones for the entire meal. I only see this becoming increasingly common and emphasized. Lament it, if you will, but I’ve always believed in turning my face to the future and not the past. You can find cause for optimism in this change, if you want to. Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling This is one of my favorite stories in the collection, probably because it explores the role language and writing play in our human experience. And writing is a serious hobby of mine. Not just with these book reviews; I’ve also written two novels, probably about 30 short stories, countless essays. I even had a “writing apprentice,” who is now getting her masters in writing and working on her first book. So, yeah, big fan. I love that writing allows the writer to condense a lot of work and thought into an extremely rich piece of language. Like a precious gem. Or a depleted uranium round. There’s an impressive contrast between the time to create and the time to consume. A poem that might’ve taken 30 hours to construct can take less than a minute to read. Which is different than other uses of language, like conversation. For me, spoken conversation can be a pleasurable social activity but I tend to find it intellectually dissatisfying. But getting to the story: Truth-truth is a split narrative, one of which follows a native from a tribe with a strong oral tradition as he learns his letters from a Christian missionary… and how this learning changes him. That’s the part centered on language. The other (main) narrative is set in a future in which most people video-blog every moment of their lives. A journalist, who is a tech skeptic, decides to review a new update that allows easy instantaneous searching and access of this live-blogged history. “Siri, show me my 9th birthday.” Bam, done. Taken on its own, the main narrative is banal - the journalist discovers just how subjective and unreliable his memories are. Old news. I hope. But, combined, the two narratives provide sharp insight into our perception and usage of modern technology. Personally, I can be dismissive of those people who feel the need to post their every thought and experience on social media. Especially when they’re not even honest about it - when they edit those experiences to make them seem better than they are. This whole phenomenon has created a social media castle-in-the-sky that so very few of us will ever actually inhabit. That said, this story made me realize that, really, it’s old news too. Social media may have accelerated the trend, but written language itself often functions similarly. Cause written language is also a technology - we don’t always think of it as one but it certainly is. And it, too, alters our relationship with reality. Take this book review, for example. It’s highly edited. See in that second paragraph where I put, “So, yeah, big fan.” Wasn’t there in the first draft. I often edit in conversational beats like that in order to make my reviews more approachable. Couldn’t have done that if it were spoken language. And I think I’ll end the review here. Run out of steam, I’m afraid, so thoughts on the last three will simply have to remain a mystery. But I hope I’ve given anyone reading this some extra food for thought. ...more |
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Dec 31, 2020
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Nov 17, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 0553418629
| 9780553418620
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| 4.09
| 59,177
| Jun 16, 2015
| Mar 15, 2016
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really liked it
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When I was studying poetry, I attended a good number of poetry readings. Some were given by seasoned poets; others, by fresh MFA grads. The two experi
When I was studying poetry, I attended a good number of poetry readings. Some were given by seasoned poets; others, by fresh MFA grads. The two experiences are wildly different, as large a contrast as visiting DisneyWorld is from visiting the county fair. And it is the latter ones I came to prefer. The veterans’ readings were performative: they already knew where to pause, where to emphasize, where to stop and look at the audience. Maybe not consciously but it was there, ingrained from practice. By contrast, the novices’ readings were exploratory. They were much more likely to stumble over words, to jumble their cadences, to alter their tempo mid-poem. As if they were testing out their options, trying to discover which one was best. Attending such a reading felt as if I were an active member of some lyrical expedition to map out a poetical future. I bring this up because Mount Char, as a debut novel, feels much the same. I can’t specifically point to any line or character or chapter and claim, “Hey this is less polished than you might find from a more experienced author.” And yet the Library of Mount Char has a roughness to it, a thrilling sense of authorial exploration. The characters aren’t fake, but they don’t quite feel natural either. The book extends a good 25% beyond where most other novels would end. And so on. None of which is a criticism. The author was clearly not following a personal formula, but creating it. And it has a fresh plot too. Mount Char focuses on a set of adopted siblings who are training to be gods, under the tutelage of the head god himself. Not a god in the traditional sense, though. More in the sense of a run-away superintelligence, in that he acquired that knowledge that allowed him to get better at acquiring knowledge which made him better still at acquiring knowledge, a pattern that continued until he reached a state of omniscience but not omni-attention. That’s a subtle but important distinction, which I think explains why some readers describe this book as difficult or confusing. Dealing with omniscience makes it tricky to track who knows what and when do they know it. Ultimately, though, the plot and the novel structure shouldn't be too difficult to follow. The Library at Mount Char is neither post-modern, nor particularly philosophical. It's a good ol' fashioned revenge story, and like all solid revenge stories, has a nice twist or two. My one unadulterated complaint is the pitifully small scope of the setting. It’s completely dissonant with the plot’s scope. We’re talking god of the universe stuff here, yet 90% of the novel is set in a tiny suburban neighborhood. It does help add to the novel’s, um, novelty, but gives it a satirical vibe I’m not sure the author actually intended. Final conclusion: You’ll probably like it. Unless you’re a religious fundamentalist. In which case you probably won’t like it. But that’ll just leave you more time to read your holy book. Hey, win, win. ...more |
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not set
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Nov 11, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1784968544
| 9781784968540
| 1784968544
| 4.24
| 274
| unknown
| Jan 08, 2019
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liked it
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In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else. Space Marines are genetically-m In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else. Space Marines are genetically-modified, trained-from-birth super soldiers encased in power-armor and loaded to the gills with cybernetics. Their weapon of choice is the bolter, essentially an automatic grenade launcher. And they sometimes wield a sword because why not?! Swords are cool. Despite the similarities of their creation, Space Marines are not one monolithic force, oh no. They’re organized into Chapters (a good analogy would be a Roman Legion), whose battle tactics and overall philosophy can vary wildly. Seriously, there are hundreds if not thousands of different Chapters. The most righteous, jingoistic Chapter of them all are the Ultramarines. Praise the Emperor this, praise the Emperor that, and, oh, beware the Corruption of Chaos! Catechisms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, these books follow Uriel Ventris, a Captain of the Ultramarines. This hefty tome, in fact, comprises three different books, each featuring a different setting and different foe. The first book, Nightbringer, follows Uriel Ventris in his first major campaign as Captain and features Dark Eldar - basically sci-fi dark elves with a splash of Giger - as well as the Nightbringer (whoever that may be…) and your usual coterie of corrupt humans. It’s that last inclusion that elevates this first book above the others. I’m sure I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know when I say that human beings practice extreme levels of species prejudice. Only humans have souls, not animals. Only humans have free will, not animals. The vast majority of human beings will only start caring about the mass extinction event we’re currently causing when human beings start to suffer. Obviously there are exceptions but point is, human beings find human affairs most interesting and worthy of attention. That’s why in The Walking Dead, the actual walking dead merely serve as a backdrop for human conflict. Same here in Nightbringer. Yeah there’s aliens, there’s Old Gods… but the human politics and human conflicts serve as the core of the story. And the story is better for it. By contrast, the second book Warriors of Ultramar features Uriel Ventris leading a solar system defense against an invasion of Tyranids who are, basically, the Zerg (or vice versa): a Hive Mind species who use rapid and extreme genetic modification to creature ORGANIC weapons and soldiers. Here, though, human politics and conflicts do NOT serve as the core of the story. Not to say there isn’t some. It’s just not the main conflict. And the story is less compelling as a result. The last book, Dead Sky, Black Sun, involves the exodus of Uriel Ventris (and his best friend Pasanius) to a Chaos-infested HELLPLANET. Its endless descriptions of torture and body horror and such reminded me of that movie Event Horizon, as well as the original Quake games. Dead Sky, Black Sun was, by far, my least favorite book and, for the foreseeable future (indeed, perhaps forever) the last WH40K book that I’ll read. All of these books are action-packed with dialogue won’t win any awards but feels natural to the characters and description that helps expand the impressive WH40K milieu. It’s just… for this type of story, writing is not the best medium. I loathe the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words” but it’s the perfect critique of these books. Dead Sky, Black Sun, for example, contains A LOT of description… and yet I could tell you vastly more about the environs of Quake 2, a game I haven’t played in decades. Video games, film, animation - these are all much better media for telling these types of stories, in which objective description takes precedence over subjective description. In fact, that’s something a lot of authors don’t seem to grasp: good description should always be a form of characterization. An author is never going to out-describe a video game or a film. Ever. But what a novel can do that a film or video game can’t is customize the perception on the basis of the character. In a film or a video game, a tree is a tree. But in a novel, a druid or an industrialist or a peasant will look at a tree and describe it in vastly different terms. That’s huge. That’s what makes novels so great at exploring diverse mindsets and building empathy. The Chronicles of Uriel Ventris is not going to be strengthening your empathy muscles. So, yeah, it’s not capital-L Literature, but then OBVIOUSLY it isn’t. So it might seem churlish of me to make this criticism of the book. And I might agree - except I’ve also read the Eisenhorn trilogy from WH40K. Which also isn’t capital-L Literature but is nevertheless vastly superior to these because they remain FIRMLY centered on human conflict and FIRMLY anchored within the perspective of Eisenhorn himself. Every description is flavored by his own unique personality. So those books have all the action, all that fun WH40K lore and flavor… but they never lose sight of the human element either. ...more |
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Jul 30, 2023
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Jul 30, 2023
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| 3.92
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it was ok
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Jul 27, 2023
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Jul 27, 2023
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| 4.15
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Sep 29, 2022
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Sep 29, 2022
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Sep 05, 2022
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Sep 05, 2022
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it was amazing
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Jun 21, 2022
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Jun 21, 2022
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it was ok
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Jun 18, 2022
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Jun 18, 2022
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| 4.11
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it was amazing
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Jan 05, 2022
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| 3.60
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it was ok
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Oct 23, 2021
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Oct 23, 2021
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| 3.92
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it was ok
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Sep 08, 2021
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Sep 08, 2021
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| 4.12
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liked it
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Aug 28, 2021
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Aug 28, 2021
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| 4.27
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it was ok
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Jul 29, 2021
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Jul 29, 2021
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| 4.18
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it was ok
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Jun 04, 2021
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Jun 04, 2021
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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Jan 2021
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May 19, 2021
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really liked it
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Jan 2021
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May 19, 2021
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| 3.65
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May 03, 2021
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May 03, 2021
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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Jan 06, 2021
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Jan 06, 2021
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| 4.28
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it was amazing
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Dec 31, 2020
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Nov 17, 2020
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really liked it
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Nov 11, 2020
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Nov 11, 2020
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liked it
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Oct 25, 2020
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Oct 25, 2020
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