Erik’s Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2023

588

pages read

books read

Erik

Shortest Book

288

pages

Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams by Walter Jon Williams

Longest Book

pages

Average book length in 2023

294

pages

Most Shelved

11,570

people also shelved

Least Shelved

10,374

people also shelved

Erik’s average rating for 2023

3.0

liked it

3.0

Highest Rated on Goodreads

really liked it

4.00 average

Erik’s first review of the year

it was ok

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.

Wel 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

ERIK’S 2023 BOOKS

really liked it

Erik’s last review of the year

really liked it

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 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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