Re: What Have You Read Lately? (2024 Edition)

[apl68]

Skylark of Valeron, by E.E. "Doc" Smith.  Forget Buck Rogers--Smith's Skylark and Lensman series are the principal forerunners of modern "space opera" science fiction.  In this one 1935 adventure we have interstellar wars, intergalactic travel (At a time when the existence of multiple galaxies was still a fairly new concept), hyperspace, disembodied alien intelligences, and a federation of planets.  There's also a superhero scientist who makes the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards look like a middle-school science fair participant.  As no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke has put it, Smith "holds most of the patents" on Star Wars-type story devices. 

Like most science fiction of its vintage, it comes across as rather unsophisticated in terms of plot and characterization.  There's a great deal of purple pulp prose.  Brilliant scientists often speak like Warner Brothers gangster movie characters.  The very few women in the story--and, to be fair, many of the guys as well--exist mainly to give the big brains somebody to explain their technobabble to.  Still, it's an entertaining read if you can accept the dated-but-vigorous writing for what it is.  Fans of space opera might find it of historical interest, especially if they didn't know that so many familiar concepts were already in use 90 years ago.

I'm not really a fan of space opera myself.  I encountered Skylark of Valeron as a kid in a 1960s paperback edition that I found among the shelves of donated paperbacks in my mother's high school classroom.  I had to spend a lot of time in my tween years going there after school and hanging out and browsing the books while she went about her teacher service work.  After forty-odd years I've finally had a chance to revisit this one.  It's always enjoyable to revisit a long-ago book and see how much of it I remember, especially since I used to be bad about skipping around when trying to read a book-length story.  I must have more or less read most of this one, judging from how much I recognized.

[spork]

Read some chapters of Warnings by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy. Not as good as Perrow's Normal Accidents, Taleb's Black Swan, and Meyer and Kunreuther's Ostrich Paradox.

Also tried and gave up on Fareed Zakaria's Age of Revolutions. Needlessly repetitive.

[spork]

Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation, Leslie T. Chang. A worthy successor to her 2008 book on China, Factory Girls.

On a similar topic, I can recommend The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution by Peter Hessler (husband of the preceding author), which I read last year, and Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East by David Kirkpatrick, which I'll probably re-read this summer.