What have you read lately?

[Parasaurolophus]

May's haul:

Laura Lam - Goldilocks: A feminist colonization attempt from an increasingly dystopian society not too far in the future, but things start going wrong en route. I think this is the first clearly post-Trump (as in, post-2016 election) piece of scifi I've read, and it's pretty OK. Some of the writing is a bit awkward, and it's plotted like a teen novel (which is fine by me, but I'm not sure it was intended as one!). I would have liked it if there was more on the colonization end of things, or if there was some mystery to the on-board problems, but it was a sufficiently interesting read despite all that. I do think, however, that it's trying to do too many things, and so has had its attention diluted somewhat. For the problems-en-route approach, I think that Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes does a much, much better job of it.

Peter Watts - Peter Watts is an Angry, Sentient Tumor {{revenge fantasies and essays}}: This is a collection of essays drawn from Watts's blog posts. The writing and tone are great, and about as acerbic as you'd expect; the topics and thoughts being collected are pretty interesting, and the memorials to his cats are especially moving. Oh, and he's working on a third installment for the Firefall series (Blindsight and Echopraxia), which seems to be called Omniscience! I really enjoyed reading these, and highly recommend them to anyone who enjoys his work.

Sue Burke - Immunity Index: This is the first post-pandemic novel I've read (although apparently she began work on it well before the pandemic), and waddayaknow, it's about a pandemic, set in a future USA that's only a little further down the Republican garden path than we are. It pains me to say this, but it wasn't very good. It's a shame, because Semiosis and Interference were brilliant. This... this just feels rushed. The different perspectives don't tie together very well, the plotting is very basic teen novel plotting (and like Goldilocks, I'm not sure the author intended it that way), the social commentary is too ripe, the story seems naïve and invites too much imaginative resistance (really? Your plan to beat authoritarianism is to hold a protest and a day of civil disobedience? And as it happens, the protest takes place on the day a pandemic gets loose?), etc. It had interesting moments, but the focus was too dilute to make much of them.

Charles Stross - Saturn's Children: I didn't think I'd enjoy it, but it was pretty fun. In the distant future, all organic life on earth is extinct. All that's left are robots, who've colonized the inner solar system. Beyond that, it's a robot-femme-fatale-thriller, and works pretty well on that score. There are some very amusing moments having to do with many of the few texts left over from our time being fundamenalist religious texts, resulting in the assumption, e.g., that we were fructivores and that Tyrannosaurs were crucial parts of our biome. I would have liked to see that connection explored in more detail!

Charles Stross - Neptune's Brood: The sequel to Saturn's Children, set many thousands of years later. This is a less-interesting thriller, sans femme fatale and with a lot of telling and repeating, and not so much showing. Also, it features a lot of cryptocurrency, and some good explanations of how they work, etc. So, a bit of a mixed bag, really. It was OK, but no more than that.

[apl68]

May's haul:

Charles Stross - Saturn's Children: I didn't think I'd enjoy it, but it was pretty fun. In the distant future, all organic life on earth is extinct. All that's left are robots, who've colonized the inner solar system. Beyond that, it's a robot-femme-fatale-thriller, and works pretty well on that score. There are some very amusing moments having to do with many of the few texts left over from our time being fundamenalist religious texts, resulting in the assumption, e.g., that we were fructivores and that Tyrannosaurs were crucial parts of our biome. I would have liked to see that connection explored in more detail!

Charles Stross - Neptune's Brood: The sequel to Saturn's Children, set many thousands of years later. This is a less-interesting thriller, sans femme fatale and with a lot of telling and repeating, and not so much showing. Also, it features a lot of cryptocurrency, and some good explanations of how they work, etc. So, a bit of a mixed bag, really. It was OK, but no more than that.

I've noticed something of a trend toward sci-fi works dealing with artificial life forms.  I've never had any interest in them myself--introvert though I am, it's flesh-and-blood people I'm interested in.  The only work of that sort I've ever really gotten much from was an anime series some years back in which the principal characters--a typical team of giant robot pilots fighting to save the world from aliens--discover that the bad guys have in fact already destroyed the world.  The protagonists are artificial life forms trying to prevent the invaders from eliminating the last traces of humanity by destroying the well-guarded servers on which the virtual worlds inhabited by downloaded copies of once-living humans run.  There was something oddly compelling about characters realizing that their world--and they themselves--are dead, and yet still sentient, and learning to deal with that fact.

[apl68]

And I hope my comments did not come across as critical of you. I haven't read the book, but I'm always leery of claims made by journalists, academics, policymakers, and random go-gooders about events in other parts of the world (Kony 2012/Invisible Children, Greg Mortenson/Central Asian Institute, and the American Red Cross in Haiti come to mind) -- especially accounts that have an Orientalist tinge to them.

One of the good things about Bring Back Our Girls is that they're trying not to fall into that trap of exoticizing the people and events they write about, or describing the Boko Haram rebellion as simply what you'd expect in "that part of the world."  They try to give a wide variety of voices their due.

[Parasaurolophus]

I've noticed something of a trend toward sci-fi works dealing with artificial life forms.  I've never had any interest in them myself--introvert though I am, it's flesh-and-blood people I'm interested in.  The only work of that sort I've ever really gotten much from was an anime series some years back in which the principal characters--a typical team of giant robot pilots fighting to save the world from aliens--discover that the bad guys have in fact already destroyed the world.  The protagonists are artificial life forms trying to prevent the invaders from eliminating the last traces of humanity by destroying the well-guarded servers on which the virtual worlds inhabited by downloaded copies of once-living humans run.  There was something oddly compelling about characters realizing that their world--and they themselves--are dead, and yet still sentient, and learning to deal with that fact.

Hmm, interesting. Sounds like a plot element from Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God.

[apl68]

I've noticed something of a trend toward sci-fi works dealing with artificial life forms.  I've never had any interest in them myself--introvert though I am, it's flesh-and-blood people I'm interested in.  The only work of that sort I've ever really gotten much from was an anime series some years back in which the principal characters--a typical team of giant robot pilots fighting to save the world from aliens--discover that the bad guys have in fact already destroyed the world.  The protagonists are artificial life forms trying to prevent the invaders from eliminating the last traces of humanity by destroying the well-guarded servers on which the virtual worlds inhabited by downloaded copies of once-living humans run.  There was something oddly compelling about characters realizing that their world--and they themselves--are dead, and yet still sentient, and learning to deal with that fact.

Hmm, interesting. Sounds like a plot element from Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God.

If you're interested, it's called Zegapain.  Don't know how readily available it is in North America at this point.

[apl68]

The Curious Reader:  A Literary Miscellany of Novels & Novelists, by the editors of Mental Floss.

This is a big collection of literary trivia and not-so-trivia.  It has entries on 65 novels and short novels of note, with facts about the works and their authors.  You learn about real people and events that were (or may have been) used for inspiration; odd stuff about the authors (Mary Shelley kept her deceased husband's heart with her!); quotable quotes; writing advice and quirks; and lots more.  There are also sidebars and entries with titles like "9 Nobel Prize-Winning Novelists."  The article on Tolstoy has a feature on how War and Peace is by no means the longest novel ever written, with several examples of longer ones.

Lots of fun stuff there, but I found it physically hard to read due to a graphic design that left the text and background colors of many pages with too little contrast for me to make out the text easily.  I have only read a dozen of the works that are profiled, plus large parts of several others.  And other works by some of the authors listed.  There are lots of recommendations for further reading...and honestly, with one or two exceptions, none of them leaves me wanting to check them out for myself.  Most of them come off sounding dreary and unreadable to me.  I guess the sorts of readers this book is mainly aimed at will probably feel different.


Holding Back the River:  The Struggle Against Nature on America's Waterways, by Tyler J. Kelley.  This is an interesting look at the infrastructure of levees, dams, and floodways built in the U.S. since the 19th century to make the nation's major rivers more navigable and open up vast tracts of flood plain for agriculture and settlement.  The idea is to make nature conform to our society's needs and desires--and nature keeps stubbornly refusing to do so.  And of course the problem is now getting worse, due to aging infrastructure, climate change, and encroachment from rising seas.

Although the author profiles a lot of failed policies, collisions of selfish interests, and even some outright injustices, he spends refreshingly little time seeking to find villains to blame.  The communities that seek to exist in what naturally wants to be flood plains are a fact of life, they've been there for generations, and their assorted competing interests all have legitimate elements that need to be taken into account.  The Army Corps of Engineers has the unenviable responsibility of trying to juggle and reconcile all these interests.  They're portrayed sympathetically too, for all that so many of their policies have proven badly misguided in hindsight.  If there's a villain, it's short-termist thinking and a refusal by some to consider that others have legitimate interests that can't just be sacrificed to protect their own.

Kelley definitely helps the reader to get an idea of the sheer complexity of the issues involved in trying to control floods and keep communities and navigation going on our rivers.  There's nothing the authorities can do or omit to do that won't create real problems for somebody.  Though Kelley is not too quick to prescribe solutions, he does ultimately come out in favor of a strategy of retreating from threatened lands in some places, with a greatest-good focus on the best long-term solutions.  He holds up the Netherlands' ways of doing things when it comes to flood control as an example--not because the Dutch are any smarter than Americans, but simply because they've been at it for hundreds of years longer.  And the fact that their whole country is at stake when it comes to flood control gives them a huge incentive to work together to do everything it takes to get it right.

[spork]

Finished Spook Country, William's Gibson's second novel in his Blue Ant trilogy. It was far, far better than the first installment, Pattern Recognition. Comparable to a John le Carré or Graham Greene thriller.

[ab_grp]

Finished Spook Country, William's Gibson's second novel in his Blue Ant trilogy. It was far, far better than the first installment, Pattern Recognition. Comparable to a John le Carré or Graham Greene thriller.

Good to know! We really liked Pattern Recognition for the most part but had heard mixed reviews of the second novel.  We'll put it on the list.

[hmaria1609]

From the library:
The Library of the Dead by T.L. (Tendai) Huchu
The 1st in a new series called "Edinburgh Nights." A secret library underneath the Scottish capitol--who knew?!

Lightbringer by Claire Legrand (YA)
#3 and finale in the "Empirium Trilogy"

[mamselle]

From the library:
The Library of the Dead by T.L. (Tendai) Huchu
The 1st in a new series called "Edinburgh Nights." A secret library underneath the Scottish capitol--who knew?!

Lightbringer by Claire Legrand (YA)
#3 and finale in the "Empirium Trilogy"

I've been to the main national library near the bridge just at the (end/beginning? I think) of the Royal Mile....is this some ghostly mirrorplace beneath it?

(That might be why I missed the main librarian the day I was there.....)

M. 

[Parasaurolophus]

The article on Tolstoy has a feature on how War and Peace is by no means the longest novel ever written, with several examples of longer ones.

If you're into it, I have in my back pocket an article on story size which offers several infinite-length stories (each one longer than War and Peace!), but argues that there is no maximum story size (in passing, it argues for a minimum story size of 0). It's 17 pretty accessible pages, although knowing some basic set theory helps them go down more easily.

[ab_grp]

The article on Tolstoy has a feature on how War and Peace is by no means the longest novel ever written, with several examples of longer ones.

If you're into it, I have in my back pocket an article on story size which offers several infinite-length stories (each one longer than War and Peace!), but argues that there is no maximum story size (in passing, it argues for a minimum story size of 0). It's 17 pretty accessible pages, although knowing some basic set theory helps them go down more easily.

I know you're responding to apl68, but I would be interested to hear more about this!

[Parasaurolophus]

The article on Tolstoy has a feature on how War and Peace is by no means the longest novel ever written, with several examples of longer ones.

If you're into it, I have in my back pocket an article on story size which offers several infinite-length stories (each one longer than War and Peace!), but argues that there is no maximum story size (in passing, it argues for a minimum story size of 0). It's 17 pretty accessible pages, although knowing some basic set theory helps them go down more easily.

I know you're responding to apl68, but I would be interested to hear more about this!

Sent you a PM!

[apl68]

The article on Tolstoy has a feature on how War and Peace is by no means the longest novel ever written, with several examples of longer ones.

If you're into it, I have in my back pocket an article on story size which offers several infinite-length stories (each one longer than War and Peace!), but argues that there is no maximum story size (in passing, it argues for a minimum story size of 0). It's 17 pretty accessible pages, although knowing some basic set theory helps them go down more easily.

I know you're responding to apl68, but I would be interested to hear more about this!

Sent you a PM!

I'd be curious to hear this also.

BTW, the bit on Tolstoy introduced me to an author I'd never heard of before.  Apparently Madison Cooper's 1950s novel Sironia, Texas holds the record for longest novel published in the U.S.  I just had to look it up.  The author was an eccentric businessman in Waco, Texas who spent 11 years writing it.  And convinced a major publisher to bring it out in two huge volumes!  It was actually a bestseller for some weeks.  Then Cooper and his work fell off the radar.  He's best known now for setting up a local philanthropic trust that is still active.

His Wikipedia article has links to more info:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Cooper


Apparently Sironia, Texas is now an expensive collector's item.  Those who are really interested can reportedly order a print-on-demand version for $70.  About what a new two-volume work of that size would probably cost today.  I decided to pass....

[mamselle]

Hmm, it even beats Proust? (Or do his various volumes count as different books?)

M.