Tag Archives: reviews

Book List: 2018Q4

Cover of Colin Tudge's, "The Tree"
Colin Tudge, "The Tree"

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Colin Tudge

Exactly what it says on the cover: all about trees. This was exceptionally well organized. As an amateur woodworker, the first few chapters were particularly helpful to sort out all of the different common and trade names and how they relate to actual species. (Short version: it's a total ontological train wreck.) This book felt exceptionally well outlined; the organization of such a broad topic was very easy to follow. My primary complaint is that I listened to this as an audiobook, which made it difficult to stop and do image searches on some of the weirder species that were lovingly described.

The last 10% or so shifts from positive to normative, which is considerably weaker. For example, Tudge advocates that more buildings should be built of timber rather than steel and concrete and also that the price of timber ought to rise. These may both be desirable, but he gives absolutely no acknowledgement that these goals are in conflict. He also sets up urbanization/industrialization as being in opposition to growth of forests, without addressing the Kuznets curve phenomenon of reforestation.

Overall, highly recommended.

Pyramids, Terry Pratchett

I've never not loved one of Pratchett's Discworld novels. This is no exception. It's not one of the best, but even mediocre Pratchett is wonderful.

How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

You already know about this book. I put off reading it for years, figuring that it was all common sense that I already knew. And frankly, it kind of is. But there can be tremendous utility to being told things you already know. It might not teach you something profoundly novel, but it will likely help you realize when and how to put into practice the things you know.

It's been re-edited several times over its eight decades, and the result seems a little mixed up. Most especially, some of the examples seem drawn from very different points in time, which would be a positive if they were more clearly tagged. As is, it was difficult to get the right context for the interactions being described.

There was also plenty of horn-tooting about how useful different people have found Carnegie's instruction, but the amount of self-back-atting was actually less than I've found in the few other business/self-help books I've read.

Overall I think this book has become under-rated by virtue of being too often over-rated, if that makes sense. Read it.

Cover of Travis Corcoran's "Causes of Separation"
Travis Corcoran, "Causes of Separation"

Causes of Separation, Travis Corcoran

This is a sequel to Corcoran's Powers of the Earth, which I recommended last quarter. If you are interested in moon bases, AI, uplifted dogs, anti-gravity, augmented reality, anarcho-capitalism, etc. then you will probably like this. The psychological profile of the protagonist continues to be well done, but the antagonists are still a bit of a travesty.

Robopocalypse, Daniel Wilson

Hard to recommend. A co-worker tells me there is a very interesting twist in the sequel, which I will not reveal. It was a decent enough action book with killer robots, but since becoming a parent I have a much harder time being excited about dystopic fiction in which bad things happen to children. Wilson leans on that heavily to create drama, which ends up feeling artificial.

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

I don't even know what to say about this. It's a very, very weird and discomforting magical realism story. It reminded me mostly of the sort of proto-horror folk tale that the Grimm Brothers would have been told.

Cover of Bill Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country"
Bill Bryson, "In a Sunburned Country"

In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

Bryson is always delightful. This is a travelogue of a couple of trips to Australia. As usualy, Bryson uses this frame as a jumping off point for whatever weird bits of history he finds interesting. Perhaps because Australia doesn't yet have that much known history ((No offense to the aboriginal population. Obviously there's been people in Australia for a long time, but they haven't left behind much historical record. Australia probably has the highest ratio of "weird pre-historic forests and strange rock formations" to "palaces, art museums, and other structures in guidebooks" of anywhere.)) he also includes a lot of natural history, with a particular emphasis on all of the weird and deadly fauna to be found. (Six foot long earth worms! Jellyfish with enough neurotoxin to kill an ox! ((Which is a total mystery, because they eat krill. What do they need with that much chemical warfare firepower?)) )

One take-away was just how inept the British colonization and exploration was. I'd give you more colorful examples, but the one that comes to mind is establishing the first colony (incidentally a penal colony) with exactly zero people who had ever farmed before. I think they had one guy that was briefly an assistant to a gardener and put him in charge of food production.I was expecting violent-but-hyper-competant Victorians but Bryson's telling is a lot more clueless-and-bumbling. It left me honestly shocked that such doofuses built an empire upon which the sun never set.

You Suck: A Love Story, Christopher Moore

This is a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. It was a fine distraction, but I don't have strong feelings about it.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

Recommended for people interested in the software business.

This was suggested to me as a general purpose business advice book. It's fairly good along that dimension, but Horowitz is really only talking about software start-ups. For instance, he discusses the problem to scaling at one point, and explicitly states that the only thing holding you back is hiring more developers and sales people. He is (rightly) unconcerned with the factors that influence growing other businesses, like suppliers, real estate, distribution channels, etc.

More people should write books like this though. I want less memoirs about how brilliant the author is, and more advice based on the challenges that people have survived.

As an aside, this exchange between Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen that was quoted in the book stood out:

Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke:
Marc: "Do you know the best thing about startups?"
Ben: "What?"
Marc: "You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find the lack of sleep enhances them both."

As I commented on twitter, this makes the rise of interest in Stoicism in Silicon Valley either intensely ironic or completely inevitable, but I can't decide which. It's also a good encapsulation of why I haven't been interested in doing the start-up thing in California: no terror or ataraxia for me please; give me some nice even ataraxia.

Cover of Marc Levinson's "The Box"
Marc Levinson, "The Box"

The Box, Marc Levinson

This is an excellent history of the shipping container. This seems like too humble of an object to need it's own history, but that is very far from correct.

The most striking thing to me was the shocking speed with which containerization swept the industry. We like to think things like smartphones or social media are unique for their incredibly rapid uptake, but their spread is hardly unparalleled. Levinson details multiple ports where containers went from essentially zero traffic to a majority in a year or two. Competitors, regulators and trade unions were caught completely unprepared for the pace of change over and over.

The other take-away was the ineptitude of almost everyone involved in post-War shipping: the Interstate Commerce Commission, trade unions, shipping lines, the railroads, the Pentagon, standards bodies — not a single one of them acquits themselves well. To take just one example, ISO set out to establish standards for shipping containers, and invited every interest group they could think of except the only two companies in the world that were already using shipping containers. Because who needs actual experience, right?

Malcolm Maclean — the originator of containerization — is as close as this story comes to having a hero, and even he seems more like someone who took lots of crazy risks that just happened to pay off rather than someone who really knew what he was doing. (After selling off SeaLand, his legitimately world-changing shipping business, to R.J.Reynolds, ((Because a cigarette company owning a shipping line is totally something that makes sense in the world of mid-century corporate conglomerates.)) he experienced a string of business failures, which cements my opinion that he was luckier than he was wise.)

Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

Assassin's Quest, Robin Hobb

These are the second and third books in Hobb's "Farseer Trilogy." I think both are better than the initial title, Assassin's Apprentice, as they have more psychological depth. What I appreciate is that the main characters face actual moral conundrums. Most fiction, are perhaps especially more fantasy, presents the protagonist with a clear choice between doing what is difficult-but-right and what is easy-but-wrong; Hobb's characters have to juggle competing imperatives and make for difficult decisions with no right answers.

My only complaint is that Assassin's Quest is as long as the first two books together. It should probably be two separate volumes. There is actually a pretty natural breakpoint in the story line about half-way through, so it would not surprise me if this was initially planned as a quartet and the final two installments were smashed together.

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers, Sarah Bakewell

This is part biography, and part work of philosophy. It's an excellent combination. I was struck by how much 16th century France seemed like 21st century America in many respects. Definitely recommended.

There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne's generation, along with a rebellious new form of creativity. If they were cynical, it is easy to see why: they had to watch the ideals that had guided their upbringing turn into a grim joke. The Reformation, hailed by some earlier thinkers as a blast of fresh air beneficial to the Church itself, became a war and threatened to ruin civilized society. Renaissance principles of beauty, poise, clarity, and intelligence dissolved in violence, cruelty, and extremist theology. Montaigne's half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it—and in some ways recovery never came, for the turmoil of the late 1500s stopped France from building a major New World empire like those of England and Spain, and kept it inward-looking. By the time of Montaigne's death, France was economically feeble, and ravaged by disease, famine and public disorder. No wonder young nobles of his generation ended up as exquisitely educated misanthropes.

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce reminded me of a theological version of Games People Play. It was interesting enough, but not that impactful.

The Abolition of Man, on the other hand, was excellent. This is also a book that feels like required reading for the beginning of the 21st century, despite being several decades old. I listened to an audio version of this, and will probably need to read a physical copy before I could offer any detailed analysis.

by jsylvest Posted on 24 January 2019
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Book List: 2018Q3

We Are Legion (We Are Bob), Dennis Taylor

For We Are Many, Dennis Taylor

All These Worlds, Dennis Taylor

A sci-fi series about a cryogenically frozen software engineer thawed out several centuries in the future by a theocratic state and uploaded against his will into a von Neumann probe. I think there was a lot of potential here, but it never lived up to it. The potential comes from having multiple nearly-identical copies of the same character, which gives you the option of playing with themes about identity and cognition and narratively the ability to interleave lots of different stories together. The latter of these was accomplished. To me, one of the defining characteristics of a von Neumann probe is exponential growth, and the character(s) decide for unclear reasons not bother growing much. They remain production/population constrained throughout the decades of the narrative. This rubs me the wrong way, perhaps because whenever I play Civilization or any other 4X game I go hard for industrial base every time.

For what it's worth, I believe this was semi-self-published — the publisher on Amazon is listed as a literary agency — and probably as a result the design of these books was not pleasing. I know I care more than most about books as physical objects than most readers do, but I'm mentioning it anyway. The title and author were printed in the footer of each page rather than the header, which was disorienting but not objectively wrong. All three volumes I got from the library were set in Lucida Bright, which is an idiosyncratic choice, but more importantly the text of all three were blurry/rasterized. It was not a good reading experience, and these books deserved better.

Powers of the Earth, Travis Corcoran

Another sci-fi adventure, this time with a very strong anarcho-capitalist/libertarian bent. Quite good, if the politics doesn't turn you off. It's got moon bases, AI, uplifted dogs, and more. Also features a real-world economy complete with reasons for being in space in the first place, which very few other books bother with. (One exception is Andy Weir's Artemis.) I will give Corcoran credit for writing a protagonist with character flaws that actually matter for the story. On the other hand, the antagonists are farcically inept. It is difficult to take them too seriously, and the drama suffers as a result.

Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu

I think enough has been said about this one already, the majority of it positive. I'd agree.

Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie

Red Country, Joe Abercrombie

A follow-on trilogy to Abercrombie's "First Law" series. These three books are only loosely connected, taking place a few years after that in the same world, with some minor characters re-appearing. If you like George RR Martin but find his worldview too cheery and optimistic, this may be the book series for you. (Indeed, I read it partially because GRRM recommended it.) I particularly like the glimpse you get of the cosmic struggle going on just below the surface of the story, hidden from almost all the characters, and the depth of the world out on the fringes of the map. You get comparatively less of both of these in The Heroes and perhaps a little too much in Red Country. All three are recommended, especially because it's nice to have a fantasy series that offers some self-contained stories instead of having to chew through ten thousand pages before you get a conclusion.

milkMilk, Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky's Salt and Paper are two of my favorites. I'm a sucker for non-fiction about common commodities. Milk was good, but not as good as those. It's less well organized, bouncing back and forth between passages on nutrition, health, history, culinary uses, etc. A better road-map would have been appreciated. It was peppered with historic recipes, which was at turns amusing and annoying.

I often complain that the books I read are good, but the economics in them is below part. This is another example of that. Kurlansky offers this assessment for example: "An oddity of the milk business in America and in Europe was that its growth was not determined by demand." How is that supposed to work? How were people being induced to buy something they didn't demand? I understand rhetorically what's he's attempting to convey, but logically what does this mean? A case could be made for increased supply being the principle factor at work, but he doesn't make that case. He just leaves this sentence there as if it explains everything.

In a similar vein, his treatment of regulation, etc. on consolidation, farm size, profitability etc. is confused. He almost acknowledges that regulatory compliance is a fixed cost that is easier for larger producers to bear, but then it slips past in favor of explaining consolidation as the outcome of some sort of capitalist conspiracy.

Good enough, but definitely not the first Kurlansky book I would recommend.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

This is a history of the late middle ages, centering on France and the Hundred Years' War. The format is interesting: it traces the life of a particular nobleman — Enguerrand VII de Coucy — from northern France with ties to both the English and French thrones. The result limits the book in geographic scope, but this is more than made up for in thematic scope, resulting in a good trade-off. Like much of the medieval history I've been reading lately, it also seems oddly appropriate for helping to understand the world right now.

[Eustache Deschamps'] complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

Definitely recommended.

The Art of Language Invention coverThe Art of Language Invention, David Peterson

Also highly recommended. Peterson is a creator of constructed languages (conlangs), with credits including both Dothrakai and Valyrian for the "Game of Thrones" TV series. This book is partially about the process of language creation, but also serves as a general introduction to linguistics. Foreign language classes were always my worst subjects in school by a mile. I loved being able to learn about what's going on under the hood rather than merely being given tables of conjugations and common phrases to memorize. I had a few minor complaints with the orthography chapter, which is a subject I know a small bit about through my interest in calligraphy and typography, but otherwise this book was excellent.

1632, Eric Flint

A small town in West Virginia is somehow transported back to Bavaria in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. I'm a sucker for this subgenre, but did not care for this at all. All of the characters are Lake Wobegonian, i.e. everyone is above average in all ways. I lost track of the number of perfect couples who fell in love at first site. The worst flaw is that there is no real challenge to the West Virginians: they are in complete command of the situation at all times, and never face a real threat, either from actual enemies or from the sorts of logistical disruptions you would imagine trying to keep a modern town running in a pre-modern world. There is apparently a whole universe of sequels that have been developed with what sounds like an innovative, open-source scheme, but the first book was not good enough to justify reading the sequels.

Labyrinths coverLabyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

More computer scientists in particular should read Borges. This volume has a mix of short stores, non-fiction essays and "parables." I had read many of the stories, but they are always worth reading again. The non-fiction was harder to follow, but it has inspired me to move Don Quixote further up my reading list. The parables were delightful but weird enough that I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from them.

I was told to get this particular edition because of the foreword by William Gibson. I like Gibson, but I didn't find anything particularly insightful or interesting in his introduction here. Don't avoid it, but don't go out of your way for it either.

On Desire coverOn Desire: Why We Want What We Want, William Irvine

Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is one of my all-time favorite books. On Desire is good, but not nearly as good. That aside, I can give it a strong recommendation as a form of bibliotherapy and a round-about way of meditating on the Second Noble Truth. It will not provide you with many answers with respect to desire — and I don't think Irvine would claim that it does offer answers — but it will help you ask good questions, which is a necessary step.

Chuck Klosterman X, Chuck Klosterman

I don't want every other review here to degenerate into "good, but the author's other books are better" but... this is good but Klosterman's other books are better. This is a recycled collection of essays, articles, reviews, etc. that Klosterman has published in other venues previously. Some are good, some are indifferent, some will depend for you on how interested you are in the subject, which tends to cover his typical range of popular music and sports.

by jsylvest Posted on 18 October 2018
Posted in Book List | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Book List: 2018Q2

Here are the books I read in April, May and June. Since it's already August, I'm going to forego commentary on some of these and just hit publish.

Cover of "The Professor and the Madman," Simon Winchester
"The Professor and the Madman," Simon Winchester

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester

This was far more interesting than a book about lexicographical history has any right to be. James Murray ("the Professor") is a fascinating Victorian autodidact. IIRC he dropped out of school at age 16 (the age at which schooling was no longer free in Scotland) by age 19 he was the headmaster of a school. William Chester Minor ("the Madman") is the sort of charming — albeit homicidal — lunatic that I didn't think existed outside of movies. Plus you get to learn about the OED!

The Truth, Terry Pratchett

This is Pratchett's "Discworld" story about the invention of movable type and newspapers. I've yet to read a Discworld book I didn't enjoy, and this is no exception.

The main character, and inventor of newspapers, is named "William de Worde." I thought the surname was a little on the nose even for Pratchett. It turns out that William Caxton's partner and co-introducer of movable type to England was named Wynkyn de Worde, so in reality truth is stranger — or at least as strange as — fiction.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory Stamper

This was a great read. I loved both the behind the scenes info on what it's like to be a lexicographer working at Mirriam-Webster, the history of dictionaries, and the general discussion of language. The chapters about what their role in society is, as contrasted with what people think it is or want it to be, were especially good.

This is yet another book that I can file away under "the more I learn about language the less of a prescriptivist I become."

Cover of "The Popes," J.J. Norwich
"The Popes," J.J. Norwich

The Popes: A History, John Julius Norwich

This was good but not great. I like the overall organization, which is important in such a wide-reaching history. As such, I recommend this if you're interested. I have three complaints though.

(1) The coverage was very uneven. I recognize this was a history of the papacy specifically rather than the Catholic church more broadly, but some capital-B Big events are fairly glossed over, like the English Reformation or the spread of Catholicism to the New World.

(2) Norwich had a habit of mentioning that such and such institution was reformed to do things in a new way without ever explaining what the old way was. It's tough to appreciate why something changing is important if you don't know what the status quo ante was.

(3) When we get to the modern period (say, post 1848), Norwich makes a very common mistake by assuming that theological positions are just like political positions. When the R.C.Ch. is at its best, it is not deciding its "policy" about, e.g. married priests, on the basis of what is popular or expedient or diplomatic or modern. (When it is at its worst and it fails to do this, you get the Reichskonkordat.) Norwich treats the church like a political party choosing a platform. By that standard, it has done a remarkably bad job in the last century and a half.

The R.C.Ch. is not choosing its position on the basis of "what will attract voters parishioners" but instead based on what it believes God thinks is correct. You might think that's silly, or that it makes that determination incorrectly — which as an agnostic non-Catholic, I typically do — but don't make the mistake of thinking it's solving the same problem that a politician is solving when deciding whether to support some new legislative reform. Personally, I think too many of the powerful people in the world — politicians, businesspeople, celebrities — are making decisions based on what is popular, and I'm content with at least some institutions in a poly-centric order not doing that. ((See also: reasons to not want the US Supreme Court to become a democracy of 9 voters.))

Two other less contentious takes:

(a) A shocking number of these stories had a coda along the lines of "but he didn't live to enjoy his triumph; he was dead within k weeks" for very small values of k. Princes and prelates were dropping dead all the time. I wonder what modern politics would be like if people were dying at the same rates.

(b) Rome's weather is the under-rated player in this drama. Seemingly every chapter included either a noble entourage or an entire army fleeing the miserable summer heat. Yes, it's very nice that you brought your overwhelming French and/or German army down to smack some sense into the Curia at swordpoint, but then *boom* malaria. The Holy Roman Emperor was constantly racing down the peninsula in the spring, only to spend about three weeks in the muggy summer sun glaring impotently at Rome's walls, before racing back north to get to the Alps before the passes closed for the winter. If the Popes followed Diocletian just 300 miles up to Mediolanum/Milan a lot of things would have gone very differently.

It wasn't just armies either. I lost count of how many Cardinals and Princes just high-tailed it out of town because of bad weather. ("Yes, yes, I know the fate of Europe hangs in the balance of this election... but the humidity is murder on my hair." ((Actually, I'm doing them a disservice. The humidity was actually, literally killing people. See the point about malaria above. But still, many of them seem to have fled just because the weather was interfering with their lifestyle.)) ). Not that I really blame them. I've been to Rome in August, and I wouldn't stick around either if there weren't some frosty Peronis to help me through it all.

Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory

Super powers plus grifters plus organized crime plus family drama. It was unclear until pretty far into the book how much of the fantastical elements were real and how much they were part of a con job. I liked that dynamic.

Every Anxious Wave, Mo Daviau

The recipe for this is about six parts toxic nostalgia as filtered through rock music, four parts fat acceptance, and one part appreciation of hunter gatherers. It's a weird combination that didn't really hold together for me, but I'm probably not the target audience, so your mileage may vary.

The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings, Lars Brownworth

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Thorough and accessible.

Scourged, Kevin Hearne

This is conclusion to Hearne's "Iron Druid" series. I loved the series as a whole, but this was a little flat. It felt, especially in the first half, like he was trying very hard to tie up lose ends that weren't actually that loose and didn't need to be addressed. The final resolution was good, but it felt like he was trying too hard to avoid "... and everyone walked away happily into the sunset" and so there is some element of a "unhappy ending" that feels a bit forced.

I'm not sure how the writing schedule worked out, but in terms of publishing dates, the first volume (A Plague of Giants) of Hearne's next series ("The Seven Kennings") was released before this was. I can't help but wonder if his interest had already shifted to that work and his heart wasn't really in wrapping up "Iron Druid."

(These paragraphs make me seem much more negative about Scourged than I actually am. It was overall still a fine book.)

Dark Run, Mike Brooks

A good space adventure with a bit of a Firefly vibe. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the next two volumes. This is only one of two sci-fi books I can think of in which software engineering is treated as an indispensable part of spaceflight in general and combat in particular. (The other being Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, with the "programmer-at-arms" role.)

Bone, Volume Seven: Ghost Circles, Jeff Smith

Bone, Volume Eight: Treasure Hunters, Jeff Smith

River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay

This is set in the same universe as Under Heaven, but is almost entirely unrelated. I need a genre descriptor for books like this that are not really fantasy, but do have more than zero unrealistic elements. (In this case, one of the main characters is given a tattoo by a spirit. There is also discussion of ghosts, but these seem to be in the imaginations of the characters rather than "real" in the world of the story.) Regardless, how can I not like a book which revolves so heavily around calligraphy?

Cover of "The Book" by Keith Houston
"The Book," Keith Houston

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, Keith Houston

Recommended. The design is excellent, as is befitting for the subject. You can see on the cover that various features are labeled. This device is re-used to good effect throughout. (So rather than having a little image of a page, with an arrows pointing out where the footer, gutter, etc. are, those arrows are just printed right onto the actual text of the book. This turns the book into a self-illustrating example.)

The book is divided into four sections, about paper, printing presses and movable type, printed images, and book binding. For the first section, there was little I didn't already know from Mark Kurlansky's excellent Paper. There were also some bits left out that I have thought were quite important, such as the Hollander beater. The other three sections were quite good though.

A theme running through this books is "someone thought of this invention a long time ago, but couldn't make it practical, then someone else re-invented it years/decades/centuries later (and got the credit)." Honestly, I'm okay with this state of affairs. We lionize that spark of genius inspiration, but the getting-it-to-be-useful phase of technological innovation deserves way more credit.

Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation, Ammon Shea

Allow me to copy-and-paste the following line from my review of Word by Word, above:

This is yet another book that I can file away under "the more I learn about language the less of a prescriptivist I become."

Every chapter of this book is about a thing that pedants have told you not to do, followed by lengthy evidence that their rule is spurious and ahistorical.

One tidbit I did not realize but should have: Latin was "native" to England before English was. If you had asked me when the Romans got to Britain and when the Angles got their, I would have given you the correct centures, and this would have become obvious but it was still a (minor) shock to me. It points out the futility of returning English to some prelapsarian state when it was free of xenolinguistic influences.

Time Travel: A History, James Gleick

Gleick addresses both the science surrounding time travel and the way it has been treated in literature. Well done to him for so seamlessly bridging the STEM/Arts-and-Letters divide. You get Wells, of course, and Einstein, but also Borges and Heraclitus and Proust and Bohr. (And David Foster Wallace, but only to discuss his philosophy thesis paper on fatalism, not any of his fiction.) There is a strong feedback loop between the Two Cultures on this subject, and any treatment of it that didn't address this would have been severely lacking.

Cover of "Gnomon" by Nick Harkaway
"Gnomon," Nick Harkaway

Gnomon, Nick Harkaway

I tweeted back over the winter that this was the perfect book to be reading during the first annual Conference on AI, Ethics & Society, which was true. Unfortunately I had to return my library copy shortly thereafter, and only got around to finishing it a couple of months later. This made it difficult to appreciate such a dense book, so probably don't trust my judgment on this one.

Nevertheless, I think this was good, but inferior to Anglemaker and The Gone-Away World (I have not yet read his fourth novel, Tigerman but very much want to). I suspect the problem may be that Harkaway started Gnomon with the themes he wanted to cover and wrote a story to match, rather than writing a story and letting themes emerge. I have no idea though; I don't want to engage in too much armchair-analysis-from-a-distant, especially since I'm basing this off of a short preface and sporadic reading of his Twitter feed. And regardless of whether this analysis is true, these are themes I'm interested in: technology, surveillance, experimental polities & "choosing in groups", altered mental states that aren't drug related, non-monocentric selfhood, cognitive monitoring, etc. So: good, but not his best.

Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer

I very much enjoyed this. It's got a wild post-Nation State, poly-centric socio-political system that I loved. It reminded me of how exciting it was reading Diamond Age back in the day.

The downside to this thrillingly exotic setting is that it took several hundred pages before things started to make sense. On top of the setting there's also a self-conscious 18th-Century style combined with 21st Century gender neutral language, and other stylistic choices that made it difficult to get my narrative footing. Even at the end I'm still not sure where the dividing line is between high technology and magic. It was all still very much worth it.

One complaint about the poly-centric, distributed nations: I find it a little implausible that there would be so much concentration, with only seven tribes. Why wouldn't they fracture further? What's holding the Cousins or Gordians together? I would enjoy a long discussion between Palmer and David Friedman on the political economy of this world.

by jsylvest Posted on 7 August 2018
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