Michael Flynn
In the movies, first contact with an alien species always takes place in modern times, or in the future. There is no reason why it couldn't have happened in the past. In this case, in the middle ages during the Black Plague epidemic in Europe. This setting provides the canvas for Flynn to write what is largely a historical fiction novel about life in the middle ages. Yes, there are aliens. But the book is less about the aliens than about how the middle age world view informs thinking about everything. Specifically, we look at how literal the christianity of the time is, and strangely enough contrast this with a hyper-literal translation of the worldview into something the aliens can understand. It is almost comical that the locals don't see that talk about "a God in heaven, who will return to earth to save us" is interpreted as a being that also understands space travel and will be arriving shortly to help with ship repairs. Flynn then intersperses the story with a modern day couple doing research in cosmology and historical mathematics, unknowingly pursuing the first contact event from 700 years earlier. So while this has the makings of a great sci-fi/historical fiction mashup, I found myself bored. Maybe some editing to take it from 400 to 300 pages would have sped things up just enough to maintain my interest. I pushed through and read the entire thing simply because of my own personality defect of needing to know the end of the story (I hate loose ends). Otherwise, the descriptions of middle ages life were interesting in the beginning and then not interesting enough to keep me engaged.
Wait
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Thursday, July 24, 2014
The Circle
Dave Eggers
Do you know how you interact with a horror film, watching the teenager hear a strange noise in the dark basement of a secluded cabin in the remote part of the forest? You yell out "Do NOT go down there!!!". And then they do. This was my interaction with The Circle, but the topic is not teen slasher horror, but modern internet privacy. "Do NOT go down that road!!!". The Circle is everyone's worst fear of Google. They develop all kinds of apps and connections that allow everyone to be connected all the time. Retinal display (e.g. google glass), friend circles (e.g. facebook), zings (e.g. twitter), etc. to start. They have an awesome campus that employees never want to leave. Enter Mae, young new hire in Customer Experience. She (like most of the millions of digital natives in this novel) drank the Kool-aid and has no concern about privacy. In fact, she comes up with Privacy is Theft. Withholding anything from the public domain is theft from the betterment of humanity. You can see where this is going (but she can't). Eggers continually releases new Circle apps and products to take the reader well beyond any grey area, showing his agenda and hoping (I am sure) to be a prophetic voice in warning against the dangers coming our way. While reading, I also picked up a distinctly Brasil vibe, which was quite fun. Lots of small screens with various inputs, each a uni-tasker. The entire privacy discussion is extremely fascinating and just to show how subtle the questions are, just this week Sciam publishes a short article on privacy apps that sound remarkably like Eggers' (The Circle's) TruYou. So are they privacy enhancing, or just a short step away from privacy obliterating. Or how do we know?
Read
Do you know how you interact with a horror film, watching the teenager hear a strange noise in the dark basement of a secluded cabin in the remote part of the forest? You yell out "Do NOT go down there!!!". And then they do. This was my interaction with The Circle, but the topic is not teen slasher horror, but modern internet privacy. "Do NOT go down that road!!!". The Circle is everyone's worst fear of Google. They develop all kinds of apps and connections that allow everyone to be connected all the time. Retinal display (e.g. google glass), friend circles (e.g. facebook), zings (e.g. twitter), etc. to start. They have an awesome campus that employees never want to leave. Enter Mae, young new hire in Customer Experience. She (like most of the millions of digital natives in this novel) drank the Kool-aid and has no concern about privacy. In fact, she comes up with Privacy is Theft. Withholding anything from the public domain is theft from the betterment of humanity. You can see where this is going (but she can't). Eggers continually releases new Circle apps and products to take the reader well beyond any grey area, showing his agenda and hoping (I am sure) to be a prophetic voice in warning against the dangers coming our way. While reading, I also picked up a distinctly Brasil vibe, which was quite fun. Lots of small screens with various inputs, each a uni-tasker. The entire privacy discussion is extremely fascinating and just to show how subtle the questions are, just this week Sciam publishes a short article on privacy apps that sound remarkably like Eggers' (The Circle's) TruYou. So are they privacy enhancing, or just a short step away from privacy obliterating. Or how do we know?
Read
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Richard P. Feynman
Really this is a set of collected speeches that Feynman gave over the course of his life. Some of it is quite technical (e.g. his talk about nano-technology), but still amazing in that much of his thinking in the 1960's is showing up today. What I enjoyed most about this were his ruminations on science and education. That is, what is science and why is it different from religion, or any other field of study for that matter. How do you teach science? What really is important to teach if you want to bring someone into the world of science, and not just dump a bunch of facts on to them? Worth it for all science educators (and religion teachers, I would say) to read at least those sections.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Submergence
J.M. Ledgard
The plot (such as it is) involves James and Danielle. It is really three memoirs, James, Danielle, and the one Christmas that they met and hit it off. Each individual story is the "submergence" of the title, with the joint memory interspersed for breathing room. James story is one of capture by Somali terrorists. Danielle is one of scientific inquiry into the depths of the ocean. This is really a 'state of mind' novel, giving the reader a picture of what happens in an isolated mind, whether by choice or by force. The prose is very matter of fact and at times, although I was reading from paper, had the distinct impression that I was listening to a monotonous voice giving me documentary style backstory. I must say that I didn't really understand this, thinking that this is a book to be read by a few and then discussed over coffee.
Wait
The plot (such as it is) involves James and Danielle. It is really three memoirs, James, Danielle, and the one Christmas that they met and hit it off. Each individual story is the "submergence" of the title, with the joint memory interspersed for breathing room. James story is one of capture by Somali terrorists. Danielle is one of scientific inquiry into the depths of the ocean. This is really a 'state of mind' novel, giving the reader a picture of what happens in an isolated mind, whether by choice or by force. The prose is very matter of fact and at times, although I was reading from paper, had the distinct impression that I was listening to a monotonous voice giving me documentary style backstory. I must say that I didn't really understand this, thinking that this is a book to be read by a few and then discussed over coffee.
Wait
Monday, July 21, 2014
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Robert A. Heinlein
That Hugo Award generally gets them right. This is a straight up science fiction story. But the story is not only about the science fiction. We also get revolution, self determination, politics, love, family systems, and thinking about the individual vs. society. Manuel Garcia O'Kelly is a computer technician on the Lunar Penal colony. He was free born, spent some time on earth in school and then came home. He gets mixed up in a scheme to initiate a revolution and have the lunar colony declare itself independent from earth. What I love about this book is that we spend a lot of time with Manuel and get to know him. We also get treated to trivial little descriptions of what life is like on (in) the moon. The fact that residents use language of 'cubic' instead of 'area', the use of the lunar cycle and how it affects life, the way that "laws" and social conventions have developed in this prison with no guards. It is all fascinating. So while the plot is about revolution and independence, the story is about life and decisions in a strange place. Love this.
Read
That Hugo Award generally gets them right. This is a straight up science fiction story. But the story is not only about the science fiction. We also get revolution, self determination, politics, love, family systems, and thinking about the individual vs. society. Manuel Garcia O'Kelly is a computer technician on the Lunar Penal colony. He was free born, spent some time on earth in school and then came home. He gets mixed up in a scheme to initiate a revolution and have the lunar colony declare itself independent from earth. What I love about this book is that we spend a lot of time with Manuel and get to know him. We also get treated to trivial little descriptions of what life is like on (in) the moon. The fact that residents use language of 'cubic' instead of 'area', the use of the lunar cycle and how it affects life, the way that "laws" and social conventions have developed in this prison with no guards. It is all fascinating. So while the plot is about revolution and independence, the story is about life and decisions in a strange place. Love this.
Read
Friday, July 18, 2014
Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov
In my recent reading, I have been contrasting Character and Narrative. Is the authors goal to have you know a person, or is the goal to tell a story? Nabokov writes a book about Timofey Pnin. This is a character book, in the extreme. Pnin is a professor of Russian at a small school in the east. He is an immigrant and has never really caught on to life in the United States. More accurately, he has a personality that does not recognize the need to "catch on" to life in the United States. As such, many (most) of his interactions are misinterpreted by either him or the other party. The entire novel is a series of interactions which push the reader deeper into understanding who Pnin is. And the descriptive prose by Nabokov is extensive. That is, paragraph length sentences with multiple parenthetical, relative and independent clauses. I would often have to reread a paragraph to find the subject/verb amidst the massive description just to track the intent of the sentence. Which may very well mean that I have missed the intent altogether. It is likely that the joy in reading a book like this is in savoring the descriptive, the clever turn of a phrase, the rabbit hole of prose. I feel like Nabokov accomplished his purpose with me, I know Pnin. But I did not savor. I will, however, reserve judgement since for me, it takes time to know whether this Pnin will stick with me, or will fall to some poorly used neural pathway, akin to the names of the barn cats that meandered through my life as a child.
Wait
note: this book is part of a Reading Lolita in Tehran project, which you can read more about here.
In my recent reading, I have been contrasting Character and Narrative. Is the authors goal to have you know a person, or is the goal to tell a story? Nabokov writes a book about Timofey Pnin. This is a character book, in the extreme. Pnin is a professor of Russian at a small school in the east. He is an immigrant and has never really caught on to life in the United States. More accurately, he has a personality that does not recognize the need to "catch on" to life in the United States. As such, many (most) of his interactions are misinterpreted by either him or the other party. The entire novel is a series of interactions which push the reader deeper into understanding who Pnin is. And the descriptive prose by Nabokov is extensive. That is, paragraph length sentences with multiple parenthetical, relative and independent clauses. I would often have to reread a paragraph to find the subject/verb amidst the massive description just to track the intent of the sentence. Which may very well mean that I have missed the intent altogether. It is likely that the joy in reading a book like this is in savoring the descriptive, the clever turn of a phrase, the rabbit hole of prose. I feel like Nabokov accomplished his purpose with me, I know Pnin. But I did not savor. I will, however, reserve judgement since for me, it takes time to know whether this Pnin will stick with me, or will fall to some poorly used neural pathway, akin to the names of the barn cats that meandered through my life as a child.
Wait
note: this book is part of a Reading Lolita in Tehran project, which you can read more about here.
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Published in 1983, this is probably one of the first novels in the cyberpunk genre. Jacking into a matrix with hardwired biological/computer connections, nanotech, software based enhancements to humans, asian underground black market clinics to test everything out. More recent books in this genre that I have read are Feed, Snowcrash, Counting Heads. Neuromancer leaves nothing out. Case is a matrix cowboy who was burned and now finds himself a drug junky in the Asian underworld. He is pulled out of his slow suicide for a job and a chance at his life back. Along with other recruits (Molly is the muscle, Armitage the middleman/organizer, Flatline the computer based hacker personality), Case is charged with infiltrating the computer networks of one of the worlds biggest corporations. Who does he actually work for? Does a matrix cowboy have any responsibility to be ethical, or is he just working for the paycheck? How important is his life? A straight up thriller that, 30 years later, is still fresh.
Read
Published in 1983, this is probably one of the first novels in the cyberpunk genre. Jacking into a matrix with hardwired biological/computer connections, nanotech, software based enhancements to humans, asian underground black market clinics to test everything out. More recent books in this genre that I have read are Feed, Snowcrash, Counting Heads. Neuromancer leaves nothing out. Case is a matrix cowboy who was burned and now finds himself a drug junky in the Asian underworld. He is pulled out of his slow suicide for a job and a chance at his life back. Along with other recruits (Molly is the muscle, Armitage the middleman/organizer, Flatline the computer based hacker personality), Case is charged with infiltrating the computer networks of one of the worlds biggest corporations. Who does he actually work for? Does a matrix cowboy have any responsibility to be ethical, or is he just working for the paycheck? How important is his life? A straight up thriller that, 30 years later, is still fresh.
Read
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