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Andre Agassi’s Open

Tadhg — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:58:25 +0000

I read Agassi’s autobiography during a five-hour layover in Philadelphia airport this weekend, and have to say I was impressed—with the book, not the layover. I had expected it to be of interest mainly for its hardcore tennis content, with some celebrity stuff thrown in, but I found it gripping throughout and was very impressed with Agassi’s voice.

I probably should have expected this, because I’ve been impressed with Agassi’s commentary on matches in the past. Open starts with a gripping account of his preparations for his 2006 US Open match against Marcos Baghdatis, and then jumps to his childhood days playing against “the dragon”, a ball machine modified by his fairly nuts father. Much of the book is about Agassi’s relationship with his father, and his attempting to find himself and his way in the strange and highly stressful world of professional tennis—and his relationship with tennis itself, which he repeatedly states that he hates.

Obivously I’m a tennis fan, but I think this book would be interesting to anyone interested in athletes generally, and perhaps also those interested in celebrity, because Agassi spent a lot of his life in the public eye, and this is one of the themes of the book.

When it came out, much was made of Agassi’s admission of drug (methamphetamine) use and his having lied about it to the ATP. In the course of the narrative, it seems almost like a natural progression to that point from where Agassi was, although I’m curious about whether or not he struggled more with getting away from it than he revealed in the text. Since it obviously wasn’t a performance enhancer, I’m not of the opinion that Agassi should have been punished for its use in any case (just as I think that calls to punish Richard Gasquet for his cocaine ingestion are ridiculous), and in terms of his tennis career I don’t think it was a big deal—although in terms of the arc of his life, it was clearly a low point, and a dangerous one. But I think that the much earlier incident he reveals, in which his father gave him pills, apparently speed, to help his performance in a juniors tournament (acting on the advice of his brother, Agassi lost on purpose and feigned illness to ensure he wasn’t given them again), was much more shocking and worthy of attention, but this didn’t get much media coverage.

Agassi’s father is clearly a piece of work, and I find it quite interesting that Agassi eventually ended up happily married to Steffi Graf, whose father is also in the same mold. One of the most hilarious sections of the book describes the meeting between Emmanuel Agassi and Peter Graf, which would seem unbelievable if I described it here but becomes all too plausible after reading the earlier parts of Open.

Agassi’s recognition that his father’s approach to parenting was, to say the least, flawed, and his marriage to a woman who went through something similar as a child, make more disturbing one of the messages he delivers to the children in the charter school he sets up: respect for authority. While I admire his dedication to trying to help others, and specifically children, and his desire to provide to others the education he feels he lost out on due to his concentration on tennis, it’s sad to see him touting authority and rules as things that are inherently worthy of respect. It’s clear that he’s trying to steer kids away from what he feels were the mistaken acts of rebellion and acting out he performed in his youth, but I really wish he had some more awareness of the dangers of authority, which should be more evident to him given his experiences with his father and his recognition of how he and his siblings suffered under it. My suspicion is that he doesn’t see how school authorities can be just as harmful as family authorities.

Media focus on the book also centered on Agassi’s comments regarding Pete Sampras; Agassi regarded him as “robotic” and as cheap. It doesn’t come across as much of a big deal in the book itself, and I don’t see how people can really criticize Agassi for pointing out Sampras’ lack of charisma, which has always been quite evident. As for the accusation of being “cheap”, I think Agassi included it largely because he was genuinely incredulous that Sampras had such a different attitude; Agassi himself seems quite generous (sure, it’s his autobiography, but given his work to raise money for philanthropic projects and his attitudes throughout the book, this is probably accurate). Further, it seems that one of the ways in which Agassi tried to deal with the pressures of his life was to reach for more connections with more people—possibly as a result of attempting to build a functional family that wasn’t the dysfunctional one he started out with—whereas the impression of Sampras from Open is that Sampras dealt with the pressures in a much more closed-off way; this contrast between them again fits in with how they’ve appeared in other contexts.

Incidentally, Agassi’s respect for Sampras on the tennis court comes across very strongly in the text, and he was also very open about how painful his losses to Sampras were, and he’s honest about how there were times when he felt his own game was at its height and that he was going to beat Sampras—only to fall, again, in another heartbreaking loss where Sampras raised his tennis to a phenomenal level. He writes also about how he would see Sampras suffering, from illness or injury, prior to a match and then be astounded at the way in which he would pull himself together and display no weakness on court.

Agassi also mentions his media clashes with Jim Courier, but one of the best things that Courier said isn’t covered: at one point Courier, possibly after a win over Agassi, stated that he was fed up with comments about Agassi’s “talent”, and pointed out that his wins over Agassi came partly because Courier was willing to spend hours and hours on the practice court, which Agassi at the time wasn’t doing, and that Courier’s willingness and ability to dedicate himself in such a way was also “talent”. Reading about Agassi’s struggles to focus and his torment over his relationship to the game, especially early in his career, underscores that Courier’s point was an excellent one.

I recommend Open, even to those not overtly interested in tennis.

Tags: books, criticism, reading, reviews, sports, tennis

Travel, Ebooks, and Real Books

Tadhg — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:27:18 +0000

Despite my techie nature, I’ve never been enamored of books in electronic format. I love the feel of books, and while I have no trouble reading large amounts on screens of various kinds, I don’t like the idea of doing so for books.

I like reading to be a focused activity, and the fact that books are monofunction devices absolutely makes this focus easier to achieve. Simply having the option of switching activities on a computer (or whatever computer-like device I might read ebooks on) makes focusing that much harder. That’s certainly true when I watch movies on my computer. I don’t want the same thing to happen with reading. Even though it’s clearly a choice, the very presence of that choice is disruptive.

Dedicated ereading devices such as the Kindle might be an answer to this, but I haven’t come across any I find compelling, and I have no intention of supporting any that use a closed and authoritarian model. On top of that, there’s my love of physical books.

Despite all of the above reservations, I find myself considering some other approach, because physical books take up a lot of space. I’ve always been willing to deal with this in the past, but have recently found myself running closer and closer to the practical limits of what I can carry while travelling. This is despite packing reasonably well (perhaps not up to Monika standards, but not bad) and exploiting quite ruthlessly the ability of my Jacket of Holding to carry almost as much as my bag.

I generally err on the side of carrying too many books, but on my recent trip to Italy miscalculated and only brought three, two of which I read on the way out. The way back required at least two as well, so I was a book short. Physical space considerations are what caused me to bring only three books, and so I’m forced to admit that if I had some ereading device (which could be my phone, not necessarily another piece of hardware) this is simply not a problem I would run into.

So I’m going to have to experiment, start investigating getting books onto my Nexus One and my iPad, and seeing whether acceptable software can be found. This is a step I’m still feeling wary about taking, a testament to how emotionally attached I am to the physical book form.

Tags: books, personal, reading, tech, travel

An Eldritch Reading

Tadhg — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:19:49 +0000

I generally don’t listen to podcasts much, but I just listened to the first ten minutes or so of “The Haunter of the Dark” on HPPodcraft.com and I’m really impressed by the quality. They’ve been going for quite some time, so there are plenty of podcasts beyond that one (although many are discussions rather than readings).

Tags: audio, books, horror, reading

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Tadhg — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 06:57:36 +0000

I’m not a fan of the Harry Potter series. I’ve only read the first one, didn’t particularly like it, and it’s not my kind of fantasy series.

I’m not a fan of fan fiction, despite technically having written some. I regard it as being of dubious quality, despite knowing perfectly well that it’s not more likely to be bad than anything else.

Nevertheless, I was, and remain, captivated by a particular piece of Harry Potter fan fiction: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Its twist is that its Harry is a hyper-rationalist genius. You should go read it now.

Tags: books, reading, science

The Tenets of Injustice

Tadhg — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:39:59 +0000

This excerpt gives an excellent summary of our current state of affairs:

The five tenets of injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable. Because of widespread and growing opposition to the five key unjust beliefs, including the belief that so many should now be ‘losers’, most of those advocating injustice are careful with their words. And those who believe in these tenets are the majority in power across almost all rich countries. Although many of those who are powerful may want to make the conditions of life a little less painful for others, they do not believe that there is a cure for modern social ills, or even that a few inequalities can be much alleviated. Rather, they believe that just a few children are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern; the rest must be led. They believe that the poor will always be with us no matter how rich we are. They have also come to believe that most others are naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior to them. And many of this small group believe that their friends’ and their own greed is helping the rest of humanity as much as humanity can be helped; they are convinced that to argue against such a counsel of despair is foolhardy. It is their beliefs that uphold injustice.

—1–2. Danny Dorling. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2010. ISBN: 9781847424266.

(Via Leninology.) I’m impressed enough to order the book.

Tags: books, politics, power

How to get Help from a Crowd

Tadhg — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:56:49 +0000

If you ever find yourself in serious need of help from people around you in a public place, follow these instructions:

Make explicit that you need help.
Make a request for help from a specific person, and call them out by pointing at them and addressing them by some characteristic that makes them stand out.
Make very clear what they should do.

Say something like “Help! You with the green pants, I need help, call [the police/an ambulance/etc.]”.

The key is to avoid the following:

Trusting that bystanders will understand the seriousness of the situation.
Trusting that bystanders will understand help is required.
Trusting that bystanders will understand what kind of help is required.
Trusting that bystanders will realize that someone else hasn’t already gone for help.
Letting each bystander share responsibility with the rest for acting (which will likely lead to no action).

Do not let bystanders figure these things out for themselves, no matter how obvious they seem.

These points come from Robert Cialdini’s Influence, which I recommend highly. In the section I was reading last night, he covers the case of Kitty Genovese, and goes through the psychological experiments which show that it’s very likely the various witnesses to her death were unaware of precisely what was going on and that she needed aid.

Cialdini argues that urban environments make it very likely that crowds around any emergency are likely to be composed of strangers, and that individuals will seek to avoid the embarrassment of taking something too seriously, as well as mistakenly assuming that those around them (who are doing the same thing) have more information—leading to each person, seeing that no-one else is reacting as if to a serious situation, assuming that the situation is in fact not serious at all.

Tags: books, psychology

Retitling for the SEO Age

Tadhg — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:11:47 +0000

Genius from McSweeney’s. (My answers for what the originals are, after the jump.)

7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism—Animal Farm, clearly.
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World—The Catcher in the Rye, possibly my favorite in this list. I’m tempted to write a post, or a series of posts, with this title.
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream—The Great Gatsby, one of my favorite novels. I don’t like this title. I would have gone with 8 Surprising Ways the Rich are Different from You and Me, even though that’s not purely a reference to the contents of the book.
6 Shockingly Evil Things The Turn-Of-The-Century Meatpacking Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know—The Jungle.
5 Insane Ways London Could Become a Dystopia (And How It’s Not That Far From Reality)—1984. I like this one because its clumsiness just seems perfect.
1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like—The Sound and the Fury, which I’ve never read. I don’t have a strong opinion on this title, although it might be the most incongruous.

Tags: books, humor, reading

Favorite Books of 2008

Tadhg — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:42:29 +0000

I read 75 books in 2008, just managing to hit my target. (This year, I won’t make my target of 80, or even get close.) Some excellent books were among those 75.

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was absolutely amazing. I would recommend it to everyone, but it was also utterly devastating. The simultaneous senses of realism and despair that it produces make it a masterwork, but one that I found difficult to handle emotionally. You should definitely read it, but don’t expect a light-hearted romp.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, was quite good. Not a particularly deep analysis of American Imperialism, but a fascinating on-the-ground account of the occupiers’ side of Baghdad.

I still don’t think that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is science fiction, but Michael Chabon’s multiple-award-winner is very good.

Are You Dave Gorman?, Join Me, and Yes Man were good comedy “non-fiction” works. I’m not sure I’d recommend reading all of them, but it would be worth it to try one. I found Join Me most interesting, but Yes Man might be funnier.

I really enjoyed Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. A dark and gritty take on fantasy, but with a light narrative tone.

Another slightly different take on fantasy that I liked was The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. I previously called it “a cross between The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Heat, and Ocean’s Eleven”, and that still seems accurate. The sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, wasn’t as good, but I’m still going to read the next one when it comes out.

M. John Harrison’s Viriconium was good; as I wrote at the time, it’s not entirely clear what genre it belongs to, but I would recommend it mainly to fantasy fans, and/or fans of “literary” science fiction (whatever that means…).

Yet another non-standard fantasy series I read in 2008 was the Engineer trilogy by K. J. Parker: Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, and The Escapement. It’s a very “rational” form of fantasy, in that it deals with technology and problem-solving as some of its major themes. I also discussed it my Fantasy Novel Roundup from last year.

The Body Has a Mind of its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better, by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, was a fascinating pop science examination of how the body and the brain are integrated, how we learn how to use tools, our perceptions of our own bodies, and how body and brain differences affect consciousness.

I enjoyed Heather Byer’s Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey the most of the various books on pool I read in 2008. It wasn’t as detailed as some of the others, and dealt with play on a much lower level, but I liked the writing style, and perhaps could relate better to the play level than was the case with the others.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace, was an excellent and disturbing read. Which is more or less what you’d expect from a collection of David Foster Wallace stories. One of those stories, “The Depressed Person”, inspired me to write this.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger was really good, a deserving Booker winner, and I recommend it. I discuss it here.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America Erik Lauer’s non-fiction work about the Chicago World’s Fair and one of America’s first serial killers, was very good. 27 million people went to that fair, which I still think is an astonishing number, and its influence was considerable.

Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn was polished and compelling, and I recommend it.

The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, by Gordon Grice, is non-fiction about several classes of predator, and does an excellent job covering its material.

Jennifer Egan’s The Keep was an enjoyable, and unsettling, read. It’s “straight” fiction (i.e. not ghettoized in one of the science fiction, fantasy, crime, or romance genres), and I’d recommend it to most people. Some of the writing in it was really good, and I was taken off-guard by a number of the twists.

My full 2008 reading list (there’s also a fancier Freebase app version of this list):

Reaper’s Gale; Steven Erikson 06/01/2008
The Conscience of a Liberal; Paul Krugman 17/02/2008
Never Let Me Go; Kazuo Ishiguro 24/02/2008
A Fine Balance; Rohinton Mistry 16/03/2008
The Three Musketeers; Alexandre Dumas 21/03/2008
River of Gods; Ian McDonald 28/03/2008
Matter; Iain M. Banks 29/03/2008
The Hustler & The Champ: Willie Mosconi, Minnesota Fats, and the Rivalry That Defined Pool; R. A. Dyer 15/04/2008
Running the Table: The Legend of Kid Delicious, the Last Great American Pool Hustler; L. Jon Wertheim 22/04/2008
Into the Wild; Jon Krakauer 12/05/2008
Shaman’s Crossing; Robin Hobb 14/05/2008
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America; Chris Hedges 17/05/2008
Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Rajiv Chandrasekaran 19/05/2008
The Possibility of an Island; Michel Houellebecq 26/05/2008
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; Michael Chabon 30/05/2008
The Night Gardener; George Pelecanos 31/05/2008
After Dark; Haruki Murakami 02/06/2008
Are You Dave Gorman?; Dave Gorman, Danny Wallace 04/06/2008
Join Me; Danny Wallace 05/06/2008
Yes Man; Danny Wallace 07/06/2008
Kiln People; David Brin 17/06/2008
The Janissary Tree; Jason Goodwin 24/06/2008
The Blade Itself; Joe Abercrombie 25/06/2008
Forest Mage; Robin Hobb 27/06/2008
A Question of Blood; Ian Rankin 30/06/2008
Fleshmarket Close; Ian Rankin 02/07/2008
The Snake Stone; Jason Goodwin; 08/07/2008
The Naming of the Dead; Ian Rankin 18/07/2008
Before They Are Hanged; Joe Abercrombie 19/07/2008
Renegade’s Magic; Robin Hobb 21/07/2008
Storm Front; Jim Butcher 24/07/2008
The Forever War; Joe Haldeman 26/07/2008
The Lies of Locke Lamora; Scott Lynch 27/07/2008
Red Seas Under Red Skies; Scott Lynch 02/08/2008
The Name of the Wind; Patrick Rothfuss 03/08/2008
Throne of Jade; Naomi Novik 04/08/2008
The Pastel City; M. John Harrison 04/08/2008
A Storm of Wings; M. John Harrison 05/08/2008
In Viriconium; M. John Harrison 06/08/2008
Viriconium Nights; M. John Harrison 06/08/2008
Rainbows End; Vernor Vinge 10/08/2008
Exit Music; Ian Rankin 11/08/2008
Devices and Desires; K. J. Parker 13/08/2008
The Road; Cormac McCarthy 15/08/2008
Evil for Evil; K. J. Parker 16/08/2008
The Bourne Identity; Robert Ludlum 17/08/2008
The Body Has a Mind of its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better; Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee 23/08/2008
The One Kingdom; Sean Russell 02/09/2008
Blink; Malcolm Gladwell 06/09/2008
Mr. Dynamite; Meredith Brosnan 10/09/2008
Last Argument of Kings; Joe Abercrombie 12/09/2008
Anathem; Neal Stephenson 25/09/2008
Toll the Hounds; Steven Erikson 28/09/2008
The Escapement; K. J. Parker 04/10/2008
Winterbirth; Brian Ruckley 06/10/2008
Child 44; Tom Rob Smith 10/10/2008
Bloodheir; Brian Ruckley 11/10/2008
Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey; Heather Byer 15/10/2008
Nova Swing; M. John Harrison 25/10/2008
Twenty Years After; Alexandre Dumas 28/11/2008
The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty; David Harris 29/11/2008
Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently; Gregory Berns 07/12/2008
The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World; Melissa Roth 08/12/2008
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; David Foster Wallace 11/12/2008
Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion; David Sirlin 11/12/2008
The White Tiger; Aravind Adiga 12/12/2008
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America; Erik Larson 14/12/2008
Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler’s Journey; David McCumber 15/12/2008
Motherless Brooklyn; Jonathan Lethem 17/12/2008
The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators; Gordon Grice 18/12/2008
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance; Joshua Waitzkin 21/12/2008
Cosmicomics; Italo Calvino [translated by William Weaver] 23/12/2008
The Keep; Jennifer Egan 24/12/2008
The Manuscript; Michael Stephen Fuchs 25/12/2008
The Last Colony; John Scalzi 26/12/2008

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Doomsday Book Review

Tadhg — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:53:24 +0000

Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book won the Nebula award in 1992 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1993. I would describe it as a time travel plague thriller academic farce, and of all the triple crown winners it is my least favorite. Some of its ideas were good, and some of its passages powerful, but overall I found it disjointed and less than gripping.

That it centers around time travel is something I hold against it—I generally don’t like time travel stories. There are exceptions, but my tolerance for it is quite low. Willis doesn’t screw around with it, which is good, but there’s a vagueness around how it works that I dislike. This vagueness bleeds into the next aspect of the story I don’t like, which is the somewhat farcically poor preparedness on the part of the time travellers and their organization. This reminded me somewhat of The Sparrow, which also featured characters being entirely too blasé about entering dangerous and unknown situations. Unlike with The Sparrow, here Willis uses the lack of competence as part of the farce aspect of the novel, but I didn’t think that worked too well.

It didn’t help that Doomsday Book also prominently features a trope I can’t stand: that of having a character with completely critical information fall ill and then mumble incoherent fragments that hint at but cannot be used to discern the knowledge the other characters need. This is a huge part of Doomsday Book, and I really couldn’t stand it.

I didn’t find the comic aspects of the book particularly comic. Instead of the farce providing comic relief, for me it underscored the incompetence of the people running the time travel operation in a frustrating rather than amusing way.

The idea of academics getting ahold of time travel capabilities and getting into tight situations while using it for research isn’t a bad one, but I don’t like its execution in Doomsday Book. It’s possible that it requires a certain type of suspension of disbelief that wasn’t forthcoming; I found myself thinking “that’s just ridiculous” too often, and not at the points where I think Willis wanted the reader to react that way.

Something about the text’s “Englishness” also threw me off, and I suspect that this was due to the fact that it’s set in Oxford, with primarily British characters, but is written by an American (I noted the awkwardness before I found out that Willis is American).

Overall I can’t recommend it, although I know at least one person who liked it, and it’s quite likely that it just happened to push all the wrong buttons for me.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Speaker for the Dead Review

Tadhg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:52:36 +0000

Speaker for the Dead is the second novel in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. It won the Nebula award in 1986 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1987. Its predecessor, Ender’s Game, is revered as a science fiction and geek cult classic that still has resonance in geek culture. I liked Ender’s Game when I first read it years ago, and when I re-read it recently (prior to Speaker for the Dead), I enjoyed it and thought it held up quite well.

Ender’s Game is quite a tightly-packed tale, one that carries the reader along with plot and character development that gel well with the gradual revelations about the larger setting. Speaker for the Dead feels much less convincing on a number of levels. It’s not as compact—we’re not following Ender as he grows older, the plot in synch with his development. Furthermore, while Ender’s Game seemed plausible in terms of characterization in its limited environment (I felt the weakest characters were Ender’s siblings, and the others outside of the military), Speaker for the Dead relies quite heavily on Card’s depiction of a broader range of people in far less restricted environments. I don’t think he succeeds with them, and the idea that Ender would be able to perceive them so clearly just rang false for me throughout.

I also felt that the concept that Ender and his friends and family were essentially the most important people in the universe wore thin. Again, that made sense in Ender’s Game, but works far less well in the sequel.

Overall I found it enjoyable, and thought it had some fairly interesting ideas, but it wasn’t a classic the same way Ender’s Game was, and it didn’t really feel like a deserving winner of the award trio.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Startide Rising Review

Tadhg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:20:10 +0000

Startide Rising is the second novel in David Brin’s Uplift Universe series, and it won the Nebula in 1983 and the Hugo and Locus in 1984. I read its predecessor Sundiver first, and it nearly stopped me from going on to Startide Rising. I didn’t like the writing style at all, and it felt unpolished. It must be said that its ideas and setting were interesting: it’s “big universe” science fiction, with a multitude of alien races. The unique concept Brin came up with was that every alien race was raised to technological advancement (or even sentience) by some other race acting as “patron”—except for humanity, which reached a high degree of advancement, and raised dolphins and chimpanzees to higher-level sentience, without a patron.

Startide Rising concerns a dolphin-/human-/chimpanzee-crewed starship that comes across a significant secret, one that causes them to be pursued by many hostile (and competing) alien races in pursuit of it. Much of the novel focuses on the internal politics (both inter- and intra-species) on the Earth ship, and the conflicts between the alien species, with the thread of Earth’s place in the universe and the fairness (or lack thereof) of the political system in place for galactic civilization.

Brin handles all of that far better than he did in Sundiver, and it’s a far more accomplished novel. That being said, it still didn’t really work for me, particularly in terms of characterization. I thought that the sentient dolphins and chimp were handled quite well, but found the humans less convincing. The immediate plot, e.g. that of how the protagonists would extricate themselves from their predicament, wasn’t particularly compelling. The most interesting thing about it was the background plot, which concerned the larger milieu.

This larger milieu is why I think that Startide Rising won the triple crown. For all that I wasn’t convinced by the plot or characterization, and despite my not being that fond of the writing style, Brin nevertheless had me believing in his universe.

This is a phenomenon mostly confined to fantasy and science fiction works, the creation of a world (or more) that entrances the audience despite other flaws in the writing. For science fiction of this style, it’s critically important. The “big universe” has to be believable.

Note, however, the “believable” and “realistic” are very different things. I’m not at all convinced that Brin’s universe is realistic. The same applies to other fictional universes that I’m much more fond of, like Iain M. Banks’ Culture universe, Niven’s Ringworld universe, or the “Zones of Thought” setting of Vernor Vinge. It’s not that they’re realistic, necessarily, it’s that they somehow make sense to me (and lots of other readers). Even while reading Brin and thinking that individual pieces were unrealistic, I had already accepted the larger framework, and was analyzing the plot in its context.

I think this may be one of the most important skills of the “big universe” science fiction author: creating a setting that the reader, regardless of how realistic it is, accepts as making sense, accepts as a perfectly plausible way for the universe of the future to turn out to be. Brin got that right, and it was enough to snag him the triple crown despite what he got wrong.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Rendezvous with Rama Review

Tadhg — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:55:54 +0000

Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama won the Nebula in 1973, and the Hugo and Locus in 1974 (as well as the 1973 BSFA award and the 1974 Jupiter and John W. Campbell awards). After I read it I described it as “old school”, which still seems accurate.

It’s a tale of first contact, in which a gigantic starship enters the solar system and humans mount an exploration expedition to it. It’s very much “hard” science fiction, in which the technical aspects of getting to and exploring a massive spaceship take center stage. The impressive feat of authorship here isn’t characterization or plotting, but imagining in detail how such a scenario would play out in reality. Clarke does this extremely well, and Rendezvous with Rama definitely adds to his reputation as a pre-eminent hard SF author.

I enjoyed it, and appreciated it as an intellectual exercise, but it’s not my favorite style of science fiction. It deserves its reputation as a classic, but it’s a classic in a subgenre that’s not as interesting to me as other strains of science fiction.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Test-Driven Development: A Bad Example

Tadhg — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:59:49 +0000

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a programming methodology that calls for programmers to first write tests that will only be passed by code that meets the specifications for whatever component they’re working on, and then to write the code for the component and keep working on it until it passes the tests.

I don’t tend to use Test-Driven Development, even though I often think I should. When working on personal projects, I don’t even write many tests after the code is done, and that’s something I should definitely do. But I generally regard it as a good practice.

That being said, it’s not a cure-all, or even a “best practice” in the sense of being something that every programming team should use all the time. I think it’s likely to significantly aid code maintainability, particularly on larger projects, but can still imagine circumstances where it makes sense not to insist on it.

I also think that, as with so many other methodologies, whether someone uses it or not doesn’t tell you much about their ability as a programmer. An unfortunate example of this is covered by Peter Seibel, in a blog post discussing some of the responses to comments on TDD (and unit tests in general) in his book Coders at Work. The whole thing is fairly interesting, but the bit I found fascinating starts after the text “The only interviewee”[*]. This gets into a discussion of how Peter Norvig and Ron Jeffries differed in their approaches to writing a program to solve Sudoku problems. Norvig did it the “traditional” way, i.e. he immediately started trying to write code that would solve the problem. Jeffries, not incidentally one of the founders of Extreme Programming, started out writing tests first.

That Norvig solved the problem in one essay and about 100 lines of Python, while Jeffries gave up after five blog posts, doesn’t actually tell us anything about TDD and its efficacy (even if it does look somewhat bad). But it does demonstrate that use or advocacy of that methodology doesn’t tell you much about someone’s ability to solve a programming problem in any particular domain. Is that news? It certainly shouldn’t be, but from time to time the buzz around these things gets out of hand and people seem to need reminders that there aren’t many reliable shortcuts to figuring out how much a given programmer is going to contribute to a given project.

I haven’t read Coders at Work yet, but it’s on my list.

[*]

It’s long been a peeve of mine that you can’t link directly into the section of an HTML document that you want to hit unless it happens to have an id attribute, and I’ve always thought that every piece of HTML-generating software should sequentially tag paragraphs to support that functionality. I will eventually write a WordPress plugin that makes WordPress do this.

Tags: books, coding, python

Dreamsnake Review

Tadhg — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:02:02 +0000

Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake won the 1978 Nebula and the 1979 Locus and Hugo awards. I’m having trouble figuring out why. This is not to say it’s bad—it’s quite good, and I’ve definitely encountered worse award winners. But it won all three while seeming to me like a good but unremarkable novel, and my expectation is that the “triple crown” winners would be remarkable in some way.

Dreamsnake does stand out in some respects from the previous winners. It’s entirely planetbound, with no characters at any time leaving Earth. It’s postapocalyptic, depicting a world ravaged at some earlier date by nuclear war and containing communities with vastly different technological levels. (It’s not a “postapocalyptic novel” in the traditional sense, however, as it takes place long after humanity has recovered to a functional state.)

I mostly liked the writing style, thought that McIntyre had some good ideas about how societies might evolve in the future, and thought there were excellent pieces of characterization in it, although some of it was less convincing. Like the two winners before it, Dreamsnake contains some musings on how human sexuality might change over time, and I thought that was handled pretty well.

What makes it short of remarkable is that the plot and the world aren’t quite compelling enough. The plot, is is the usual approach, uncovers the world as it progresses, but about two-thirds of the way through it veers off and leaves quite a few questions unanswered. It’s a relatively simple quest plot, with the lead character, a female healer called Snake, searching for a replacement for her dreamsnake (an alien snake that grants visions and that healers use to ease the pain, and sometimes the passing, of their patients). It has a romance subplot tied into it also, which I found less than convincing.

I thought it was worth reading, and I suspect that other triple crown winners will strike me as less deserving, but there was something ultimately slight about Dreamsnake that made me surprised that it won—I woud have been less surprised by a terribly-written winner that had some kind of (purportedly) “big idea” at its heart. Dreamsnake is definitely better than that, and perhaps my own focus on plot is what makes me underestimate it.

Tags: books, reading, reviews, science-fiction

Favorite Books of 2007

Tadhg — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:44:38 +0000

My total number of books read for 2007 dropped significantly from 2006, to 50. This was mainly due to not reading much in the first six months of the year. I read significantly more non-fiction, and that difference felt more marked because almost 50% of my favorite books from that year are non-fiction.

I liked The God Delusion, and my review of it holds the record for the most comments of any post on this blog. I might be more critical of it now, but I still think it’s worth reading, and expresses important ideas.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma was fantastic, influenced me strongly at the time, and continues to influence me now.

Sadly, my behavior has not been influenced as strongly by The Four Pillars of Investing—a book I recommend to everyone. No-nonsense and clear, it’s an excellent approach to money management.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed was nowhere near as gripping as Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think that Diamond unfortunately started it with the weakest case study, but it was still worth reading, and hadp plenty of compelling and depressing facts about where the human race is currently headed—essentially along the lines of “current trends cannot continue”.

Empire of Capital, by Ellen Meiksins Wood, was an interesting brief outline of Wood’s ideas on how modern imperialism differs from its older counterparts. I think I’d like to re-read it in about ten years to see how well it holds up by then.

Richard Morgan’s Market Forces (a gift from my friend Brett) was an interesting take on a future where the movers and shakers of finance and capital reify their struggles as a form of car-based combat. Not as good as his takeshi Kovacs works, but I still enjoyed it.

Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are fascinating examinations of empiricism, pyschology, philosophy, finance, and the always-present question of whether we really have any idea what the hell is going on. I recommend both very highly.

H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, upon which the television series was based, was surprisingly good. It held my attention throughout, and offered many insights, some disturbing, about both sports and education.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles was really good. Good enough that I think I should re-read it relatively. Like The Artist’s Way, it has some religion-related aspects that I’m not fond of, but its overall message and the tools it provides are more than enough to make up for that.

I quite enjoyed The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard; I wrote a review of it shortly after I read it.

Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint was rather good, and had quite a different tone to most fantasy I read. I’d like to get some people I know who don’t usually read fantasy to try it.

Spin, the first in a trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson, was quite enjoyable. Wilson seems to be quite good at mixing stories at the individual level with events that occur on a much larger scale. Spin’s larger scale includes the Earth being sequestered from the rest of the universe, and the passage of billions of years, and as such deals with some fairly major questions. I haven’t read the later books in the series yet.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson, was probably the best of his work I’ve read since his Sprawl books—although it’s not quite up there with those.

King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, and Wizard’s Eleven, by Sheri S. Tepper, were all interesting, more fantasy that has a quite “different” feel. They’re actually the first three in a series of nine, but the other six are hard to acquire, and I haven’t found them yet. I started out liking them more, and was less certain later. There’s a certain dreamlike, “anything goes”, feel to parts of them, something that isn’t that uncommon in fantasy and science fiction, and which I don’t seem to like much; I’ll have to write about this further. The other series that comes to mind with a similar feel is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine was excellent. I highly recommend it. In it Klein examines the ways in which capitalist elites have exploited disasters and disorienting circumstances to push their agendas onto unwilling populations, and also examines the effects of unrestrained “Chicago school” economics. It may place too much personal responsibility on Milton Friedman and his disciples, but apart from that is a very strong work, probably Klein’s best.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts, was the best fiction work I read in 2007. Extremely compelling science fiction with big ideas, plenty of neuroscience speculation, and one of the best takes on vampires I can remember.

Jon Krakauer’s exploration of Mormonism, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, was fascinating and rather depressing. The history of Mormonism is rather interesting, but the authoritarianism and hideous misogyny are just unbearably awful to read about.

I read No Country for Old Men after I’d seen the film, which is fairly unusual for me. The Coen Brothers adapted it very faithfully, so there weren’t too many surprises. I like McCarthy, and this was worth reading.

Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, on the other hand, might not be worth reading. Light fantasy around the idea of Napoleonic-era military dragon pilot corps, it strikes me as being close to a series based around non-sexual fan service. I know that the term “fan service” refers to sexual content, but it seems like it could reasonably apply to any content that was inserted into a work because fans would think it was cool (as opposed to titillating). I read a few of the series, all along wondering why I was doing so. I don’t really recommend it, although I admire it as an exemplar of coming up with a cool idea and running with it.

A number of my friends really liked The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, but I wasn’t too impressed by it. Structuring a novel such that some terrible event is known to occur, so that the reader is waiting for the revelatory details to hit, is tricky to pull off successfully. It didn’t work for me in The Sparrow primarily because I found the actions of the protagonists at key points to be incomprehensibly idiotic, and thus instead of feeling the author’s intended reader response of “those poor people, how terrible”, I was instead thinking, “how could they be so insanely stupid?”

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a short story collection by Haruki Murakami, and as such is something you should read.

My full reading list from 2007:

Cuba: A new history; Richard Gott 09/01/2007
The Borgia Bride; Jeanne Kalogridis 11/01/2007
The Bonehunters; Steven Erikson 21/01/2007
Gardens of the Moon; Steven Erikson 18/02/2007
The Immortal Game; Mark Coggins 22/02/2007
The God Delusion; Richard Dawkins 04/03/2007
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero; David Remnick 01/04/2007
The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Michael Pollan 28/04/2007
The Four Pillars of Investing; William Bernstein 09/05/2007
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Jared Diamond 31/05/2007
The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite; David McWilliams 09/06/2007
Empire of Capital; Ellen Meiksins Wood 10/06/2007
Market Forces; Richard Morgan 13/06/2007
Fooled By Randomness; Nassim Nicholas Taleb 16/06/2007
The Black Swan; Nassim Nicholas Taleb 27/06/2007
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream; H. G. Bissinger 30/06/2007
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams; Darcy Frey 30/06/2007
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles; Steven Pressfield 30/06/2007
Zen in the Art of Writing Ray Bradbury 04/07/2007
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Edwin Lefévre 13/07/2007
War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Chris Hedges; 15/07/2007
Changing Planes; Ursula K. Le Guin 04/08/2007
Spin State; Chris Moriarty 04/08/2007
Spin Control; Chris Moriarty 05/08/2007
Failed States; Noam Chomsky 18/08/2007
The Pale Blue Eye; Louis Bayard 19/08/2007
The Dante Club; Matthew Pearl 21/08/2007
Swordspoint; Ellen Kushner 21/08/2007
A Shadow in Summer; Daniel Abraham 22/08/2007
Elantris; Brandon Sanderson 29/08/2007
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture; Ariel Levy 31/08/2007
Spin; Robert Charles Wilson 31/08/2007
Out on the Cutting Edge; Lawrence Block 31/08/2007
The Privilege of the Sword; Ellen Kushner 03/09/2007
Pattern Recognition; William Gibson 10/09/2007
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game Michael Lewis; 02/10/2007
The Blade Itself; Marcus Sakey 20/10/2007
The Art of Losing; Keith Dixon 20/10/2007
King’s Blood Four; Sheri S. Tepper 20/10/2007
Necromancer Nine; Sheri S. Tepper 21/10/2007
Wizard’s Eleven; Sheri S. Tepper 25/10/2007
Brasyl; Ian McDonald 28/10/2007
The Shock Doctrine; Naomi Klein 18/11/2007
Blindsight; Peter Watts 18/11/2007
The End of America: A letter of warning to a young patriot; Naomi Wolf 02/12/2007
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith; Jon Krakauer 17/12/2007
No Country for Old Men; Cormac McCarthy 18/12/2007
His Majesty’s Dragon; Naomi Novik 19/12/2007
The Wild Palms; William Faulkner 20/12/2007
The Sea Came In At Midnight; Steve Erickson 23/12/2007
The Sparrow; Mary Doria Russell 28/12/2007
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman; Haruki Murakami 31/12/2007

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Favorite Books of 2006

Tadhg — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:41:00 +0000

2006 involved quite a lot of reading, including perhaps a higher number than average of books in series.

Before those, however, I started the year with another excellent collection of David Foster Wallace essays, Consider the Lobster. Excellent stuff, highly recommended.

Then I went on another gambling/gaming book binge with A. Alvarez’ classic The Biggest Game in Town; David Kushner’s rather poor book on MTG star Jon Finkel, Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; and Andy Bellin’s Poker Nation. Of those, I’d only recommend The Biggest Game in Town.

The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr’s book about Luca Turin and the vibration theory of olfaction, was an excellent read. It suffers from having its worth correlated to that of the theory Turin espouses, as much of it revolves around the idea that Turin is fighting the institutions of science over the nature of smell. This is still an open question, and while soon after I read it the research (from what I could glean online) seemed to be going against the vibration theory, it now appears to still be viable.

Woken Furies, the last book in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series, was good, and I think it finished the series well.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann, is an examination of the current understanding of what life was like in the Americas just before Columbus arrived. Short answer: quite different than you might think. Definitely worth reading, and it makes clear to what extent the common conception of this period is colored by what was/is essentially colonial propaganda.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was gripping and extremely interesting, structurally as well as otherwise. I don’t want to give much away, but it’s not terribly far from If on a winter’s night a traveller—although ultimately less frustrating, and less of an exploration of reading per se. I keep meaning to read more of Mitchell’s work, but haven’t gotten around to it.

The Thousandfold Thought finished off R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing series, and did so in satisfying fashion—but it’s just the first series in a larger set, and so I had to wait until this year for the next series’ first book, The Judging Eye.

The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood is a good read if you’re interested in how Hollywood and the American movie industry actually functions.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium was excellent, and I thought that it was by quite a bit the most developed of his works that I’ve read. Like those earlier works, it’s worth reading if you’re interested in human happiness and fulfillment.

Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys was a gift from Helen, and while I had some fears at the start that it might be a humdrum coming-of-age novel, it turned out to be fantastic, covering a fascinating and tumultuous period in Irish history and doing lots of things very well. Recommended.

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s epic, labyrinthine novel concerning the city of Bellona, which is in the United States but somehow not of it after “something” happened there, is amazing.

Among the series I read were: Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall, which I rate so-so; George Pelecanos’ Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, which wasn’t bad; Bits of Denise Mina’s Garnethill and Paddy Meehan trilogies, which were quite good; a bunch of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series, which I like a lot; The Blood Knight, part three of Gregory Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, which sadly started rather better than it continued; and the first three books of Philip Kerr’s Bernhard Gunther works, which I thought were excellent.

Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore was good, possibly my favorite novel of his after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but that masterpiece remains far and away his best work.

I wasn’t that fond of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, and wrote a detailed review of it.

Penelope Lively’s The Photograph started well but faded.

I was impressed by God’s Playground: A History of Poland Volume I, The Origins to 1795, by Norman Davies, but still haven’t picked up the second volume. I reviewed it as well.

Century Rain, a science fiction novel by Alastair Reynolds, was reasonable but not great.

The Glass Bees, a 1957 German science fiction novel by Ernst Jünger, was extremely interesting, particularly in its apparent prescience about the nature of industrial development later in the 20th Century. Apart from that, it’s also worth reading because it’s radically different from the American and English science fiction of the period (at least that I’m aware of).

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer winner, is excellent for the first two thirds. It’s not terrible thereafter, but didn’t sustain its earlier energy (part of this is probably deliberate, but even so the resultant experience felt off). Comics, love, lifelong friendship, trying to escape (and help loved ones to escape) from Nazi Europe, war, sexual identity—all mixed together in what is mostly a great book.

Don Quixote is clearly a great classic of literature, but I’m not sure about it. I think that I found the early going somewhat slow, and that it became more interesting a lot later. I also think that the humor isn’t quite right for me, although there were definitely some hilarious moments.

Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, Julian Dibbell’s exploration of virtual economies in massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games, was absolutely fascinating, and I’m quite sure it’s still very relevant—the names of some games might need to be changed, but I suspect that the broad strokes are still similar a few years later. The best part might have been the author’s conversation with the IRS as he tried to figure out whether his virtual earnings were taxable.

Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, a memoir of gameshow apearances by Bob Harris, was extremely good, and I was quite surprised by it. Harris managed to make a rather uplifting and seemingly profound story out of his time on (and around) Jeopardy!, and also made it seem quite relevant to anyone with an interest in knowledge (hopefully not too small a group).

K. L. Bishop’s The Etched City is a brilliant fantasy novel; I resisted the temptation to put “literary“ in front of “fantasy” there (I had a similar temptation with Dhalgren). I recall stopping while I was reading it several times to appreciate the language and the writing—not something that happens too often, and that should be recommendation enough.

The full list of what I read in 2006:

Consider the Lobster; David Foster Wallace 09/01/2006
The Biggest Game in Town; A. Alvarez 11/01/2006
Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; David Kushner 12/01/2006
Poker Nation; Andy Bellin 13/01/2006
The Emperor of Scent; Chandler Burr 19/01/2006
Woken Furies; Richard K. Morgan 20/01/2006
Looking for Jake; China Mieville 21/01/2006
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus; Charles C. Mann 03/02/2006
Oracle Night; Paul Auster 05/02/2006
Cloud Atlas; David Mitchell 17/02/2006
The Thousandfold Thought; R. Scott Bakker 19/02/2006
The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood; Edward Jay Epstein 02/03/2006
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 16/03/2006
The Magus; John Fowles 30/03/2006
Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters; David D. Friedman 25/04/2006
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity; Lawrence Lessig 29/04/2006
At Swim, Two Boys; Jamie O’Neill 07/05/2006
Norwegian Wood; Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin 13/05/2006
Dhalgren; Samuel R. Delany 25/05/2006
The Praxis; Walter Jon Williams 26/05/2006
The Sundering; Walter Jon Williams 02/06/2006
Conventions of War; Walter Jon Williams 03/06/2006
A Scanner Darkly; Philip K. Dick 05/06/2006
Redemption Ark; Alastair Reynolds 09/06/2006
Old Man’s War; John Scalzi 10/06/2006
Wonderland; Michael Bamberger 12/06/2006
No Place to Hide; Robert O’Harrow, Jr. 27/06/2006
Right as Rain; George Pelecanos 28/06/2006
Field of Blood; Denise Mina 29/06/2006
Mr. Irresponsible’s Bad Advice: How to Rip the Lid Off Your Id and Live Happily Ever After; Bill Barol 01/07/2006
Flesh and Blood; Michael Cunningham 02/07/2006
The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them; David Goodman, and Amy Goodman 09/07/2006
Hell to Pay; George Pelecanos 09/07/2006
Soul Circus; George Pelecanos 11/07/2006
Hard Revolution; George Pelecanos 13/07/2006
Drama City; George Pelecanos 13/07/2006
Garnethill; Denise Mina 13/07/2006
Kafka on the Shore; Haruki Murakami 16/07/2006
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes; Lawrence Block 17/07/2006
A Long Line of Dead Men; Lawrence Block 18/07/2006
All the Flowers are Dying; Lawrence Block 18/07/2006
A Simple Plan; Scott Smith 18/07/2006
Underground; Haruki Murakami 22/07/2006
The Blood Knight; Gregory Keyes 23/07/2006
The Ghost Brigades; John Scalzi 24/07/2006
The Ruins; Scott Smith 26/07/2006
Exile; Denise Mina 27/07/2006
Resolution; Denise Mina 29/07/2006
The Dead Hour; Denise Mina 30/07/2006
On Snooker; Mordecai Richler 31/07/2006
The Glass Bead Game; Hermann Hesse 14/08/2006
The Photograph; Penelope Lively 15/08/2006
God’s Playground: A History of Poland Volume I, The Origins to 1795; Norman Davies 30/08/2006
Century Rain; Alastair Reynolds 02/09/2006
The Ten Thousand Things; Maria Dermout 04/09/2006
The Glass Bees; Ernst Juenger 04/09/2006
Across the Nightingale Floor; Gillian Rubinstein 04/09/2006
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Michael Chabon 16/09/2006
Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Edith Grossman 22/10/2006
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Carson McCullers 31/10/2006
The Kite-Runner; Khaled Hosseini 09/11/2006
The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America; Gus Russo 13/11/2006
The Immortal Game: A History of Chess; David Shenk 14/11/2006
The Meaning of Night: A Confession; Michael Cox 18/11/2006
Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot; Julian Dibbell 25/11/2006
In Persuasion Nation; George Saunders 26/11/2006
Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine; Allan MacDonnell 03/12/2006
Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!; Bob Harris 09/12/2006
Year of Wonders; Geraldine Brooks 16/12/2006
The Etched City; K.L. Bishop 18/12/2006
March Violets; Philip Kerr 20/12/2006
The Pale Criminal; Philip Kerr 21/12/2006
A German Requiem; Philip Kerr 22/12/2006

Tags: books, reading, reviews

Gateway Review

Tadhg — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:38:51 +0000

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, the opening novel in his Heechee series, won the Nebula in 1977 and the Hugo, Locus, and John W. Campbell awards in 1978 (making it even more highly-decorated than most of the “triple crown” winners).

It tells the story of Robinette Broadhead, a prospector who struck it rich while searching for alien artifacts and/or significant scientific discoveries. It takes a split form, alternating chapters between Robinette talking about his past and about his present; the chapters in the present are all focused around his sessions with an AI therapist, Sigfrid.

This structural device means that the reader knows from the start that Broadhead is ultimately successful in his quest for riches, while both present and past strands move towards a common point of revealing the key traumatic event in his history.

The universe that Pohl sets up involves an Earth that is short of food and other resources. Pohl suggests that easily-accessible oil will run out with the result that shale mining is common, and Broadhead begins his adult life at that. He wins a lottery that pays enough to get him off planet, to Gateway. Gateway is an abandoned base, constructed out of an asteroid by the long-gone Heechee, aliens who apparently abandoned the human sector of space five hundred thousand years ago. Humans found artifacts of theirs on Venus, and then discovered Gateway, where the Heechee left abandoned starships. These ships have faster-than-light capabilities, but humans can’t figure out how they work, or how to really control them. They have navigation systems that seem to go to predetermined destinations and then return to Gateway, so the humans use them by trial and error.

This process is extremely dangerous, which is why the reward structure is such that lucky trips can mean retirement into a life of luxury. Broadhead initially refuses to take many trips, because of how dangerous they are, but economic and other pressures eventually push him to it.

As might be evident from its structure, the novel has a strong psychological bent, and there’s a heavy focus on Broadhead’s therapy, his complexes, and the relationship he has with his lover Gelle-Klara Moynlin. (Incidentally, I read this novel as encouraging toleration of homosexuality, and difference in general, something it shares with its “triple crown” predecessor.)

I liked it but wasn’t crazy about it. I’m curious enough to want to read the rest of the series, and while it certainly wasn’t bad, I thought it was weaker than most of the previous triple winners.

Tags: books, reading, reviews

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