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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

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

Nobody Scores Returns

Tadhg — Wed, 26 May 2010 06:21:31 +0000

The webcomic Nobody Scores is back. Its return is accompanied by some nice anti-iPad snark, too. I’m glad it’s back, even though I don’t think the new strip itself is that great.

I used to read it, but had entirely forgotten about it until MetaFilter reminded me of its existence.

Tags: comics, internet, reading

The Unfeasibly Tall GBBMCSMB

Tadhg — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:50:02 +0000

I’ve always had a soft spot for good genre parody, regardless of genre, and The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire’s Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride is pretty damn hilarious. You can read the first chapter in HTML, or the whole thing at Scribd.

Tags: genre, humor, parody, reading, writing

2010 Goals

Tadhg — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:53:36 +0000

Happy New Year!

Once again, my goals for the coming year.

Some of these recur from last year, but that’s okay. They’re not really in any order.

Write at least one draft of the fantasy novel.
Revive sfmagic.org. Many of my MTG-playing friends simply don’t believe I’ll ever do this one, but I’m still determined to make it happen, and right now there are fewer obstacles to doing it than there have been in years.
Celebrate my birthday. A strange-sounding resolution, perhaps, but I haven’t actually done any significant celebration of my birthday for a couple of years, and that’s just dumb. So this year I’m going to do something. I might need help figuring that something out, we’ll see.
Participate in the CrossFit sectionals. I don’t expect to qualify, or even come particularly close to qualifying, but I want to take part anyway to see what it’s like, and to give myself a training target. Given that at the end of March last year I was in fairly poor physical condition, competing in them at all will be an achievement.
I have some miscellaneous fitness-related goals I’ll lump together: break three hundred pounds on the deadlift, get to ten dead-hang pullups, get my shoulders strong enough to safely do kipping pullups again and then get to thirty of those, break 23:00 for the 5K. Just because it’s the first day of the year and I think I should set one of these that’s a lot further away for me, I’ll add this: do “Murph” in under 50:00.
Finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour. Just five episodes to write up, I simply need to get down to it.
Run a roleplaying campaign. I haven’t done this in fifteen years, and it’s time to start again. This already looks like it’s going to happen, but starting and finishing are separate things… this goal is to run at least one story arc, and to make it good (but not worry about it being perfect).
I don’t like having amorphous goals, but this last one is going in regardless. I need to do something about building a sense of community for myself. I’m not totally sure what this means, and it’s not that I utterly lack a sense of community now, but it’s not quite where I want it, and I need to figure out what it is I want to change and how to do it. I have a post kind-of in my head about this, which I’ll hopefully get down in the next few weeks.

That seems like a good set. I also want to read 80 books, but for some reason this year that doesn’t feel like a goal in the same way as the above.

Tags: coding, community, CrossFit, exercise, games, goals, MTG, personal, reading, roleplaying, web-development, writing

2009 Goals Review

Tadhg — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:43:17 +0000

I had eight goals for 2009, and all of them that I’m going to get done I’ve already completed. Time to review.

Here are the ones I accomplished:

Fix my blog. I resurrected the full blog in January, finishing on 27 Jan 2009. I’m rather happy to have gotten this one out of the way.
Fix my Subversion repository. I’m even more glad I did this, as version control is just too important not to have. It took me until 04 May to do this one.
Finish at least three software projects. More than three, even if none of them were sfmagic.org. The reST–WordPress pipeline, the various WordPress Plugins, and the RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain all qualify.

I abandoned the “write a summary/review/synopsis of every book I read” goal fairly early into the year, on 27 Feb. I don’t think I’m going to try that one again, as it just seems that the practice simply isn’t right for me.

That leaves four goals I didn’t accomplish:

Write at least one draft of the fantasy novel. This, for me, is the big one. I didn’t get anywhere close, and in truth I feel like I never really gave it a good effort. I’ll make it a goal again this year.
Read 80 books. It was looking great until the middle of the year, when my reading inexplicably dropped off. I’ll be at 56 or 57 by the end of December, which is off by quite a few. I’m really not sure what went wrong with this one, and will probably try it again next year also.
Finish pafib. Well, I got one, so just five more of those to go… I might not make that one a goal for next year, and instead I’ll just leave that series hanging around to work on whenever the right mood takes me.
Finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour. No progress, but I still want to get this one done, and so I’ll probably leave it on there next year as well.

Looking at it as “three out of eight” probably isn’t a great plan. Instead, I’m going to consider it a great thing that I fixed my blog, fixed my Subversion repository (both things quite central to my activities), and wrote quite a few bits of software that I’m happy with. The failure that stings is the fantasy novel, and with that, I must fall back upon the old chestnut of trying again.

Tags: Blog, goals, personal, reading, reStructuredText, software, version-control, web-development, writing

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

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

Friday Fast Game

Tadhg — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:28:21 +0000

Via Greg Costikyan comes The Nemean Lion, a very short text adventure. I find it interesting partly because it’s somewhat like microfiction, and because it plays with the form somewhat.

While I’m here, I should also mention Hamlet—The Text Adventure, which I’m rather fond of (and which is a signficantly larger game, although probably not huge by text adventure standards).

Tags: games, reading, writing

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