Apr 27 2015

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang

This novelette won the Hugo in 2007. I picked it up as a standalone e-book that was part of the Humble Bundle mentioned here, and it’s the first work I’ve read by Ted Chiang. It won’t be the last!

The story as a whole is broken into several parts, which nest and braid together in a way that isn’t obvious from the beginning. The first part is also called The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, and starts with a scene from The 1001 Nights, with the first-person addressing the “mighty Caliph and Commander of the Faithful” and promising that “were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one’s eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted.”

The narrator is a merchant named Fuwaad ibn Abbas, and he was born where he is addressing the Caliph, “Baghdad, City of Peace.” (There was some irony in that appellation, four years after the American invasion of Iraq. The Assassins’ Gate, a widely read book about the invasion, was published two years before Chiang’s novelette.) Fuwaad is prosperous, trading in fine fabrics, though his father was a grain merchant. The story that he recounts to the Caliph begins with a walk through the market, where he notices that “one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, so I entered to peruse its wares.” It is filled with wonders, the like of which Fuwaad has never seen before.

Hitherby spoilers.
Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/27/the-merchant-and-the-alchemists-gate-by-ted-chiang/

Apr 26 2015

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

As probably one of the slowest readers in this group, I, perhaps, shouldn’t have chosen a book that was almost 600 pages long.

With the heavy academic reading I do for work, and the last two books I read being emotionally hard and challenging, I just wanted something fun to read. Mistborn filled that role nicely.

The first of the Mistborn trilogy, ‘The Final Empire’ is set centuries after the bad guys won the great fight for mankind. It is a dystopian world of systemic despair and hardship, where even those in power have to walk political tightropes to maintain their position. Yes I did say it was fun. It’s what I consider a traditional fantasy, where the horror is without the gritty realism, where it is there for the story but does not leave you disturbed. It’s the equivalent of watching those action flicks, where buildings explode and people fly through the air but it’s all light and magic.

It is a well-developed ensemble of characters, where even the secondary characters hold enough interest. The majority of them are thefts and conman, even those in power and never what they seem. ”There is always another secret” becomes a key theme, and it is this that kept me going. The intrigue, the manoeuvring, the never being entirely certain of the truth and motives.

Kelsier, the co-main character is built on secrets. He survived the unsurvivable, and became a name that is whispered with awe and fear. He’s also the leader of the gang, who talks of trust but holds close his own secrets. His motives were always so unclear, questionable, and like Vin I would sometimes question if he was too good to be true.

Vin, the other co-main character was an interesting depiction. She was a theft that learned the hard way never to trust. That could have made her one-dimensional so easily, but you get to see her struggle with that. She does not wish to hold onto her distrust but yet retreats to its lessons. When shown a world she never knew, of richness and opulence she feels herself seduced by it. Again, she could have easily become a stereotype of a gullible girl, but there’s a deft touch there, of understandable seduction, but also strength of character.

As I said, it’s the first of a trilogy, so there are a lot of questions unanswered, there is a sense of the ending creating questions rather than tying it all together. This is the nature of trilogies after all. But it is readable as a standalone, there is still enough resolution to feel the satisfaction of the last page.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/26/mistborn-the-final-empire-by-brandon-sanderson/

Apr 24 2015

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian starts with a soon-to-be-classic opening line: “I’m pretty much fucked.” One of humanity’s first manned missions to Mars has encountered a dust storm stronger than their base and their return vehicle can withstand. During the hasty evacuation, a freak accident incapacitates one of the crew of six; even more freakishly, it does not kill him, though it vents all of the air from his suit. The rest of the crew can’t find him in the dust; the data they receive from his suit indicate that he’s dead; the rising storm threatens to prevent their launch from the surface. They have to leave, or the whole crew will perish. So they do.

Mark Watney, the abandoned astronaut, regains consciousness some time later and assesses his situation:

I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days.
If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
So yeah. I’m fucked.

The rest of the book is a straightforward story of how Watney gets out of his predicament. There’s tension, because Watney is in an extremely difficult situation and he occasionally makes a mistake that worsens things; but not too much tension, because it is clear from early on that The Martian is not the kind of book in which the protagonist dies.

It’s fun, exciting reading, and I sped through it in about a day and a half. Weir cares a lot about the science of eking out a precarious existence on Mars, and his attention to detail gave me confidence as a reader that the author wasn’t fiddling with the physics or the chemistry just to get his story where he wanted it.

Weir tells his story at first through Watney’s logs, and then just as I was getting tired of only having Watney for company, he introduces chapters on Earth and in space with the other members of Watney’s mission. Readers get to see both sides of attempts to rescue Watney, which helps advance the story and give it a greater range. Weir writes vividly about the parts of the story that interest him — the setting, the physical challenges Watney faces, and sometimes the search for solutions back on Earth. He writes snappy dialogue, too.

The Martian is not a book of great character depth. That’s just not the story that Weir wants to tell, nor is a broody, introspective type likely to have made it through NASA training and a two-year journey to the red planet. The politics, even office politics, portrayed in the book are very simple. It felt like some of the bits of dialogue had an unwritten “Boo-yeah take that, Authority Figure!” just waiting to drop onto the page. A crucial plot turn depends on a low-level minion getting a nearly immediate meeting with a top NASA official; that was things in the book that most tested my suspension of disbelief. Weir is better at a realistic portrayal of the Martian environment than of earthbound conflicts.

These shortcomings are easy to overlook. The Martian is an exciting, bumpy ride all the way through. Buckle up, and good luck getting back home!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/24/the-martian-by-andy-weir/

Apr 22 2015

What If? by Randall Munroe

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color? Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different solar system bodies?

I had never wondered about any of those questions, but clearly someone had. And all of those various someones wrote in to Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, who had launched a sideline in “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions.” In the book version of What If? Munroe not only delights in answering questions like these (more than half of which have not previously appeared online), he often extends them, taking the situation as posed and then asking “But what if we tried more power?”

As with the question about laser pointers and the Moon.

[Cartoon of unchanged moon]
Well, that’s disappointing.
It makes sense, though. Sunlight bathes the Moon in a bit over a kilowatt of energy per square meter. Since the Moon’s cross-sectional area is around 10^^13 square meters, it’s bathed in about 10^^16 watts of sunlight—10 petawatts, or 2 megawatts per person—far outshining our 5-milliwatt laser pointers.

[Cartoon figure asks] What if we tried more power?

A 1-watt laser is an extremely dangerous thing. It’s not just powerful enough to blind you—it’s capable of burning skin and setting things on fire. Obviously, they’re not legal for consumer purchase in the US.
Just kidding! You can pick one up for $300. Just do a search for “1-watt hand-held laster.”
So, suppose we spend the $2 trillion to buy 1-watt green lasers for everyone. (Memo to presidential candidates: This policy would win my vote.) In addition to being more powerful, green laser light is nearer to the middle of the visible spectrum, so the eye is more sensitive to it and it seems brighter.
Here’s the effect.

[Cartoon of unchanged moon]

Dang.

The cartoon figure keeps asking “What if we tried more power?” until Monroe finds a laser power level at which he can write both “Under those circumstances, it turns out Earth would still catch fire” and “This flow of material effectively turns the entire surface of the Moon into a rocket engine—and a surprisingly efficient one, too.”

There are nearly 300 pages devoted to the questions and answers, along with several sections of short answer (more than one Q&A per page) and 12 pages of “Weird (and worrying) questions from the What If? inbox.” I was interested and amused all the way through. What If? hit the sweet spot of serious science mixed up with deadpan presentation, and proved a (periodically dangerous) garden of delights.

By the way, the answers to the other questions noted above are “an explosion leveling everything within about a mile of the baseball field,” “yes, especially with Russian weapons,” “sort of but it would be really weird,” and a chart showing seriously short life expectancies for the Cessna pretty much everywhere. I hope there will, eventually, be a second volume.

+++

Eight years later: Eventually, there was a second volume.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/22/what-if-by-randall-munroe/

Apr 21 2015

Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons

This was the book that made me wonder whether I just wasn’t enjoying reading books on the smartphone. Bridge of Birds would be terrific in any format, but I had had lukewarm or only just better than lukewarm reactions to two authors I normally quite like, Connie Willis and John Scalzi. Then I tried an author I was unfamiliar with, Dan Simmons, and the book, Muse of Fire, didn’t do much for me at all. (It originally appeared as part of the anthology The New Space Opera. I read an electronic version of an edition from Subterranean Press.)

The story follows an interstellar troupe of Shakespeare players in a universe where humans have been reduced to slave labor for mysterious and extremely powerful alien overlords. Humanity has been dispersed to small settlements among the stars, while earth itself has been converted into a massive mausoleum: dead humans are brought back from various stars to be interred in crypts that cover the surface of the planet, a surface now dry and dusty because the oceans have been drained by the aforementioned overlords. The traveling Shakespeareans seem to be one of the few groups of humans to move from star to star, and to escape lifelong drudgery.

The protagonist is Wilbr, a 20-year-old actor who has been with the Earth’s Men since he was nine. As the story opens, they are about to perform Macbeth at a mining outpost. Wilbr introduces most of the cast, and it is a group rife with conflict and ready for drama. And then … nothing happens. Or rather, a great many things happen, but none of it arises from the characters, and only minimally from the setup. The course of the plots struck me as one deus ex machina after another, quite literally, as the crew encounters an ascending line of godlike aliens, all of whom are very fond of Shakespeare. Or at least want to see Shakespeare performed by live humans, for reasons that remain ineffable.

I get that the author considers Shakespeare a pinnacle of human achievement. That’s nice. It’s not a story, and reading this attempt made me cranky enough to wonder whether the act of swiping a screen rather turning a page had something about it that annoyed me so deeply (and yet unconsciously) that I would be unable to like any book I read in smartphone format. Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate cured me of the notion, but that’s another story.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/21/muse-of-fire-by-dan-simmons/

Apr 20 2015

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett

The witches from Equal Rites return in Wyrd Sisters, and it is clear that by this stage of the Discworld series, Pratchett has really begun to hit his stride. From the title page, where he says that Wyrd Sisters is “Starring Three Witches, also kings, daggers, crowns, storms, dwarfs, cats, ghosts, spectres, apes, bandits, demons, forests, heirs, jesters, tortures, trolls, turntables, general rejoicing and divers alarums” it is clear that Pratchett will be riffing on Macbeth throughout the book. As indeed he does with the very first scene:

[A fire] illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: “When shall we three meet again?”
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: “Well, I can do next Tuesday.” …

Two pages of introduction later

In their clearing above the forest the witches spoke thus:
“I’m babysitting on Tuesday,” said the one with no hat but a thatch of white curls so thick she might have been wearing
a helmet. “For our Jason’s youngest. I can manage Friday. Hurry up with the tea, luv. I’m that parched.”
The junior member of the trio gave a sigh, and ladled some boiling water out of the cauldron into the teapot.
The third witch patter her hand in a kindly fashion.
“You said it quite well,” she said. “Just a bit more work on the screeching. Ain’t that right, Nanny Ogg?”
“Very useful screeching, I thought,” said Nanny Ogg hurriedly. “And I can see Goodie Whemper, maysherestinpeace, gave you a lot of help wit the squint.”
“It’s a good squint,” said Granny Weatherwax.
The junior witch, whose name was Magrat Marlick, relaxed considerably. She held Granny Weatherwax in awe. It was known throughout the Ramtop Mountains that Mss Weatherwax did not approve of anything very much.

An author can’t riff on Macbeth without murder most foul, and that happens about a dozen pages into the book. A rising Duke murders Verence, King of one of the small domains near the territory of Granny Weatherwax and the other two witches. Verence winds up as a ghost, and soon discovers that he is one of many haunting the castle.

Granny Weatherwax paused with a second scone halfway to her mouth.
“Something comes,” she said.
“Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?” said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books.
“The pricking of my ears,” said Granny. She raised her eyebrows at Nanny Ogg. Old Goodie Whemper had been an excellent witch in her way, but far too fanciful. Too many flowers and romantic notions and such. …
“Hoofbeats?” said Nanny Ogg. “No-one would come up here this time of night.”
Magrat peered around timidly. Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered.
“What’s to be afraid of?” she managed.
“Us,” said Granny Weatherwax, smugly.

The dead king of course has an infant heir, and his last faithful servants deliver both heir and crown to the witches for safe-keeping. After a brief discussion of whether taking in the babe constitutes “meddling,” which is not done, the witches accept him, and the plot is nearly off and running. The one missing element is a troupe of strolling players, and a few pages later they do in fact stroll by and stay a while. Long enough for a childless couple among them to adopt the babe, having no idea of his identity, and for the witches to stash the real crown among the prop crowns, where it is not nearly flashy enough to attract attention.

Now that the elements are in place, readers can bounce along, enjoying the story in its own right as well as how the novel varies from Macbeth. There is no need for Pratchett to up the stakes, as he did in Sourcery; the conflicts and situations that arise from the opening and the characters themselves are more than sufficient to propel the story. One of the joys of the book is the sheer variety of funny bits. Pratchett still has the one-liners and set-pieces that marked the first books in the series, but he is also building humorous elements that develop over several scenes, that get funnier with each appearance of a character, or that take the whole course of the book to come to fruition.

Some of the short bits are also by way of droll commentary:

“The duke often mused on his good luck in marrying her. If it wasn’t for the engine of her ambition he’d be just another local lord, with nothing much to do but hunt, drink and exercise his droit de seigneur*
[footnote at the bottom of the page] *Whatever that was. He’d never found anyone prepared to explain it to him. But it was definitely something a feudal lord ought to have and, he was pretty sure, it needed regular exercise. He imagined it was some kind of large hairy dog. He was definitely going to get one, and damn well exercise it.”

And wry observation:

“Oh, obvious,” said Granny. “I’ll grant you it’s obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.”

Or perhaps a bit more:

Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees or veracity, and carrying away the past.

And:

There was something here, [Death] thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet … and yet …
Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

Despite the murder and the witches, it’s a comedy. You can tell by the ending.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/20/wyrd-sisters-by-terry-pratchett/

Apr 19 2015

Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos

One of the hazards of getting a blurb for your book from someone who has written a great book on a closely related subject is that it invites comparisons. Age of Ambition — subtitled Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China — has a blurb from Peter Hessler, whose three books on contemporary China set the standard on the topic, as far as I am concerned. I spent an unfair amount of time wondering why Osnos’ book wasn’t like one of Hessler’s, a deeply present book, written from the inside out, from someone grounded in the place who is an inhabitant (even if a foreigner) first and a reporter second. Age of Ambition isn’t like that because Osnos isn’t writing a Hessler book, and it took me a while to get over my supposition and see what he was getting up to.

Osnos was the China correspondent for The New Yorker from 2008 to 2013 (he had been a reporter there for The Chicago Tribune from 2005, after two stints in the 1990s spent learning Mandarin), and Age of Ambition is his summation of China in that period, along with threads of discussion that show how particular aspects of reform-era China came about, or longer personal stories that illuminate themes in recent Chinese history that Osnos sees as important. The largest themes are the three of his subtitle — fortune, truth, faith — though he develops several others in the course of the book. The changes in China over the course of the last 30 to 40 years strain superlatives, and Osnos sketches their scope right at the start.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/19/age-of-ambition-by-evan-osnos/

Apr 16 2015

The Three: A Novel by Sarah Lotz

I’ll be honest with you – I have no idea how this book ended up on my TBR list. But there it was on my Kindle in the pick-me-pick-ME section, and so I read it.

There’s a lot of… well, lukewarm is the best word to describe the reviews I’ve come across for this book; however, I don’t feel lukewarm about it. It’s not a 5-star masterpiece built of epiphanies and subtleties, but it’s creepy, and a bit haphazard, and sometimes annoying but more often just interesting (with a side of creepy; I did mention the creepy, right?).

Four planes crash on four different continents, and in three of those crashes, one child miraculously survives. I won’t spoil things for you, but these kids have issues (and not of the PTSD kind, as might be expected), and their caretakers end up having issues, and that part of the story is the best part because it’s the creepy part.

Unfortunately the book gets sidetracked from its creepiness by subplots that could be interesting but don’t really seem to fit overall. I’m mainly referring to the preachers and televangelists who become convinced the children represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (conveniently ignoring the lack of a fourth child), and run rampant over American politics, ending with the U.S. being well on its way to becoming a theocracy. This part just didn’t fit. The crazy conspiracy Apocalypse stuff fit, but the politics didn’t. It lowered the creep value, and that made me a sad panda.

The abrupt switch to a journalist’s point of view, was, well, abrupt, and really was just a lot of exposition explaining what happened in the end, kind of a long-ass epilogue that actually didn’t resolve ANYTHING. And that was the most annoying part. So much foreshadowing that simply withered on the vine.

It occurs to me at this point that I am writing a lukewarm review. Please strike the first sentence from the second paragraph.

The author has other horror books out there and I wouldn’t be averse to reading them. Sometimes authors hit the mark and sometimes they don’t, and this book had enough good creepy ideas in it that I can imagine her writing something that would really catch my attention. There was so much potential in this book that didn’t get followed through, perhaps because there was a lack of a really strong overarching plot to pull everything together.

If we used stars on this blog I would give it 3 stars, which for me means I don’t feel like I completely wasted my time reading this book, but it’s not something that I’ll be re-reading.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/16/the-three-a-novel-by-sarah-lotz/

Apr 02 2015

The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry In Paris And New York by Chandler Burr

I read Chandler Burr’s original New Yorker article on Un Jardin Sur Nil when it came out and remember being absolutely fascinated. Mr Burr is an excellent journalist and writer, and he really drew me into a world which I never really give much thought to otherwise. This book expands upon that original article and, even better, includes the research he did following Sarah Jessica Parker through the unprecedented creation of her scent, Lovely (if you’re a fan of hers, this book is essential reading.) The Perfect Scent made me hyper-aware of the role of perfume in our daily lives, and taught me a lot about the modern industry. I found especially amusing Mr Burr’s periodic rants against the market, though I do confess that I was not personally impressed with Un Jardin Sur Nil when I finally got a chance to try it, though most everyone in the book lauds it. But taste is a difficult creature to pin down, I suppose. Mr Burr does a great job with helping the reader break down the whys and wherefores, however, and really broadened my view of perfume.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/02/the-perfect-scent-a-year-inside-the-perfume-industry-in-paris-and-new-york-by-chandler-burr/

Mar 20 2015

Inside Job by Connie Willis

I had almost forgotten how charming Connie Willis’ writing can be. I started reading her in the mid-1990s with Bellwether, which is another one of those books I have to be careful about picking up because I will have a very difficult time putting it down again, no matter what else I am supposed to be doing during that time. Over the next few years, I read most of her novels and a couple of her short story collections. The ones that have stayed most in memory are Doomsday Book and Passage; I haven’t yet read Blackout and All Clear, the pair that won the Hugo in 2011.

By comparison, Inside Job is a slight work. It’s a novella, and won the Hugo in that category in 2006. The story follows Rob, a professional skeptic, and Kildy, an actress who has decided to ditch a successful Hollywood career for working with Rob at his magazine devoted to debunking psychics, mediums, channelers, spiritualists and other purveyors of hokum. It’s a setup like a movie comedy, and Willis’ work often has that screwball comedy feel to it. Absurd situations come up, powered by witty dialog and quick banter.

The book revolves around Ariaura Keller, a woman starting to make a splash in Beverly Hills by channeling “Isus,” who lived in Lemuria and who has returned to earth in California, just in time to fill the spiritual longings of the tanned and overpaid. That this operation will also fill Ariaura’s coffers goes without saying. So far, so typical for Rob and Kildy. But then something unusual happens during the appearance of Isus, eventually making the skeptics skeptical of their skepticism. Or at least something very much along those lines as hijinks ensue.

Inside Job is funny, it’s charming, and there is a connection to H.L. Mencken. What’s not to like?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/03/20/inside-job-by-connie-willis/