May 05 2015

On Basilisk Station by David Weber

Introduction

The Honor Harrington series (the name of our heroine and main character in the series), also known as the Honorverse, is a Military Science Fiction series by author David Weber. On Basilisk Station, published in 1992, is the first book in the series, which already spans thirteen books and a few spin offs.

Setting

The honorverse occurs on our universe, in around century 41 our reckoning. A universe where humanity has dispersed thorough the stars (Both before and after finding Faster Than Light technology) and established homes in numerous planets on different star systems, and evolved into large and complex but clearly distinct political-social affiliations grouped mostly around star systems.

Characters

The series centers strongly around Honor Stephanie Alexander-Harrington, a young officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, whom we meet as a newly raised Commander, taking command of HMS Fearless, a light cruiser on the Royal Manticoran Navy.

Weber devotes a good large portion of the book at developing the internal thought process and psychology of Honor, developing her as an almost utopic leader, the pure image of an effective leader who looks to drive everyone under her command to give the best of themselves, and a guide who will sit with her underlings as equals (as much as military rank, which she seldom uses to push people, would allow) and gently push them to share ideas and take initiative on the running of the ship. Honor rarely pulls rank and she doesn’t micromanage, but it’s obvious she expects only the best effort from her subordinates, and views anything less than heroic efforts as a lack of self integrity and a sign of the person cheating themselves and others. Genially, with one exception, the whole ship responds by rising to their best for her in a manner that is so constantly perfect that becomes emotionally draining, and shaming, to read at times.

Honor also exhibits almost perfect morality and adherence to military rules and ideals, thankfully pulling from perfection and showing just enough pragmatism in the nick of time, and using her drive for perfection and desire of recognition to make the character still believable.

The only other character that is developed to a level, if not close at least somewhat comparable, to Honor’s is Lieutenant commander Alistar McKeon, first in command to Honor on HMS Fearless, and whose internal plot arc revolves mostly around his struggle with his mostly unexplained and seemingly unmanageable resentment towards Honor, the redemption of which marks a slightly cliche if enjoyable moment in the book.

The only area in which Weber leaves me seriously craving for deeper development is around alien (to Earth) life forms in his universe.

On one hand, treecats, like Honor’s inseparable companion Nimitz, hold an interesting niche as pets who both exhibit higher than normal sentience traits and sociological insertion into human civilization than pets in real life, yet being pets I think Weber did reach a good balance having Nimitz’s presence felt, and not stepping into the more artificial “Look at this, it’s a treecat, look at the treecat, see the special animal I made” stance some writers exploit. Yet as a lover of cats, and frustrated zoologist, I must admit, I wouldn’t mind a smaller novella, or fake sociozoological analysis stint onto treecats outside of the main Honorverse story arc/setting.

Yet where I do feel the book is seriously lacking, is around the sentient alien species indigenous to Basilisk. An interestingly non (entirely) anthropomorphic species to which the author and the humans he writes pays such little regards that it almost feels like we’re dealing with normal humans with a strange name and a passing mention of a third arm.

This species is not the main plot of the book, and certainly I do not expect a full anthropological paper on them, yet the dismissive way they’re mentioned makes me feel they’re an artifact the author was not sure to include in the verse, and somehow might still regret having come up with at times. While it’s true that not every human will launch into a deep philosophical analysis and dissertation on the meaning of nonhuman sentience, it’s also true that it’s existence will have a noticeable impact into the humans on this verse and thus the narrative around them.

Story development

The story development is pretty good for a first book in a series. Weber introduces Honor to new circumstances to herself which allows the reader to take an easy hitchhike alongside the protagonist into the playing field of the story, creating an introduction to our surroundings and environment that feels natural and not at all forced. He has also mastered a good blend of story and back-story, dropping elements from Honor’s (and the setting’s) past here and there thorough the evolving arc in manners that tie to the current story we’re following and works the background information we need to form the characters and events into easy to follow segways which do not rip the reader from the occurring action.

While this could be considered a surprise reveal story, if much softer a surprise than say, Ender’s Game, for example, the development of it does not draw onto many artificial elements, cliffhangers or soap opera-ish, so that its progression feels natural and plausible.

As someone who has a cursed knack for guessing a book’s plot’s ending, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy a surprise reveal that did catch me partly off guard, but in a much amenable “Oh why didn’t I see that” manner rather than a “Oh, that can’t be” forced reveal.

One thing I do have to warn the reader about is that Weber seems to share a mentality with George R.R. Martin. His hand doesn’t waver at killing beloved or important characters, though, like Martin, never in a spiteful or dagger turning manner but just as part of a natural and realistic narrative.

All in all, “On Basilisk Station” was a thoroughly enjoyable, and enjoyed, book. It introduced me to a series, of which if I do not read the extensive whole available I’ll surely partake again, most surely more than once. It’s not a light read, and it needs you to be able to at least coexist with the military setting, but it’s not a burden to read either, it’s logical and well written, with language that lays easily in a very enjoyable middle between simple English and deep and thoughtful acts of acrobatic word-smithing (meaning, this book is not written in very plain simplistic English, but it’s not fanciful and show-offish either), and it will provide for sure several good hours of entertainment, with well timed emotional ups and downs, and an ending that will not leave you resentful of the author or the work.

Technical data

Book: On Basilisk Station
Series: Honor Harrington (Honorverse)
Author: David Weber
ISBN: 0-671-57793-X
Date: 1992
Publisher: Baen Books

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/05/on-basilisk-station-by-david-weber/

May 04 2015

The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard

Of course the house is haunted. But what does it want? Who is writing the letters that seem to deliver themselves? And what does that person (?) want? Malcolm Mays, a protagonist on the run from his past, might live to find out. Or wish he hadn’t.

The End of the Sentence is deliciously creepy.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/04/the-end-of-the-sentence-by-maria-dahvana-headley-and-kat-howard/

May 01 2015

What Work Is by Philip Levine

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but …

Full poem is here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/01/what-work-is-by-philip-levine/

Apr 30 2015

So, Anyway by John Cleese

The back of the dust jacket of So, Anyway… by John Cleese gives the book an unofficial subtitle, “The Making of a Python,” and indeed, that is what all but one of the book’s chapters describes. There are a few flash-forwards, or asides regarding later events, but the bulk of the story concerns what happened before a collaboration with five other comedians launched him to global fame.

It’s a straightforward book, and I suspect it’s a terrific audiobook, since Cleese reads it himself. His comedic voice comes through clearly, and he permits himself the occasional zany tangent, usually returning to the main thread of the narrative with his titular phrase, “So, anyway…” Reading through, one also inevitably learns a certain amount about mid-century England, Cambridge, and the BBC. It also surprised me at how easily Cleese fell into success in fields that are now fiendishly competitive. He seems a bit surprised in retrospect as well.

The best parts of the book, in my view, were the ones in which he talks about the craft of writing comedy, how difficult it is to be funny, rather than just clever or witty. The sketches that he often co-wrote with Graham Chapman often had an internal logic and Cleese worked very hard to keep that logic consistent with itself, no matter how tenuously the sketch might be tethered to consensus reality. Ultimately, though, funny defies definition; in the end there are no rules, only laughter. A BBC censor let them end a Python sketch with the exclamation, “Bugger!” As he explained, “I would never have believed I would OK it … but when I actually saw it, it was so funny, I’m going to.”

I would like to read Cleese’s take on the Python years, and even more a behind-the-scenes account of A Fish Called Wanda. Just as an aside, I’ve noticed that general-interest non-fiction books originally published in the UK have better indexes than those first published in the US. The observation holds true for So, Anyway… as well, and I wish that however the British publishers manage to make the economics work would find its way across the Atlantic.

So, anyway … the book is detailed, it’s written very much in Cleese’s voice, and it sheds a lot of light on where he came from.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/30/so-anyway-by-john-cleese/

Apr 29 2015

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

One of the possibly apocryphal stories told about Terry Pratchett being knighted for services to literature is that he said his service was “presumably not trying to write any.” He knew better, of course, and kept right on writing literature as long as he could.

Pyramids is the seventh Discworld book, and at this point in the span of the series, he’s doing several different things quite in addition to writing books that are funnier, both line-by-line and over longer spans, than practically any other novels being written at the time (1989 for Pyramids). First of all, he’s adding settings within the overall concept of the Discworld. Pyramids is the fourth different set-up so far, with more to come. (As things turned out, Pratchett did not revisit the setting of Pyramids.) Second, he’s broadening the range of his satire. Where he had started out skewering the conventions of fantasy fiction, he’s now turning his dissecting tools onto government, history, religion and commerce. Not all at once; or at least, not always all at once. Third, he is letting the stakes of the story emerge from the characters. In Pyramids, a significant danger to much of the Disc does arise, but it’s almost as if by accident, coming from choices that characters made without any regard to larger implications. That’s a more thorough subversion of fantasy tradition than the obviously contrived danger in The Light Fantastic. Pyramids is also, unlike any of the previous novels, divided into four separately titled sections. (The third, “The Book of the New Son,” plays on Gene Wolfe’s very serious fantasy series, The Book of the New Sun.)

The land along both sides of the river Djeli is one of the Disc’s oldest existing kingdoms, with a ruling house whose known history stretches back some 7000 years. The pharaoh of Djelibeybi is a divine monarch, who causes the sun to rise every morning and set every evening. When he dies, he is laid to rest in a pyramid suitable to commemorate such an important personage. Unfortunately, the country’s waning fortunes, not to say shrinking territory, along with seven thousand years’ worth of accumulated pyramids mean that there is very little suitable land left to cultivate, and Djelibeybi is increasingly impoverished.

Teppic, heir to the throne and the godhood, is sent to the great city of Ankh-Morpork in the hope that he will learn a lucrative trade and help alleviate the kingdom’s poverty. He is also, if possible, to get an education. Both goals are served by apprenticing him to the Assassins’ Guild, whose school is both excellent and easy to get into. The trick is to get out again alive. The book opens as Teppic is preparing for his final exam, an account of which is interspersed with flashbacks that tell his tale up to that point and give some background on Djelibeybi. But no sooner has Teppic improbably passed with flying colors (and knives), than his father Teppicymon XXVII dies. Teppic inherits the throne and the godhood.

His time in Ankh-Morpork has given Teppic ideas about enlivening and modernizing the very traditional kingdom he has inherited. Ideas such as plumbing. His foil is the venerable high priest and adviser, Dios. In a pivotal arrangement, Dios convinces Teppic to build for his late father the largest pyramid in all of Djelibeybi. That drives the plot, because on the Disc pyramids have a magical property of slowing time, a property that increases, possibly exponentially, with size. The construction of the largest pyramid ever built plays havoc with time inside and then outside the kingdom. Teppic has to find ways to remedy the situation without actually knowing what is happening; further, he would like to reform the kingdom; and if he really had his druthers he wouldn’t have to be pharaoh at all. How that works out is the matter of Pyramids.

One of the best diversions along the way is the time that Teppic spends in a neighboring kingdom, one modeled on ancient Greece, complete with bibulous and querulous philosophers:

Teppic wandered along the table to where Pthagonal was sitting in unrelieved misery, and currently peering suspiciously over the crust of a pie.
Teppic looked over his shoulder.
“I think I saw something moving in there,” he said.
“Ah, said the geometrician, taking the cork out of an amphora with his teeth. …
[Pthagonal] pulled a pair of dividers from the folds of his robe and measured the pie thoughtfully. “Is it a constant, do you think? It’s a depressing concept.”
“Sorry?” said Teppic.
“The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There’s no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me?”
“I expect it makes you extremely pissed off,” said Teppic politely.
“Right. It tells me that the Creator used the wrong kind of circles. It’s not even a proper number! I mean, three point five, you could respect. Or three point three. That’d look right.” He stared morosely at the pie. (p. 269)

And then sometimes Pratchett just casually drops a major observation on unsuspecting readers:

And I’m shut in my body, thought [the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII]. Everything we believe is true? And what we believe isn’t what we think we believe.
I mean, we think we believe that the gods are wise and just and powerful, but what we really believe is that they are like our father after a long day. (p. 260)

Or:

The thing, [Teppic] told himself, is not to look up or down, but straight ahead, into the marble [of the pyramid he is climbing], parcelling the impossible height into manageable sections. Just like time, That’s how we survive infinity – we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/29/pyramids-by-terry-pratchett-2/

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/