We just got back from seeing Michael Jackson This is It.

I like seeing behind the scenes footage, so I was OK with going to see it, but I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected. I grew up surrounded by Michael Jackson songs, but it wasn't kind of music I liked then. Time has been kind to a lot of his best songs, and now I can appreciate how good they really are, particularly when played live by a good band.

On top of that, you have Michael's dancing, which is still phenomenal. He showed few signs of his age or his condition in this footage and the movie is very enjoyable, just as a performance. I left the theater actually considering buying a greatest hits package of some kind, and feeling it was a shame he didn't live to do at least a few of these live shows.

This morning I finished Warbreaker by Branden Sanderson.

This is the second book I've read by Sanderson, and while this book is not as good as his first, Elantris, it still feels very fresh in the somewhat stale fantasy field.

Not set in the same world, at least as far as I can tell, Warbreaker has to do with a brewing war between two countries, one weak and one strong. The strong one is so mainly due to magic derived from Breathe, something all individuals possess and that can be exchanged and hoarded and used to animate the inanimate, under certain conditions. The weaker power rejects the use of this magic, on religious grounds.

At the start of the novel, one of the royal daughters from the weaker countries is being married off to the stronger one. Once she gets there, along with a sister that follows her surreptitiously, the intrigues that might lead to war are explored.

It's a good book. The ideas are fresher than most fantasy, but the characters are not as strong as his first book. They sound, and act, like very modern Americans rather than people from a different world and this breaks down the suspension of disbelief somewhat.

I finished two books in the last few days - The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King.

The Green Glass Sea is a YA book about two girls growing up in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Both are social misfits and end up being friends. It's an enjoyable book, with some very sad moments as one of the girl experiences terrible losses. The characters are less generic than a lot of YA characters, although the kid without parents present is almost a cliche.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about a baseball loving nine year old who wanders away from her family and gets lost in the woods. It shows that King hasn't lost his ability to write compelling narratives, even if his ability to accurately portray a nine year old girl is very weak. His characters that are teens or adults feel much more real than this girl - I had to constantly remind myself that she was supposed to be nine.

Last night I got to see Devo at the Regency Ballroom in SF.

On this tour, they are doing two nights in each city. Night one, they play the entire album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo! Night two, they play Freedom of Choice.

We decided to just go see the second night. It was a fun show, after a weird opening act. Though it was short, since they only did one album plus two encore songs, it was very satisfying. The high points for me were Gates of Steel and the closing Beautiful Life (with Booji Boy!).

I hadn't been to this venue before and it was quite nice. From their website, they tend to get rock/metal acts, so the security presence was a little heavy for the older/calmer Devo crowd.

Also, the only tickets available were "Meet and greet" tickets, so I got to hang around afterwords and speak to the band briefly and got pictures with the Casale brothers, as well as signatures on an old band picture and a poster. They are supposed to be working on a new album, and hopefully they will tour for that as well.

The latest book I have finished is Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin.

The title Digital Barbarism could cover a lot of ground, but the subtitle is "A Writer's Manifesto" and the book mainly deals with the issue of copyright, in particular the efforts of some to reduce or eliminate it in our era of digital storage.

The title gives away the fact that Helprin is against this. The book was germinated out of an op-ed piece he did promoting copyright extension, and the resulting criticism by bloggers, etc.

The book is alternately infuriating and convincing. His overall argument wins out - that copyright is a valid and valuable piece of individual rights and needs to be defended, not extinguished - but along the way there are too many ad hominem attacks, pointless pieces of memoir and misplaced anti-modernist diatribes. He also complains about being mis-represented, while mis-representing his opponents. All of this gives the book a scatter shot, disorganized and poorly thought out feeling that undermines the cogent arguments he does make.

This morning I finished The Road to Vengeance by Judson Roberts, the third book in his Strongbow series of YA historical fiction.

Everything I said about the first two books still holds - here and here. Strong story, well drawn battle scenes, well researched history and weirdly inappropriate cover pictures.

The third book picks up from the abrupt ending of the second book, and continues the story as the protagonist is campaigning with a Viking army in France. This book wraps up that campaign, and also puts the focus back on his quest for revenge towards the end. The end is much more satisfying - open ended and obviously continuing the saga, but wrapping up enough of the story to feel like a complete book instead of part of a larger piece.

Yesterday, I finished The Laws of Our Fathers by Scott Turow.

Another excellent book by Turow. While others are writing generic legal thrillers, Turow is using the legal thriller medium to write literature. While there is a killing, and a trial, at the core of this book, it is used as a way to explore many other topics including aging, the holdovers from the 60s, the relationships between children and parents and the races.

The book is told primarily from two perspectives, one is the judge on the case of a killing where some people she knew in the 60s are involved, and is set in the present. The other is one of those people, her ex-boyfriend, who also knows the people in the case although not involved himself, and is set in the 60s. The people they know are hard core revolutionaries and may have been involved in a campus bombing in "Damon", a fictional town obviously based on Berkeley.

As I said above, another excellent book showing why Turow is head and shoulders above other writers in the genre.

Last night I finished Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell.

I've been interested in the battle of Agincourt since I was a kid, an interest that was heightened when I found out that an ancestor of mine, John De Byllam, was one of the English archers who fought there, and was knighted afterwords.

Agincourt is a piece of historical fiction, following an English archer who survived the slaughter at Soissons, and ended up on the fields of Agincourt. The battle itself only takes up a small part at the end of the book, the main part is build up, developing characters who's fate would be decided at Agincourt.

Overall, an enjoyable book. Cornwell's characters don't feel like true period people, like you would get in the Patrick O'Brien books, but they don't feel so modern as to totally undermine the historical part of the fiction. The history is reasonably accurate, adding only a few non-historical characters.

I just finished Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind, the sixth book in his Sword of Truth series.

I've commented in other reviews how Goodkind creates these ridiculous situations for his characters, but I finally realized why--it's the Superman dilemma. His main character, Richard Cypher/Rahl, along with his companions is so powerful and hyper-competent that he will defeat any opponent that comes against him openly, and has done so over and over in these books. The result is that it is very difficult for the author to put him in real jeopardy, and therefore the ridiculous situations, similar to what used to happen in Superman comics. This book actually makes that situation worse as it is revealed by the end that in addition to being a superb warrior, the most powerful wizard in many years (and a new type of wizard), he is also a great businessman, an insightful philosopher and a great artist.

This book also has two other problems. First, it's way too long. The second is that Goodkind has obviously become enamored with the ideas of Ayn Rand and is using them in the most transparent and cliched ways possible. For those readers out there who think Ayn Rand is a hack writer, pick up this book and see how badly those ideas could be portrayed.

Today I finished Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane.

Lehane has a reputation for being more than just a standard genre writer, so I was a little surprised by Gone, Baby, Gone because it is just that - a standard genre novel. All the cliches of the modern private eye novel are there - the hard PI (in this case a man/woman team), their even harder but loyal to them criminal friend, the world weary cops they deal with, etc, etc.

The characterizations are a little deeper than your standard run of the mill PI book, but nothing too special when compared to other top of the line practitioners like Estleman or Parker and definitely not notable compared to genre innovators like Hammett or Ellroy.

I also had problems with the portrayal of child kidnapping. It does point out in the intro that the vast majority of child disappearances usually involve family members and are resolved quickly with no problems for the child, the child disappearances in the novel are portrayed so vividly and have horrible outcomes, at least in one case, that that is the impression it will make and increase our societies silly paranoia about it's children.

Still a good novel but, as always, expectations can lead to disappointment.

I just finished Cryptic by Jack McDevitt, a collection of his short fiction.

I'm a fan of McDevitt's novels, but a lot of the short stories in this collection didn't wow me. Most of them were just OK. Of the 30+ stories, there were probably five that I really liked.

Reading a bunch of different pieces by one author in a row does give you a good sense of their writing. Reading through this collection gives a strong picture of the sense of melancholy that runs through a lot of McDevitt's work.

Just saw The Invention of Lying, the new Ricky Gervais movie. It has some funny moments but it wasn't as good as I hoped.

They handle the premise in a weird way. Instead of just not being able to lie, the people in the movie must tell the whole and literal truth all the time, i.e. they can't stay silent and they can't be mistaken. It also postulates that everyone in the real world is very negative and mean, but just keeps quiet about it. This changes the whole tenor of the movie, and makes all the characters come off as more mean than truthful. And after Ricky starts to lie, it makes them all appear stupid.

The beginning of the movie, mainly scene after scene of people criticizing Ricky, are a real downer. It picks up somewhat as Ricky learns to lie, but never fully recovers. And the main plot centers around his pursuit of Jennifer Garner while never making it clear why he is interested in her, other than her looks. He's portrayed as deeper then that, but she never offers anything and comes off as shallow throughout.

I just finished The City & The City by China Mieville.

(Spoiler alert)

Mieville's latest novel is, at heart, a hardboiled detective/police procedural style mystery. The setting is what sets it apart, at puts it with one foot in the SF field. The protagonist works in a strange city in the Balkans that has become mentally bifurcated. Some people live in Beszel and some live in Ul Qoma, though they are physically co-located. Both sets of citizens are trained from birth to ignore the other city and its populace unless they cross between them through a border crossing. Inadvertent, and intentional, illegal crossings are investigated by a feared and mysterious group known as Breach. When a foreign student is killed in one city and dumped in the other, the resulting investigation threatens to undermine the whole setup.

The weird setup gives it the feel of a SF novel, without actually involving any fantasy or SF elements. And overall, the mystery elements work. There are the standard sinister businessmen, threatening thugs and people who want to shut down the investigation, but they all feel fresh enough in the telling to work. The climax of the novel is a little of a let down, but this kind of mystery is more about the process then it is about the solution. The most similar mysteries are probably Martin Cruz Smith's Renko novels.

Overall it's nice to read a Mieville novel that is not set in the same world as most of his fantasy novels. This one is not as disturbing to read as some of his others, more like a middle ground between the feel of Perdido Street Station and his YA novel Un Lun Dun.

I just finished The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

The Age of Wonder covers what Holmes calls the second scientific revolution in Britain. Specifically he covers the careers of Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Humphrey Davies as well as the craze for ballooning and the early careers of Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and John Herschel.

One of the main points of the book seems to be to put this new crop of scientists (a term that was only created towards the end of this period) in context and show how art and science were more closely aligned. Most of the scientists above wrote poetry of one form or another and were friends with some of the great Romantic poets like Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, who also wrote poetry that used scientific themes and inspiration.

The topic is an interesting one, but the books main strength is the writing. The author has a strong, clear style that brings out the various personalities and keeps the narrative interesting and informative without getting bogged down in details.

I just finished The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton, the second book in his Void Trilogy.

Not surprising here - it's not really a separate story as much as a direct continuation of the first book, which I wrote about here. So much so, that it was hard to start this book since it's been a while since I read the first one. Keeping track of the list of characters and their complex interactions wasn't easy even while reading that book - trying to do it jumping into this one was worse.

Also, like the first book, the story within a story, told as series of shared dreams, is more compelling than the main story. It takes some unexpected twists here, turning it's protagonist into even more of an uber-mensch, but still makes for a good fantasy story, although it is now tied into the main story in such a way that it wouldn't make sense on it's own.

I spent most of the weekend at Bluegrassin' In The Foothills, (commonly called the Plymouth festival).

The highlights of the show were Town Mountain, Audie Blaylock & Redline, and Bluegrass, Etc. Three very different acts, but all put on excellent stage shows.

I also got to see the Steep Canyon Rangers, a band I didn't expect to like from their radio songs and the work they do with Steve Martin, but they also put on an excellent live show.

One theme of this years show seemed to be speed. All the bands were playing very fast - faster than I've seen some of them play in the past. I don't know if this is a new trend, but a lot of them are starting to push the point where things still sound musical instead of like some kind of contest.

Good research, but sloppy thinking.

I just finished Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell.

The thesis of the book is that the fixation on low price has significant long term costs, mostly hidden. Overall, that thesis is mentioned many times but not fully developed or explored. Most of the book is historical discussions about the rise of discounters and other purveyors of low prices.

The research is mostly very well done. The sections on cheaper food, discount stores and behavioral economics are very interesting. But each chapter stretches at the end to include some meandering thoughts, seemingly attempting to tie into the overall thesis but usually with little success.

In general, the logic and arguments presented in the book are it's weakest points. The author does not seem capable of connecting the data to the thesis and continually makes weak, off-topic or totally invalid argument after argument. One egregious example is the following excerpt from the chapter on cheap food.

Left to their own devices, global food markets pretty much follow the same "race to the bottom" model followed by other unfettered markets. Subsidies and economies of scale make grain and everything it is made of -- including animals that eat it -- increasingly cheap.

The author doesn't seem to notice that the 2nd sentence actually undermines the first, since "subsidies" are not a part of an "unfettered" market. This kind of sloppy thinking dominates the argumentative sections of the book.

Yesterday I finished The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard.

Subtitled How Law is Suffocating America, it would be more accurate to say How Changes in Philosophy of Law is Suffocating America. Howard does a good job providing lots of examples how the law has become less useful, more restrictive and counter-productive. How goes through three areas where he sees this.

The first is the growth of statutory law over common law. Statutory law specifies not only the general principles or rules, but also lays out the specifics of exactly how the law is to be interpreted and implemented, sometimes in grotesque detail. This over-specification is intended to ensure the exact results intended by the lawmakers without any judgment or flexibility and produces laws that become ends in themselves.

Similarly, his second main topic details how process has overtaken progress. In particular, processes that are intended to ensure fairness and lack of bias instead create forums for endless discussion, since there is no alternative once someone asks to be heard.

His third main topic details the growth of what I will call active rights. Starting with the important civil rights laws of the 1960s, some of the same ideas were extended to cover the disabled, etc. moving from the removal of barriers for some to the active support of others. Howard does a nice job in this section of pointing out that real rights are actually defensive in nature - a shield against the law/government, while these new "rights" necessitate action by others in order to support others. As such, they are not actually rights but are instead demands.

An interesting book. I don't know if his proscriptions at the end of the book are the correct fixes, since they don't focus on the philosophical problems that led to the problems, but the problems themselves are nicely delineated. One quibble - the book could have used in line footnotes to better source it's data, rather than just using end notes.

A few minutes ago, I finished The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman.

I've previously read a lot of Estleman's Amos Walker mysteries, mainly when I was over-dosing on mystery novels in university. This is his first western that I have read, and I wasn't blown away. It's an OK read, a semi-comic take on the Old West, with lots of asides to the reader thrown in about it's semi-comic take.

The story is basic at heart. There is a son of wealth who decides to be a black sheep and gets into robbery, using a travelling band of actors as a cover. Along the way, they interact with a detective from Pinkerton's and a much more serious, and nastier, gang of outlaws. Mix in a few twists and turns, and you have an OK novel but not much more.

Yesterday we saw Julie and Julia, the latest Nora Ephron chick flick.

It was better than I expected. Ephron's work has consistently headed downhill since her biggest success, When Harry Met Sally, but J&J misses some of the flaws that have come to characterize her movies - overly cute dialogue, characters with no real edge to them and extreme sappiness. This is probably due to the fact that she was constrained by this being based on two real stories.

The first is Julia Child's discovery of cooking as her passion while living in France, the second is Julie Powell's story of how she got her life back on track by starting a blog and dedicating herself to cooking all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking within one year.

For me, the most interesting take away from the movie was the contrast between the self-confident, outwardly focused Julia Child's and the whiny, self absorbed, very modern Julie Powell.

The ending is probably the weakest, as it meanders to an end after Julie completes her cooking on time and Julia gets her book published. But overall, it's an enjoyable movie, particularly if you are vulnerable to food porn binges.

The latest book I've finished is Drood by Dan Simmons.

Drood fits nicely in a fairly new sub-genre, the "secret history. Pioneered by writers like Tim Powers, secret histories take actual people and actual historical events and put their own plot into the space created by odd coincidences or unexplained events. In Drood, this secret history is built around Charles Dickens and his one time protege Wilkie Collins.

It also uses another neat trick -- the unreliable narrator. The book is told in the form of a memoir written by Collins, who does not hide that he is taking huge amounts of opiates, usually in the form of laudanum, resulting in holes in his memory and the possibility of hallucinations. Even by the end of the book, it is never 100% clear what is real and what is fantasy.

While the book is well written overall, I do have a few quibbles. First, there is too much exposition. I did learn a lot that I didn't know about Dickens, Collins and the time they lived, but at times the exposition is too blatant and pulls away from the story. Second, the use of actual historical characters feels uncomfortable. In particular, the Collins character becomes less and less attractive as the story goes on. By the end of the story, he takes actions that would seem libelous if Colins was still alive. I don't know if there is any historical evidence for that kind of character assassination. This is true to some extent with all "secret history" type books, but it seems very egregious in this case.

Last night I attended the first public meeting of Make Oakland Better Now, a new organization focused on trying to improve Oakland, particularly in the three areas of public safety, infrastructure and city government accountability/transparency.

This is the first time I've attended a meeting for a political/grassroots organization like this, so it was pretty interesting. There was a decent sized crowd, probably around 100 people. Sadly, for such a diverse city, the meeting was not very diverse - almost exclusively older white people with a smattering of younger people.

The meeting organizers did a good job of laying out why they thought a new organization was needed and what they hoped to accomplish. I thought it was very good that they had realized that in order to be effective they need to focus on a small number of topics, and target things that can be measured and have impact.

I think they key will be in what comes next. The meeting broke up into three groups, each focusing on one of the improvement areas. I joined the group on transparency/accountability. There were some interesting points raised, but I think the person moderating this group needed to be more assertive in keeping the discussion on topic and coming up with concrete next steps. The "report out" from the other groups seemed more complete because of this. Our group ended up saying that we wanted to research the budget more and produce a version more people could understand, and do more with PR for the city. The first one isn't surprising since the moderator was a budget person and brought that up as the first thing, which influenced the direction of the whole discussion. The second is a nice, and important, idea, but is completely off topic for transparency/accountability of city government. Keeping it in totally undermines the focused approach of the organizers.

If I stay involved, I will try to influence this sub-group to re-focus on transparency and accountability, part of which includes understanding the budget.

This morning I finished Likely to Die by Linda Fairstein.

I don't know if this is a typical book in this series about a NY assistant district attorney, but it is a very weak book.

It seems the author, a NY assistant district attorny, is too focused on capturing the realities of her life in the novel. For example, there are too many characters thrown at the reader, with little purpose for many of them. Presumably these all map to real people the author deals with, but putting them in the novel without giving them significance in the story is pointless. There are also significant digressions where one character tells another about various sex crimes they are prosecuting or need help investigating. The author points out in a post-script that these details are all taken from real cases, but who cares? She seems to ignore whether or not it helps the story she is trying to tell.

In addition, the protagonist is almost inert for most of the novel. Since the plot never gets to the point of an actual trial, something surprising in and of itself for a book with a trial lawyer as the main character, the protagonist spends most of the book alternating following the police around as they investigate and relaxing while the police are off investigating things.

The book also fails on basic writing tasks. For example, there is an issue raised about a possible relationship the protagonists date and the murder, the protagonist is shown being very concerned about it and then it is never cleared up by the end of book.

Overall, one of the weakest books I've read in a long time. Too bad - I was hoping for something interesting because there are few legal thrillers told from the prosecution point of view.

Latest book finished - Elantris by Brandon Sanderson.

Elantris is Sanderson's first book, and it is an impressive debut with compelling characters and a setting that feels new.

The world he creates feels like it has a lot of back story, although this the rarest of fantasy beasts - a stand alone novel. There is enough to build on that I suspect there will be a sequel at some point, but the novel feels complete as it is.

It tells the story set ten years after the fall of the titular city, populated by members of the population that have been changed by a mysterious process to be powerful magical beings with the ability to manipulate the world around them. After the fall, these same creatures are turned into half dead creatures that have no abilities and can't heal and therefore deteriorate into madness over time. On top of that is the conflict between one expansive empire based on an aggressive religion and the surrounding kingdoms.

A lot of the plot elements feel new, rather than a standard re-tread of fantasy ideas. Sanderson weds that to a nice handling of characters, particularly his villains, who have more depth than is typical for the genre.

He has some other series novels now, and based on this book I will probably check them out at some point.

Last night I went to see The Honky Tonk Dreamers at McGrath's Pub in Alameda.

I mainly went to see Tony Marcus's guitar playing. He did play guitar on a few songs, but mainly played fiddle. I was also impressed by the rest of the band. Charlie Wallace was great on lap steel, pedal steel and guitar. Jerry Logan played excellent bass and sang a few songs, including one of my favourites, Across the Alley from the Alamo.

The surprise of the evening was Julay Brooks. I had seen her with some bluegrass bands, so I assumed she would just be the singer but she played a very nice swing rhythm guitar and took some good solos as well.

The band bills themselves as "Western Swing and Country Music". The set I saw was mostly Bob Wills songs, which isn't a bad thing, with a few country tunes thrown in. Overall, a very fun band to see live.

I just finished Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner.

This is by far the best non-fiction book I've read in a long time. It covers the history of recording music, from Edison's first cylinders to the modern Pro Tools/MP3 era.

It's not an exhaustive history, but gives snapshots of important events and people along the way. Not only does it cover these, but it also goes into detail on how the different and conflicting viewpoints of the time were reflected in the recording technology, from Edison wanting to stick to analog, mechanical recording to capture the "true" sound to the use of electronic recording and then digital and the quest to capture the sound of a space plus the sound and then to create new sounds out of nothing.

The one thing that could have improved this excellent book would be an accompanying CD or web site with sound samples based on what is mentioned in the text.

Well written, well researched, overall excellent.

Last night I finished In War Times by Kathleen Anne Goonan.

In War Times is almost an alternate history book, but in this case the protagonist thinks about alternate histories, wants to create alternate histories and, in the end, interacts with alternate histories. It follows a soldier who loses his brother at Pearl Harbor, gets involved in the design of directors for anti-aircraft guns, and travels through UK and Europe during the WW2 and lives through the birth of bebop. Early on, he is given the plans to a device that is never clearly described, but could change the world through some foggily described relationship between DNA and consciousness.

The creation of that device, and it's nebulous effects, run through the rest of the book. It is a very literary and intellectual science fiction book, filled mostly with discussion and ruminations on the nature of things. The unspecified nature of the device, and it's effects, does undercut a lot of that discussion though.

The movements, but not the specific character, of the protagonist are based on Goonan's father, who kept a memoir of his life in the war and just after.

There is one other annoying point in the book - a major plot point hinges on the Kennedy assassination and Goonan does seem to subscribe to the liberal trope that if Kennedy had survived, the result would have been Utopia. In truth, history has made it clear that Kennedy was just another scheming, deceptive, over-medicated, philandering politician.

This morning we went to see the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum.

When we got there, I wondered about how successful the exhibit was - there was no line outside and none I could see inside. But they do a good job of controlling the lines, and there was one down stairs, and once we got inside it was quite crowded.

The exhibit is very good. The signage is excellent, making the audio tour almost, but not quite, superfluous. And the quality of the exhibits and the amount of important artifacts was very good.

One warning - even though it is a "Tut" exhibit, don't expect room after room of Tut artifacts. There are basically two Tut specific rooms, the rest of the exhibit covers the period leading up to Tut and give a nice background. Of the two Tut rooms, the first is more interesting, with many objects from the tomb. The second is supposed to represent the burial chamber and is anti-climactic. There are only a few artifacts there, and none of the sarcophagi or masks. Those no longer leave Egypt.

Overall, an excellent exhibit and definitely worth the price of admission.

I just finished Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

This was a disappointment. It's a great topic for a book, and there is some interesting material here, but it is put together in a sloppy, un-focused format and the good stuff is mixed in with a lot of drivel, sometimes leading to conflicting ideas.

For example, parts of the book espouse the idea that being able to direct your focus towards the future, particularly the anticipation of events, can be beneficial, while other parts of the book take a strong stance in favour of the new age "be in the now" kind of thinking.

The sourcing is also all over the map. At times the author seems to have spoken to direct sources for scientific data, other times she repeats stories taken from a newspaper or TV show, with seemingly no effort made to distinguish between the different reliability levels of these sources.

Hopefully there will be another book on the same subject. There appears to be enough interesting research to support that.

More Heaven Than Hell

Last night we got to see Heaven and Hell, i.e the Dio version of Black Sabbath, at the Warfield in SF.

I pretty much lucked into finding out about this show. Guitar Center had a sale over the weekend and I had one guitar cable I've been whining about for years. So I decided to take advantage of the sale to replace it. On the way out, I always look at the flyers near the door and the one for Heaven and Hell caught my eye. Given that I haven't played my electric in over a year before this weekend, and I hadn't been to a Guitar Center in longer than that, it was very fortuitous.

The show was the next day, so I rushed home, expecting it to be sold out. Luckily for me, Heaven and Hell doesn't sell as well as Black Sabbath. This meant that not only were they playing a smaller venue, but that they still had good seats available.

The show itself was amazing, from the opening strains of E5150/Mob Rules to the ending of Neon Knights. For me the high points were Falling of the Edge of the World and Die Young, near the end of the set, but even the songs off their new album, The Devil You Know, and the slightly older songs from the under appreciated Dehumanizer were really good. They also had the obligatory solo sections for drum and guitar and some jamming and a sing along on Heaven and Hell.

It was the Mob Rules era lineup - Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice - and none of them have lost any of their chops. This is particularly amazing since Dio is 67, just 2 years younger than my mum. He was looking a little old running around, but he still has the pipes. Geezer was also looking, well, like a geezer but Tony Iommi is amazing - he doesn't look like he has changed in 20+ years.

Overall, I'm still amazed and thrilled that I got to see this band in a smaller venue. I don't do arena shows any more, so this might be the only chance I get to see them, and this is probably the closest I will every get to any of Black Sabbath. I will have to keep my eye on the Warfield to see who else comes through there.

The opening act was Coheed and Cambria. I'd heard their name somewhere before, but never heard any of their music. They did a good set, without a lot of stage banter. I assume this was because they were trying to fit as much as possible in their shorter set. Live rock shows aren't the best place to judge new music, due to the usually terrible sound mix and loudness, but they seemed to have some possibly interesting songs. The high point of their show for me was a nice cover of Iron Maiden's The Trooper. The only down side of their set was their lighting - they had a set of floor spotlights that were nicely set to point directly at the balcony, making it impossible to actually look at the band for a good portion of their set.

I just finished Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow.

Pleading Guilty isn't a legal thriller like you might expect from Turow. It's actually a modern noirish mystery with a partner in a law firm substituting for the typical private investigator protagonist.

The protagonist is an ex-drunk, former cop who is been underperforming at his firm and is on his way down, if not out. He's asked to look for a missing partner who might have also stolen a lot of money.

This is a departure for Turow, and feels very different from his other novels. It still has the complex and flawed characters he is known for. It starts out slow but picks up momentum in the second half. Once you twig that it is noir, everything -- twists, turns and betrayals -- falls into place and the end is about what you would expect.

Yesterday I finished All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear.

All the Windwracked Stars is set at the end of the world, in a fantasy world derived from Norse myth. The beginning is set at the end of the world in it's equivalent of Valhalla, the rest of the book is set much later in Midgard, when that world is ending as well.

The main character is an ex-Valkyrie who ran away when her comrades were slain and has lived alone ever since. She gets drawn back into things when an old enemy pops up, and she tries to save the world one last time. In addition to these struggles, the novel also features some intense and somewhat violent sexual scenes, somethat that seems de rigueur in many modern fantasy novels written by women.

An interesting, and very dense novel. The use of a mythology that hews closer, in some ways, to it's origins is well done.

Yesterday, I finished WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer.

Wake is the first of a planned trilogy, obviously dealing with the rise of an emergent AI on the world wide web. The book follows four separate plots. The first is of an awakening AI. The second is of a blind girl who gets an experimental implant to try and give her sight. The third is of the Chinese government trying to contain an outbreak of virulent flu, and repressing internet connections to contain publicity. The fourth is of a hybrid chimp/bonobo that not only can talk using sign language but starts to show actual artistic ability.

By the end of the book, the first and second plots have intertwined, as the nascent WWW AI starts to communicate with the blind girl through her implant. The third plot does not cross with the others, except for the isolating of China's web causing the AI to bifurcate and then re-unite early on in the book, possibly spurring it's development. The fourth plot does not cross with the others in this novel, presumably it will in the rest of the series.

Overall, it's not one of my favourites of Sawyer's works so far. There is a lot of obvious exposition in this novel, with characters delivering huge speeches on neuropsychology, Zipf plots, etc. Sawyer does a good job of making the exposition compelling and timely, in terms of the plot, but it eventually drags everything down. I didn't like his last book, Rollback, very much either but I'm still interested enough to continue reading his books in general.

After getting back from our trip, I finished Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow.

This is the sequel to Towing Jehovah, which I wrote about here. The corpse of God has been recovered from his Arctic resting place and put on display in an amusement park, and visited by the sick like Lourdes.

The protagonist is a very sick man, with very bad luck, who decides to sue God in the World Court at the Hague. From this point on, the book basically becomes a detailed examination of the "Problem of Evil" as the protagonist wrestles with his opponent in the lawsuit. All of the theodicies (defenses of God against the "Problem of Evil") are examined. As such, it is quite interesting, but the rest of the story and the characters feel a little tacked on, like in most one issue books.

Not one of my favourites by Morrow.

I just finished The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon.

In some ways this is a gimmick novel - the gimmick being that the protagonist is autistic and the book is told in first person from his perspective. But it's a very well done gimmick, so readers won't mind. Moon does a very good job of creating a compelling character and plot, even though she is telling it through the viewpoint of someone who things very differently from most people.

I don't think anyone really knows if her descriptions about what it is like to think like an autistic person are true, but it feels true, and that is all that matters in a novel. Once we get used to the protagonist, we can follow him, and care about him, as he goes through various trials and adventures.

The plot deals with how outsiders deal with autistic people, and how autistic people themselves feel when an opportunity to cure them of autism comes up.

If I had one quibble with this excellent book, it is that the protagonist, Lou, is set up as a little too perfect - nice guy, genius, excellent fencer, capable of fighting off attackers, leader of his group of autistic people, etc. He does grow through the course of the novel, but a more rounder protagonist would have been nice.

Last night we went and saw the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Another good job on the movie adaptation's for Harry Potter. Other than the first two films, of which the less said, the better, the movies have all been quite good. I still think the third one, which fixed the problems with the earlier ones and set the template for the rest of the series, is the best.

This movie had two advantages over the previous one (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). First, the book is shorter. That allows for fitting in all the important elements without feeling too rushed. As it is the movie does have a very quick pace, and will probably be difficult to follow for non-fans, and the titular character gets much shorter shrift than in the book. Second, the book is better. Phoenix is the weakest of the seven books, with too much angst from Harry and other story problems. Half-Blood Prince is a stronger story and gets to start tying up and paying off some of the story arcs that have been building from the previous five books.

Last night we saw The Seldom Scene at Yoshi's SF, with opening act The Tuttles.

The Seldom Scene are a more progressive bluegrass band then I typically listen to, and the version we saw last night only has one original member, but they put on a great show. It was particularly good to get to see Dudley Connell on guitar.

The Tuttles also did a great job as the opening act. The band is made up of Bay Area bluegrass teacher extraordinaire Jack Tuttle, his daughter Molly, sons Michael and Sullivan, and guest A.J. Lee. Molly and A.J. sound great singing together and all the Tuttle kids picked up a storm.

Although the bands were great, like my previous visit to Yoshi's SF, it left me cold as a venue. It looks nice, but the sound in the room comes across as sterile. Combine that with the obvious fact that the sound people are more used to dealing with jazz than bluegrass and didn't have a great sound mix, and it takes some away from even the best performers.

Last night I finished The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick, his follow up to the The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I wrote about here.

The new book is set in the same post-Industrial Revolution fantasy world as the old one, but are otherwise unrelated. The new book is also a better book - both better written and more enjoyable. The action and events are a lot easier to follow in this book, which makes it easier to appreciate the story and the characters instead of puzzling about what just happened. And although the story involves war, death, etc., it is a lot lighter in tone than the previous book.

Like the previous book, this one involves a lone child that gets involved with a damaged cybernetic dragon war machines. In this case, it is one that has crashed and takes over his village. This eventually leads him on the road to Babel, a variant of the fabled biblical city that did not fall and has instead continued to grow. On the way there he gets involved with various shady characters, gets in scrapes and barely survives. As expected in a fairy tale, eventually he comes out on top, whether he wants to or not.

Recommended much more than the previous books by Swanwick.

Last night, I finished Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan.

Market Forces seems as if it was written as bid for a movie - picture Death Race 2000 meets Wall Street. The world seems to be divided into three parts - the UK/US, which are ruled by an economic elite that settles their differences in formal duels involving their cars while the poor live in squalid "zoned areas"; socialist Europe, not described much except in Utopian terms; the rest of the world, where the evil financiers manipulate and exploit continual small wars. The action scenes, either duels on the road, fights in the "zoned areas" or brutal acts of revenge are described in loving detail, even though it is nearly impossible to picture the car scenes in any kind of real world.

The protagonist is almost a caricature of something Mickey Spillane would create - he starts out hard, and gets harder as the novel goes along, ending with (SPOILER ALERT) killing his super-hard mentor in a car duel.

At the same time, the author seems to intend the book as some kind of condemnation of capitalism, taking it to what he obviously considers is a reasonable extrapolation of where the current system might lead. It would be flattering to call his extrapolation childish, and in any other book it might be clear that this is parody or deliberate exaggeration, but this book does not seem to have any kind of humour attached to it, and he gives a bibliography at the end of "books consulted", including Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Joseph Stiglitz, that makes it clear that he isn't kidding.

But at the same time, I do have to admit that the book does work as an extreme hard-boiled thriller. The over-the-top action and ever-wrought relationships do pull the reader along.

Yesterday, I finished The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross, the third book in his Merchant Princes series.

First, a quick re-cap: in this series, there are people who can switch themselves between alternate worlds. There are a few known worlds: our world; a world where things have not progressed beyond the medieval era; a world where technology has progressed, but in a different manner, and gov't is more totalitarian than ours. The group of "world walkers" featured are part of one family in the medieval world and they exploit their talents like mafia, in order to smuggle drugs and other high value goods. The story involves one journalist who stumbles into these people, finds out she is one of them, and gets involved in all three worlds.

At the end of the second book, the protagonist had discovered the third world and started a base there, but was still having difficulties with her mafia like family from the second world. This book is mainly a long continuation of those difficulties. It is mainly occupied with tiresome political discussions of how she can survive within her family.

I started off by not liking the first book very much, then liking the second one more. With this third book, I'm back in the "not liking it" camp again. The story is bogged down with not very interesting political discussions, and the protagonist is mostly reduced to a bystander, as things happen around, and to, her.

Yesterday I finished The Last Colony by John Scalzi, the third book in Old Man's War universe.

This book uses two of the main characters of the previous two books in the series - John Perry from Old Man's War and Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades. They've settled down and are helping run a colony when they are asked to volunteer to help start another new colony. That colony turns out to be involved in some schemes of the human government against a new alliance of alien races.

There's nothing surprising here - just some well written, old-fashioned military/political science fiction.

I wrote about the previous two books here and here.

Yesterday I finished The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick.

Similar to The Stations of the Tide, Iron Dragon's Daughter throws the reader into the deep end of the pool, introducing a complex and multi-faceted world with little explanation or background. In this case, it's a clever combination of fantasy and technology. The background seems to be built around what might happen in a world where magic exists, and the industrial revolution also happens. The result is a fairly grim world where elves rule, dwarves and others serve and the disadvantage exist at the sufferance of those in power.

The protagonist starts out a virtual slave in a factory, longing for some other kind of life, which is eventually supplied by a damaged dragon - in this world a sentient war machine. The relationship between them is more built on mutual explotation than anything else, and is typical of the relationships in this book. The book is fairly grim, with characters scheming against each other, abusing and exploiting those around them whenever possible.

Very interesting, but also frustrating. The lack of exposition on the world make everything that happens feel somewhat arbitrary, and undermine the arc of the character's development and the story.

I just finished Odyssey by Jack McDevitt.

Odyssey is set in one of McDevitt's common worlds, where humanity seems to be almost alone in the universe, with no other advanced civilizations around and most of the threats come from the natural world or mysterious things, like the "Omega Clouds", but it is very different from most of his other novels. There is a lot more use of the politics of this world, which seem oddly similar to our own, with the future equivalent of NASA facing being shut down or under-funded. Meanwhile, some ships have started to see strange objects along their routes and no one is sure what they are.

By the end of the novel, there is more revealed, but McDevitt doesn't insist on wrapping everything up neatly in his novels and this is no exception.

The first half of the novel, which focuses more on the political struggles, is below average for McDevitt, but the second half comes on strong and gets a lot better, continuing McDevitt's streak as one of the more interesting modern SF writers.

On Sunday, I finished The Soul of the Fire by Terry Goodkind, the fifth in his Sword of Truth series.

The Soul of the Fire is better than the last book in the series. Maybe it's not surprising at this point, but the most interesting characters were the new ones he introduces just for this book. The main series characters are off screen for good portions of this book.

The plot involves some evil spirits accidentally loosed at the end of the last book. As a side effect, these spirits drain magic from this world, so the characters have to get by without their immense magical powers for a while.

The book also does very little to advance the larger level plot of the struggle against the Imperial Order that has been hanging around since part way through book two.

I just finished Ivory by Mike Resnick.

I don't know if there is a term for this type of story, but I have seen other examples, like the movie The Red Violin. Basically, it tells a larger story about the last of the Maasai tracking down the tusks of a legendary large elephant through smaller stories of the people who owned them, or stole them, or tried to acquire them. In this case, the stories range from Mount Kilimanjaro in the 19th century to 7 milleniums in the future, and from Earth across the galaxy.

The main character is the researcher who helps the Maasai. The author tries to make that part of the story interesting by holding back why the Maasai wants the ivory, as well as adding some minor growth in the protagonist, but it's really just an excuse for the mini-stories. The researcher is portrayed as a great puzzle solver, but his work seems entirely to consist of asking his super-computer "Have you found and new data on the tusks yet?".

But that minor quibble aside, it's quite an enjoyable book.

I just finished Dragons From the Sea by Judson Roberts, the second book in his Strongbow series of YA historical novels with horrible covers (see my review of the first book here).

The second book continues directly after the first, with the protagonist on the run and seeking revenge after his family is killed. In this book, he joins up with a ship's crew that is heading off to war against the Franks. The YA cliches do continue, but this book is darker than a lot of YA. The protagonist fights in a few realistically depicted battles, as well as killing a few people when forced, from his point of view.

Everything I said in previous review still holds - good story, great historical focus, some YA cliches and a protagonist with a somewhat a-historical modern outlook. The weakest part of the book is the ending, which comes fairly abruptly and leaves the entire story and characters development hanging. It feels like it is actually one book that had to be broken up for market reasons. The best part is the intense, well written, battle scenes.

On the weekend, we saw UP, the new Disney/Pixar animated film.

UP continues Pixar's string of winners. It's not as good as Ratatouille, The Incredibles or even WALL-E but definitely better than Cars.

While I will continue to look forward to Pixar's movies, I think they need to be careful about one thing - over use of nostalgia. UP almost drips with nostalgia, as did the much worse Cars, and it has also been strong element in a number of their other films, including Toy Story and The Incredibles. In UP, I hope it has reached its zenith and Pixar can move on to forward looking, rather than backward looking, stories.

I spent all of last week at the California Bluegrass Association's yearly music camp and Father's Day Festival up in Grass Valley.

Volunteering at the camp was fun, as usual. I was an assistant to Kathy Barwick's level 3 guitar class, focusing on cross-picking and playing up the neck. Kathy is a very good teacher and the class was very informative. I've decided that I need to move away from focusing on technique to going back to focusing on ear training, so it will be a while before I can make use it, but once I come back to it, I think her approach will be very useful for me to get away from just playing in the first five frets.

The rest of the camp seemed to go very well - no major problems that I know of, and I think everyone had a great time.

The festival was also great. In fact, I think it was the best one for me personally. There were a lot of good, hard driving bluegrass acts on the main stage (Danny Paisley and Southern Grass, Junior Sisk and Rambler's Choice, The Bluegrass Brothers), as well as some great sets by California bands, including 49 Special, Blue and Lonesome and Mountain Laurel. One of the highlights for me were the two sets by the Tuttles, a family band put together by Bay Area bluegrass teacher Jack Tuttle.

I also did a fair amount of picking this year, mostly with people I already knew, but I was a lot happier this year with my playing.

I wrote about this last year here.

I finished The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling over the weekend.

The Caryatids is set in an environmental dystopia where global warming has damaged the Earth badly enough to de-stabilize most of the world's nation states. The titular characters are a group of highly dysfunctional clones that become central to global events. The four surviving ones (of a set of seven) all hate each other, and their "mother", and refuse to interact, meet or even talk about each other.

The story was interesting, even though most of the characters are fairly unpleasant, and emotionally over-wrought to the point of annoyance. Sterling's thoughts on the environmental dangers of global warming seem over-blown, given current projections, and his political and economic ideas seem crank-ish, and that's probably being generous.

Yesterday I finished Black Gangster by Donald Goines.

Goines is one of the more famous early African American authors writing about street life. Black Gangster is a very pulpy story about the rise and inevitable fall of young man trying to take over the gangs in Detroit, through organization, shake-downs and murder.

It's enjoyable in the pulp sense, but not something to read if you expect to learn much about the realities of the street. This novel feels more like a reflection of the movie version of gang life, through a more authentic lense since Goines himself lived his life in this context.

I just finished Greymantle by John Morressy.

This is an early '80s era fantasy, similar to a lot of things I read when I was a kid. It's the second book in a trilogy, though it's a prequel to the first one, so maybe I should say it's the first book in the trilogy.

In any case, it's an OK read. Shorter than most modern fantasy books, which is a good thing, but with characters that are almost cardboard. The plot involves a baby with a destiny, saved by the good guys by swapping it with a dead one just before the bad guys try to kill it. He turns out to be the best fighter ever, as well as a darn nice guy, etc, etc, before returning to discover the bad guys and kill them all.

There are some twists and turns, as it turns out the bad guy is actually being manipulated by a group of other bad guys. And some of the plot is handled oddly. Characters are introduced, built up and then killed off screen with very little fanfare. The final confrontation between the hero and the guy who tried to kill him as a baby is very quick, and then things move on to the behind the scenes bad guys.

Maybe it would make more sense if I'd read the other first book in the trilogy, but I doubt I ever will.

Amazon Link: Greymantle

Today I finished Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Anne Goonan.

A post-apocalyptic book without the military as the featured bad guy - yay!

Actually, it's kind of post-post-apocalyptic, which is clever. It seems civilization got into trouble after broadcast medium (radio, TV) is eliminated due to some kind of extraterrestrial radiation. (I know that sounds stupid, but it's not really a heavy feature of the book, so it's best to just ignore it.) Afterwords, the world turns heavily to nanotechnology, which produces some seemingly Utopian cities and then leads to "Information Wars" and nanotech plagues.

The book is confusing (and possibly confused) in places - for example, is Norleans a good place or a bad place? Are the plagues actually helpful or not? - but there are lots of interesting images and ideas once the heroine travels from her countryside community (based on the Shaker ideals) to one of the nanotech infested cities. She turns out to be kind of a chosen one/sacrifice, (of course) but doesn't quite want to go along with others plans for her as she unravels the mystery of why the city is the way it is.

Interesting book, and maybe some of my questions will be answered in the sequels.

Last night, we saw the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek.

Based on the trailers, I didn't know if I would enjoy this version, but I did. It continues in the trend that the more action oriented Star Trek movies are the better ones. This new re-boot of the series is almost all action, with just enough pauses to introduce new versions of the old characters.

There are tons of plot holes and stupid moments, but the quick pace of the movie, along with some decent jokes and acting, propels the movie along fast enough to gloss over the problems. And not everything was stupid. For example, the fact that the movie internally addresses the fact that it is a re-boot, was amusing and well done.

The real challenge will be if they can pull it off again - if this movie does well enough to lead to a twelfth film.

Last night, I finished The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks.

To read my general thoughts on Iain Banks, you can see the synopsys at the top of my review of his last book, Dead Air, here. This new book is again in a similar vein, more like The Crow Road than his stranger books. In this case, even more so than Dead Air, since both The Crow Road and The Steep Approach to Garbadale have a lot to do with family mysteries and conflicting romantic relationships. The newer book is structured very differently, with interlacing flashbacks and points of view instead of a consistent narrator.

Garbadale is a good book, if not quite up to the standards of The Crow Road. His characters never fail to be compelling and interesting, and the reader strongly feels their emotional struggles and dilemmas. The opening is weakened a little by the multiple, switching narrators and point of view, but once the main shape of the story is visible, it is quite engrossing. There is a minor revelation at the end that I had mostly figured out.

The one negative about the book were the anti-Bush/America diatribes near the end. Putting aside whether or not one agrees with their content, they felt out of place in the story and seemed to be their just so the author could vent his spleen. In the future, I'd recommend that he gets a blog for that purpose, and doesn't burden his characters, stories and readers with them.

I spent most of Saturday and a good part of Sunday at the Maker Faire in San Mateo.

This is my third Maker Faire (I missed the first one). Seemed to be a slightly smaller crowd this year, though still well attended and very crowded feeling at times. This year had fewer of the huge metal sculptures that seemed to everywhere last year, more sponsors and people selling things and fewer logistical problems than in the past. For example, all the speeches I saw were pretty much on time and free of issues with laptops, presentation software, video or audio that were prevelent at the previous two. Most of the major things seemed to be the same - the Crucible was there, the huge mousetrap, the dangerous rides, the incredibly expensive food. No sign of Robot Wars this year (or whatever they called it) but they did give a lot of space to Playing At Learning's displays on the First Lego League and First Tech Challenge. The music seemed to be a little de-emphasised this year, with a smaller stage and less shaded seating but still some good acts (like Culann's Hounds). This year also had less emphasis on steampunk, though there was a strong steampunk contingent, both costumers and makers, there representing.

Adam Savage's speech, although very different from last years, was a highlight again. Some of the other interesting speeches I saw were on DIY electronics prototyping, needs for better robotic manufacturing, a history of Silicon Valley before Hewlett-Packard.

Overall, very fun, but also getting very expensive and the crowds are still an issue for me.

(some photos here).

I wrote about the last two Maker Faires here and here.

Yesterday, I finished First Contract by Greg Costikyan.

Costikyan is best known as a game designer, including the wacky post-apocalyptic Paranoia. First Contract has a similar feel, in terms of wacky action, at time. It's the comedic story of the CEO of a high-tech company and what happens to him, his company, and the human economy after first contact between humans and a galactic federation.

The novel starts off weak, with some poorly developed characters and worse dialogue, but picks up after the CEO loses everything. When he gets caught up in a new business scheme, the book picks up pace and the comedic tone comes through stronger. The economics also strike me as a little unlikely, but they are necessary to set up the rest of the amusing story, so I guess it's OK.

Fun, but minor.

A few days ago, I finished William Blake: An introduction by Raymond Lister.

I got re-interested in Blake from seeing an exhibition at the Tate Britain in London. It was a recreation of a exhibition Blake had given in his brother's home. The exhibition was intriguing, even though most of the exhibition items are either missing or so dark as to be hard to pick out details. I'm not sure if they darkness was due to the effects of time, or part of Blake's intention.

This book is an OK introduction, walking through the events of Blake's life and discussing most of his major works. The mix of biography and analysis, and the small size of the book, results in a shallow analysis of both. Given that Blake is so different from any other artist of the time (or probably since), I would have like more about how Blake came up with his unique mythology, or more analysis with more prints, preferably in colour.

William Blake;: An introduction to the man and to his work

I spent a ton of time this weekend at Baycon, the local science fiction convention.

I've posted before about Baycon. I'm not involved in the local fan scene, so I don't really know any of the people, so most of my con experience is about the panels. There were no real stand out panels I saw this year but I think I've refined my "panel triage" skills, since I enjoyed the panels I did attend more this year.

Here are some of my thoughts on the important items to consider in "panel triage".

Panel Topic

• Aside from being interested in the topic, is the topic something that will be able to be talked about for an hour, usually by non-experts? If it's not, expect a panel that will digress and wander a lot.
• is the panel intended to be a panel + audience or a more free form discussion? Both can work, depending on your taste.In the first case, the moderator becomes key. In the second, the quality of the audience is paramount.
  

Panelists

• are they experts (or at least knowledgeable on the topic)? A rough rule - if more than one panelist opens by saying "I'm not sure why I'm on this panel", check out a different panel.
• how are their presentation/humour skills? For example, there are a few presenters at Baycon that are consistently amusing, no matter what the topic (Seanan McGuire comes to mind).
  
• are there any blowhards on the panel? These can derail almost any panel, even with a good moderator.
• how strong/experienced is the moderator? This is particularly important relative to the next category

Audience

• if the panel is intended to be more of a "panel + audience", are there members of the audience who don't understand this and try to have a back and forth conversation with the panelists, even if they aren't talking to this attendee directly?
• are there attendees who don't seem to understand that the panel isn't about them, and that there may be more than one person who has questions or comments? This can also be a problem with some panelists (see "blowhard" comment above).

I just finished The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy. A post-apocalyptic story set in and around San Francisco.

I'm not sure why this is, but it seems the military is the villain of choice in any post-apocalyptic story, whether they caused the disaster (see Stephen King's The Stand), or whether they try and take over and impose their ideas of order and discipline afterwords (see CBS's Jericho, or many others. The one semi-original piece of this book is that the apocalyptic disaster is actually accidentally caused by peace activists, instead of the military industrial complex.

In this novel, the contrast is even larger because the protagonists are artists and free spirits who live in San Francisco in a very Utopian anarchic society. Who knew that all we needed for a comfortable life we could devote to art was for 99+% of the population to die off? In addition to that silliness, there is an uncomfortable anti-American vibe throughout the book. For example, the evil military leader espouses the values of "America" and is mocked by other characters and one characters opines that they always thought the old American flag was "ugly".