I just finished Singularity Sky, the first novel by Charles Stross.

I've read a few books by Stross but this one is by far my favourite. I can finally see why he is so popular and considered one of the rising stars in SF writing. Like a few of his contemporaries, Alastair Reynolds and Ken MacLeod, Stross is one of the a new age of British SF authors that like to mix some hard science in with space opera and the current fascination with the Singularity. The result is usually convoluted and plot heavy books but they also have a decent hand with characters.

Another trait he seems to share with a lot of his British peers is a soft spot for socialism in one form or another. It is one of the most retro things about them. Back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, during SF's golden age, a common assumption was that the future belonged to socialism or some form of technocratic central planning. Eventually, the field has drifted away from this idea as the actual evidence of the 20th century proved central planning to be nightmare and more and more serious economists demonstrated that central planning was not only flawed based on the evidence but couldn't even work theoretically. If a political model was evident in most SF from the 70s through the end of the millenium, the assumption was more often than not that a capitalist system had survived. Of course, it was usually some kind of dystopian capitalist system where multinationals had replaced governments and abused everyone in sight, but the assumption was still there.

But it seems a lot of British writers have been raised with a soft spot for socialism and the idea of the end of scarcity due to nanotechnology or some post-Singularity event has given them the inspiration to revive the Glorious Socialist Future, but usually of an anarcho-socialist or syndicalist variant rather than the standard communist/fascist axis that dominated the 20th century.

Sadly, even though their political ideas are so silly, they tend to write good novels! Why is it that socialist writers are mostly better writers than capitalists? Is it because the capitalists have better things to do with their time?


Amazon Link: Singularity Sky

Last night I finished From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, one of the earliest works of science fiction.

It's a short read, with only a minimal plot and minor characterization work. As others have pointed out, it is surprising how much Verne gets right about what it would actually take to send a person to the moon. His canon is not realistic, but the launch site, transit times and other considerations are not far off what was used for the actual Apollo launches.

It also has a surprising, and fairly abrupt, ending.

Amazon Link: From the Earth to the Moon

This morning I finished You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem.

This Lethem's latest book, and the first one of his that I have read. It tells the story of the quirky characters that make up a rock band that is in the early stages of being a band. They play music together, fool around together and interact with some other extremely artsy characters along the way.

The book starts slow but picks up after the band gets its first gig at an art event put on by a friend. There are strange complications as the band gets some strange new lyrics from an odd source that push them into new directions.

Overall, I liked it even though the characters were a little hard to understand. A few of them were complete ciphers while the others were more sympathetic but acted in odd, seemingly random ways at time.


Amazon Link: You Don't Love Me Yet

I just finished The First American by H.W. Brands, a quite enjoyable biography of Benjamin Franklin.

In addition to covering Franklin's life, this book also provides a portrait of life in America when it was still just British colonies fighting with French colonies. I'd known the basics about Franklin since grade school but I didn't realize just how central he was to a lot of the pre-American Revolution diplomacy with Britain or to the work he did during the Revolutionary War while in France.

Franklin's transition from a loyal British subject to an advocate for independence is particularly interesting. Franklin stayed true to what he considered true English principles of rights, virtue and liberty all along and only when he was convinced that the British Parliament would not fairly apply those values to it's own colonies did he strongly defend those principles by urging his countrymen to break away from British rule and to stay the course when the war was going against them.

If you are interested in early American history or Enlightenment society, I'd recommend this book.

Amazon Link: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

For the first time in a long time, we went and saw a rock show at a bar.

I was in a guitar store last week looking for a new electric when I saw a flyer for a "prog rock" night at a bar about 30 minutes from our place. There were two bands, Parallels, a Yes tribute band, and Trilogy, a Rush tribute band. The show was supposed to start at 8 PM but didn't get going till close to 9:30 so we only got to see one of the bands, Parallels. From the looks of things, it looks like 8 PM was just a mistake and they would have started at 9PM but they were having problems getting the sound right.

Parallels did a pretty good job of covering Yes songs like Heart of the Sunrise and Roundabout and even did a few surprises like Gates of Delirium. As is to be expected at a rock show, the sound was fairly awful. I'm not sure why 90% of live rock music has such terrible sound mixing even when they have dedicated sound people.

Overall, it was a fun night even with the late start.

I just finished Starfish by Peter Watts, his first book and the first book in a trilogy dealing with a group of people who become adapted to living at extreme ocean depths.

Watts has a very dark take on human nature -- all the characters in his books that I have read have featured characters with very damaged psyches.

In Starfish, the corporation setting up operations to facilities at extreme ocean depths theorizes that people who have been through severe personal stress situations, whether as abuser or abusee, will be best able to tolerate the conditions found there. Combine those characters with the claustrophobic environs, a dystopian world and an unexpected threat and you have the core of Starfish.

Even though the characters and situations are very grim, they are at least interesting and Watts speculations on human nature are engaging if not convincing. If you're tolerant of the dark themes and anti-heroes, Starfish is a good read and I will probably follow up with the other books in the trilogy.

Amazon link: Starfish

We just saw the movie Stardust, based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman.

An interesting thing has happened since the critical and box office success of the Lord of the Rings movies - Hollywood has finally come around to taking fantasy movies seriously. In the 1980's, fantasy movies were meant to be quick, cheap money makers mostly aimed at either kids (see Krull or Beast Master) or very stupid adults (see Conan the Barbarian or The Sword and the Sorcerer). They were more likely to have novelizations than to be based on novels. Even as special effects got cheaper and more effective, major studios did not spend the time or energy to work on decent stories and acting to go with the new effects (see Dungeons and Dragons).

The major change after the success of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies seems to be that Hollywood has realized that it has a ton of quality source material available to it. One of the anticipated Christmas releases for this year is an adaptation of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (under it's American title The Golden Compass) and the previews before Stardust included The Spiderwick Chronicles and an adaptation of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, recently renamed as The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (presumably to cash in on all the successful films with colons in the title).

This increase in the number of fantasy films has also allowed for a little diversity to slip in - not all of the films have to be large scale epics like Lord of the Rings. Instead some of the lighter novels, like Stardust, can be developed. The creators were fairly obviously trying to duplicate the feel of the mix of comedy and action from The Princess Bride, the best fantasy film released before Lord of the Rings, but with only mixed success.

Stardust is enjoyable but not a classic like those movies. Sadly, it looks like it will not make back its $70M budget. A few more expensive failures like that and this new golden age of fantasy films could quickly draw to a close.

Today I finished A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, the Pulitzer Prize winning comic novel and one of the most disappointing books I've read.

I picked it up after reading about the problems people have run into trying to put together a movie version but I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would give this book a prize, want to make a movie out of it, or even recommend it to anyone else.

The characters aren't sympathetic, realistic or even interesting in any way. The only word I can come up with to describe them is squalid. They wander from one absurd situation to another with little rhyme or reason, forcing the reader to alternate between annoyance and boredom. Absurdity in itself isn't a problem - people who know me, know that I have a soft spot for absurd comedy of all types - but this book simply fails to be funny. I think I laughed at most once while reading it and I almost abandoned it a few times over the last week.


Very strongly not recommended.

Amazon Link (for masochists only): A Confederacy of Dunces

I just finished The Loser's Club by John Lekich, a YA book by a Vancouver author recommended to my by a friend.

The Loser's Club is the story a group of outcasts in a Vancouver school who are brought together by the extortion of a bully. As you might expect in a YA book, they end up triumphing in the end but there are some unexpected twists along the way as they interact with the adults in their lives and find their way from losing to winning. In some ways, it's pretty standard fare but it is well written and enjoyable.

This weekend we saw a play, Oda Oak Oracle, one of only two English language plays by Ethiopian poet-laureate Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin and The Simpson's Movie.

The play had some nice moments but was a little too slow moving and over-wrought for my taste.

The Simpson's Movie was pretty good - not as funny as some of the best episodes from when it was in it's prime but better than a lot of the current episodes with a few very funny bits. Recommended for fans.

Amazon Link: The Losers' Club

Yesterday I finished Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. Londonistan is a non-fiction book about how the UK has become a haven for radical Islam, even after the Tube bombings in 2005.

The factual part of the book is pretty interesting - Phillips has put together an compelling list of Islamic radicals who have been allowed to not only enter and reside in the UK but have been invited at times to take part in the political process and recruit from the British Muslim population. The only problem with this part of the book is repetition - sometimes a piece of writing will re-appear almost verbatim after a few pages or even a few paragraphs. This seemed particularly true on the section on anti-semitism.

The more editorial parts of the book are weaker. Like many conservatives, she things that the core values of western civilization are Judeo-Christian ones instead of just being developed in a Judeo-Christian context. She also doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between what are core western values and what are not. Instead, she asserts that Muslims in Britain should simply go along with the majority simply because it is the majority. I wonder if she would be OK with Sharia law if Muslims became the majority in the UK? Somehow, I doubt it. In another example, she asserts that Muslim self-segregation in Britain would be less if they were prevented from marrying inside their own circles - I'm not sure how she would square banning Muslims from marrying who they want with western ideals of individual rights but she offers no explanation.

Overall, an interesting book about some of the problems the UK has faced, and will continue to face, but I would look elsewhere if you are looking for intelligent philosophy or well thought out solutions to these problems.
Amazon Link: Londonistan

I finished His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik last night. It's kind of an odd duck - take Patrick O'Brien writing about Napoleonic Europe and add dragons as an air force. I've seen this book in the stores but it always looked a little cheesy to me so I never picked it up but while looking up Blindsight on the web, I noticed that it had been nominated for a Hugo, science fiction's top award, and that I had read four out of the five novels nominated for the 2007 Hugo. That inspired me to pick up this one to complete the set before the Hugo's are announced in a few weeks.

This is a perfectly pleasant book with some sympathetic characters and nice writing but I don't think it is really of the same calibre as the other nominees. It's an odd idea for a book, particularly since the existence of dragons doesn't seem to have effected anything other than creating a military air force.

The Hugo is a fan voted award, so anything could win but if I was voting I would probably go for Michael Flynn's Eifelheim.



Amazon Link: His Majesty's Dragon

Last night I finished Blindsight by Peter Watts, an interesting hard science fiction book.

Even though most of the action in the book takes place on the fringes of the solar system, the main scientific speculation in the book is more about neuropsychology than physics or chemistry. For example, the titular "blindsight" is an actual phenomenon where the conscious mind perceives itself as blind but the unconscious mind is still seeing things and the body reacts as if it can see them.

Parts of the book feel a little preachy as the author uses plot devices to lead to discussions of the limits of consciousness and how perception can be manipulated by the external world.

Despite that flaw, it's an interesting book and based on that I've already taken another book by the same author out of the library.

Amazon Link: Blindsight

This morning I finished A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park. I had never heard of Paul Park but I went to an event called SF in SF, one of a series where pairs of science fiction authors read from their books in San Francisco, to see Gregory Benford and the other author was Paul Park. I enjoyed the short story he read so I thought I would try out his novels.

A Princess of Roumania is the first of a trilogy involving the passage of 3 young adults from our world to an alternate Earth where folk magic works, Roumania is a major power, England was destroyed by some natural disaster and America has remained un-populated. The title character was sent as a child to our Earth to protect her but now she has been pulled back and has to deal with the consequences.

This book falls pretty heavily into a tradition of more literate, less action oriented fantasy. A lot of time is spent on character's inner turmoil and not a lot of external action takes place. Combine that with the author's obvious love for pretty prose and you have a book that will be slower than many will appreciate. In particular, the prose is so pretty sometimes that it is difficult to tell what actually happened and it's only by reading subsequent sections that the reader can figure out the actual events.

Even given those complaints, it was compelling enough that I will check out the sequels and see how the story develops.

Amazon Link: A Princess of Roumania

Since my blog has "and some bluegrass" in the sub-title, I should probably post occasionally about the concerts I see. Last night was a triple bill at the Freight and Salvage.

The first band up was Berkeley's own Bluegrass Revolution.
This band isn't my cup of tea - theie set could only be loosely categorized as bluegrass but that wasn't the real problem. It seemed like the whole band was playing as hard as they could 100% of the time. Not only does that get boring after a song or two, it doesn't actually sound that good. One of the secrets of bluegrass and acoustic swing is that to play fast and intense sounding music well, the musician actually has to be very relaxed and in control. Bluegrass Revolution is a pretty new band and I think they will get somewhat better with time but I also think they need to step back, listen to themselves and think about what they are trying to do.

On the other hand, the second band Belle Monroe and Her Brewgrass Boys, clearly knows what they are trying to do and they do a good job. Their repertoire was mostly unfamiliar to me - no bluegrass standards that I had heard of and a lot of original songs - but their execution was quite good and they have a very nice band dynamic. I liked their set quite a bit.

The headlines were Mighty Crows. I might be biased since I've known all of them for years and I jam with some of them regularly but I think the audiences agree that they are one of the best of the local bluegrass bands, particularly if you are looking for traditional bluegrass. They focus on singing pieces to take advantage of their powerhouse vocals but do a few nice instrumentals that show off the fiddler as well. If you like traditional bluegrass in the SF Bay Area, look for them at some local venues and local festivals.

I'm not a fan of short stories in general - I much prefer novels where there is more space to develop characters and tell complex stories. But last month I saw a story on BoingBoing about the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction giving away a copy of their Sept 2007 issue to anyone who was willing to blog about it. Since it was free, I decided to check it out. I sent off an email, got my issue in the mail about a week later and just got around to reading it.

Even though I don't like short stories that much, I did enjoy reading this issue of F&SF. Many, many years ago I briefly had a subscription to Analog and at the time I preferred that to F&SF. I don't know if the magazine has changed or my tastes.

Unexpectedly, a number of the stories were slightly or mostly comedic -- including a trivia contest amongst the god and an interplanetary ambassador who suspects he hasn't been told the truth about his mission -- but I also enjoyed the more dramatic ones, particularly a post-apocalyptic story written without the use of periods! I don't know if that is usual for this magazine or just this particular issue. I also liked the non-fiction sections and added a few books in the book review section to my "to read" list.

The short story market is not as extensive as it once was so if you are a short story fan and are looking for a fix, I recommend this magazine. Particularly if you are looking for some slight, light hearted stories.

Amazon Link: Fantasy & Science Fiction

Last night I finished The Shadow in the North by Philip Pullman, the second of three books he has written about Sally Lockhart, plucky Victorian heroine. I wrote about the first book, The Ruby in the Smoke, here.

In the first book, Sally was trying to find out what had happened to her father and stumbled into some friendships and a mystery involving opium and a jewel from the Far East. In this book, she is established as a financial consultant and gets drawn into another mystery when one of her clients loses all her money in a suspicious failure of a shipping line.

Those descriptions sound like something out of Nancy Drew but the Sally Lockhart books are a lot deeper, and darker, than that. Pullman uses a fairly accurate Victorian setting and he doesn't shy away from the poorer parts of that society. With that comes the real chance of death by misadventure or, possibly worse to some of the characters, being shamed in public.

I'm enjoying these books more than I enjoyed Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I enjoyed those books but they didn't grab me the way these ones are - if I can find the time I will probably go back and re-read that trilogy, maybe around when the movie for the first book, The Golden Compass, comes out.

Since I also recently read the last Harry Potter book, it is interesting comparing him to J.K. Rowling. Pullman is clearly the better writer - there is really no comparison between the writing in any of the His Dark Materials books and any of the Harry Potter books. Rowling's writing often seems very simple and un-evocative in comparison. On the other hand, I found the Harry Potter books much more compelling and engaging than His Dark Materials. When I re-read them, I will have to do some more thinking to see where that is coming from - does Rowling simply create more interesting characters and situations or is something else going on?

Amazon Link:The Shadow in the North

I just finished Dungeons and Dreamers by Brad King and John Borland, an interesting take on the what happened in the computer game culture over the last ~20 years. The book really focuses on a just a few parts of that culture and uses those to try to make larger points. The first half of the book uses Richard Garriott, creater of Ultima and sequels, as its central character to highlight the connection between paper based games (like Dungeons and Dragons) and early computer games but he disappears for most of the second half of the book since he was a much less central figure once PC games took over from the Apple II as the dominant game platform.


The second half of the book jumps around a lot, starting out with chapters about the rise of id software and their "first person shooters": Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, but eventually returning to Garriott's story to talk about the early MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) like Ultima Online and Everquest.

One odd point is that even though they start out with the connection between paper wargames/RPGs, they don't really discuss the part of the industry that is most closely related - real time strategy games. A section chronicling the rise of Blizzard, the most successful RTS game company, would have been a good addition, particularly since they only missed by a year the release of the most successful of all of the MMORPGs, Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

Amazon Link: Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic

Last night I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, the final book in the Harry Potter series. I'll try to avoid any spoilers in this post but if you haven't read the book and intend to, you might want to come back later in case I let anything slip that you didn't want to know.

Since this book serves as a third act for the entire series and I've written before about the difficulty of writing third acts, I was a little wary when I started it. On the other hand, I had just finished re-reading the 6th book so I was also raring to find out what happened next and to have some of the mysteries that have built up over the series resolved. And Rowling didn't disappoint. She pulls off one of the better books of the series as well as a great third act for the series as a whole.

Deathly Hallows not only wraps up most of the outstanding questions from the previous book, it also explains a number of things from earlier books that seemed odd at the time but most readers probably just brushed off as mistakes or oversights. This is not to say that the book is just a huge lump of exposition filling in all the holes that have opened over a seven book series. All the explanations actually come in the context of a story that stands on its own with the other books and even introduces a lot of new background on old characters and the wizarding world.

I got into Harry Potter back in 2000 when my girlfriend brought back the first three books from a trip to London and we have been big fans ever since. I'm a little sad to know that I won't be able to look forward to the next Harry Potter book coming out but I will definitely take a look at whatever J.K. Rowling comes out with next.

Amazon Link: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It was a very Harry Potter weekend at my house this weekend. My girlfriend was away on a river rafting trip so I spent a good chunk of the weekend re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince and starting on the latest one. Then after she got home, we decided to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I remembered liking the penultimate book quite a lot when I read it two years ago and re-reading it was also a pleasant experience. The previous book, Order of the Phoenix, is the weakest of the set and I was happy at the time to see that Rowling had recovered from it nicely. In particular, it seemed that she had recovered from one syndrome that many very successful authors fall into - excessive length. Half-blood Prince is a much tighter edited book than Order of the Phoenix, coming in at around two thirds the word count.

I think that Order of the Phoenix also suffered due to Harry spending a good portion of the book out of the loop of what is really going on, simply an outsider trying to figure out what is happening and going through internal turmoil at the same time. Page after page of Harry struggling with his anger and angst while being treated as a pariah made for some hard reading. One of the few bright parts were the sections about Dumbledore's Army where Harry gets to take an active role again.

Some of these problems are minimized in the new movie version, since Harry's internal struggles don't take up as much screen time they don't seem so burdensome. The new movie is quite good but like the movie version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it does struggle with trying to pack the action of a huge book (nearly 260 thousand words) into a reasonable length movie. And since a lot of the later books/movies build on earlier events, very little can be cut out whole sale. The result is that many of the beats in the new movie feel under-developed or short changed and the overall film feels quite jumpy.

I'm about 100 pages from finishing the latest book so a post about it should appear here tomorrow.

Amazon Links:

Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - DVD

This morning I finished The Gathering Storm by Kate Elliott, the 5th in the fantasy series The Crown of Stars.

Like the last time I read one of her books, I read most of this one on an airplane. As I wrote back in April, big fantasy books are perfect company for flying - engrossing enough in the moment to distract you from long waits/flights but un-important/un-challenging enough that you can follow the plot without giving them your full attention and throw them away if you need more space/less weight in your luggage.

The Gathering Storm is a good continuation of this series. It does a number of unexpected things - in particular, it wraps up a number of ongoing plot elements built up over the last 4 books even though it is not the last in the series. Now that I've read it, I'm curious to see what happens in the last book.

But first, I have to make some time for Harry Potter!

Amazon Link: The Gathering Storm