I just finished Acacia: The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham.

I didn't notice this until I was almost done this book, but Durham is also the author of Pride of Carthage, which I wrote about here. 

This book starts off slow, setting up a world run by a single empire that has been basically static for hundreds of years.  But one group that considers themselves oppressed has been plotting for most of that time and now strikes against the empire.

It's a complex story, because both sides are far from perfect.  The rebels are vicious and brutal, while the empire has been guilty of many terrible crimes, including slavery and drug dealing.  The main story really starts after the rebels have been successful and the heirs to the empire have been scattered to the countryside to rebuild and seek revenge.

Overall, well written and enjoyable.  It has the added advantage to telling a complete story even though it is obviously intended to be the first in a series.

I just finished For the Win by Cory Doctorow.

 For the Win is about various people who work inside games, based on the "gold farmers" and "mechanical turks" that exist today.  Usually, these tasks are done in poorer countries, under bad work conditions, for low pay, etc.  Doctorow takes that world and then suggests they use the power of modern networks to unionize and turn the tables on the bosses who control them and the game companies that try to prevent them from working.

Doctorow's strength is that he writes easy to read, moving text.  His weakness is the one note nature of his thoughts, and the huge chunks of exposition he likes to stuff into his stories.  In this book, anyone on the union side is good, anyone who owns anything or is a boss of any kind is bad, and there are no complexities to be dealt with, no depth to any characters or situations beyond this.

It's been a while since I posted.  With volunteering at a music camp, traveling to Singapore and being sick for a few weeks, my motivation has been low.  Here's a list of books I finished, with a note or two.

Up Jim River by Michael Flynn

- decent sequel to The January Dancer.  Good to have read that book just before reading this one.

The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
- standard good book in the Discworld series

Innocent by Scott Turow
- surprisingly good sequel to Turow's most famous novel Presumed Innocent.

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
- OK generation ship story.  Oddly similar in feeling to the movie Pandorum.

The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris
- interesting take on the way the development of science and politics happened during the Enlightenment.  Makes the case that without the scientific advances, the political ones wouldn't have happened.

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
- good finale for the Mistborn trilogy



 

A few days ago I finished The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton.

The Art Instinct lays out the case for art as an evolutionary adaptation and is a very interesting and well written book.  It is a little bit of a difficult philosophical read, but not to the point of most un-readable philosophy books, more of a mid-point between a pop sci book and a philosophical treatise.

Dutton does a good job of laying out the evidence for art as a result of human evolution, and the effects that this has on art and how it helps resolve some of the standard problems in esthetics, the study of art.  He starts off in a smart way, bypassing most of the pointless "what is art" discussions, through discussing the common middle ground that everyone would agree on as art and seeing where that leads.

Well worth a read, and it's too bad that since Dutton recently passed away we will not see more works of this quality from him.

Over the weekend I finished Searching for El Dorado by Marc Herman.

Set mostly in Guyana, Herman traces the evolution of the search for gold in South America from the Spanish raiding the Inca's to the modern giant gold mines in Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.  He does a nice job of illustrating the "resources curse", where countries that depend overly on resource riches actually end up poorer, and of illustrating the day to day life of amateur gold miners.

Full of fascinating stories, well worth a read.

Yesterday I finished Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham.

This book is basically the story of the second Punic war, where Hannibal picked a fight with Rome, crossed the Alps, terrorized the countryside for a decade and a half and then had to run home to defend Carthage when Rome got smart.  He only lost one battle, but it was the final one.

The book does a good job of creating believable characters out of Hannibal's family and entourage, the Romans who are trying to beat him and a few miscellaneous common people thrown in for colour.  It doesn't do as good a job of making the characters feel like historical people, rather than modern people in a historical drama.

I finished two books over the weekend. 

The first is Vampire$ by John Steakley.  I'm a big fan of his other book, Armor.  Vampires$ isn't as good as Armor, but is enjoyable.  It was written before the latest deluge of vampire related material and in contrast to most of it, it doesn't humanize the vampires.  They are judged from a very Catholic point of view and are shown as inhuman monsters.  Lots of action sequences, lots of existentialism as the hunter team knows most of them will die sooner rather than later.

The second is The White Rose by Glen Cook, the third book in the Black Company series, and concluding book in the first series.  Since I like this series a lot, I don't know why it took me so long to track down the final book of the first series.  The book itself is quite good, wrapping up all the earlier plot threads and introducing some interesting twists and turns along the way.  Definitely some of the best of military fiction.

The last book I finished is The Nine Wrong Answers by John Dickson Carr.


Carr is a master of a form that no longer really exists, the pure puzzle mystery.  These books are usually set amongst the upper class, and involve locked rooms or other factors that make a crime seem impossible.  The game is for the author to present the facts that led to the crime being possible, but to not have the reader guess the solution before it is revealed. 

Modern mysteries have moved on to a more character or situation based approach, where the reader enjoys the ride but is not expecting a "fair game" at the same time.

This book is fairly typical of the type, involving switched identities, mad uncles, poison and a duel to the death.  It even goes so far as to add asides from the author at various points to explain that certain solutions are not correct, the "nine wrong answers" of the title.

A few days ago I finished Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton.

Villjamur is a city on a freezing world.  It's never clear if this is actually a far future version of our world, where the sun is slowly dying, or a pure fantasy world.  In any case, the city is facing an upcoming ice age and is trying to prepare.  At the same time, parts of the political structure are trying to generate a coup, while others are trying to find a way of escape.  By the end, a lot of action has taken place but not many questions are answered, something probably left to the sequels.

It's a well written new world, with decent characterizations and an interesting plot.  Hopefully it won't develop into an overblown, endless series, but keep focus and resolve the story in a few books.

I just finished Saturn's Children by Charles Stross.

 Saturn's Children is a convoluted book, with sections in dreams combined with sections in memory combined with sections where it's not clear who the protagonist is or what is going on.  This is as a result of the setup - a universe where humanity is extinct, and the artificial intelligences they created still roam the solar system.  These robots can exchange memories through "soul chips", leading to the above conclusion.

Stross does add one major new, interesting twist.  Some of the robots are trying to re-create a human being, but because all of the robots have been programmed with the equivalent of Asimov's Laws, making them slaves to any human, they fear humans and fight to prevent this resurrection. 

The only other novel part of the book is Stross's didactic attempts to convey exactly how difficult/terrible he things even intra-solar system travel would be.

Overall, it's an OK read but not one of his most enjoyable books.

I just finished Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds.

Not set in the same world as his Revelation Space series, Pushing Ice is a strong stand alone novel.  His other novels that I have read have been extreme space opera, set in a far future with humanity already on the verge of becoming, or already having become, strange transhumans.  This novel starts in the near future, and only moves into more familiar space opera territory with the second half.

Highly recommended, and it made me interested in checking out more of his stand alone novels.

Earlier in the week, I finished All the Devils Are Here by Bethany Mclean and Joe Nocera.

This book is one of many current ones on the financial crisis that started sometime around 2007 and is still not completely finished.  It does a good job of laying out the roots and major players of the financial system that led to the crisis, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to Ameriquest and AIG.  They give lots of details on the rise of subprime mortgages, derivatives (particularly credit default swaps) and the financiers who used/abused them.

Very interesting reading, but it doesn't lend itself well to final conclusions.  The whole situation is too complex to be wrapped up with a simple summation, but this book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what happened.
 

A few days ago, I finished Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter.

Manifold: Time is as odd as it's title.   It starts off like a modern version of Destination Moon, but then quickly goes off the rails with messages from the future, philosophical predictions of the end of humanity and Midwich Cuckoo like children being abused across the globe.

It started to lose me with the predictions of humanities doom based on the Carter Catastrophe.  The Carter Catastrophe is a real idea, but the way it is presented in the novel is transparently wrong, and that bothered me for the rest of the novel.  The rest of the ludicrous plot didn't help.

Not recommended.

I just finished The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.

Set in a near future Istanbul, were nano-tech is a cottage industry, The Dervish House follows a number of plots centered around one home.  These include the launch of a new tech product, the search for a man turned into honey and the fallout of a tram bombing.  They all tie neatly together in the end.

A dense, slow read, but worth the effort.  Expected to be on a lot of end of the year best of lists.

Some time last week I finished Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.

I've been a huge fan of Banks non-science fiction writing for a long time, but the last time I tried to read one of his Culture novels, I lost interest quickly.  This time, I decided to start at the first one and see if it was any better.

And it was.  Consider Phlebas is actually a pretty straight forward, and old fashioned, space opera, right down to characters using "laser rifles".  It follows a soldier from a human offshoot species that can modify it's shape under some circumstances, as he works to track down a lost AI in order to help undermine the Culture, a vast anarcho-socialist empire.

It's an enjoyable read, if not anything spectacular, and I'll probably try some of the other Culture novels as I find time.

Over the weekend, I finished Pirate Latitudes, the posthumous novel by Michael Crichton.

Pirate Latitudes, and another novel, were found as completed manuscripts on Crichton's computer after his death.   I don't think it is known why it wasn't published - if it was held back for a reason or just hadn't reached publishing.

It's a good novel, more similar to his earlier works like The Great Train Robbery, than his later techno thrillers.  The first few chapters are a little annoying as they constantly and blatantly throw in facts about the time when the novel is set to correct assumed misconceptions in the readers.  After that, it settles down into a nice nautical tale of English versus Spanish in the New World.

A few days ago I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

At the start, I was a little disappointed with this novel, but through no fault of the author.  I had heard about this great new historical novel about Cromwell, and assumed it was Oliver Cromwell, England's so-called Lord Protector.  Turns out, I was mistaken.  This book is about Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII.

I had hoped for a book about Oliver Cromwell because he is part of a period of English history that hasn't been as well covered in fiction.  In contrast, Thomas Cromwell is part of the whole Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, divorce, etc. story told in many different forms over the years.

Once I got past that, it is a well written book, although very dry and slow.

I just finished The Hammer and the Cross by Harry Harrison.

I guess it's an alternate history, rather than a straight historical novel, since the premise is based around the Vikings resisting the spread of Christianity through Europe.  The main character, Shef, is English but falls in with Vikings and helps them against the English, and the church's forces that work with them.  The medieval Christian church is portrayed, probably fairly accurately, very harshly - mostly money grubbing, cruel and aloof.

It's an interesting book, though the inventiveness of the main character seems a little ahistorical at times.

A few days ago, I finished The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, winner of the 2010 Hugo for best novel.

The Windup Girl is a dystopia set in Thailand, after a collapse due to the end of the petroleum age and then a second collapse caused by plagues of mutated genetically engineered crops.  The narrative is split between four characters, a North American businessman in Thailand to undermine the government and get access to the Thai market for his companie's crops, a Malaysian refugee trying to survive in a country hostile to foreigners, a soldier of the enforcement arm of the Thai government's environmental ministry, and the titular windup girl - a genetically modified human abandoned by Japanese businessmen.

It's hard to find anyone to sympathize with.  The windup girl herself is an innocent, abused horribly throughout the novel and constrained by her breeding and training, but is so helpless through most of the novel that it is hard to identify with her.  The businessman is amoral and thoughtless.  The refugee is scheming and dishonest.  The soldier is a bully and a proto-fascist.

I suspect the author wants us to sympathize with the latter character, and his lieutenant who takes over the narrative part way through, due to his efforts to protect the local environment and loyalty to the Thai government, but this is hard to go along with given the obvious comparisons between his "white shirts" and the historic "black shirts" or "brown shirts".

Even with the lack of a sympathetic protagonist, the book is still well written and compelling. 

I just finished The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

This is the basis for the movie of the same name.  There's no way I'll be able to avoid SPOILERS in this post, so reader beware...

I saw the movie version of this story years ago, and enjoyed it as one of the most intelligent movies of the time.  The book is equally good, though different in many ways.  Both are built around a feud between two magicians, Borden and Angier, ultimately ending in tragedy, but the differences are striking, and are mostly improvements in the film version.

The novel is book-ended by modern scenes involving the magician's grandchildren that don't feel necessary to the story, and the film wisely gets rid of them.  In the novel, the fact that Borden is actually a twin is strongly hinted at from early on, and is even investigated by Angier before being dismissed.  The movie avoids any hints of twins, and depends on the impression created by only showing one Borden, to keep the audience from suspecting it as well.  This strengthens the contrasts between the two magicians and the irony of Angier making the Tesla device work.  In the book, the device leaves behind a copy that is not fully alive (referred to by Angier as the "prestige materials", which explains the title, something the movie never really does), while the movie Angier is actually actively killing the duplicates left behind, a much more intense, almost melodramatic, emotional choice.  The movie also makes the feud between the two stronger, tying it to their actions while working together and making their acts of sabotage more concrete, while the novel keeps the two very seperate, and their feud is almost abstract.

Overall, the novel is still a very good read and recommended.