The Last Theorem

What happens when you take Arthur Clarke's "The Wind from the Sun", toss in a chunk of Fred Pohl's Heechee Rendezvous, add some of Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise and Pohl's Man Plus, top with some Olaf Stapledon, and then hit the frappé button? You get the not-quite-a-novel-but-more-a-series-of-sketches The Last Theorem from 2008. It's not as tight as the work that either of them has done in collaboration before, and I attribute that to their working on this solely by e-mail. Interesting ideas tossed hither and yon, but they don't hang together with anything like a completely coherent plot.  That's too bad, since it's virtually the last work either of them published, and they were capable of so much better.

The Inside Ring / The Second Perimeter

The Inside Ring is the first of a series of thrillers by Michael Lawson, recommended by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. An attempted assassination of the President is tied up too neatly and the Homeland Security secretary has some suspicions about what actually happened. Our main point-of-view character is Joe DeMarco, the “fixer” for the Speaker of the House, who --- like Robert B Parker's Spenser --- runs around asking questions, stirring up the waters, trying to find answers. However, unlike Parker, the writing is vivid, rather than snarky. The chapters are each reasonably self-contained, many of them written almost like stand-alone flash fiction. The third quarter of the book is predictable and gory, but overall, it's a very, very serviceable thriller.

        In the second of the series, The Second Perimeter, Joe and his friend Emma investigate some shady consulting contracts at a Washington state naval base. (This allows Lawson to give his own Congressman, Norm Dicks, formerly of Washington's 6th, a cameo.) It turns out that the shady contract is, in fact, a cover for an espionage ring, run by a Chinese agent who has past dealings with Emma. After Emma is kidnapped and the action bloodily moves across the border to British Columbia, things get more and more complicated. Our various plot threads are resolved in a shootout at a yacht basin on the Potomac River. I had great fun this time, not only with Dicks's cameo, but aligning various fictional politicians with their real-life counterparts. Again, not great literature, but a perfectly servicable thriller.

Buzz

Following from Anders de la Motte's Game, we have the second book in the trilogy, Buzz, in which our ne'er-do-well slacker, having taken revenge on the organizers of the Game and after a long foreign holiday, finds himself in a Dubai prison on murder charges after a night of drug-infused partying. Meanwhile, his sister, the bodyguard, finds herself brought up on charges for waving off the arrival of a Swedish diplomat to a meeting in an African country. The slacker takes a real job, under an assumed name, infiltrates a company he thinks may be involved in the Game, takes up with an attractive woman, becomes a party to some insider trading. His sister fights the charges, argues with her boyfriend, carries on a clandestine affair, meets a long-lost uncle, finds a plot to invade the royal palace on New Years Eve. Like Game, quite the page-turner, with a lot of local color from Stockholm, a city which I wish I knew better.

Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (2008, 2nd edition 2011) is a fairly short, very dense book about constructing your public presentations with skill and care to get your message across. Because he's studied zen, and mostly lives in Japan, he takes a very introspective view of how to develop a presentation. Reynolds certainly has some interesting ideas about how to make compelling slides --- including not using any slides at all in some cases --- and echoes some of the points I made in a Toastmasters speech I gave a couple of years ago entitled "PowerPoint PitFalls". He also introduces a trick I want to try from Japan called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter") in which you do a presentation by talking through 20 slides for 20 seconds each, with slides on a timer so you have to get your talk completely keyed and timed to the images behind you.

What If?

Randall Munroe is, of course, known for the often hilarious web comic xkcd, but he's also been answering odd questions on his web site for a number of years. The questions and answers are now gathered in What If?, subtitled "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurb Hypothetical Questions." Most questions merit a several page essay considering issues such as how a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz and how many archers you need to shoot enough arrows to block out the sun. Or what happens if the earth suddenly stopped spinning. Or how much Force power Yoda can output. He uses a lot of entertaining footnotes, including a number of pseudo-Wikipedia [citation needed] notes, and some more-or-less accurate calculations. His explanations sometimes take notable shortcuts on clarity, but this is, after all, in the interests of amusement, not scientific rigor. There are also some interjections of questions he chose to not answer, like: "what is the total nutritional value (calories, fat, vitiamins, minerals, etc) of the average human body?" All-in-all it's a lot of fun, but may require a certain nerd sensibility to appreciate.

zen pencils

For a couple of years, the excellent Australian free-lance artist Gavin Aung Than has been producing a several-times-a-week cartoon, zen pencils, each illustrating an interesting quotation. Not only are the quotations inspirational, so is Gavin’s own story: he quit a regular job to do this because he was getting no emotional fulfillment out of commercial art. He landed a syndication contract with Universal Press, and now appears on their web site, though he's still available at his own site zenpencils.com. Now many of his cartoons are collected in a volume of the same name, which I bought not only because the work is good and the illustrations add amazing depth to the text, but to encourage Gav to continue doing this. I recommend it to you for the same reasons.

Superfreakonomics

Superfreakonomics is Stephen Leavitt and Stephen Dubner's 2009 sequel to the wildly interesting 2006 Freakonomics. They discuss the economics of prostitution, how tracking bank fraud can also help you track down terrorists, and how the number of automobile deaths went up up in the months after September 11th, not because people were afraid to fly, but (as you find if you look at the numbers more closely and notice that they were clumped in the northeast and showed a larger-than-usual number of alcohol-related accidents) because of post-traumatic stress.  Currently, they’ve followed up with Think Like a Freak, about the metaproblems of thinking outside the economics box, which is in the to-be-read pile.

Feed

I was wrong. I read the first bits of Mira Grant's Feed before the 2011 Hugo deadline, but not enough to actually get the feel of it. And so I voted for Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear first for that year's Hugo. However, now that I've finished it, I can report that Feed is just a killer book --- in both senses of the word. Grant managed to tell a really compelling story about life in the mid-twenty-first century after the zombies have come. She manages to get enough Joss Whedon-style snarkiness in, particularly in the interactions between our point-of-view character Georgia (as in "George Romero") and her brother Shaun (as in "...of the Dead"), and their sidekick Buffy. Together they run a web site where Georgia is in charge of the news (the "Newsies"), Shaun is in charge of exploring the outside world and occasionally chasing zombies (the "Irwins", who give out an annual award called the "Golden Steve-o"), [As a tossoff, she notes about Shaun, "A good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke look death defying and suicidal." Those of you who have seen Shaun of the Dead will note that scene sounds eerily familiar.] and Buffy runs the poetry and story side of the house (the "Fictionals").

     Then she leavens it with some swipes at thinly disguised versions of current political figures, like the congresswoman from Minnesota running for president who is described as a "publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change." But it's not all lightness: she provides an excellent political thriller as a base, in which people die badly. And she manages to write it with some gut-wrenching passages like the quote below from Shaun's blog.

        She rounded out the rest of the "Newsflesh" trilogy with Feed and Blackout, both also highly recommended.

"If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: Go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms."

Blackout / All Clear

I first heard Connie Willis reading pieces of what would become Blackout in the spring of 2002. It was one of the books I wanted to read on our fall vacation in Whistler back in 2010 shortly after it was published.  It might not have affected me as it did had I not spent the entire preceding week immersed in capturing my father’s memories of WWII as an Air Corps officer. To read her retelling (in part) of the stories of Londoners in the Blitz, of the guys who built a fake Army to convince the Germans the invasion was coming at Calais, of the ambulance drivers and air raid wardens and rescue workers is all pretty amazing. I timed reading Blackout carefully, knowing that it was only half the story, and that if I got sucked in at the cliffhanger, I'd only have to wait a few weeks for the second half, All Clear, to appear. I was and I did.

     Basically, a flock of time-travelling Oxford historians (see Willis' Hugo-winning "Fire Watch", et sequelae) are visiting Britain during the War. Things, of course, go wrong --- including the whole of the events in the "Fire Watch" taking place under their noses. Oxford don Mr Dunworthy traipses back into the past in an attempt to help and finds himself trapped, too. There was a point in the middle where I was getting frustrated with Willis for dragging us through day after day of the uncertainty of our time travellers dealing with the uncertainty of the Blitz. But then I realized: this is what it must have been like. Not just the uncertainty of the time-travelling historians, but the uncertainty of day-to-day life for Londoners in the Blitz, for everyone in southern England during the V-1 and V-2 attacks, for everyone while the threat of invasion was high. She manages to weave in the central mystery of why things are going wrong, with some surprising results. I blasted through the back half of All Clear on a Sunday afternoon, and when I was done and tears were streaming down my face, my first reaction was "How the hell did she do that!?" and my second was "I'm glad she did."

Manhood for Amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs is Hugo- and Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon's 2009 book of essays, subtitled "The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son." It is, unfortunately, disappointing. While there is the occasional characteristic turn-of-phrase that makes me enjoy Chabon's writing, this smacks of little essays-as-writing-exercises that were tossed into a drawer and pasted togther to make a book. Some of them are interesting, to be sure --- his musing about how being elected President was going to take Barack Obama away from his daughters, his internal struggle about being honest with his children about smoking marijuana --- but overall, we expect far more from Chabon.

    As an aside, shortly after I finished this, there was a review in the December 2009 Atlantic for Ayelet Waldman's then-current book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. I read the review, because it was by fellow Caltech alum Sandra Tsing Loh, though I did not intend to read the book itself. I note this only for the purposes of amused contrast, since it is out simultaneously with Chabon's book and Waldman is Mrs Chabon.

Back Channel

Back Channel is a new thriller by Yale law professor Stephen L Carter set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It posits that the agent of back channel communications between Kennedy and Khruschev was actually a nineteen-year-old Cornell co-ed, whose cover was having an affair with JFK. It's very well-constructed, with an extensive note at the end detailing the ways in which he adjusted the timeline to suit his story and dramatize events. Nonetheless, Carter slips through a couple of anachronisms --- he has our point-of-view character use a Princess phone three years before they were available, and have a Kodak Instamatic camera two years early. He also assumes ubiquitous direct-dial long distance calling, which wasn't available in the New York area until 1964. Most grating of all, our heroine is African-American: even though Cornell was co-ed since it's founding, and also integrated early-on, a black teenager being able to navigate Washington circles without extra comment at the beginnings of the civil rights struggles --- six months before the letter from the Birmingham jail and a year before the March on Washington --- strikes me as unlikely. I solved that major suspension of disbelief by merely ignoring Margo's race for much of the book.

    That all said, it is a very well-told story, with a lovely convoluted plot. As hawks on both sides beat their drums for war and saner heads try to prevail, we get to watch the President and his brother and his national security advisor try to keep the lid on the boiling pot. Carter has clearly drawn some from An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek's biography of Kennedy, and from the White House tape recordings in the JFK library. We watch JFK's efforts to steer the middle ground elegantly, with steel resolve, against the cajoling of McNamara and LeMay; we watch Bobby playing the devil's advocate to see the sense of the room; and we see a fictionalized McGeorge Bundy both advising and plotting.

The Dying Light

Based on a favorable review in The Economist I dug up The Dying Light, a 2009 thriller by British writer Henry Porter. Consider what happens when the British government starts gathering an unbounded set of information on everyone in the country on the grounds of protecting us all from terrorists. But that the data collection grows to the point where it's used to persecute everyone who shows any sign of protesting or being against the party in power. And that the head of the security services is forced out because he objects to the massive violation of civil liberties. Faked deaths, rigged coroner's inquests, loose organizations of protesters, small towns in England and Wales, people who care about rights and privacy. A call-to-action on our side of the Atlantic as well as to the British. Nicely done, and worth the read.

A Spy Among Friends

Cambridge, the 1930s. Young men dabble in Communism, with some of them taking it more seriously than others. Some of the serious ones ended up in high government posts, to wit, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and of course, Kim Philby. Philby's life and times are covered in the new volume A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre. Macintyre covers the whole of Philby's life, particularly his relationship with his life-long friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliot (about whom John leCarré provides an interesting afterword), and his CIA colleague James Angleton. That Philby was able to get away with his perfidity for so long, spying for the Soviets under the nose of MI6 is (according to Macintyre) a tribute to the British class system: his colleagues in MI6 did not believe that someone of good breeding, who had gone to the right schools, was a member of the right clubs, could possibly be a traitor. The divide was that members of MI5 (roughly, in Britain, the FBI, to MI6's CIA), who were largely from less-prestigious backgrounds, had no problem believing the evidence that Philby was a double-agent. They were able to put together the trail of broken operations, murdered spies, leaked secrets, and hints from defectors, and see Philby. His drinking buddies and old school chums were not. And thus, Philby was finally fired by MI6 in 1951 when Burgess and Maclean defected --- after having been warned by Philby. But he was rehired in 1956 and sent to Beirut, where, as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, he also worked for MI6. In 1962, a Soviet defector was finally able to finger Philby, and in early 1963, he was interrogated by his old friend Elliot. After several rounds of questioning, and Philby's confession, the KGB managed to spirit him out of Lebanon and on to Moscow, where he lived out his days. It is the real history of the fictional wilderness of mirrors leCarré captures in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and as a vital part of cold war history, it's worth a read.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

There are many books that are called classics, some of them even justifiably. For example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I recently reread. Robert Heinlein postulates a revolt at a penal colony, which organizes itself on libertarian principles with the help of a self-aware computer. The wrinkle is that the penal colony is on the Moon, and anyone sent there can't come back because their body has acclimated to the lower gravity.  This includes the guards and administrators. The Moon is hydroponically growing a large chunk of the grain needed in Asia, and literally drop shipping it via catapault back to Earth. The Loonies defend themselves with a superior understanding of their environment and gravity, and by the simple expedient of dropping rocks on Earth via the selfsame catapault. It is well-told, tightly-plotted, with appropriate suspense, including side discussions of Heinlein's alternatives to monogamy. If you haven't read it, make the time. If you have, it's time to re-read it.

    Alas, I read the Tor/Orbit reprint, which suffers from the perennial problem displayed by Tor: there was no human intervention between the optical character recognition of the text and printing the bound volume. This means there are innumerable typoes which would have been avoided by the simple expedient of proofreading. The most annoying example was references to "flat money" instead of "fiat money." (Those pesky "fl" and "fi" ligatures were obviously invented by medieval type designers just to confuse the OCR software.)

Intelligence

Intelligence (subtitled "a tale of terror and uncivil service") is a fine first novel by Susan Hasler from 2010, out in paperback this year. It watches an unfolding terrorist incident from multiple points of view inside a US intelligence agency known as The Mines. Our hero, Maddie, her ex-father-in-law and mentor, Doc, among others, see the day-to-day happenings at this agency from their own points of view. They are unable to get anyone to listen to their warnings, are raked over the coals for their inability to prevent another terrorist incident on American soil, and then they get revenge. No actual idiot bureacats were harmed in the writing of this novel by a twenty-one year veteran of the CIA as a counter-terrorism analyst. Liz stole this from me the moment it came from the library, and we both laughed out loud a lot when we read it.

"Yes, there is a Starbucks in the Mines. Ours sells only beverages, no clever mugs with Latin phrases, espresso machines, or bags of beans, but you can still obtain a variety of pretentious concoctions distantly related to coffee --- the way a lemur is distantly related to a human. Coffee with caveats. I stand in a long line and listen to people roll off their lengthy orders, which must specify size of cup; percentage of fat; whether milk be of the cow or of the soybean; flavor and number of pumps of syrup; presence or absense of whipped cream, sprinkles, sugar, and a partidge in a pear tree.

It's my turn. I refuse to say venti. There is nothing wrong with the English word large."

     --- Susan Hassler, Intelligence

The Healing of America

Given the current policy debates, TR Reid's 2010 book The Healing of America (subtitled "a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care") is worth revisiting.  It's a book comparing how medical care is delivered and paid for in several countries across the world. He argues that deciding to provide health care as universal coverage is fundamentally a moral decision, and then proceeds to show how delivering coverage works in places like Japan and France and Germany and England and Canada. Note that two of those countries --- France and Germany --- achieve universal coverage completely with private insurance plans. All of them tightly control costs by dictating what is covered by a standard medical insurance plan and the prices charged for services. France goes further and gives everyone an encrypted smart card with all their medical information so that your doctor can look at all your records immediately. Such a card also cuts the time for a bill to be paid down to less than a week. The next effect is that France, which is seen as profligate by its EU neighbors in its expenditure on health care spends half what the US does on healthcare (as a fraction of GDP) and a tenth what the US spends on administrative overhead.

     Net take-away for me: Anyone who calls European healthcare "socialist medicine" is lying. Anyone who says that cost control won't work is a shill for the insurance industry.

The Ghost / The Ghost Writer

Robert Harris, who wrote Fatherland and Enigma, both serviceable novels, has also given us The Ghost (2010), about a ghostwriter helping a former British Prime Minister with his memoirs. Any similarities between Tony Blair and the PM in this book, who was too firmly in bed with the Americans over the Iraq debacle, signed off on the torture and rendition of British citizens, got tossed out of office on his ear after Britain got pissed off over being sold a bill of goods in the "war on terror", and who has spent his year since retiring amassing a great personal fortune, are completely coincidental.  Our unnamed point of view character is the replacement ghost writer for a former British prime minister's memoirs. His predecessor, who had started the project, has died under mysterious circumstances, and the writer struggles to solve the mystery and turn in a serviceable manuscript. Things go pear-shaped for the writer when he actually figures out the mystery. 

    Roman Polanski's movie, confusingly titled The Ghost Writer, and then renamed The Ghost on re-issue, is a very good version of the book, preserving the story's backbone in a compelling way, with Ewan McGregor as the writer, Pierce Brosnan as the PM, and 

Marooned

Martin Caidin's novel of a rescue in outer space, Marooned, actually exists in two versions. There's the one that was published in 1964, and then the fixup based on the 1969 John Sturges movie. I've had the latter version, unread, on the shelf for a number of years, and read it a couple of months ago. Then I was curious and got the earlier version out of the library. They're both overdone a bit, very much products of their times. And once you've read the earlier one, the seams in the later one are even more obvious. However, they both suffer from "dark and stormy night" syndrome. Sample sentence: "In the growing absence of restrictive air, the stripped atoms and wildly agitated gases howled mutely in every direction, spreading in the form of a phantasmal spheroid, it surface and inner space rippling and turning with the light reflected from the blazing rocket."  That said, it's a good adventure story.

Replay

In the mainstream-with-sci-fi-conventions category, Lisa Roberts recommended Ken Grimwood's Replay, originally published in 1986. It is (in some sense) the serious version of the movie Groundhog Day. A man repeats a chunk of his life again, and again, and again. There's no clear-cut purpose, though. He doesn't need to make one perfect day or one perfect life so much as experience it from different angles and be grateful for what he's got. He can make money by betting on horse races he already knows the winner of and investing in unknown companies that will make it big, but he can't stop Kennedy from being assassinated. He can marry his college sweetheart, but not reconnect with the woman who is also caught in a similar time loop. In the end, when he pops out the other end of his loop, he has to deal with life as it comes, one day at a time.

     (Two anachronisms which pop out painfully, and I note because I'm a nit-picking pain in the butt: The desk in the hero's office features Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, which is a lounge chair, not a desk chair. Our hero is drinking Glenlivet scotch in a New York bar in 1964 --- to the best of my knowledge, the only bottle available in the US at that time had been smuggled into my father’s liquor cabinet from Scotland as a gift by an Inverness-bred friend of his: it wasn't generally available until the late '70s.) 

The Secret History of Science Fiction

I picked up an anthology at the library edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel entitled The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009) which contains stories such as Kate Wilhelm’s "Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis" and Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent", which are mainstream stories in sensibility, but use the conventions of science fiction. You and I would recognize them as speculative fiction, but they could hide in plain sight in The New Yorker. Kelly and Kessel’s intention is to bring material in that middle ground to your attention. And they do a good job, providing some excellent stories, many of which I'd read before, but some, like the Chabon, Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat", and Connie Willis's "Schwarzchild Radius" were new to me.