Ready Player One

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a wonderful cyberpunk story, covering the search for an epic Easter egg hidden in cyberspace. The inventor of cyberspace as we know it has died, leaving no heirs, but has left clues strewn throughout the bits and bytes of his creation to find his inheritance. The path is littered with movies, video games, books, comics, and other references to the 1980s, when the inventor grew up. (About the only missing reference is to Tetris.) In itself, this is reason to read the book: Liz and I amused ourselves by being able to say things like "Jordan from Real Genius" and "Inigo Montoya" to each other as we caught the references ahead of their explanation.

Our narrator and hero is on a quest to find the egg. He meets interesting characters on the way, including the (cyber) girl of his dreams. Of course, there are bad guys from the evil corporation who want to take over cyberspace for their own ends; they're on the hunt, too. Our hero almost keeps ahead of them, and outsmarts them until the point where they kill him. Then it gets truly epic.

We listened to the audiobook version of this in the car on our various peregrinations last summer and fall. By Thanksgiving weekend, we were sufficiently sucked in that we listened from chapter 33 to the end in the living room. Part of that delight was the performance of Wil Wheaton --- yes, Wesley Crusher --- who just does a stunningly wonderful job as the reader. Not only is he a good voice actor, but he clearly was enjoying the material, and was particularly well-suited to read it.

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

My friend Lisa highly recommended Robin Sloan's Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and I can now do the same. It's a book in that odd space between mainstream novel and science fiction. There's a clear quest, secrets to be decoded, heroes and villians, patrons and sinners, danger and love, secret cults and the internet. Our point of view character is a clerk in a bookstore that Is More Than It Seems. His roommate is a guy at Industrial Light and Magic who builds physical props not digital ones, and he begins dating a young woman who does data visualization at Google. He and his crew work to solve a puzzle left by Aldus Manutius, the brilliant Venetian printer and typesetter. Sloan recreates Aldus's type designer Francesco Griffo as the German Griffo Gerittszoon, with a very different backstory. There are nice puzzles for the reader, too: the secret society membership numbers appear in odd places so you can track folks through them. Aldus's printer's mark appears in an interesting context. And there's a boutique hotel in New York catering to computer nerds where the bar has a drink called the Blue Screen of Death. (I'm sure I missed some other little fillips.) It's a wonderful book, and I completely devoured it.

Feynman

Having reviewed The Challenger Disaster recently, I should also mention Feynman, a graphic novel biography of Richard Feynman written by Jim Ottaviani with art by Leland Myrick. It's based, in part, on the oral histories Dick did with Ralph Leighton, son of his long-standing colleague Bob Leighton. It's great fun to read, bringing back a number of memories of a fascinating character I had the pleasure of knowing. It includes some stories I hadn't known, and quotes extensively from some of his lectures. His Nobel Prize banquet speech, for example, covers some of the same ground as Robert Heinlein's SFWA Grand Master speech. The artwork is lacking in several places --- sometimes it's hard to tell Feynman from Freeman Dyson, for example --- but the story is nicely laid out in the same random-walk way that Feynman's oral histories are.

(That said, all of the graphic novels Ottaviani and his collaborators have done have been excellent. They cover a wide range of technology and science, and are a delight to read.  I'll review more of them some other time.)

About Time

In the same sense that William Gibson kept rewriting the same damned novel for so damned long, Richard Curtis --- Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill --- keeps making the same damned movie. At least with About Time we get to skip Hugh Grant. It's the same mix of heartwarming pap that all his movies are. Father passes on to his son the family secret, that men in their line can travel backwards in time. Hilarity and hijinks ensue. Our hero learns that love is more important than being able to take a do-over. Yadda, yadda. Domhall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams put up a good fight against the material, and Bill Nighy is excellent as usual. Wait for the short story instead.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Given that yesterday was the forty-fifth anniversary of the events described, it seems appropriate to post this review today:

They're old men now. Gray or balding, wrinkled, with liver spots. Their voices are still crisp and animated, with the calm of test pilots, which they all were, as they explain what it was like to be In the Shadow of the Moon. We have interviews with ten of their tiny fraternity --- it was a fraternity which only ever had twenty-four members, six of whom were dead and one of whom didn't give interviews at the time the film was made.  The interviews are intercut with archival footage from their adventures on and around a world a quarter of a million miles away. Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins talk about the seat of the pants feelings as three hundred feet of rocket below them lights off and starts to propel them upwards. Charlie Duke explains that his father barely believed he traveled to the Moon, but his son thought it wasn't a big deal. Jim Lovell explains that the let down of not walking on the Moon didn't hit him until after he'd safely returned to earth after Apollo 13. Gene Cernan says baldly "I called the Moon my home for three days of my life... That's science fiction." It's material I know well, so there are no new facts here, but it is wonderful to hear the story of their adventure in their own words, to see the expressions on their faces as they pause to gather their thoughts and realize that, yes, they were at the Moon, to sample the awe they felt, to have them tell how they were transformed by the experience, how they now regard the Earth as a precious jewel. However, this has a very high wow! factor. Certainly, my sense of wonder was actively engaged through the whole three hours it took me to watch this hour-and-a-half long documentary: I kept backing up and watching passages a second time.

"When they opened up the fuel baffles we could hear the full rumble down these huge pipes. Then it dawned on me from an emotional point of view that we're gonna go to the Moon."

     --- Jim Lovell, In the Shadow of the Moon

Dick Francis's Bloodline

I've been a voracious reader of Dick Francis's thrillers -- all of which take place with a background of horse racing -- since I discovered them in the 1980s. After Francis's wife (his unacknowledged co-writer) died, his son Felix left his job teaching physics at a British prep school and started writing with his dad. Now that Francis senior has died, Felix has continued the franchise his parents started with Dick Francis's Bloodline, and continues it badly. Like Silks, the novel which they wrote jointly, this ends with the hero killing the antagonist. It also proceeds through the gratuitous murder of an attractive woman who appeared for six chapters only to be knocked off, the annoying "I recognized the murderer, but won't tell you who it is right now" ploy, and two instances of "how could they have been so stupid" for the sole purpose of advancing a stalled plot. That's it. I'm done. Francis pere put together good thrillers, which violated rules of plotting to good purpose. I don't know how good a physics teacher Francis fils was, but as a writer, he seems to be re-inventing particle physics --- he's just smashing things together to see what flies out.

Where the Truth Lies (film vs book)

I tripped over Atom Egoyan’s film Where the Truth Lies via a Netflix recommendation.  I was massively disappointed.  The film stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a 1950s comedy-singing duo, who break up under mysterious circumstances after a dead girl is discovered in the hotel suite they are about to check into.  The point of view character is a young journalist who idolized them when she was a small child, and is writing a biography of one of them in the 1970s.  It wants to be a film noir mystery, but can’t quite get its act together to do so.  Fortunately, the credits note that the source material is a novel by Rupert Holmes (who you know for “The Pina Colada Song” and the plays Drood and Accomplice), and the novel is everything the movie should have been.  It's a send-up of Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” and provides the full story of our intrepid girl journalist chasing down the reasons for the team’s break up, their sexual predilections, the quirks of their entourages, and surrounding oddness.  It is a fully formed story, rather than the cartoon Egoyan attempted to get past the censors at the MPAA.  We have a real whodunit plot with murder, blackmail, suicide, mistaken identity, and several interesting switchbacks in the path.  This is the story I would have expected from Holmes, who, in Accomplice, was a subtle and sneaky storyteller.