Walking on the Moon

A friend of mine was talking up later books in this series and when I checked the library, A Fire Upon the Deep was listed first. The completeist in me signed up for the first one first and I’m glad I did.

I like the stuff I’ve read by Vernor Vinge, but it’s been so long that none of it has been reviewed on this blog. I know I read True Names and other Dangers because he was definitely playing with early ideas of online collaboration. I liked his take on it then and I still do now.

I’m going to praise all kinds of structural features and speculative bases in this book that I loved, but if you are looking for an answer to the question “is there an ominously powerful galactic threat that can only be defeated by two marooned human children and the complex medieval society of intelligent dog packs they’re trapped with if a team of kinda intelligent swamp reeds, a research librarian, and a cut rate Space Opera hero can get to them in time?” the answer to that is yes. Enjoy. It’s thrillingly executed.

To make that work, Fire does some ambitious world building. There are lots of SF settings that are meticulously laid out but that still boil down to “it’s the Age of Exploration with starships” or something similar. Fire posits a spatial topology based objectively on the level of communication and technology of the inhabitants. Kind of. There’s considerably more to it than that and Vinge does a great job just telling you what you need to know at the moment without showing all the cards. I come away with the feeling that it probably coheres but in a way that hinges on parts of it being clearly labeled as “beyond human ken.”

It works for this story and gives the reader the feeling that they never know everything that’s in motion.

And as a fellow who has a personal interest in and detailed knowledge of communication networks, it is extra delightful to me how much of this cosmology is based around communication speed and connectivity. It pervades the work once you look for it, but if you don’t look that’s fine, too. The fundamental social and professional networking feels directly based on 1990’s era USENET to me and that’s an additional joy. While the way we express ourselves on modern networks has changed, Vinge has captured a lot of the fundamental lessons that continue to express them selves in modern network communication.

The writing is uniformly great as well. The situations and characters come on at a pace that brings the reader in comfortably. The threat introduced in the first few pages gathers speed throughout the story in a way that feels exponential. There are hints and hints and then without realizing how much faster the pace has gotten, there’s no longer any way to slow down.

I understand that the next couple books are only loosely connected to these events, which seems fine to me. This stands alone very well.

A must.

I’m a big fan of Patrick Wyman’s work in history podcasting and was happy to check out Lost Worlds. This is a history of prehistoric or at least early history societies that are often overlooked in our historical narratives. Wyman’s not just taking readers on a tour of interesting societies that most people haven’t heard of. He’s also championing the idea that none of humanity’s development is a guaranteed outcome. If some of these societies had hung on longer our world might be very different.

Along the way he describes a ton of new scientific techniques in enough detail to understand them and find out more if you want. Even if you hate the idea that the organization of modern states was not the only outcome, the info about how we’re learning more about the past is a worthwhile investment.

Wyman writes clearly both in describing how isotope distributions in bone remains correlate with locations and in the dirty day-to-day of a society we barely understand. Doing the latter without overstepping the bounds of what we do know is a joy to read.

Strongly recommended.

This is a biography of Thomas Noguchi who was a flamboyant LA Coroner during some exciting times in Los Angeles and the country. He performed the autopsies on Marylin Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy and was involved with numerous other high profile cases up to John Belushi. And he was loud about it. He clearly enjoyed the personal publicity and sought it out. Just his public life role in those famous cases is interesting history.

His story also has a more tragic arc. After years of running the Coroner’s office, he is ultimately publicly removed from that role for mismanagement. Probably with reason.

He is also a Japanese-American in charge of a large department in the second-largest city in the USA when few non-white people had access to those roles. More than that he was publicly driving investigations of national figures. His investigation of Kennedy’s murder still teaches forensic pathologist lessons today. Seeing a Japanese-American describing the details of a presidential assassination was unheard of at the time.

Anne Soon Choi tells a story of this brilliant but inconsistent individual well. It’s obviously tricky to do. There are aspects of his life that show excellence. There’s the thirst for attention. And there are failures of ability as well. All of that is in the environment of racial and city politics of turbulent times. Choi covers it all well with the eye of a historian.

I can’t say this is the sort of beautifully written biography that rises to literary greatness. It is messy in places, and sometimes repeats information. But I think the messiness reflects the subject well. This is a person who was not one thing, or even consistent across time. He’s not a literary character and it’s rendering him as one would minimize the person he was.

Strongly recommended.

More Murderbot. The LA public library had this listed as following Network Effect when it actually is set before that novel. It was still good Murderbot fun, but I was hoping to see more of the post-Network Effect worlds.

Still recommended.

This is a fun book. I often read SF that’s speaking to bigger ideas and trying to change minds. In Bounce House Matt Dinniman is telling a ripping yarn first. For that to work for me, there has to be enough going on thematically that I care about why that yarn is in the realm of SF. I don’t mind if that leads to tropes, but I do care why we’re in the future.

Dinniman does a nice job with that. He wants to talk about gamer culture, imperialism, immigrants, personhood and a bunch of other ideas that fall nicely into SF. That is a lot to talk about while also setting up a space opera with stakes. In the end Bounce House doesn’t poke at any of those ideas deeply, but they’re creating believable stakes.

The shallow approach works because he gives us a winning cast of characters in a world that’s real enough as long as the pace is high. The pace is high, the stakes are clear, and the whole thing rips along with me in the seat.

Strongly Recommended.

Many people whose opinions I respect have said good things about Charles Portis’s True Grit. There are also those two very different movies, both of which I like for different reasons. So let’s see the original.

From the movies, I knew the general plot, but Portis’s novella is beautiful in its own right. He looks at the post-Civil War west through the eyes of a precocious teenager bent on revenge. The first trick he pulls is somehow making that point-of-view character believable. It’s a hard character to sell. A teenage kid driven enough to want simple bloody revenge on her father’s killer while simultaneously being competent enough to move the world to do it is a challenge for a writer.

He writes from the kid’s point of view so deftly that the reader can see what an unusual child she as well as how showing her inexperienced understanding of the world. I said “the kid” there, but she’s drawn so vividly I feel like I need to say her name – Mattie Ross – as if she were real.

Portis does a great job portraying her youth in that there are things she only understands in a shallow way, but that shallowness rings true. You can tell she knows people will try to take advantage of her, but she’s ready for it in ways that make more sense to a child. You can tell she understands she’s dealing with bounty hunters who are working outside the law, but she doesn’t understand entirely what that means.

Making your central character reveal their limitations in those ways without realizing she’s doing it is one thing, but showing the reader what she’s not seeing is more impressive.

Portis does allow himself the out that Mattie is telling the story as an adult, but that is just another source of unreliability in his narrator that he’s playing deftly.

It’s a story about desperadoes in the Old West. Truth and justice are slippery concepts. Portis plays with them in a way that lets the reader in on that. And he tells a rollicking yarn with outsized characters while he’s at it.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up because John Scalzi mentioned that Sherri Tepper does some great world-building in Grass. I like Scalzi’s writing, so I gave this a look. I agree with Scalzi that the world she creates and how she introduces readers work brilliantly. The characters in that world and how it drives them to grow make it a great book all around.

The world of Grass is an extrapolation of ours that heightens the aspects that Tepper wants to talk about and elides the ones she doesn’t. One of the ways that works is that she makes the parts she wants to talk about so intriguing that the reader forgets about what’s missing. Religion is there in a big way, and I found that picking at how much of it she is extrapolating it from Mormonism, Catholicism, or something caught my attention. And then sects within the church pop up with the inherent intrigue and I’m thinking about how all that meshes. None of which is really the aspect of the religion that she wants to focus on, bit its all engaging until she does get to her point.

Tepper brings us into the world through several characters’ views of it in ways that both show the reader the world and the characters. Good writers who are writing from the third person across their cast are usually aiming to do that, but I think Tepper is really doing it well. There’s a double shell game going on here where each the events each character is telling the reader what they know about the world and how they think and feel about those things. And she is author is deftly choosing the events that tell us about the characters and how they are changing. Or are not changing.

Tepper writes a book that makes this all happen for a reader. I think it’s built to be magical, even though it wasn’t magical for me. It’s not one of my favorite books, but I can tell it’s someone’s favorite. It’s worth a look to see if it’s one of yours.

Strongly recommended.

This turns out to be the kind of quirky sitcom someone of my age might have run into in a neglected time spot on an off channel. It’s the kind of show you wouldn’t quite believe was aired until you ran into someone else who had gotten into it and you wound up spending a couple hours talking about it at a party. It’s working inside the form but with the kind of stylish takes that seats it in its own world. It’s not where you live, but is fun to spend time in. Sonoko Machida does a great job creating that feeling in a novel.

The whole thing is set in a seaside Japanese town, specifically in a convenience store. But, it’s a quirky TV sitcom convenience store. There are larger than life employees, a weird ecosystem of neighbors, some customer or employee with a problem- one to a chapter – and strange product placement moments for the fictional products of the fictional store seamfully inserted. It’s all quirky and fun and I quite enjoyed spending time there.

Recommended.

Annalee Newitz’s latest is a simple book to sum up. Some robots open a noodle shop. There’s more to that to it, of course. To the pot Newitz adds politics, decency, a love of San Francisco, and a delightful sentient contract that wants to live and not ask too many questions.

It’s a lot of fun, compassionate, well written, and has interesting ideas. It does seem a little shallow and maybe YA. That’s not a criticism. This is a good book to hand to younger readers or to take to the beach or on a flight.

Recommended.

John Scalzi is very good at finding a good hook for a story. Redshirts and Starter Villain can both be described in a sentence and are fleshed out into interesting fun reads. When the Moon Hits your Eye is the same. The hook is that one day Earth’s moon inexplicably turns into cheese. He spends the rest of the book looking at how that affects people.

Scalzi does a really nice job picking the people he’s going to talk about and also the topics he’s going to use them to touch. There are little stories about how headlines drive entertainment, and deep moments of grappling with the ineffable. There are lots of funny moments and the prose crackles.

At the end, though, the word I’d use to describe this book is “sweet.”

Strongly recommended.