Walking on the Moon

I used to be more diligent about checking in with these sorts of collections of short writing in genre, but I got away from it. I hopped on this collection edited by Nnedi Okorafor and quite enjoyed it.

Short story collections are by nature a mixed bag, and that’s what I signed up for when I borrowed this. For me there were no bad stories in here – which isn’t always true. There were two or three standouts. And the writers are playing with genre tropes and representation as well as telling very straight-ahead genre fiction well. Worth a look for a quick way to survey current SF. I’ll probably grab another one of these.

Recommended.

This is the what the Los Angeles Public Library tells me is the second book in the series started with A Fire upon the Deep, but it’s a prequel with little obvious connection to Fire. Vernor Vinge wrote both.

There are ties to Fire‘s setting. This takes place in the same basic human history established that book, and there are places and characters referenced in that book that appear here. But if you show up fresh, it will all be good.

It is a very well done space opera, if anything, to a fault. I think Fire has more to think about and play with in it. Where Fire introduced a new cosmology and a threat that was intimately tied to that, Deepness puts us back in conventional physics with more direct extrapolations of technology. Any fan of Ringworld will be right at home here.

It is absolutely a space opera. The good guys are the tenors and the bad guys are the basses. There is enough nuance to make the characters worth rooting for, but this is an adventure story. I could get all English-teacher-y on this and dredge up some complaints about it, but that’s not the book Vinge obviously wrote. It’s a lot of fun.

I also can’t resist pointing out that according to this, it’s strongly implied that thousands of years from today human software still reckons time from the Unix epoch.

Strongly recommended.

The Los Angeles public library has led me to a bunch of interesting and different Japanese fiction over the past couple years and Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow is the latest. It’s a difficult book to drop into a genre. There is plenty of crime and it takes place at the edges of Japan’s criminal underground. There’s a coming of age story in there, of sorts. There’s basis for some kind of activist fiction like The Jungle, but it’s not explicit. And may not be present.

What is there is a completely gripping narrative told from the point of view of an unreliable but completely believable narrator. This is the story of a girl growing into adulthood on the fringes of society. She’s less a mobster’s daughter and more Richard Pryor. She grows up alongside generally shady goings on, but she’s never actively harming anyone. In her mind.

And her mind is absolutely the core of the story. There’s a framing sequence that asks a question that seems to have a clear answer. But not to her, which drives her remembrance which takes up much of the novel. She’s an obviously unreliable narrator, but even looking in from the outside, there is a lot that is not black and white.

I think this is a book where some readers will look at the question that the framing sequence asks and have strong opinions of the answer. Since that question is pretty close to “was this person held hostage and forced into a criminal enterprise by a woman twenty years her elder?” it seems like there should be an answer. But I can build arguments both ways. I suspect the litmus test of it is part of the point.

And there’s much more in there than a puzzle. Have a look for yourself.

A must.

Now this is the Murderbot book I was expecting when I read Fugitive Telemetry. And the following one. All the character growth and context Wells has been building across the series is there. We get to watch Murderbot deal with new complications – personal and plot-driven.

It’s all great. Snappy, tense, and something to think about.

Strongly recommended.

It will surprise no one who knows me that I do not read a lot of management books. And if you don’t know me, I’m surprised you care about what I think about anything. I quite liked Crisis Engineering, though and I even think I learned some things about technical systems and the institutions that create them.

The authors, Marina Nitze , Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson have been in the trenches. They do the kinds of things they discuss here for a living and those kinds of things are rescue healthcare.gov in a few months. This kind of thing is interesting to me, because anyone technical has to occasionally wade into a trash fire and help put it out. If you care about the human systems that deal successfully with that, the authors have done a good job explaining what they’ve seen clearly.

I should be a little careful with what I mean by clearly. If references to Dune, the novel not one of the movies, are clarifying and an isolated reference to ptrace output provokes an “I see you” reaction, they’re super clear. I also think there are shibboteths for other components of their audience in there as well. The point is that if they’re talking to you, you’ll understand they’re talking to you.

Beyond the conversational tone, they have done the homework to support their intuitions about institutional (and technical) behavior. If something sounds crazy, it gives the reader a thread to pull on to assess it.

No single book can assess a topic like this, but I walked away with a lot to think about.

Recommended.

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.