Walking on the Moon

Phil Lapsley’s Exploding The Phone captures the phone phreaking culture with both solid journalism and with the sort of enthusiasm that brings a story to life. I have long known that phreaking was a foundation for the modern hacking and open source communities, but the scene never came alive for me.  Reading Exploding The Phone was like finding my parents’ high school year book for the first time and realizing that they went through the same things I did.  It was enlightening and warming.

The first few chapters are a little repetitive for my taste.  Lapsley follows several seminal phreakers introduction to the phone system, and those paths are different only in detail.  As a result, the chapters are somewhat repetitive.  I think that Lapsley is trying to give these fellows their due and to introduce the cast for the rest of the chapters, but I would have been happier with one detailed chapter and somehow getting just the differences.

Once the narrative begins to talk about the social scene that phreakers developed around conferencing and connecting to one another inside the phone network, the scene becomes recognizable as a forerunner of modern social networks. That’s the point at which it becomes rich enough to go from academic to exciting for me.

In addition to the social networking of the phreakers, Lapsley brings the stories of the phone company employees and law enforcement officers who collided with them.  These folks shared the phreaker mentality and skill set to different extents, just as such folks do today.  It makes the scene more full and believable.

Overall this is a great view of an legitimately exciting time that is the basis for much modern technology.  Jobs and Wozniak figure prominently, and the path from phreaks to hackers is remarkably clear.

Strongly recommended.

Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters is an exciting, suspenseful, thriller set in Africa.  For me, and I suspect most readers, the plot is really a sideline, though. The mood Johnson sustains is much more powerful and interesting.

Johnson’s Africa is haunted.  It’s haunted by ancient ways of life ruptured by recent horrors.  It’s haunted by the West’s history of exploitation and recent headless terror over 9/11 and related unrest.  It’s haunted by Africa’s homegrown despots and their rapacious hungers.  It’s haunted by poverty, greed, and ambition. These restless spirits howl throughout the whole book.

Importantly, all these ghosts visit our protagonists directly. There are no moments where anyone announces that Imperialism brought about a plot element or haunting detail, but there’s never any doubt where those elements and details stem from, either. The ghosts are always personal; they touch our anti-hero adventurers as directly as a creepy uncle in a church basement. The unease and guilt swirl throughout the narrative.

It’s a spooky book front to back, and a good thriller to boot.

Strongly recommended.

Kevin Underhill writes Lowering The Bar, which is really all the credentials one needs as a funny lawyer. His Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance is one of those e-mails or gift shop books that collect strange, stupid, outdated laws.  Unlike the e-mails and the gift shop books, Sasquatch is well researched and properly referenced. It’s also funnier.

So Underhill has done an existentially strange thing.  He’s produced the best instance of a disposable piece of pop culture.  The result is an engaging piece of ephemera.  It’s well worth buying and reading it, even if you may do so in the bathroom.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up based on a review of a writer I like, and I got something I wasn’t expecting.  The blurb and the review both gave me the idea that Eric Kaplan was going to use the abstract question of how we relate to imaginary characters as a stepping stone into a general philosophical discussion. Does Santa Exist is more about how Kaplan has made peace with the questions than how society has.  The result is a philosophical memoir.  I admire the audacity but don’t share his positions.

He begins with a tour of the philosophy of logic and quickly zeros in on logic’s limitations in dealing with self-reference and contradictions.  Valid concerns, of course, and well expressed.  He moves on to other belief systems: Buddhism and other mystic systems.  It’s sort of an odd juxtaposition in terms of the overall shape of philosophy, but seems to trace his own metaphysical journey.  He alludes to formal Buddhist and Zen training a few times.  He clearly does not find what he calls the mystic approach compelling, either. From there he wends his way to Kabbalah.

I’ve encountered the Kabbalah system before, and I don’t find it an intuitive way to organize my thoughts on reality. If Alan Moore (and J. H. Williams III!) can’t sell me on a system of magical thinking, well, anyone else will have an uphill battle.

So, I’m happy Kaplan’s found a belief system that works for him, but if the point of Santa was recruiting others – and I think it is – he didn’t manage to get me.

The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things is an essay by the estimable Bruce Sterling that promotes his perspective on pervasive computing, big data, the giant companies that promote these and the effect of it all on society.  It’s thought provoking and refreshing with plenty to turn over in the reader’s mind.  It’s also thick with snippets that went directly into my quote file.

Sterling is largely interested in current trends in public and private surveillance.  He starts by working backword to see their causes – tech drivers and economic ones – and forward to see their effects.  Many have pointed out the changing role of consumers in a system where so many “products” are free, but Sterling captures some of the driving forces particularly clearly. His perspective is both polemic and entertaining.

Not all of his essay is convincing, of course.  He’s thin on the economic forces that sustain his favorite big data companies, for example.  However, as a perspective changer and food for thought The Epic Struggle is invaluable.

Strongly recommended.

Douglas Adams warns against blowing up the Earth in chapter 1 because you’ll need it later.  This is good advice even if you’re writing an apocalyptic trilogy. MaddAdam is the last of Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic trilogy that started in Oryx and Crake, and the trilogy had kind of run out of gas for me.

MaddAdam ties up loose ends from the earlier books, fills in some details of some characters pasts, and advances the post-apocalyptic plot.  The earlier episodes had more momentum and satirical bite.  One of the joys of those books was the fairly biting look at the modern society that Crake wanted to wash away.  Atwood would skillfully extrapolate that world from this with equal parts horror and humor that made for the best satire.  MaddAdam does not extend the satire much, and it is definitely missed.

The plot of MaddAdam fills in the gaps in a character’s history, but that history doesn’t add much to the world or the plot.  One of the strengths of After The Flood is that Atwood shows us the events of Oryx and Crake from a different conceptual part of the world.  The difference in the characters’ perspectives enrich the plot and add satirical targets.  MaddAdam’s flashbacks bring few new perspectives, though plot details get filled in.  I’m glad that Atwood knows these details that make her plot more sound and consistent, but I didn’t get very excited about learning the finer points.

Atwood is one of my favorite writers and technically the writing is spectacular.  Even though I was not very impressed by MaddAdam, it is full of beautiful phrases and brilliant literary constructions.

Overall, I recommend MaddAdam for completeists, but most readers won’t get much out of it that wasn’t in Oryx and Crake and After The Flood.

As a comics fan, I’ve long been aware that the backstory of Wonder Woman was at least as interesting as the character herself and much less accessible. Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman solves the second problem, and leaves one free to look over the glorious craziness and fundamental importance of the first.

The fellow generally credited with creating Wonder Woman is William Moutlon Marston whose resume is quite remarkable in a vacuum, aand more interesting in the context that Lepore provides.  Marston was an early student of psychology and physiology as the connection between the two was beginning to be understood.  He claims to have created the lie detector and was certainly the fellow who first tried to get its evidence made admissible in trials.  He was an early feminist and proponent of women’s equality, if not superiority.  He was an unusual choice to create a comic character, but the one he created was an uncontested smash hit, selling Superman & Batman kind of numbers.  While comics fans remember many characters fondly, that kind of financial and popular success was beyond rare.

And yet, as Lepore draws out, there was more than a hint of the charlatan about Marston.  His lie detector didn’t seem to work reproducibly for people other than him, and even his successes were often inflated in his claims.  His attempt to get lie detectors made into legal and investigative tools failed as a matter of law, and quite probably was a key distraction that undermined the defense of the accused.  Worse, his claims and results are generally so unconvincing that investigators use the device as a bluff to get confessions rather than a tool to find facts.  He lectured widely partially because he was slowly failing himself out of academia, sliding down the hill from professor to lecturer and below.

He also lived in a basically polygamous arrangement with several women, all of whom contributed materially to the creation and success of Wonder Woman, and all of whom saw their contributions minimized to keep the details of their living arrangements hidden. His principles of equality of the sexes seemed to be limited by practicality.  As a result, when he died young, the core creators of Wonder Woman lost creative control quickly. Consequently, corporate profit overshadowed feminist principles – even the somewhat unusual ones of the creators – as a primary driver of plot and theme.

It’s a fascinating story that touches on many of the intellectual revolutions of the 1920’s to the 1940’s culminating in the creation of one of the most unusual and compelling characters in popular culture.  Lepore’s story follows these gripping people through their remarkable journey and can also be a jumping off point for many more historical and intellectual explorations.

If there’s a downside to Secret History, it’s that Lepore writes more like a scholar than a storyteller.  She  has her facts straight and documented, but often the people do not breathe as they could.  Fortunately these folks are largely dynamic enough that the facts speak fine.  Furthermore, just unearthing these facts is an achievement in itself.

Strongly recommended.

It took me a while to figure out  seemed out of place in William Gibson’s latest, The Peripheral. The cool stark prose was there. There’s a near future seeing, though he does do a few more hard SF tricks than most of his recent work. World spanning settings – from rural towns to high end art enclaves.  There’s nothing missing.

It took me a while to figure out that there’s something new here.  There’s some actual optimism.  Not the usual optimism one finds in a Gibson book that’s born of a few of his gentlemen losers eking a minor concession from a relentless world.  There are folks in here who are genuinely good in an almost Carl Hiaasen way whose good deeds are rewarded.

It surprised me quite a bit when I saw it.

The book as a whole is thought provoking and chock full of characters who humanize the big ideas at play.  Gibson’s always been a writer of character and atmosphere to me, and Peripheral is no exception. Everything is crisp and interesting and in the service of ideas and theme.

Good fun.

Recommended.

I generally don’t have too much to say about Brust’s Taltos novels, though I find all of them rewarding and most of them entertaining.  Hawk is a surprisingly meditative and cerebral book for a series that starts as such a lark.  This is the sort of thing that brings me back as a reader.  I liked the Sharpe’s books, but they don’t change much and you can see that my interest waned.  I was reading Gardner Bond books for a while, too, but I stopped reading them and he stopped writing them.  While some Taltos novels are similar, more the early ones  than the later ones, none of them are the same.  The tone and writing style changes and the characters develop in ways that are unusual for characters in what initially feels like a stock fantasy world.  I’ve said all that before.

Hawk finds Vlad tired of running and feeling the pull of his life getting away from him.  He spots a way that he thinks will get his pursuers, the Jhereg – his old allies in organized crime, off his back. Plotwise, Hawk is about building and executing that plan.  “Former fantasy mafioso on the run executes caper to get himself clear of the mob” is how my high-concept friends might summarize it.  And the summary is correct as far as it goes.  (And if that sounds like a book you’d read, you won’t be disappointed.)

I found Hawk more rewarding for two major reasons.  First, thematically, it’s about getting the right details right and Brust expresses that by doing it.  “Show don’t tell” is great writerly advice. Good writers do it with their plots; better writers do it with their characterization .  Brust does it with his theme.  Several times he creates affecting moments that both moved and surprised me.  I eventually realized that many of these were because Brust wrote exactly enough to make the scene work, not a word more, and avoided being flashy about that. A pleasure to read, whether you appreciate the technique or just feel the scene’s punch.

This is a nice theme to apply to the writing process and the living process.

Second, Vlad is ripening as a character.  Age and experience are changing him, and seeing an author take an established, popular character through that process is interesting.  I’d like to use a verb other than “ripening” here for variety, but I think this is what Vlad’s doing.  From the character’s perspective there’s no end state or plan to it (though Brust seems to have some handle on where he’s going) and the fundamentals of the character are guiding what happens.  And yet, we’re not quite sure where he’ll be next time.  It’s very interesting to watch that happen.

Strongly recommended.

In preparing Doctor Mütter’s Marvels, Cristin Aptowicz has taken the most important first step in writing an interesting biography – choosing an interesting subject.  Thomas Dent Mütter is a dashing, slightly eccentric physician who lived a rags-to-riches success story and left behind a respected museum that is both a curiosity and a serious boon to science.  What could go wrong from there?

Lots of things could, but none of them do.  Aptowicz writes a tight, informative book that keeps the story moving while communicating both what’s interesting about Mütter personally – his drive, skill, and compassion – and historically – his role in founding an important early medical college, pioneering plastic surgery techniques, and collecting important medical specimens.  The resulting volume is a joy to read.

There are some choices I would make differently. For example, Aptowicz spends more time making sure readers know that one of Mütter’s rivals gets his just desserts than I cared about.  These are minor differences of preference.  Marvels does a great job telling the storing of a fascinating medical pioneer.

Recommended.