Walking on the Moon

P.T. Barnum believed in aggressive marketing and wasn’t shy about separating people from their money.  It may be surprising to see that he wrote this book exposing scams and balderdash as well.  He claims that exposing this kind of stuff makes his entertainments look better by comparison, and I believe him.  I don’t believe he never stretched the truth, though.

Whatever you believe about Barnum’s personal ethics, the book is a nigh-comprehensive explanation of ways that people fleece the unwary.  Spiritualists, Religious crooks, and cults all take a licking, but it’s interesting to see Barnum take shots at adulterers of food and liquor, and at unscrupulous businessmen cashing in on bubbles. It’s also interesting to see his religious commentary given that he takes a very pro-Christian point of view.

Skeptics wont find a ton of new information in here, but it is remarkable how few new tricks have premiered since the 1880’s.  I enjoyed seeing just how many of these scams continue unchanged to this day, as well as how easily new tech gets incorporated.

While Barnum’s writing is clear, I did find that the book seemed long.  Some of this is that there were few new revelations; some is that many of the names here are otherwise lost to history.  The parade of historic scams gets a little tedious when you don’t recognize any of the players.

The Higgs Discovery is a short discussion of the recent Higgs Boson announcement from Lisa Randall.  It includes a couple relevant chapters reprinted from a couple of her books.  I picked it up because I wanted to know more about that announcement and what it means for physics.  I’m not a physicist, of course, but I like to believe that I know enough to not completely make a fool of myself in intelligent discussion.  This Higgs thing was outside my range, though, and I’d like to be less lost.

The Higgs Discovery helped. I’m far from completely understanding how this all works, or how we think it all works, but I’m doing better.  After reading it, I have the beginnings of an intuition.

To an extent Discovery didn’t make things simple enough for me, and felt jargony where I thought that jargon wasn’t necessary.  I’m picking nits.  This is a very short primer on a complex topic in quantum physics.  Randall’s goal has to be to tell me enough to get me interested enough to pick up a more complete discussion.  Discovery did that very well.

Some Remarks is a very mixed bag of Neal Stephenson’s shorter writings.  Stephenson’s novels are usually tomes, so it’s interesting to see some of his shorter work.  But then about a third of the book is an epic article for Wired that describes laying an undersea telecom cable, so shorter is relative; the article is as long as a novelette.

One of the things I enjoy about Stephenson’s writing is that he often sees commonplace things in new ways, combined with a close correlation between the things he and I think are commonplace.  This collection treats me to his take on the Star Wars movies as well as the aforementioned telecom cables.  We look at similar things and I like the way he sees them.

As much as I enjoy his writing, I can’t really recommend this as a starting place.  The topics, formats, length, and genres of the pieces vary widely.  There are short stories, addresses, interviews, articles and a book foreword. I found them all interesting and engaging to some degree, but I think new readers would be best served by one of his novels.

I grew up in the 1980’s as a geek, playing video games, reading comics, watching movies and a lot of bad TV.  I was a kid who lost himself in stories, and I used all of these as fantasy homes away from home.  So did Ernest Cline, who wrote Ready Player One as an homage to these immersive entertainments.

Player One is set in the near-ish future where a variety of slow catastrophes have made the real world even less attractive than it seemed to a kid growing up in the Reagan years.  The climate’s a mess, pollution and overcrowding are rampant, and the economy is so far in the tank that most people are little more than serfs.  One of the few bright spots in this world is the powerful virtual reality environment called OASIS that acts as a getaway and diversion for the vast majority of people.  When the primary designer of OASIS dies, his will states that the first person to find a particular hidden feature of the game – an Easter Egg – will inherit his considerable wealth.

The Easter Egg is the McGuffin that brings our protagonists together.  The very idea of Easter Eggs comes from the early days of mass market video games in the 80’s and Cline ties his story more tightly to the decade by making the designer a fan of 80’s pop culture.  The protagonists solve 1980’s-themed puzzles in lifelike simulations and enhancements of the entertainments that inspired them.

Cline does a great job running with this without becoming so tied to the era that he’s just regurgitating it.  He replicates the facets of the best diversions most responsible for their charm without producing a clone of any one in particular.  It has the feel of War Games or The Last Starfighter without being a rip-off or a retelling.

There are a lot of 80’s references, overt and oblique.  If you’re a student of the era who likes to play spot the reference, or to annotate stories, Player One will keep you busy. I grew up in the era, and certainly had my share of obsessions, but I didn’t find the references distracting.  There were plenty of times a reference would jog my memory, but I never felt taken out of the story by them.  In fact, the one time I was taken out of the story was an aviation reference, not a geeky one; flying a chartered jet across the country at 10,000 ft is as jarring to me as getting the title of Dancing With Myself wrong would be.

The references are a way to let readers play along with the game of finding the Easter Egg without having to explain all the possibilities.  A sufficiently knowledgeable geek from the 1980s could solve the puzzles fairly without having to learn a bunch of new lore introduced here.  It’s a nice idea.

As with any good quest story, however, Player One sinks or swims on the strength of its characters.  Cline creates a world and set of protagonists who are fun to spend time with and to root for.  They’re flawed enough to have some flavor, but not so real that they get in the way of a fast-paced story.  There aren’t really any deathless characters here, but they’re a lot of fun to spend a couple hundred pages with. Basically they’re heroes of an 80’s quest movie.

There are a lot of good quest movies from the 1980’s and Ready Player One is a worthy addition to that pantheon.

Strongly Recommended.

Strictly speaking, the most likeable character in They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? is probably the Premier of China, and that’s by a nose.  It’s an interesting trick to write a thriller where there’s no one to root for, and Christopher Buckley pulls it off nicely.  The whole thing has the antic, grotesque feel of an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel, but without the good guys.  But even in a world without good guys, there are worse guys.

Despite the fact that everyone’s compromised somehow here, Buckley keeps things light and dynamic.  Things move right along and he shifts the point of view around enough to both keep the reader guessing and to give an idea of the scope of the plot. That plot circles around a set of defense contractors trying to drum up business by manufacturing a threat from China, while the various factions of both governments jockey for position around the faux threat.

Buckley does a nice job showing that even PR threats can have devastating repercussions and that once a rumor picks up a certain amount of speed, no single person or group can steer it.  The multiple perspectives help bring that home well.

It’s a lot of fun and a fast read.

Recommended.

I think I’m happy that I went to public high school.  Adolescence is lonely and stressful enough without the added isolation and expectations that boarding schools seem to impose, if fiction is to be believed on the matter.  Jennifer Miller’s The Year of The Gadfly uses those heightened emotions to tell a compelling story.

Stories set in high school are about how this time shapes people as it’s happening or how people have changed after those crucial years.  Miller tells a little bit of both by splitting her narrative across three characters and two time frames.  Her characters all are intricately bound to her fictional academy and the secret societies and plain cliques that animate it.  As usual in a boarding school drama, these are all boiled down to their pure and symbol-laden essence.  On the surface a hidden group of students is enforcing the school’s honor code to the letter through unorthodox and painful means.  Underneath adolescent passions and pressures are clashing operatically and symbolically.

Martin handles her timelines and character perspectives deftly.  Each character sits at a different point in their development and in the development of the events that ensnare them, as well as representing a distinct point of view.  The result is a look at the nominal plot and the symbolic coming-of-age drama from multiple perspective.  Miller creates a nice hologram of adolescence through prose.

It’s also a gripping read.  The plot moves along snappily, and even as the mystery begins to resolve itself, there are twists that engage the reader.  If you’re not one for prose holograms of the adolescent experience, there’s a fun ghost story/mystery here with diverting characters in the mix.  And also cameos by the ghost of Edward R. Murrow.

Recommended.

I’ve never seen Dave Hill perform, though I have heard some of his work on This American Life, including a version of at least one of the essays in Tasteful Nudes.  Most of these essays would appeal to that audience, in my opinion.  They’re fairly light, thoughtful, well written personal essays from a fellow who’s lead an interesting young life.

And I don’t have a whole lot more to say.  I enjoyed reading them, but they also didn’t knock me out.

Laurent Binet helpfully subtitles HHhH as “a novel,” but that’s probably intentionally misleading. It’s more of a book that intertwines a historical novel, with the commentary track of that novel, with the story of it being written.  That kind of thing can come off as too clever for its own good, but Binet remains engaging throughout.

The topic of this combination of introspection, research, and literary project is Operation Anthropoid, a WWII assassination carried out by Czechoslovakian resistance fighters trained in London by the Allies.  It is indubitably the stuff of high adventure.  Daring secret agents strike a symbolic and pragmatic blow against the mastermind of the Final Solution in their occupied homeland.  The stakes couldn’t be higher and there’s drama in both the execution and the aftermath.  Binet’s not the first to see the literary potential here.

This kind of story basically has to become a myth, but Binet – having set out to write about it – spends a lot of his time writing about how he wants to write about it and what others writing about it has meant.  He doesn’t want to change the people involved from heroes to protagonists, though writing about them in a historical novel will certainly do so.  And thereby make them more heroic, but less human.  By writing himself into the story thinking about these things he makes himself into a character.  Now his concerns become as much a part of the story as the history.  That’s always true, of course, but he makes it explicit.

It’s a saving grace of the book that Binet the character is friendly, thoughtful, and great company.  He may be concerned with the effect of telling the story, but he also does a great job of doing it.  He brings the men to life compassionately, describes the times and places with telling detail, and relates his feelings sympathetically.  The overall effect is one of hearing the history with a well-read and interesting friend.

Binet the author has researched his topic in nearly obsessive detail.  He knows the history of the operation in every particular, and the versions told in literature and popular fiction even better.  It’s great to think deeply about the nature of fiction, but nothing gives those concerns weight like being able to point at the telling details one author uses and another discards.  Especially when the truth gets slippery.

HHhH is unique and fascinating.

Strongly Recommended.

As a long-time comics reader, it’s been strange to watch them become so prevalent in popular culture.  When I was a kid, something like Super Folks was a genuine anomaly – commenting on real life through comics in a way that indicated a love of that medium was never done.  Lately this has become a more common lens through which to get at the world.  Prepare To Die! is Paul Tobin’s entry.

Tobin has built a world of superheroes in the 90’s comics sense.  His heroes (and villians) sport colorful powers and celebrity stature backed with realistic characterization and real failings.  His hook is that when confronted with the cliched command “Prepare to die!”, Tobin’s hero, Steve Clarke,  negotiates a 2 week cease fire to do just that.

From there the history of the world and the protagonist unspool as we follow Steve through his bucket list.  Following Steve is fun and moving.  Superheroics is mostly teenage boy wish-fulfillment and yanking his protagonist into that world at that age lets Tobin riff on celebrity and the differences between childhood dreams and adult aspirations.  Steve’s reflections are resonant and believable while the suddenly ticking clock gives his introspection real stakes.  This is good stuff.

And then it all comes off the rails for me in the last chapter.  The tone and what I thought was the theme all change and the world finishes in a place that makes a lot of that soul searching seem moot.

That may be my limitation, of course.  And heaven knows that so many promising comic series come to an unsatisfying conclusion that it’s practically a genre trope. But, still, the ending really felt too arbitrary and at odds with the rest of the book for me.

The ending would not have disappointed me if the vast majority of the book wasn’t excellent.  Tobin has a knack for getting inside the head of young men and putting them on the page for all to see – good and bad.  He also puts together a propulsive adventure story and comics plot. There’s a lot to like here, but that final chapter just doesn’t work for me.

John Scalzi’s Redshirts is an affectionate look at the worst job in fiction – the doomed minor character. As soon as I start writing about the inner lives of minor characters, I wind up twisting myself around the axle of noticing that they’re fictional.  Saying a doomed character doesn’t know he’s doomed forces me to confront the fact that they’re a character – they have no inner life at all, but that’s true of  a main character, too, and  their inner lives are what fiction’s made of, and look there’s that axle again.  Fortunately for his readers John Scalzi doesn’t have these problems.

Scalzi deftly breathes life into minor characters running around the irrational and dangerous Star Trek universe (actually a knock-off of that universe).  He does a fine job both bringing those characters to life and showing us the world in which they live without changing the essential nature of either.  This is a fictional Sci-Fi universe that only makes sense as fantasy; these are not the heroes of that series. Creating interesting characters without breaking those rules is quite a trick.

It’s far from the only trick he pulls off.  As the characters begin to understand their world, they  figure out the tropes of the genre they find themselves in.  This allows plenty of room for commentary on the sorts of world serial fiction creates by looking out from that world.  It’s an interesting and fun perspective.

It’s fun because Scalzi knows these tropes intimately. He can smile with  genre conventions and inside jokes that grow from necessity. He also decries the lazy writing or the corner cutting that springs from a tight schedule, limited talent, or laziness. That distinction is important to him and,  he implicitly argues, should be to us as well.

It’s one thing to point out through meta-fictional games that genre characters are often written worse than they deserve.  The trick that makes Redshirts powerful is that without leaving this world that he constructed to expose all faults and inconsistency of bad wriing, he writes several moving, absorbing, meaningful arcs while sticking to those rules.  It’s one thing to point out hackwork; it’s quite another to show how to transcend genre in the same breath.

Even if you couldn’t care less about what this all says about writing and genre, Redshirts is a fun read. If you do care, it’s quite a lot more.

Strongly recommended.