Walking on the Moon

1984 is a book that can haunt you.  It is certainly relentlessly grim in content, which is enough to wedge it firmly in your memory.  It is also extremely thought provoking – both daring you to disagree with its bleak view of mankind and relentlessly defending its position.  Finally, it has so permeated popular culture that one cannot go more than a day or two without seeing or hearing a callback to it somewhere.

Most people seem to remember 1984 as a blueprint for a repressive state, and it is that, but what I found even bleaker was his ideas of how such a state appears.  The idea of a state built on power as cruelty seems more depressing than one that grows oppressive from venality or ignorance.  A nation of sadists seems more discouraging than a nation of sociopaths, somehow.  Yet, I find my internal arguments in favor of the sociopaths less compelling than I would like.  A book that leads one to argue unconvincingly that sociopaths are a better and more likely set of rulers than a null hypothesis of sadists is already an  impressive thing.

While I may argue myself into knots trying to escape the biggest and worst conclusions, I do notice some problems in the details.  Women are not portrayed well at all.  Even the romantic female lead is represented as primarily an object of desire possessed less of intelligence than a low animal cunning.  She is there to be betrayed.  Other females do not do any better.

I also believe that there are some aspects of human behavior that are so fundamental to our animal nature that no amount of conditioning could drive them out.  A world where men build governments to satisfy their lust for power, but in which the masses have their drive for sex and competition conditioned away seems unlikely. Still, that’s a quibble about the portrayal of a detail, not a fundamental flaw of the ideas.

And, of course, Orwell can be didactic to the point of lecturing.  Large hunks of the text are Orwell speaking directly to the reader through one mouthpiece character or another about how the world works or why the world of 1984 is a logical progression from the world today.  While these icebergs of exposition have the disadvantage of being bone dry, they have the significant advantages of being well thought out and clear.  If you are of a mind to listen to such things, they are filled with interesting ideas to oppose or jump off from.  While I am of that mind, I can only imagine the obstacle they present to a reader of a different mindset.

Those paragraphs make it sound like I am a 1984 detractor.  I am the opposite.  I came away from this reading convinced that this is one of the most interesting and important books of the 20th century, and that it is easily as important the people in the 21st.  It is not terribly entertaining, but it is brimming with interesting ideas and difficult challenges.

A must.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a classic fairy tale, and benefits from all the timelessness and iconography of the genre.  Writing about pigs and horses means he can be pretty direct about the failings of men and women without blaming particular men and women.  His story about animals that overthrow their farmer and adopt socialist dogma is a classic.

Reading Animal Farm again, I was struck by how general his writing and themes were.  In addition to using animals to stand for people, he gives each iconic rather than individualistic personalities.  Rather than a group of memorable characters, I was left with the memory of a set of archetypes, which reinforces the universality of his ideas.  Similarly, though the chronology and ideology are based on communist history and dogma, the animals’ revolution seems less about a specific doctrine than a universal story arc.  As with all fables, this gives it a moral rather than an outcome.

While this generally works in favor of the piece, there are some moments when I felt a little distant from the proceedings.  There is not really anyone to identify with or root for in the story.  It is easy to follow the plot, but hard to be drawn in.

That is a fairly minor nit to pick.  Animal Farm is an excellent fable about the failings of men in pursuit of their ideals and the attraction of power.

Strongly recommended.

I don’t have too much to say at this point about David Allan’s  Getting Things Done.  I received it as a gift from a friend who was sick of hearing me moan about my lack of productivity, and I’ll try to read basically any book someone hands me.  Overall, the ideas in here made a lot of sense.  I’m trying to implement them, but it’s very early to tell how well they’ll work over the long haul.

So far, I’m optimistic.  If you’re looking for a strategy for organizing your priorities, this is worth a look.

Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast is a very well known memoir of an unusual experience.  Dana was a college student and well-to-do Bostonian who took several years off from study to serve as a common sailor on a merchant vessel trading on the coast of California.  This sounds like a recipe for gimmick book today, but that was not a common tactic at the time.

There are a lot of memoirs that get lost in time.  Dana has two major factors working for him.  First his book is one of the only pre-gold-rush descriptions of California that was accessible to the Gold Rushers.  Many of them retraced Dana’s path with gold on their mind and Two Years Before The Mast under their arm.  Second, he writes very well.

I have read many historically interesting books that were deadly dull.  Even the best authors from more than 150 years ago can be opaque.  Dana is a welcome surprise.  His language is clear, evocative, and descriptive.  While some of the turns of phrase are dated, his meaning is clear and his language flows pleasingly.

He is a good enough writer that a simple diary would be interesting.  The topic is inherently more interesting than that.  Part adventure story, part travelogue, part behind-the-scenes story, Dana always has an interesting incident to relate in his clear prose.  We are treated to two trips around Cape Horn – no Panama Canal in 1834 – trading and hide gathering work in California, a survey of the coastline and population, and quality time on the ship.  As a current Californian, it is fun to hear the descriptions of the people and land from years ago.

My version also includes a chapter relating a later trip to California years later where he sees the changes from the Gold Rush and reconnects with some of the people he met years before.

Overall a very interesting, well-written memoir of exciting times.

Recommended.

William Spaniel wrote this pamphlet , Game Theory 101: The Basics, showing elementary game theory concepts applied directly to simple games.  There’s not much actual theory in here, and certainly no deep proofs, but there are many illustrative examples that combine to give a familiarity with the ideas.  I’ve been curious enough about game theory to want to see that, and this was a useful introduction.

He writes clearly and well, and walks through every step of the calculations.  Still, this reads more like a good textbook than like an essay for the layman.  I found the combination of basic explanations and detailed examples very illuminating.  I walked away knowing a bunch more than I did when I started.

Recommended if you want to see the basic nuts and bolts of tame theory.

Von Clausewitz’s On War is a classic work on war, its ramifications, strategies, and tactics.  It was written in the 1830’s (and technically unfinished), so it is easy to imagine that it is from another age and largely irrelevant.  There are certainly parts that are of their time, but there’s a surprising amount of thinking that is fresh.

All the discussion of the lines between and interdependence of strategy and tactics is relevant, even when the specific examples are from battles of another time fought with old weapons.  Every bit as compelling are discussions of politics and strategy.  Clausewitz is unambiguous that those are never separable and to understand that is to have a hope of understanding a a war.  It makes our current adventures in Asia even less comprehensible to me, probably because I don’t want to think about what our political goals are.

While there are many interesting ideas here, the text – translated from 19th century German – is often opaque.  It doesn’t help that all the examples are drawn from the time as well.  While there are some Napoleonic battles that I have some inkling of, overall I don’t know many details.  The combination of the syntax and obscurity makes for difficult reading.

Worth it if you’re interested enough to penetrate the fog.

I picked up Shine after I had such a good time reading Engineering Infinity.  Shine is billed as “an anthology of near-future optimistic science fiction.”  I was looking for another collection, this was advertised in the back of Engineering Infinity, and I really had to see what they could pull off within those constraints.  Our guide through this happy near-future is Jetse de Vries.

Constraining tone and setting is an interesting approach, and a remarkable set of authors took up the challenge.  From my perspective, the most successful authors in here are the ones who most aggressively subverted one limitation or the other.  That is not surprising; looking at a constraint in a new way is something great SF writers do.  I enjoyed how the folks in Engineering Infinity interpreted the “hard SF” constraint, and I similarly enjoyed most of these.

Optimism is a particularly interesting constraint.  With the exception of Ben Bova’s almost jingoistic odes to space exploration, I can’t think of a lot of SF that is optimistic in tone.  The most Bova-esque story in Shine, Jason Stoddard’s “Overhead” is instructive in how the most successful authors in here attacked the problem.  Setting up multiple perspectives and letting the reader decide who to root for helps, though in “Overhead” there is little mystery where the author’s sympathies lie.  Others provide more complex options.

I should say that “Overhead” is a propulsive, interesting story and that I enjoyed it a lot, but it did not break the mold of a bunch of plucky explorers going into space against any of society’s objections.

Overall, I found Shine to be more hit-or-miss than I found Infinity, but if the lows were more mundane, the highs were higher.  I particularly liked Holly Phillip’s character study of an artist in “Summer Ice,” Marti Ness’s writing clinic in “Twittering the Starts” which expresses a short story as a series of reverse-chronological-order tweets, Alastair Reynolds’s delightful “At Budokan” which I won’t spoil, and Madeline Ashby’s heartbreaking “Ishin.”  Ashby clearly slipped past the “optimistic” requirement with a Hollywood ending, but I’m not fooled.  Finally, I feel like I should mention Gord Sellar’s “Sarging Rassmussen: A Report (by Organic),”  because it is so much the kind of story that resists description, but is so much fun to follow along with.

Because of the high variance, readers are likely to find some stories they dislike in Shine, perhaps some of the ones I like so much. The ones I liked I liked so much that the collection was worth it.  I don’t know that a collection can get a better review than than.

Recommended.

Engineering Infinity is a collection of recent hard SF short stories edited by Jonathan Strahan.  Strahan does a fine job keeping things hard – which is to say stories that turn on current scientific ideas – without making them heartless or humorless.  Overall this is an excellent selection of stories that encourage thought about old tropes in new ways, which is one of the reasons I enjoy SF.

I should say that I grabbed this collection out of a desire to recapture the fun of spending a rainy day or long car trip sampling cool short stories.  For my money SF is the best genre for this kind of thing, because any story has the chance to turn your assumptions on their head.  In a collection like this, if the one you are reading now does not make your ideas flip, the next one will be right along.

By that metric, this collection was a smashing success.  There was a wide range of ideas and writing styles on display, many of them to my taste.  Even the stories I didn’t like were clearly trying something interesting, even when I did not think they succeeded.  Some clung more closely to genre conventions, but it was rare that a story in here did not offer some new twist.  It is to Strahan’s credit that the topics and tones do not overlap much at all.  This is a great sampler.

As I say, there was much to like in here.  My top three were “Bit Rot” from Charles Stross, “Malak” from Peter Watts, and “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees” by John Barnes.  The last was particularly successful in throwing ideas out at a rate that well exceeded the length of the story.  And if you don’t want to read a story with that title, I’m not sure I want to talk to you.

If one of your ideas of fun is sitting down to gobble up short blasts of adventurous writing on hard SF kinds of topics, this is a good collection.

Recommended.

James Randi’s The Faith Healers is pretty much a seminal work in debunking.  Randi is one of the first, if not the first, to take a serious look at these people who travel from place to place claiming to heal the sick through faith for money.  Randi and his team do a great job running down the evidence on how these guys operate and often spectacularly beating them at their own game.  These faith healers are clearly just ripping people off and it’s great to see them called on it.

All that said, there are some problems with The Faith Healers.  The biggest one is that it is a victim of its own success.  In 1987 when The Faith Healers was published, most of these techniques were unknown by people outside the “trade” and their brazenness and  sophistication was surprising.  Today a lot of this work has become much more widely known.  It was a bombshell that these faith healers were using two-way radios during performances; now it’s a plot point on Leverage.  There are lots of other places for someone of a skeptical bent to find this information these days.

While I love the good works that James Randi has done – this book included – I will say that I didn’t find him a gripping writer.  All the facts are here and the information is clear, but he does not have the flair for narration that makes it exciting.  When one is presenting surprising truth, that is not a great limitation in an author.  Combined with the fact that I knew most of the raw information in here from other sources, it made the book something of a slog.

As I say, The Faith Healers is a victim of its own success.  Its success comes from the fact that it is clear, accessible, extremely thorough, and convincing.  If you have never looked into how faith healers operate, or why you should care that they are not on the up and up, this is a great book to read.  As a template for how to lay out an investigative work, it is sound.

I am amazed how different Kurt Vonnegut’s books can be while remaining Vonnegut books.  Cat’s Cradle has a unique tone and focus among his work, but it is difficult to imagine a reader believing that anyone else wrote it.

Cradle has a lot to say about religion, science, government and how they all interact as constructs of the complex humans who create them.  The water is deep there, but the environment is plenty warm.  While Vonnegut calls out the follies and inconsistencies of people and their intellectual constructs, he is always wryly affectionate to the individual people – or their fictional equivalents.

This is the work from which Vonnegut’s calypso-themed Bokononism religion appears, and is one of the key characters.  The religion gives him plenty to say about how they start and perpetuate themselves, but his genius is in making it simultaneously inviting.  A semi-nihilistic Caribbean religion with pidgin calypso hymns sounds pretty good.  No matter how calculated and ridiculous Bokononism sounds at times in the book, the underlying attractiveness of it takes some of the teeth out of the satire.  That warm feeling goes a long way.

It also contains a Memorial Day speech that is every bit as powerful as Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, while remaining respectful of the valor of young soldiers.  Vonnegut manages to scorch the men who lead young men to war while still lauding their spirit.  It is a remarkable piece of writing, and worth reading even if the rest of Cradle is not for you.

Overall an interesting work that walks a tightrope between satire and warmth.

Strongly Recommended.