Walking on the Moon

There are people who will assert that Mary Sue characters are solely the product of female writers.  These people have never read a Stainless Steel Rat novel.  Harry Harrison’s Slippery Jim DiGriz only fails to fit the bill by being older.

I hadn’t read a Stainless Steel Rat novel since I was in high school, but I remembered them rather warmly. I did remember that I stopped reading them after a few because they had become formulaic. I was right.  Even with a couple decades of time off, the formula is pretty easy to spot.

It’s a shame that Harrison’s execution leaves me so cold.  There are a few fun ideas running around in here, including the basis of the series.  The idea is that in the future as authority gets more repressive and effective, criminals must similarly become more ruthless and effective to continue their trade.  The insights that we’ll always have rule-breakers and that evolution improves everything are well taken, as is the To Catch A Thief conceit that some criminals – like DiGriz – will use their skills to help society.

But, like I say, the execution leaves much to be desired.  DiGriz and his family of hyper-competent criminals are never challenged by any of the plot twists.  None of the main characters experiences the slightest self-doubt or concern about taking on a planet of corrupt officials.  No one ever breaks a sweat or really slows down to do anything but compliment DiGriz.  The rest of the family are machines, right down to having no agency.

Worse than simply being lazy writing, it undermines the main premise.  Everyone outside the DiGriz family is so ineffectual that the very idea that society bred a super-criminal is unbelievable.  If these guys are all DiGriz has to go up against, he’d never develop the super-competency that he needs.

There are a couple nice set pieces in here.  DiGriz is an atheist with a code against killing.  Harrison supports those positions simply and clearly, and it’s a welcome change from today’s bloody action heroes.  Still, overall I can’t recommend the Rat.

I hope Daniel Handler made a huge amount of money on those Lemony Snicket books, so he can continue breaking my heart with the projects he publishes under his own name.

Why We Broke Up shares a lot of setup with and many of the merits of The Basic Eight. Both capture and breathe life into the vulnerability and rush of adolescence.  Handler’s recreation of being in love and being in study hall both resound with authenticity.

To its considerable benefit, Why We Broke Up is more intimate and personal than The Basic Eight. Everyone in Why We Broke Up has real depth and motivation.  No one is a symbol or a plot device.  Or just those things.  Everyone has irredeemably bad moments and inexplicably selfless ones.  Everyone has best and worst times, and no one gets away with being words on paper.

Its a deep trifle and a moving read.

Strongly recommended.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is a sprawling, intricate novel constructed of well-crafted parts.   It is literally broken into sections that are broken up further into individual narrative bits – usually a day’s events – that interconnect to form the decades-spanning whole.  The sectioning is clear and explicit. Mitchell seems to be pointing out the parts that make up the whole.  At the same time, the whole is economical and sleek, though it didn’t feel that way as I read it.  It felt like it meandered in places – pleasantly – but on reflection there was no wasted prose.

Each section covers a different age of the world and a character. Most are told from different character’s points of view. Mitchell does an excellent job making each novelette stand on its own.  They all have a strong sense of place and time.  Each seems its own self contained work.  In addition to the strong location and point of view, each is tonally and thematically complete unto itself.  They feel like individual novels, but also link together in terms of plot and larger themes and tones.  It’s an impressive effect, this holographic fractal structure.

Bone Clocks has a significant fantasy component, complete with magic and secret societies that are largely unseen by mortals.Mitchell is such a good writer that these elements often seem unnecessary.  Several times I noticed that I preferred to escape the escapism parts and get back to the characters’ day-to-day lives. One of the characters running away from home and breaking her heart felt more important than the brushes with a secret society that led to. Mitchell’s literary skills are on vivid display there, making the prosaic more engaging than the magical.

The magic is key to the literary power and vice versa, though.  I think Clocks is ultimately more engaging and interesting for its inclusion.

Overall Clocks is a vast clockwork of ideas, passions, and interconnections that is well worth exploring and chewing on over time.

Strongly Recommended.

Tom MacCarthy’s Satin Island is a very beautiful and evocative work.  His prose captures images, ideas, interactions – many powerful moments one encounters in moving through our interconnected world – with clarity and dynamism.  Reading Satin Island is a tour of the time from an engaged guide.

What Satin Island didn’t give me was enough of a structure for those moments to cohere into something that MacCarthy wanted to tell me about.  Of course that undersells the work.  By his selection and juxtaposition of images and incidents, MacCarthy forms a whole.  I’m sure Joyceans will enjoy pulling on threads of subtext to get any message that MacCarthy is sending.

I’m not much of a Joycean.  I do like rich works of literature, but I do prefer a more explicit literary structure around it.  Many of the moments are thought provoking or plain breathtaking, so Island may be worth a trip.  But don’t tell them I sent you.

I could probably skip this post and just mail Marc Zorn directly, but in case someone else wants to hear an aviation confession, here it is.

I filed a NASA ASRS form today. NASA is responsible for both space flight and for aeronautics – aviation – and one of the best ways that they address that part of their responsibilities is ASRS (pronounced a-sars), the Aviation Safety and Reporting System.  It’s a system for collecting and analyzing data about incidents in which unsafe things happen in aviation with the intent of improving overall safety. The data is largely self-reported by pilots, air traffic controllers, and other aviation professionals.  In order to get people to admit when they screw up, filing an ASRS indemnifies the reporter against FAA punishment when (loosely speaking) the incident was a genuine accident and the infraction did not result in significant damage or danger.  I had one of these today.

I took a long-ish trip this morning to work with some of Sleipnir‘s en-route systems and get some brunch at Fresno’s Chandler Executive Airport.  Slippy has a dazzling array of features to help a poor pilot cope with her complexities, and most of my time to date in her had been working practicing landing, taking off, and other activities that happen at the ends of flights.  So today I went further and spent some time on the middle phases. I practiced using the autopilot, leaning with the engine monitor, flying an IFR flight plan and some other things.

That was all interesting and fun and enlightening.  It was also apparently distracting enough that I took my feet off the rudder pedals.

Actually, now that I think about it, I know exactly when I took them off.  I was looking for a landmark and was adjusting my position relative to the higher cowling position.  Hurm.

In any case, the upshot is that when I landed, I had one foot on a steering pedal and one off.  On the ground, one generally steers an aircraft with one’s feet.  Left pedal turns left, right pedal turns right.  If a pilot has one foot on a the left pedal, and none on the right, it means they can only turn left.  This is the situation I found myself in, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Slippy lands pretty fast – touchdown is in the 80 mph range – and the runway I was landing on was one of the more narrow I’ve attempted.  So, I get her on the ground, and suddenly she jerks hard left.  And doesn’t stop doing that.  It feels like I’m countering it, but I’m not, because I haven’t realized my right foot is pushing on the floor, not the pedal.  Runway edge markings are not happy things to see when you’re not expecting them.  When they’re approaching at 80 mph, discretion is the better part of valor.

My go-around technique is not beautiful yet, but it is good enough to recover from a near-loss-of-control on the runway.  In other news, Slippy’s engine is quite powerful.

Unfortunately, I did pass through Fresno’s Class C airspace before I finished cleaning up.  That’s what I filed the ASRS about, though the controller indicated that I hadn’t caused any problem.

I did think it was bad form to go back to Fresno after basically buzzing the place. The trip to Porterville gave me enough time to work out what I’d done, and I had a great lunch.

Reading Michael Faber’s Under the Skin right on the heels of Distraction highlights the range of storytelling in the SF genre.  Distraction is a high velocity romp through big ideas. Under the Skin is an almost meditative exploration of humanity.

Faber (no relation) hangs his exploration on an SF conceit that superficially is more suited for a Twilight Zone episode than a literary novel.  While I intend no disrespect to the Zone, its allegories and allusions are not often subtle.  Under the Skin starts from a premise that is right on the nose and then proceeds to challenge, undermine, and reinforce the themes opened by the trope.

He does this by committing completely to the (ludicrous) premise and constructing a flawed, damaged, unbowed, believable character and putting her through the wringer.  He keeps the action mostly centered on his main character by circumscribing her role using plot twists born of genre convention.  That effectively keeps us inside the head of his perfect outsider as she confronts our world and her own ideas.

The whole narrative hangs on his characterization, and he carries it off completely.

I’m being deliberatively vague about the particular hoary SF in question since there are mild spoilers getting to it.

Recommended.

I found a pointer to Distraction as a political thriller that was good to read in an election year.  I don’t think Distraction fits that bill particularly well – Interface does – but any excuse to read Distraction is a good one.

Distraction benefits from two related strengths of Sterling’s: he sees technical issues and societal trends with unique insight and he expresses his insight precisely and enjoyably. I found Distraction’s plot and characterization to be excuses to move the action from observation to observation and to render them for maximum effect.  That was great as I found the observations well worth the time.  A couple favorites:

You can’t trust abstract mathematics, sir; it always turns out to be practical.

The climate’s in flux now. You can’t shelter whole environments under airtight domes. Only two kinds of plants really thrive in today’s world: genetically altered crops, and really fast-moving weeds. So our world is all bamboo and kudzu now, it has nothing to do with the endangered foxglove lady’s slipper and its precious niche on some forgotten mountain. Politically, we hate admitting this to ourselves, because it means admitting the full extent of our horrible crimes against nature, but that’s ecological reality now. That’s the truth you asked me for. That is reality. Paying tons of money to preserve bits of Humpty Dumpty’s shell is strictly a pious gesture.

Country like France gets along great without science. They just munch some more fine cheese and read more Racine. But you take America without science, you got one giant Nebraska.

These are the kinds of ideas that kept bringing me back to Heinlein, and will keep me reading Sterling.  Distraction is chock full.

Recommended.

I’ve mentioned my new airplane a couple times on here, though not as often as I probably should have.  I’ve omitted a whole saga with getting a brake leak fixed and a particularly exciting go-around caused because I let some pilot-induced oscillations get the better of me on the ground.

Today’s post is where I come clean about another facet of the aircraft and my relation to it.  I seem to have given her a name.

I haven’t named any of my previous vehicles.  Not even my beloved Archer on which I cut my aviation teeth.  I laways referred to her by her callsign or as “The Archer.”  Fanciful names were not for me.

This plane is different.  It’s quirky nature and charmed life combined in my head to form a name.  This happened without my intention – or really permission.  I slowly started thinking of her as Sleipnir.  If you’re not a comics fan or familiar with Norse mythology, that’s the name of Odin‘s eight-legged flying horse.  Sleipnir is called the best of all horses, and that’s how I think of the Viking.  It stuck in my head and it’s become the name of the plane to me.

I finally sheepishly mentioned that I’d named it to Brenda – who names all her vehicles – and she somehow improved it.  “You mean we could call her Slippy for short?”

That’s perfect.  It’s got the right light-hearted ring to it, and alludes to the slick airframe that helps Slippy go so fast.  So, Sleipnir – Slippy for short – is our new girl.  (Yeah, planes are female. That seems true to me in the same way that GNU software is green.  I don’t understand it, mind you…)

Saladin Ahmed is a great follow on twitter.  I’ve been enjoying his wit and insight in 140-character chunks for a while and decided to check out some of his longer writing. He’s been nominated for Hugos and Locus awards, which is encouraging.

Engraved On The Eye is a collection of his short SF works. His work lives up to his reputation quite nicely.  Almost all of his work is informed by his Muslim and Arab background.  When he alludes to conventions and background in those areas, one gets a feeling of authenticity.  Of course I don’t know enough about the customs in question to know if that’s because he knows what he’s talking about intimately or because he’s a confident and persuasive writer.  I don’t much care about the cause when the result is so effective.

While the local color of the works in Engraved is always worthwhile, I found I enjoyed the stories that stretched the genres to be his most interesting.  Again one gets the feeling of a writer who is stronger when he challenges himself and convention.  Several of the earlier pieces are traditional fantasy set in what I would naively call a Middle Eastern tradition.  These are certainly well executed and good fun, but his work is brighter when he’s challenging superheroic tropes or writing about duped cyborgs.

Strongly recommended.

One of the aspects of electronic books that still befuddles me at times is the inability to judge a book by its heft, production quality and other intangibles.  I get the feeling that if I had a physical copy of Steven Ruffin’s Flights of No Return, I would have expected less from it.  It has the definite feel of an overview intended for a student or newbie to an area, in this case the area being aviation crashes.

If I’ve understood its intended audience, the book itself is quite good.  Each short chapter tells the story of an aviation disaster, tragedy or mystery in sufficient detail to give the reader a flavor for the events.  In many cases, the description is compelling enough to whet the appetite to learn more.  That’s the perfect balance in my opinion.

Ruffin selects events from throughout aviation’s history, from 1800’s ballooning crashes to the 9/11 2001 horrors and beyond.  In all cases he gives a clear, concise overview of what we know, including recent updates.  It shows that we as a society continue to pick at these scabs.

Overall a diverting short book.

Recommended.