Walking on the Moon

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.

There’s really only one place I’ve lived that I cannot imagine moving back to – Poughkeepsie, NY. I spent a year there one summer working for IBM and left every weekend. I just never warmed up to it, and I was very much looking forward to leaving. On my last day I was driving home from work to put the city permanently in my rearview mirror, when my car skidded across the centerline on wet pavement and was totaled. I always thought it was a little unfair for Poughkeepsie to kick me once more when I was down, and apparently the year 2014 also wanted to get one last lick in.

I am writing this from a hospital bed waiting for surgery to repair my third broken hip this year.  Unlike my earlier mishaps, this was pretty much a slip and fall. I was lifting my leg off the bike before I put it in the garage, but it was at a dead stop.

It’s another broken femur, on the right side this time. I’m hoping for another speedy recovery. Watch this space for more details as the morphine wanes!

It’s Thanksgiving today, and I’m a very thankful fellow this year.  The image above is from the ride I took this morning.  It’s the first time I’ve been able to ride all the way down to the little beach where it was taken in quite some time, and I’m thankful and happy for that.

I’ve also had the kind of year that makes one take a look at life and consider what’s good and what’s bad.  I turned out to be pretty lucky.  I love where I live, and I like what I do for a living.  I’ve found some ways to spend my time that make me even happier, and maybe help some others, too.

But most importantly, I have a set of friends and acquaintances who are kind, considerate, and engaged with humanity.  Being laid up twice this year certainly helped me see that, but I’m working to notice it even when things are going well.  If you’re reading this, you’re one of those friends.  Today I am thankful for you.  And I’m trying to be so every day.

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.

This is a short book taken from and extending Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture at CMU.  Pausch died of pancreatic cancer and gave this talk as a farewell to his colleagues and family.  The lecture was very well received and turned into this book.

It’s not a very long book, but it’s too long. The first half of it gives background on how the lecture came to be and gives something of an outline of how it was given.  This is all great stuff.  It’s honest and moving.  Pausch knows he can be a stereotypical professor – egotistical, over-analytic, etc. – and still lets that voice be heard.  Behind that is someone doing everything they can to come to terms with their imminent death.

Then the padding starts.  By the time Pausch is giving out productivity hints, it’s time to put up the book.

The first half (and one assumes the lecture on-line) is well worth checking out.  Stop there.

Tales of Pirx the Pilot is a collection of short stories by a giant of SF, Stanislaw Lem.  It’s the first Lem I’ve read, and definitely held my interest in many ways.  Lem does a great job of moving the tropes of being a working pilot into an SF world.  The jargon and technology is all extrapolated, but the feel of being a line pilot is very contemporary.

“Contemporary” has a bit of a timeless connotation here.  Lem wrote most of these stories before I was born, but the rhythms of flying for hire echo through the blog posts I read today about flying for the airlines.  One can see the details and assumptions that underlie them come from the 1960’s, but the beat is clearly timeless.

The stories themselves look like pulp science fiction from afar, but when the reader engages, they turn out to be a door into another more timeless fictional tradition.  There are stories that turn on the workings of a predicted technology, but this isn’t hard SF.  There is the wonder of faraway places and other planets (or moons, anyway), but the stories are all very human.  There’s a ghost story in here, and a locked room mystery. The trappings are rockets and astronauts, but the stories are all about people who are pilots.  Or people who are long distance truckers.  Or people who are sailors on wooden ships.  Or 21st century container ships.

Pirx and his fellows are not the first ones into a new world, but the ones who make a living travelling that world and seeing the odd corners of it. Consequently these are moody universal tales of walking the mundane unknown.

Recommended.

I’m still working to balance my love of the bicycle with my love of not being in the hospital or on crutches.  I was officially allowed off the crutches and back to the active life on 15 September, and I’m trying to take advantage of it without overdoing it.  That can be hard, but, on the other hand I take a lot of joy in being able to just carry things from room to room.

I have picked up and begun riding the Surly Long Haul Trucker.  It’s easily the most I’ve ever spent for a bike, and worth every penny.  Just jumping up on it to ride makes me happy, and it seems to be a rock solid platform for getting around.  I’m still making tweaks to it – the rack goes on today – but so far it’s been everything I wanted.

I have gotten back to swimming, and that has been humbling.  I’m barely swimming a third of the distance I’d like to be doing, and forget about performance.  But there are bright spots.  I’m beginning to see improvements.  And I’m certainly tired and certainly sore in all the right places.  I think this will be a good plan in the long term.  Frankly the humbling parts of it are just as important as the physical improvements.  I feel like I grow as a person when I do things that are difficult for me.  Swimming is definitely an opportunity there.

For no good reason, I had a professional barber shop that fronts a speakeasy shave my beard.  It was an expensive evening of personal grooming, but an great experience I’ll remember a long while.  Jim and Sabrina Geldmacher shared the experience and pronounced the cocktails at the speakeasy excellent.  If you like fine grooming or fine drinks – or both simultaneously – take a trip to Blind Barber.

Finally, the support and love of all the folks out there still amazes me. Thanks all!

Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys is a quirky little collection of pieces on British engineering in the late 20th and early 21st Century. I’m not a dedicated anglophile, but I found plenty to like in his lively and unusual descriptions of the men and the challenges they faced.

British engineering is an odd subject in and of itself.  There are certainly great examples of it, but as Britain’s influence and empire contracted after WWII, so did the ambition and scope of its engineering projects.  Rather than leading the world’s efforts in creating transports and munitions, British engineers work at a smaller scale.  This adds a bittersweet tone to Spufford’s tour.

In addition to the wide-sweeping historical forces, from the 1980’s on British engineers were also blown by the winds of Thatcherism.  That government believed in small government and privitization of services in all aspects of service.  Keeping the funding flowing for, say, a space exploration agency going in that climate is well nigh impossible.  Spufford calls his government out on that pretty much continually across the periods when they are in power.

This adds up to a rich tale of little known efforts – some successful, others quixotic – set against a backdrop of historical sweep and villainy.  It’s delightful reading, perhaps because being an American gives me some distance. Spufford lets the reader see the great in the small as he describes some genuinely fascinating technological tinkering.  One of the strangest chapters is the description of the Concorde SST, which mostly revolves around the economic and marketing battles fought by British Airways to keep the plane flying, rather than the tech to make it go fast.

In addition to the big picture, the book entertained me because of its British audience.  If you’re writing for Brits, you certainly use a different set of homey analogies when describing technology.  Still, it was an unexpected pleasure to reverse engineer the analogies from the technologies.

Recommended.