Walking on the Moon

I hate to say it, but usually when  see a small airport has changed, it’s a change for the worse: an FBO has vanished, a cafe has closed (again), or the whole airport is gone. When the opposite occurs I’m practically beside myself with glee.  Today I got to see a small airport that looks like it’s in the middle of coming to life: Hemet-Ryan (HMT) in Hemet, CA.

I’ve been to Hemet-Ryan before and have some great memories of the place.  I shared the pattern there with someone who had built himself a Mad Max-style Gyrocopter (not the one in the film, to my knowledge) on my private pilot long cross country.  I’ve been in and out of there to do a few landings a few times, but hadn’t gotten out of the plane there in years.  I saw that there was a cafe there, so I figured I’d stop by.  My expectations were pretty low.  The last time I’d been there, the cafe hadn’t been much to speak of, pretty much the baloney sandwich type.

I was very pleasantly surprised.  The pattern had several planes in it as I arrived, which is always a good sign.  I joined in behind another Cherokee and pulled in to a large transient parking area.

That was new.

In fact the whole terminal area looked new.  The last few times I’d been here there was really no terminal area to speak of, and the hangars had given me the impression of being dark and unwelcoming.  There was no obvious FBO or other services.  Today there was a renovated terminal building with a flight school and FBO, a clean cheap fuel pit, and a big tanker base.

After I got tied down I asked a passerby – a passerby! – if there was a cafe, and I got directions and a microreview.  I hadn’t ever seen people walking around HMT before, but the new terminal building had instructors and students coming and going as well as other locals.  A Civil Air Patrol flight was just going out, and a fellow was waiting for friends to return.

The cafe itself was a short walk past more welcoming and renovated hangars with a bunch of interesting planes tied down in various states of repair.  None looked like hulks, but some were clearly being worked on.  The cafe itself was hopping.  There were a couple tables outside that looked inviting, but I sat inside at the counter to soak up the sound of a busy airport restaurant.

The food was very good – excellent for the price – and the folks running the place were great.  Despite the fact that the place was probably about as full as they can support, they made sure I was given the full hospitality of the place.  I was a lone stranger, and it says a lot that they took such good care of me when they were so busy.  I had an “Irish melt” sandwich and they had plaques claiming they’d won pie contests.  Clearly a place with their priorities together.

Hemet-Ryan looks like a lively small airport.  Stop by and buy some gas and have a meal if you’re coming through the area.  I’m already planning to drag my buddies down there.

John Irving writes a John Irving novel better than anyone else does.  That’s more of a trick than it sounds like.  More than many writers, Irving pays explicit homage to his influences and has become closely attached to a set of symbols and touchstones.  Having such a strong and imitable voice will attract parodists and rip-off artists at a surprising rate. It’s easy for a rip-off to become more noticed than the original; ask Bill Hicks.

It’s amusing that Irving has chosen to practically parody himself in In One Person. Reading it isn’t so much a game of “spot the trope” as looking for ground that hasn’t been covered by Irving before. It’s a misleading game, though.  Even as I was checking the boxes (there’s a cross dresser, there’s a wrestler, it’s a New England Prep School, Dickens story, oh, look Austria) it never felt old. It’s a nice way to make the point that individual characters and people are individuals, even if they share experiences.

And really, what Irving does better than anyone is build his characters lives that bring them into sharp focus.  There’s usually an issue of the day to address as well, of course.  The man is a Dickens disciple, after all.  While his well-wrought characters generally illuminate that issue, I always enjoy them just for their clockwork completeness and emotional verisimilitude.

In One Person has a lot to say about the lives of non-heterosexuals (that sounds PC, but Irving covers a fair amount of this ground) that is certainly worth hearing.  Irving says it all by walking a real person through that world and inviting us along. Writers have been doing that since Dickens (at least), but few as well.

Recommended.

E. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who did her field work studying hackers – in the “free software geeks” sense of the word.  And that’s “field work” in the sense of “serious social science investigation of a culture by immersion” sense of the word.  She applied the same techniques and rigor to studying Debian maintainers as others have applied to Maori tribes.  If I’m not a member of that hacker tribe, I’ve certainly lived around them for many years, and it’s both enlightening and disconcerting to see that analysis progress.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I find the analysis insightful and largely accurate. It’s strange to see the values, mores, and rituals of my community described with the clinical compassion of the anthropologist.  In addition to describing these features, her dissection of how they relate to and are motivated by larger societal issues is compelling.  I think someone reading this could explain hacker culture more effectively both to non-hackers and to hackers themselves.

In addition, I learned some specific things about the Debian project.  I understand their positions and why I didn’t know more about them now.

Coding Freedom is a scholarly treatise and an anthropological one at that, so it is thick both with anthropological jargon and with references and citations.  That can make for dense reading, but for me, it remained compelling.

Recommended.

I picked up Greg Rucka’s Alpha because Warren Ellis had nice things to say about it and because I’ve enjoyed his comics writing.  In Alpha I found a well executed thriller that didn’t have much ambition beyond that.  Now, I like a potboiler more than the next guy, so a well-executed thriller is nothing to apologize for.  It did throw Gun Machine into sharp relief, though.

Rucka’s action is tautly written and clear to follow.  Even though we’re pretty sure how things will go in the long run, there is plenty of suspense in the individual engagements. It’s always clear who’s doing what to whom and what the stakes are.  Tension builds and the action proceeds at a snappy clip.  The tactics and strategy of heroes and villains are believable and original in an action movie kind of world. The pot boils nicely.

I do wish that I cared about the characters some more.  Everyone is a little too much a variation on a theme from central casting.  I gave up trying to tell members of his anti-terrorist team apart, though they all do have cool code names.  The most interesting variations are a well realized sleeper agent and the protagonist’s deaf teenage daughter. Probably the worst thing about the undercharacterization is that when the protagonist is feeling put upon by his alienated family it’s hard not to see their point.  He is a duty-driven action hero who doesn’t do enough to help people he ostensibly cares about to see his side and that’s what they tell him.

Back at the plot, things are moving quickly and cleanly toward an exciting conclusion.  As long as you keep your eye on that, Alpha is a lot of fun.

Ted Saves The World is a novella for young adults that intentionally has the feel of a smart TV action drama.  Bryan Cohen, the author, is very up front about his goals and inspirations.  He’s writing in the vein of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Ted was originally intended as a TV pilot.

In terms of those goals, I found Ted to be very well done.  The writing is clear and engaging.  The characters are sharply drawn, and the story moves along well structurally.  Everything in the story serves the narrative and it all meshes well. This is all very promising.

It will be interesting to see if Cohen can go beyond these technical achievements and infuse his work with something unique.  Right now he’s sticking very close to his inspirations in theme, tone, and character, but Buffy already exists. There are good reasons to hope that he can begin mixing in new elements and make something completely original.  This is worth a look and keeping an eye on.

Recommended.

James Daily and Ryan Davidson have a fun idea in The Law Of Superheroes.  They take situations that arise in the comics and show how current and future US law  would apply.  Extreme hypothetical cases are a good way to understand the ramifications of any set of rules, especially the law, and it’s tough to come up with more extreme hypotheticals that comics.

The execution was a little dry for me.  I felt like too many of the problems had cut-and-dried solutions that would be helpful in getting law students to remember the principles, but that were less thrilling to the layman.  That’s not to say that the book reads like a police blotter.  There are several places where interesting aspects of the law pop out, but I think the book would benefit from a deeper look at the more interesting cases, rather than trying to survey too much of the legal landscape.

Worth a look through, especially if you are a law student or have a strong interest.

Warren Ellis has the skills and ambition to take a genre piece and lead it to uncommon places.  Gun Machine is a thriller that boasts a fabulous hook – a cop literally falls into a cathedral of guns each tied to an unsolved murder – but Ellis has more on his mind than just creeping the reader out.  He doesn’t let it get in the way of a propulsive thriller, though.  Gun Machine hits all the police thriller beats, but comes at them all from slightly askew.

So, take the cop/thriller stuff as all there.  In addition, Ellis brings us many views of New York – subjective and objective – each of which is telling part of the story that makes Gun Machine turn. He brings us larger than life characters who still have a soul, and a redemptive arc for his protagonist that is measured in realistically sized steps. Each turn of the story has some whorls that tug at the reader’s interest, but the whole machine never stops moving forward.

It isn’t perfect, of course.  For all the different perspectives that he tries to capture New York from, I did not get the feeling of being there.  Key locations feel photoshopped into place, and the place isn’t quite recognizable as either the New York I’ve visited on occasion or the fictional versions I’ve seen.  The sense of place doesn’t emerge as strongly as I was expecting.

Realistic or not (whatever that means), Ellis’s New York is the scene of a breakneck race where every turn, taken or not, offers a glimpse of fascinating possibilities.

Strongly recommended.

Dear Life is a collection of short stories from Alice Munro, one of the acknowledged masters of the form.  She is also getting old enough to wonder if each book will be her last.  Dear Life closes with a set of stories somewhere between fiction and autobiography that are closer to the facts than the others.

All of the stories display the craftsmanship and inspiration of a great writer.  Nothing is wasted.  Each story illuminates a character and a time sharply, usually caught in a key conflict. I found them quite beautiful, if a bit cool.  Some distance remains between me and them.  While some of that may be the inevitable gulf between an American man born in the 60’s as compared to Canadian women characters with another ten or twenty years of life, I think that a the tone is intentional.

The more autobiographical stories crackle more with life.  Some of this is because of their younger protagonists, but not all of it.  It’s difficult to put one’s finger on it, but there’s definitely more zip in the last few.  All of them are well worth reading though.

Recommended.

Ken Jennings is rapidly moving into that set of authors that I read and enjoy unconditionally.  He’s informative, interesting, funny, and doesn’t take himself too seriously except when it’s merited. Reading one of his books is like passing time with an old friend, except that he doesn’t laugh at your jokes.

The hook in Because I Said So! is that Jennings takes a list of rules that parents lay down for their children and see how well those rules hold up to objective assessment.  It’s kind of a Snopes for kids.  This is easy to do wrong – too much droning of facts, too much chafing about foolish rules in one’s youth, or not giving parents their due for doing their best and the whole thing would become mean spirited.  Jennings navigates around these pitfalls and produces a book that’s got a warm feel of pleasant memories that also deflates baseless platitudes.  It’s fun to read.

Strongly Recommended.

Mary Roach loves to poke into strange corners of science and the human experience, and I hope she doesn’t stop.  I enjoyed Stiff – her exploration of cadaver experimentation – quite a bit, and it established her as a writer who can take on uncomfortable subjects with wit and intelligence.  Packing For Mars is about all the aspects of manned space travel that a drier publication would call “human factors.”  Packing is not dry.

The range of topics is surprising if you hadn’t thought about it deeply.  I didn’t really and I suspect that most people have not either, but Mary Roach is on the job for us.  The composition of food; excreting in zero-gravity; spacesickness, and its causes; interpersonal relationships in confined places; and how NASA studies all these things before they fire a couple folks into space for a week or a month all get their share of attention.

It’s all fascinating stuff – really! – but Roach does a great job making it more accessible.  She points out the problems in plain English and then underscores them with a bunch of things you didn’t know about space missions just to show she’s not making it up.  Then she charges off to get you the details on what’s being done about it and how it leads to the next problem.  That’s done by finding a bunch of interesting and engaging people to tell her about it, and often to let her try something out herself. The footnotes alone show how hard she worked on digesting this stuff and hint at what’s left out.

Of the various forces she interacts with, the one we learn the most about is probably NASA itself.  There isn’t a chapter on NASA, but it pervades so much of the narrative that one walks away with a feeling for how the manned spaceflight part of the agency functions and how that’s shaped the program.  It’s a unique view of an agency that does its best to control how it is seen.

There’s no actual packing list, but I’m willing to overlook that.

Strongly Recommended.