2009-07-03: Transition day
The flowers of a bush anemone, with one unopened bud poking up. This
picture doesn't quite capture how weird these flowers can sometimes look.
I have another picture (which requires a bit of work) that I may post
later on.
Today was a transition day into a nice, long weekend. I did some grocery
shopping, did a bit of reading, and wrote a review so that I'm catching up
a bit on that. Calm, relaxed, not particularly notable.
Quick plug: Stephen Laniel's blog is my new
favorite book review source. He reviews a lot of non-fiction of the sort
I like reading, and I've been looking for a good general source for
non-fiction recommendations.
2009-07-01: Long weekend
Not one of the most exciting pictures I've taken, but I like the mirrored
effect of the water as a background for a couple of skunk cabbage plants.
I'm not sure why it feels like the right picture for today, but it does.
Due to spending all of Saturday switching work desktops, as well as being
quite productive the first three days this week, I get to take tomorrow
off and have a four-day weekend. Tomorrow is a relaxation day, and then
I'll think about what projects I might want to tackle.
I unfortunately didn't get the WebAuth release out that I was hoping for,
in part because I worked on some other cleanup this morning, but I've made
a lot of progress. I spent a couple of hours today starting to write the
Automake Makefile.am for it as the first step of converting the build
system to match my other packages and significantly rearranging the
source. That's the last big thing that I want to finish before the next
release. It will also significantly reduce the mental barriers I have
against doing more extensive work on the package.
I'm slipping behind at the moment on writing book reviews again, but I
haven't felt like doing it the last few days. It's relatively rare, I'm
finding, for me to be in the right mindset and mood to do this after I get
back from exercising in the evening. That's a shame, since schedule-wise
it's the perfect time, devoid of distractions and after the day's work is
done. But I suspect that it's too low-energy to work reliably enough, and
I need to get into the habit of writing reviews at the start of the day
instead. I may push a little at getting caught up this weekend.
The one thing I did forget when swapping computers was my crontab, but I
think I've reproduced it from memory and just ran a few things (like FAQ
posting and RSS to e-mail) that had been skipped for a few days. I could
boot up the old computer and check to see if I remembered everything, but
I probably won't bother. I think I'm going to just quietly stop posting
the news.admin.net-abuse.* pointers, for instance, rather than figure out
what the postfaq command I was running was. I've been feeling weird about
posting FAQ pointers in groups that I don't read anyway, and I doubt
anyone cares.
2009-06-30: Summer haul
I've not been reading as much as I normally do this year, but last month I
found more time and devoured a few books (I have three more waiting for me
to find a chance to review). So as a reward, I get to buy more books. I
was particularly excited about this order.
Jacqueline Carey — Naamah's Kiss (sff)
Jacqueline Carey — Santa Olivia (sff)
Jane Jacobs — Dark Age Ahead (nonfiction)
Urusla K. Le Guin — Gifts (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Voices (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Powers (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Deepsix (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Chindi (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Omega (sff)
Karen Traviss — City of Pearl (sff)
Karen Traviss — Matriarch (sff)
I've already read (and reviewed) City of Pearl, but I read a
borrowed copy and I like the series well enough that I wanted to own it.
When buying the rest of the series, I'd somehow missed Matriarch,
so now I can keep reading.
The only question is what I'm going to dig into right away and what I'm
going to save for long plane flights later this month.
2009-06-29: Review: The World Before
Review: The World Before, by Karen Traviss
| Series |
Wess'Har #3 |
| Publisher |
Eos |
| Copyright |
November 2005 |
| ISBN |
0-06-054172-5 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
388 |
This is the third book in the Wess'har series. This is a very tightly
integrated series that reads like an extended novel, with major
revelations that build on each other from book to book. It's not the sort
of series that you can read out of order. You should start with
City of Pearl. But do; it's an
excellent series.
As usual, it's very difficult to talk in any detail about this book or
even name characters without possibly spoiling earlier books. I'm
therefore going to be more vague than normal and try to describe the
emotional feel rather than the details.
This is the first book in the series that didn't shock me with a major
plot twist. The plot twist is certainly present, but it's a twist that
I'd been expecting since the middle of Crossing the Line, and despite keeping me guessing up until it
happens, it plays out fairly conventionally and predictably. I think it's
the right direction for the series to go to keep it interesting and to
keep me involved, but I must admit to a bit of minor disappointment that
Traviss didn't try something much riskier.
This is also the first book in the series in which the characters do
things so stupid that I want to strangle them. There are unfortunately a
couple of those moments, including one of those slow-motion
lack-of-communication train wrecks that are entirely realistic but so
painful that I hate it when authors include them. Traviss was doing so
well, too. She had a lot of emotional angst and relationship
difficulties, but between people who were still communicating about hard
things. I was very disappointed. It's not that it's untrue to the
characters, but it's simply not a character direction that I care about or
want to read about.
To be fair, it's not pure unthoughtful misunderstanding. Traviss did
deftly handle complicating the lack of communication so that all parties
aren't being completely honest and some of the miscommunication feels
moderately intentional. It didn't quite salvage that part of the book
(and sadly it's near the end, so it left me with a bad taste), but
combined with lots of other really excellent relationship bits it does
salvage the whole book. (Polyamory! And mostly not handled in ways that
make me cringe, although it's treated as annoyingly inhuman and there is
still some nonsense about human monogamy.)
These misses, plus a feeling of "middle of the series" development and
lining up of chess pieces, mean that I didn't enjoy The World
Before as much as the previous series entries. The ending in particular
I thought was weak, with quite a bit of stubborn self-sacrificing refusals
to communicate and a closing revelation that I found less dramatic than
the previous two books. However, it's still a solid book in an excellent
series, and if you liked the previous two books as much as I did, it won't
stop you from staying with the series. It's more a bit of a breather to
give the characters and the world time to absorb the truly shattering
revelations of Crossing the Line. The best part for me was further
revelations and depth to the Wess'har, who of the alien races in the
series are the most interesting to me. There are also a few growing
character connections that I suspect will be great fun in future books.
This continues to be one of the best SF series I've read. I'm looking
forward to the next book, where hopefully the conclusion of this one will
be shown to not be quite as stupid as it looked.
Followed by Matriarch.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2009-06-29: New desktop
Saturday, I finally built the new desktop system for work, which I also
use as my primary home directory and mail server and a build system for
Debian packages and other software. Today, I switched over to the new
system. It's pretty and much faster, and also has the advantage of being
built within the last five years, so I don't have to worry as much about
the hard drive dying.
The new system is an HP Firebird 802, bought straight off their web site.
The drawback from a Debian perspective is that it uses nVidia motherboard
video (nForce 760i SLI), but it's supported by the non-free Linux drivers
(despite being missing from the README). I'd prefer ATI or Intel video
with free drivers, but not enough to veto the system for it. Otherwise,
it's water-cooled, very quiet, and has a four-core Intel processor, 4GB of
memory, and two 250GB hard drives.
I kept notes on the build and
configuration in case they prove helpful for anyone else.
This is the first time I've built a system with LVM, and I even did an
online resize of the root logical volume since the installer used an
extremely small 7GB default size and I couldn't figure out the easy way to
increase it in the installer. I like the flexibility of allocating space
as I need it into separate logical volumes.
2009-06-26: Review: Little Brother
Review: Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
| Publisher |
Tor |
| Copyright |
2008 |
| ISBN |
0-7653-1985-3 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
380 |
Marcus is a 17-year-old high-school student in San Francisco. He likes
taking technology apart and rebuilding it, learning how it works, and
improving it for his needs. He also likes not being monitored by the
school surveillance systems or forced to use the buggy spyware-infested
default OS of the free school laptops. Otherwise, his main hobby is
playing ARGs:
role-playing games on a mass scale that may have thousands of players or
teams of players and that involve real-world locations and hidden clues.
He and three of his friends had skipped out of school to follow a clue in
their current ARG when a terrorist attack destroys the Bay Bridge.
They're caught in the subsequent chaos, picked up by a Homeland Security
team as suspicious, and then taken to a secret prison and interrogated
after Marcus initially refuses to unlock his cell phone or reveal his
passwords. After grueling and humiliating five days of imprisonment, he
and two of his friends are released with dire warnings about how they're
being watched. The third, Marcus's best friend who was injured during the
aftermath of the bombings, is not released with them.
Marcus is too angry and humiliated to tell anyone what happened and swears
his friends to secrecy, lying to his parents about being trapped in a
refugee camp on the other side of the Bay. He vows revenge on Homeland
Security for his imprisonment and his friend. But the world to which he
returns is changed: surveillance is everywhere, as are Homeland Security
agents, and the government massively increases security checkpoints,
restrictions, and monitoring of everything.
Little Brother, as you've probably figured out from the above plot
summary, is a political protest novel and a sort of young-adult
modernization of Orwell's 1984 with computers. It's also a revenge
novel, with most of the plot driven by a bright teenager with lots of
friends making life increasingly difficult for bureaucratic, invasive
monitoring in the name of fighting terrorism. If the summary above sounds
implausible, that's because Doctorow takes some significant liberties in
pursuit of his setup. The best thing the book has going for it is that
it's fast-paced and sufficiently emotionally engrossing that one is
generally too busy turning the pages to argue.
Doctorow here wholeheartedly embraces a
cypherpunk attitude
towards computing. Parts of it reminded me a lot of the more paranoid
political rants of the heyday of the list. Strong encryption, black
networks, webs of trust, and identity hacking (particularly of RFID chips
and similar tracers) are central to most of what Marcus does. With that
also come segments of infodumping, unfortunately. Doctorow tries to keep
them interesting by making full use of Marcus's first-person voice, but a
complete introduction to public key cryptography is a lot to swallow no
matter how you dump it into the middle of a book. I was reminded of
portions of Cryptonomicon, but Doctorow
lacks Stephenson's fascination with baroque technology and some of his
infodumping style. Doctorow's segments are shorter than Stephenson's
rambles, but I found them more boring for the already-informed reader.
Stephenson digs into things, whereas Doctorow tends a bit more towards
"ooo, shiny." I don't want to read a Boing
Boing post in the middle of a novel.
As for the substance, I had a reaction similar to my impression of a lot
of cypherpunks technology: Doctorow gets the technology mostly right, but
gets the people wrong. In particular, he suffers from the standard
problem of being way too optimistic about mass uptake of computer hacks
and crypto-based black networks. Everything that Marcus does in
Little Brother is possible, and I can imagine a dedicated core
group of people doing it. I can't imagine so many people joining a black
network built on hacked Xboxes running a CD-based Linux distro that it
becomes an effective mass communication medium, or that even with help
from a convenient ISP (with completely unrealistic market share) Marcus
and his friends would manage to massively increase the encrypted network
traffic as portrayed in the book. Little Brother is riddled with
this sort of thing. Nearly everything Marcus comes up with hits a tipping
point and becomes a massive youth fad, which even in the midst of an
over-the-top oppressive government crackdown strikes me as horribly
unlikely.
Simiarly, Doctorow needs a hissable villain, a Big Brother, and creates
one in the form of a vicious Homeland Security department. This one is
emotionally tempting, at least for those of us with a civil liberties
obsession. He takes the stupidity of the TSA, Bush's warrantless
wiretapping program, warrantless searches, Guantánamo Bay,
data mining, torture (including waterboarding), and behavior profiling,
turns them up to eleven, and directs them all at a sympathetic
protagonist. All of these programs are real; the government has done all
of this. However, what Doctorow assembles from the components is a
stereotype of a government that lacks intelligible motivation for what it
does.
Doctorow's theory for this novel is that another major terrorist attack
would cause the government and much of the populace (voiced here by
Marcus's dad) to completely lose it and agree to enough of that being done
openly to US citizens to support the plot of the book. But there are more
psychological lines here than Doctorow is acknowledging, and Doctorow
discounts all motivations except fear mixed with a totalitarian desire for
power. It's emotionally seductive, but it's also a cheap shot.
Despite this, Homeland Security would have felt more plausible if any of
the agents in the book came off as serious professionals who truly were
trying to do their jobs properly and had even adequate amounts of street
smarts. Instead, there's a black-and-white line and an utter lack of
understanding of Marcus's friends. The one agent who's put forward as the
face of their actions is both sadistic and remarkably incompetent.
Little Brother takes Homeland Security from a pessimistic
projection of current day to a full-out secret police with practically no
transition and a bit of handwaving political justification. Real US
government agents are not uniformly this stupid.
In other words, Doctorow falls prey to the tendency to dehumanize and
villainize political opponents. I largely agree with him politically,
which makes it seductive, but it's still cheap. There is little evidence
here of any motives for the "other side" apart from terror-driven desire
for authoritarian control, which is more of a cypherpunk political talking
point than an accurate representation of reality. It's hard to walk this
line in a dystopian political novel, so I can't fault Doctorow too much
for the failure, but he did fail.
The saving grace of Little Brother is that it's an emotionally
satisfying revenge story with a likeable protagonist and excellent pacing,
despite the occasional infodump. It gets the reader good and mad in the
first few chapters, makes one want the government to be defeated and
humiliated, and then slowly delivers, with a lot of tension as Marcus
finds creative ways of fighting back. It sucked me right in, got me fully
emotionally engaged, and was almost impossible to put down. I suspect
that someone who disagrees politically with Doctorow would throw it across
the room, but if you have libertarian, liberal, or cypherpunk tendencies
and like to see a good humiliation of a government police state, it's a
satisfying and well-told story. And I will give Doctorow major credit in
one other place: he avoided the ending I was afraid of, where all the neat
cypherpunk technology saves the world, and instead told a much more
nuanced and realistic ending than I had expected. Little Brother
shows some awareness that the underground crypto panacea doesn't live up
to its promises, and that politics still rests on much older solutions.
I'd like to be able to recommend this book. I had a lot of fun reading
it, and as a near-future thriller it certainly delivers on the tension. I
also think it's a very well-meaning book that's trying to warn its readers
about giving up civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism and
explain some of the things ordinary people can do to fight back against
pervasive surveillance.
Unfortunately, it's a guilty pleasure, and in a much more significant way
than a trashy romance. It's a political hatchet job that gets a lot of
its emotional power from turning the villains into caricatures. It
reminds me far too much of the sort of political debate that happened on
cypherpunks and that happens in blog comments, and I think it's a form of
political debate that only preaches to the choir and doesn't persuade.
Even the most sympathetic voice for the other "side" in this novel is
obviously deluded within the framework of the novel and undergoes a sudden
conversion experience that felt like the unobtainable dream of every
Usenet flamewar participant.
Maybe this sort of emotional tone is inherent in the dystopian warning
novel, and I'm criticising Little Brother in the same way that
1984 would have been criticized in its day. Maybe this is just the
effective way to present the argument. But it still bothers me too much
to recommend a book that I otherwise enjoyed.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2009-06-26: Weekend!
A path along the Nanaimo River. This feels like a nice, summer picture
(and a picture that feels cooler than apparently this weekend is going to
be around here).
One week done after vacation, although of course it doesn't feel like a
full week since I didn't come back until Tuesday night. I didn't do a
great job of keeping momentum up today, and therefore didn't do a good job
of leaving work early like I was planning on doing so. I have a hard time
leaving early on a Friday unless I feel like I've been very productive
that day, even if I did well for the rest of the week.
But I've made a lot of progress on the new features for the WebAuth 3.6.1
release (and the Git
repository is now publicly available), and I'm staying current on my
other projects. I feel very good about the week.
I'm doing laundry now, and then I'll have nothing specific that I need to
do this weekend other than do grocery shopping (and even that I could put
off if I wanted). I want to play some video games, since I've missed that
while I was on vacation, and find other good ways to relax, although since
I'm coming off a short week, I might work on some non-work things so that
I'll feel more caught up for the next weekend (a nice, long holiday
weekend).
Oh, and write book reviews. Since I'm within two reviews of being caught
up writing them, for the first time in months and months.
2009-06-25: Review: Twisty Little Passages
Review: Twisty Little Passages, by Nick Montfort
| Publisher |
MIT Press |
| Copyright |
2003 |
| Printing |
2005 |
| ISBN |
0-262-63318-3 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
233 |
"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building."
For many of my friends who took a more traditional path to computing
through home computers, their first memories of video games are early
home graphical systems, or perhaps typed in to an early Commodore.
Because of my dad's job, my first experience with computers was
connecting to a VMS mainframe through a terminal. The mainframe was
used for Serious Work, but it also had copies of the DECUS tapes,
including the freely available games. I have fond (if sometimes
frustrating) memories of Star Trek and Moria, but the
text adventure games were the most memorable, some of the earliest,
and the games into which I put the most time. I'm not sure if
Adventure was the first computer game I ever played, but if not
it was close.
I ran across Twisty Little Passages while following links from a
review of Montfort and Ian Bogost's Racing the Beam and immediately
bought a copy. Text adventure games, or interactive fiction to use the
more inclusive term, used to be huge in the commercial game market in the
1980s during the heyday of Infocom but have died completely except as the
inspiration of a few graphical exploration games in the style of
Myst. With that commercial death, they've dropped out of public
awareness as well. Graphical exploration games, while sharing some
properties with interactive fiction, have replaced text input and the
challenges and surprises of a text parser with a graphical interface,
gaining predictability and simplicity but limiting the available actions
to essentially object manipulation. Montfort discusses that evolution
briefly, but Twisty Little Passages concentrates on games with a
text parser, which still survive and thrive among hobbyists despite their
disappearance from the commercial marketplace.
Twisty Little Passages attempts to be three things: a formal
introduction to interactive fiction that defines terminology and places it
in both a literary and computing context, an argument for a particular
critical approach to interactive fiction based on similarities to riddles,
and a history of the field from the precursors of Adventure through
the Infocom games and concluding with the state of the hobbyist field in
2002. Of those, the history was the most successful. The introduction
and argument are worthwhile but flawed.
Montfort opens with terminology and a general introduction, which is
unfortunate for pacing if probably necessary. Much of the introduction is
formal and academic, introducing a lot of words with very precise
definitions of the type that can feel nit-picking. Included are somewhat
uninteresting terminology arguments. Montfort makes good use of a
transcript from For a Change (a freely-available work of
interactive fiction from 1999), but otherwise as someone already familiar
with the basics of interactive fiction, I found the introduction a bit of
a slog.
The next chapter, which discusses the history of riddles and makes the
case for riddles as the traditional literary form closest to interactive
fiction, can also be slow going. The argument was interesting and seemed
natural to me — many of the text adventure games I played
made direct use of riddles, reinforcing the connection — but
there was a bit too much about riddles that wasn't directly related to
interactive fiction. I would have preferred material better mixed with
discussion of IF works, ideally with more specific examples.
After those two chapters, though, Montfort hits his stride. The history
of interactive fiction starting with chapter three was fascinating and
thoroughly enjoyable. I played a great deal of Adventure and
Dungeon (a modified version of the original Zork, as
distinct from the sometimes quite-different Zork I, Zork II,
and Zork III for smaller computers), so I expected to enjoy those
chapters for the nostalgia and background on games that I loved. However,
not only were those as good as expected, but so were later chapters on
Infocom and the more recent independent interactive fiction creations such
as Galatea and Curses.
Twisty Little Passages is very specifically focused on interactive
fiction with textual input and an English parser. Montfort obviously has
to draw the line somewhere, and 230 pages is only enough room to give a
cursory history of the post-Infocom days of the field. But the line is
drawn very sharply and works straying outside that focus are discussed
briefly at best. This unfortunately neglects some of the influence that
interactive fiction has had on the current games market, the commercial
evolution of interactive fiction into the Sierra games and Myst,
and connections with aspects of modern computer RPGs (which often include
puzzles). I was particularly disappointed by the lack of deep discussion
of the early Sierra games. They had a text parser and textual commands,
but used a graphical depiction of the world, making them a sort of
boundary form. Montfort does well within his scope, but I would have
loved to read more exploration of the tradeoffs in world design and
interactivity between graphical adventures, interactive fiction, and
hybrids such as the early Sierra games.
With that caveat, and with some reservations about the slow first couple
of chapters, I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in
interactive fiction or fond memories of text adventure games. Montfort
does more than recount lists of games. He analyzes the evolving nature of
the interaction with the world, relates the parser and world model to work
in AI, and shows how far the form has expanded beyond exploration and
treasure collecting. It's a good overview and the beginning of an
analysis and discussion that I hope will be continued.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2009-06-25: Back to work
Looking south from platform five at the San Jose Diridon train station.
I'm back at work, which so far is going well. Vacation didn't feel long
enough, but it clearly was enough to recharge my energy. I'm doing
reasonably well at prioritizing and focusing, and as a result I've already
gotten quite a bit done this week. Wednesday was my most productive work
from home day in quite a while, which is a trend that I'd like to see
continue.
One thing that's easier to see coming off of vacation than it was before
vacation is why some of my scheduling plans haven't been working. I keep
trying to do things in the evening, but after working eight hours or more,
I'm mentally beat. After I come home and eat and spend some time with
friends, I'm having a great deal of difficulty focusing enough to post a
journal entry or write book reviews.
I'm not sure how much is tiredness after working and how much is having
cycles of energy through the day, but either way, the solution is probably
to try to move more low-energy things to the end of the day and move
anything higher-energy towards the beginning. This may mean pushing even
harder to do things like writing book reviews before work instead of
afterwards. I think the other key will be to not fight against being
tired so hard that I stay up late pulling out tiny bits of productivity at
the cost of being well-rested and energized during the more productive
time the next day. I'm currently experimenting with a relatively hard
bedtime to prevent that.
Anyway. Still doing lots of time management pondering, as you can tell.
2009-06-23: Review: The Graveyard Book
Review: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
| Illustrator |
Dave McKean |
| Publisher |
HarperCollins |
| Copyright |
2008 |
| ISBN |
0-06-053092-8 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
312 |
The Graveyard Book starts with the nighttime murder of the Owens
family, and from the start one can tell this is a Gaiman novel. Gaiman
starts with a delightful description of the knife, telling the murder
off-camera by implication and simultaneously introducing the man Jack with
a memorable bit of description. The opening chapter features his
trademark smooth balance between blunted horror, fascinating description,
and hope from innocent skill and luck. The lone survivor of the family,
the toddler, walks out of the house into an enveloping fog, narrowly
escaping the murderer and wandering into the local graveyard. There, he's
defended and eventually adopted by the ghosts of the graveyard and a
persuasive cloaked man named Silas.
This is a children's book, illustrated by Dave McKean, but typically for
Gaiman it's readable and thoroughly enjoyable for adults. It is aimed
younger than many of his novels, though. I'm not much of a children's
book reader, but the core audience felt like 8 to 12. The early going is
very episodic and feels a bit unconnected, more like a set of bedtime
stories about Nobody Owens and the graveyard he lives in than a novel.
Chapter three in particular, an extended digression among ghouls, felt
pointless and unconnected and not as imaginative or interesting as I was
hoping.
Hang with the book, though, since The Graveyard Book really hits
its stride a third of the way through in the fourth chapter. Gaiman takes
all the elements he introduced episodically and slowly pulls them
together, reintroducing the man Jack and portraying Nobody's increasing
determination to revenge the death of his family. It's a solid
coming-of-age story with some enjoyable reversals. The power that Nobody
comes into is simply the natural skills of ghosts, which of course anyone
in the graveyard can do. The larger world that Nobody enters is ours,
with school, pawnshops, and police, and it makes a wonderful contrast with
the cozy history of an English neighborhood graveyard. When all the
pieces come together, the conclusion is exciting, suspenseful, and
heartwarming.
In either children's or adult writing, Gaiman has a knack for portraying
complex people in all their uncertainties, determination, limitations, and
courage. He does a particularly good job with Nobody: he makes some bad
decisions, but only one of them is cringeworthy and Nobody knows it and
deals with the consequences. Gaiman's worlds are dangerous, but they also
reward open-hearted empathy and common sense. I frequently come away from
his books with a strange feeling that I've caught a glimpse of how to be a
better person. Despite the younger target audience, The Graveyard
Book is no exception.
As universal the appeal of Gaiman's writing is, I prefer his adult books
to his children's books. The style of his children's books don't allow
for the same depth of mythology and philosophical detail of, say,
Sandman or American Gods, or even Neverwhere. The
better comparison for The Graveyard Book is
Coraline, and I think those who liked
Coraline will like this book as well. Comparatively, I think it
had more plot and more character development (the longer length helps),
less weird, and less horror. Both featured the same general sort of
determined protagonist who is brave and daring in a quiet and subtle way.
I think The Graveyard Book was a bit more successful overall, but
also a bit scattered and not as tight.
Gaiman didn't blow me away with this one, and I'm not sure I'd recommend
finding it in hardcover. His adult work is better. But Gaiman is an
excellent descriptive writer whose characterization is particularly
well-suited to a children's book, and any Gaiman is worth reading.
Recommended, including for adults, if you're in a Gaiman mood.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2009-06-21: Review: Zoe's Tale
Review: Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi
| Series |
Old Man's War #4 |
| Publisher |
Tor |
| Copyright |
August 2008 |
| Printing |
May 2009 |
| ISBN |
0-7653-5619-8 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
406 |
This is the fourth book of the Old Man's
War series, but it takes place concurrently with the third book,
The Last Colony. It's the same story,
but told from Zoë's perspective.
Usually, the technique of retelling a previous novel from a different
perspective drives me nuts. Anne McCaffrey's repeated use of this
technique during the Pern series wore out my tolerance for it, and I've
stopped reading series where each book is half-devoted to retelling the
previous novel. I therefore came to Zoe's Tale with misgivings
and, despite enjoying the previous book of the series, read it primarily
because it was nominated for a Hugo.
I'm glad I did. Zoe's Tale is written as a young-adult novel with
a first-person teenage protagonist, but unlike a lot of young-adult
novels, I loved the narrator. I have no idea how accurate she is for a
teenage girl, but she has a snarky, bantering tone that's a joy to read.
Given how much of the book is about her day-to-day life, friendships, and
some amount of teen relationship drama, I was amazed at how little it
irritated me and how well Scalzi kept me turning the pages.
The major plot events will, of course, be familiar to anyone who read
The Last Colony, except for the role that Zoë has in
the resolution that was handled off-camera. Zoe's Tale builds up
to that moment, adding additional significance around Zoë's
sense of self and her place in the alien Obin civilization and mythology
that The Last Colony didn't cover. Despite how well-paced and
interesting the book was, I did spend the book partly waiting for that
payoff, and I thought it lived up to the anticipation. Scalzi complicated
Zoë's decisions in several interesting directions, and while
the conclusion was a bit easy, I found it satisfying and a bit
thought-provoking.
Particularly helpful for the depth of the series universe as well as this
entry is the additional depth Scalzi gives to the Obin. The core idea of
their species is questionable, feeling in previous books like a joke that
lasted longer than one expected. But Zoë has a deep
connection with Hickory and Dickory and a mutual respect that only comes
out in the background of the previous books, and while it's hard to fully
redeem the odd basic idea, Scalzi does a better job than I expected. The
Obin are at the center of this story and hold up their place, turning into
interesting characters rather than background props in the process.
I think this is the best book of this series, so I'd like to say that one
could skip the previous books and just read it, but unfortunately that
isn't the case. Apart from Zoë's personal background, which
is relatively well-explained in the course of the book, Scalzi relies
heavily on the plot parallelism with The Last Colony. We get
summaries of the high points of the plot, but I consider them adequate
just as a reminder of what one has already read. Without having read
The Last Colony, I would have been annoyed at how much I didn't
know about the underlying plot. This is particularly bad at the end of
the book, where the climax of the underlying plot is dealt with in
narrative summary. Even having read The Last Colony, I went back
and re-read the conclusion just to remember fully what happened.
Attempting to tell an engrossing novel completely paralleling another is
quite difficult, and even though Scalzi was generally successful, it
leaves its marks. I can't recommend Zoe's Tale unless you read and
liked The Last Colony. But if you're a fan of the series so far,
do pick up and read this one; don't skip it as a pointless rewrite.
Zoë has the same delightfully sarcastic outlook as Scalzi's
other characters but is even better at banter and, in my opinion, more
endearing. Zoe's Tale is much lighter in tone than the rest of the
Old Man's War series, but I think it is the best-written of the
set.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2009-06-21: Meandering
I'm in an uninspired mood this evening for picture selection, so have a
picture of morning glory from last year. Flower pictures are always
pretty. [ETA: Apparently this is actually calibrachoa or trailing
petunia, not morning glory.]
Today was a rather meandering day, in which I had little focus for
anything in particular and just did a bit of this and a bit of that. I
suspect this is largely because I had the US Open on TV most of the day,
and while it doesn't feel that way at the time, having anything on TV
takes a lot of focus away.
Nothing wrong with meandering for a vacation Sunday, of course. I do wish
I were feeling more of an energy bounce coming into the last days of
vacation, though. I'm mostly feeling it slip away faster than I want and
dwelling a bit too much on the things I'd wanted to do and haven't done.
This is making me irritable and unnecessarily negative. Tomorrow, I'll
work on snapping myself out of it, and probably take some time away from
both the TV and the computer after the US Open concludes.
2009-06-20: Last vacation weekend
Well, I could use another week of vacation, but I seem to be gathering
more momentum and finding it easier to do accomplishment-like stuff
instead of relaxing-like stuff. Hopefully that means I have enough
vacation to feel refreshed and able to dive back into work. I didn't do
quite as much reading as I wanted, but now the US Open is on and I'm
enjoying watching that more than reading at the moment.
Yesterday, I uploaded new OpenAFS 1.4.11pre1 packages for Debian, which
include the new documentation built from editable source. I still need to
update some of the supporting Debian documentation a bit and we should
yank the old documents from the OpenAFS CVS repository so that I can
remove the disclaimer in debian/copyright. But I should be in fairly good
shape for the 1.4.11 release.
I also did some work on Debian Policy last night and this morning,
committing five bug fixes and proposing wording that's now awaiting
seconds for several more. I sent out a heads-up about eliminating the
provision for packages to modify ld.so.conf and so far haven't gotten any
feedback; hopefully we can get that into the next Policy release.
2009-06-19: Vacation Friday
The arrangement of rocks on wood had a zen-like calm feeling for me and an
interesting subtle pattern. I love noticing prosaic things like this
randomly when I'm out walking with a camera.
Vacation is concluding quickly, unfortunately, but it's been a nice
vacation. A bit packed with things I wanted to do and look at, but I've
also finished a couple of books, played some video games, and poked at
some Debian work when I've felt like it. And I still have a long weekend
left.
The archive-wide Lintian run is making good progress, and I think the
changes in version comparison are making it a little bit faster. Lintian
still eats a lot of memory, which indicates to me that there's still
something less than ideal, but hopefully it will be better.
I've been successfully ignoring work other than keeping up on e-mail and
letting other people pick up the problems. I'm hoping that after I get
back to Stanford I'll be able to take some time to release new versions of
a few software packages before diving back into the project grind.
Despite some worries about losing portability, I think I've talked myself
into using libtool for building my PAM modules, and I'd like to set up a
test suite for pam-krb5 and do a new release of it soon.
2009-06-18: Review: Ambulance Ship
Review: Ambulance Ship, by James White
| Series |
Sector General #4 |
| Publisher |
Orb |
| Copyright |
1980 |
| Printing |
2002 |
| ISBN |
0-312-87770-6 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
211 |
Ambulance Ship is the fourth book in the Sector General series, but
as with the previous books it doesn't assume knowledge of the rest of the
series and can be read independently (particularly with the excellent
introduction). The publication information is for the Alien
Emergencies omnibus, which contains the fourth through sixth books of the
series. This version includes the short story "Spacebird," which was
omitted from the original US version of Ambulance Ship.
If you've read the earlier books in this series (or, I suspect, the
later), you know basically what to expect. Sector General is a huge
multi-species space hospital with environments for every known intelligent
species. It's specialty, at least as portrayed in the books, is solving
medical mysteries, particularly for previously-unknown aliens. This book
changes the setting a bit by sending the primary series protagonist,
Conway, on a tour of duty on a medical ambulance ship, but the feel
remains roughly the same and much of the action still takes place in
Sector General.
The highlight of this book for me wasn't the aliens. They're interesting
and inventive, but even after a break from the series they do feel a bit
alike. White comes up with different twists and quirks each time, but the
structure of the problem is fundamentally the same and the problem-solving
follows a similar pattern. More interesting to me were the two quarantine
episodes in Ambulance Ship, which show how the doctors function in
situations where safety may be at odds with treating their patients. The
first of these, the part entitled "Contagion," is the best, largely
because it turns into a much different puzzle than is normal for Sector
General and adds some depth to the universe. This series consists mostly
of straightforward puzzle-solving, so moments of deeper characterization
and history are appreciated.
Ambulance Ship is similar to previous entries in its flaws as well
as its features. I'm not sure if the gender roles and sexism has gotten
worse or stayed about the same as Major
Operation, but they're still bad, particularly early in the book.
Conway treats his wife (or girlfriend — I forget, and from
that you can tell something about the focus of the story) with a noticable
amount of condescension, and White feels obligated to constantly point out
how men react to her physical appearance. It could be a lot worse, and
White's tone is light-hearted and balanced somewhat by the presence of
competent female characters who occasionally (although too rarely) partly
put Conway in his place. But as I read later in the series and the books
are written more recently, it becomes harder to treat this as an artifact
of an earlier culture and read past it. I was cringing enough in spots to
detract from my enjoyment of the book.
If you've read previous books in the series, well, this is more. If you
liked the previous entries, you'll probably like this as well. The
omnibus that I read has the advantage of a pair of solid introductions,
one by David Langford for the omnibus edition and another by James White
for the original book; the additional context and Langford's highlighting
of particular features improved my enjoyment of the stories. But, alas,
this is not House in space: it's engineer-with-a-wrench stories
featuring doctors instead of engineers, told with minimal characterization
in a light-hearted world with detailed and bizarre aliens. It's
wonderfully good-hearted, but it's not very deep. I think it's best-used
as undemanding reading between other, more significant work.
Followed by Sector General.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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