2005-10-02: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 1966
ISBN: 0-425-03436-4
Pages: 302
Depending on how one wants to divide his career, The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress comes in the center of Heinlein's strongest period or near the
end of the good "early" Heinlein (contrasted with the inconsistent at best
"late" Heinlein). It was his last major critical and influential success
(although some of his later novels were still popular successes).
The most famous part of this book, its portrayal of a libertarian utopia
that gave the SF community the term TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing
As A Free Lunch"), is only a small part of it. Like most utopias, it
doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny and is based primarily on cheating:
setting up artificial, ideal conditions for a utopia and then showing how
well the utopia would deal with those conditions. But the plot and the
action deals primarily with the process of revolution rather than the
results, and the utopian aspects can be shuffled under the carpet of
suspension of disbelief.
The plot, sadly, could be summarized as follows: a hyperintelligent
computer learns the techniques of revolution and arranges a rebellion of
the Moon penal colony, while the humans mill about, wax poetic on the
merits of complex polygamous family structures, and generally act silly.
It says a lot about Heinlein's competence as a writer that he manages to
salvage an entertaining page-turner from this. By all rights, the book
should have been either stultifyingly dull from the politics or pointless
given that the computer ends up solving nearly all of the problems in the
book. Heinlein mostly avoids both traps and manages a decent story,
although I had to laugh when the computer started impersonating the main
characters to get things done when they weren't in the right places at the
right time.
The beginning of the novel is its weakest part. The first-person narrator
has an enjoyably cynical voice, but it stretches credibility right from the
start that the computer running everything in the Moon colony has magically
become self-aware yet he's the only one who has noticed. Quickly he picks
up a female companion whose role (matching the role of nearly every other
female in the book) is to be emotional, look pretty, and have sex. They,
the computer, and a professor with political experience (the most likable
character in the book) decide to start a revolution, which never manages to
be more than a laughable farce. It's painfully impossible for the good
guys to fail no matter how badly they bungle. The computer silently and
untracably controls everything electronic in the colony and is absolutely
loyal, and the evil rulers of the colony are so stupid and incompetent that
they don't suspect the computer even when they start getting phone calls
from each other that neither party placed. (The characters even notice
this and remark on how stupid they are. It's usually a bad sign when your
characters are complaining about your plot.)
Decent characterization, at least of the men, and good pacing carry one
through, though, into the far more interesting second half of the book.
The local revolution is successful. Now the colonists have to deal with
Earth. This is not by any stretch realistic political intrigue, but with
the good guys and bad guys clearly defined, I found myself emotionally
involved in the success of the good guys. Mostly this was due to blantant
emotional string-pulling, but it did work. There are struggles, losses,
and daring adventure along the way, and the novel reaches a satisfying
climax featuring unusual weapons and the victory of the plucky, loyal
comrades in arms. And, since this is Heinlein, the guy gets all of the
girls and everyone marries everyone.
This is a mostly well-written book at the technical level, although I have
a couple of complaints. In contrast to his usually clear prose, Heinlein
wrote this book in an oddly clipped style that I think was intended to
convey the feeling of a Russian accent by omitting articles. This is
probably where David R. Palmer got his inspiration for the narrative voice
of
Emergence,
but he handled it much better and provided far stronger justification.
Heinlein also betrays a tin ear for slang, peppering the dialogue with
phrases that clang horribly. Thankfully, one gets used to both flaws and
the irritation subsides considerably past the first hundred pages.
I won't spend too much time discussing the politics. If you've read
Heinlein, you pretty much know what to expect: every man for himself
libertarianism, dislike of governments, dislike of mobs of people, and an
emphasis on personal loyalty above all else. This story can say nothing
meaningful about politics since it contains no grey areas. In real life,
politics is largely concerned with trying to referee between diametrically
opposed parties who are not conveniently right or wrong. In the book,
everyone opposed to our heroes is evil, corrupt, stupid, and incompetent,
whereas mysteriously nearly all of the inhabitants of what was a penal
colony are polite, courteous, respectful, loyal, and brave. Heinlein
confidently states that the latter is the natural result of a harsh
environment where anyone without these traits is killed, and illustrates
this with a story of an exiled mob boss who's too stupid to learn how to
put on a space suit. Convenient how evil and abject stupidity invariably
go hand-in-hand in this world. And of course, within the carefully
constructed parameters of the story, all of the beliefs of the heroes turn
out to be the only reasonable solutions.
Since this is Heinlein, the story is also painfully sexist. Obsession with
women as hypersexual brood mares disguised as male gallantry abounds.
While Heinlein allows them to fight hand-to-hand in a few places when
threatened directly, the primary contribution of women to the war effort is
to sleep with the men to keep morale up. There's a lot of that sort of
nonsense to tune out.
One reads this book mostly because it's important in the history of SF,
particularly as an early example of the sub-genre of libertarian military
SF. TANSTAAFL has shown up somewhat regularly since, in Niven and
Pournelle's writing if nowhere else, and the polygamous line marriages
lovingly described here are at least a regular feature of the rest of
Heinlein's writing. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of those
books that nearly everyone has read, and that's worth reading just so that
you understand the references when they come up in conversation. Just
remember to avoid giggling when thinking too deeply about the world
background.
On its own merits as a story, this book is okay but not great. It's a
satisfying if obvious good versus evil adventure with generally likable
characters, a background full of holes and authorial manipulation, a bit
too much preaching (but entertaining preaching), the standard Heinlein
sexism problems, and a few too many pretensions of political relevance.
It's not a bad read, but there are a lot of better books out there.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2005-10-02: Library size
Out of curiosity, yesterday morning I counted all of my books (other than
the technical books that I have at work and some things that I have packed
away in boxes, that are going to the used bookstore, or that are on loan
from someone else). The result, not counting graphic novels but counting
course readers from college, is 1,179 volumes.
Not horribly impressive compared to a lot of people I know, but pretty good
for a one-bedroom apartment. And I have plenty of room to add shelves
still.
I did some rearranging yesterday, pulled out of shelves some old game
magazines that I think I'm going to get rid of, and have now shelved all of
the recent book arrivals. I'm back to having another shelf and a half of
paperback space again, which is good since I'm likely to buy a bunch more
in Oregon. (There are also some paperbacks that I expect I'll get rid of
eventually, like all the Jordan and Goodkind.)
2005-10-04: svnlog 1.7
One of the reasons why I wrote svnlog was so that it would automatically
tag bugs as pending in Debian when I was working on Debian packages. This
worked great, but when importing a new package into Subversion using
svn-inject (such as when working on an orphaned package or adopting a new
package), it would get too aggressive and happily try to tag as pending
every bug mentioned in the changelog file.
Now fixed by skipping the debbugs integration if the log message looks like
it was generated by an svn-inject import.
You can get the latest version from the
svnlog distribution
page.
2005-10-04: S/Ident 3.5
I've been meaning to do this all summer, but I finally got around to
releasing a new version of S/Ident with warnings about the protocol flaw
that we found. Turns out that the S/Ident protocol is inherently
(unfixably) vulnerable to an active man-in-the-middle attack, although the
vulnerability only allows an attacker to hijack a session, not initiate a
new one.
This means that S/Ident is still usable for certain applications in certain
network environments, but it's not useful as a general authentication
mechanism and a lot more caution should be exercised before relying on it.
I've also fixed the way logging is configured; previously, -d, -l, and -v
were a mess and all enabled various different things in odd ways. Now -d
controls only the stderr spewage that breaks the protocol, and everything
else is available via -l and -v. There are also fewer debugging messages
that have never actually been useful.
You can get the latest version from the
S/Ident distribution
page.
2005-10-04: WebAuth 3.3.0
After turning off S/Ident support in Stanford's weblogin server a while
back, I finally got around to releasing a new version of WebAuth with all
the S/Ident support removed. Since that's a change that breaks backward
compatibility, even if likely no one cares outside of Stanford, I bumped
the minor version number.
While I was in there, I also implemented the requested support for
combining multi-valued attribute values into a single environment variable
with a user-defined separator. We'll see if anyone uses that. The
mod_webauthldap manual is also in much better shape, and libwebauth now
uses symbol versioning on Linux.
You can get the latest version from the main WebAuth site. I haven't yet
gotten around to creating a personal software page for WebAuth similar to
the ones I have for other packages I maintain.
2005-10-05: Serenity
Went and saw Serenity in the theaters today, which is, I think, the
first movie that I've seen in a movie theater in a year and a half. Yes,
Firefly was that good as a series. If you haven't watched the DVD
set yet, I highly recommend it.
Conclusion after watching the movie: Yes, Firefly was that good as
a series. If you haven't watched the DVD set yet, I highly recommend it.
Less flippantly, it's not that I didn't like it. I did. I loved River as
a character, and loved seeing more of her. The overall plot was a little
hokey, but the characters were back and (mostly) doing their thing, and it
was great to see them again. The special effects didn't always work, but
when they did, they were amazing. It was a great SF action movie, and it
brought back great memories of the series.
However, I'm with
jwz on this one
(warning: spoilers halfway down the page on that link). It felt like Joss
compressed a season's worth of plot into a movie, and did so by hitting all
the action climaxes that would have been paced through the season. The
result was to squeeze the depth out of what we knew and loved in
Firefly, with less banter, less setup, less impact, less humanity,
and less of a reason to care. It also made all the stock bits stand out
and look cheap and superficial, whereas in Firefly he could get away
with using unoriginal ideas since there was time for the plot to set the
idea up and the actors to sell it.
You can sort of mentally construct the episodes that could have been while
watching the movie, and they're very good. I did that throughout the
movie. But I have to admit to being disappointed for what could have been.
The movie is certainly better than nothing, and I'll buy it when it comes
out on DVD and watch it again, but it's not the series. The series was
much, much better.
Was it worth the hassle of going to the movie theater for the first time in
a year and a half? I'm not sorry that I did it, but if I had to be
completely honest, the answer is probably no. And that means that I doubt
it will earn enough that we'll be seeing more movies, which is really a
shame. It's still better than almost everything being done in SF film
these days, and I'd watch more of it. It's just not quite as special.
FOX sucks.
2005-10-09: Altered Carbon
Review: Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0-57507-390-X
Pages: 534
Schwarzenegger meets film noir detective crossed with Blade Runner.
Add a hefty helping of Neuromancer and you have Altered
Carbon, a very visual first novel with a cinematic feel and a high body
count. This is the novel equivalent of a high-tech action movie: the final
confrontation features cutting-edge weapons, dramatic explosions, and lots
of shooting.
Surprisingly, it's also a well-written book.
It's not an original book. Morgan wears his influences openly. But he
also understands how to use the stock scenery of SF. The point of not
inventing your own furniture is that you don't have to spend a lot of time
explaining it. The reader is already familiar and comfortable, so you can
leave the background in the background and focus on your characters and
your few defining ideas. When handled well, the result is tight pacing and
few infodumps, and despite the 534 pages, Altered Carbon never
bogged down.
The defining idea here is the concept of sleeving, combining personality
capture implants (reminiscent somewhat of the implants in Iain M. Banks's
Look
to Windward but with more retrieval options), a touch of uploaded
personalities (the holodeck Matrix version, not the Singularity
version), and the possibility of putting someone into someone else's body.
That body probably belongs to someone convicted for a crime who is sitting
out their sentence in electronic storage, during which they lose any rights
to their original body. It's a disturbing and cynical idea that Morgan
explores in detail, focusing on how the rich use it to achieve immortality
and the less fortunate beggar themselves to try to get some of the
benefits, or at least avoid ending up in hoc to the powerful. (As with
most stories in this genre, there are the haves and the have-nots and not
much inbetween.)
The hero, Takeshi Kovacs, is an ex-Envoy, a type of military special forces
with special training in being beamed through space into random bodies on
whatever world he's supposed to operate on. It's a good justification for
why he's a bad-ass, since all sorts of military training can be called upon
as a plot device to justify his fighting abilities, but it also adds to the
dark cynicism of his first-person viewpoint. This is not a pretty or
optimistic world, nor does it become more so over the course of the story.
Kovacs gets a chance to help a few people who are down and out, but he's
mostly looking out for his own interests and trying to get through the
mystery he's forced to investigate.
Perhaps the best symbol of this story is the Hendrix, an AI hotel in
downtown San Francisco that Kovacs gets a room at early in the story and
uses as his base of operations throughout. It's one of the best characters
in the story, delighting the reader in an early scene and hinting
throughout at a complex and nuanced relationship between AIs and the
government and elites. It's also an obvious plot device at multiple
points, having just the right facilities or just the right access that
Kovacs needs for some scheme. This mix of fun characters, beautiful visual
set pieces, and occasionally heavy-handed plotting typifies the book and
makes it feel very much like an expanded, well-written, big-budget action
movie (if such a thing actually existed). If one inspects the plot too
closely under the pile of bodies, splashes of blood, and flying fortresses,
it's a bit too obvious and a bit too forced, but moves so quickly that one
usually doesn't notice.
I liked the visceral action sequences a bit more than the convolutions of
plot towards the end of the book, but mostly that's because Morgan starts
expecting the reader to recognize characters by name that hadn't been seen
for many chapters. A dramatis personae, or simply more narrative
help, would have been nice towards the end. That and the occasionally
too-graphic brutality and too-seedy sex scenes are the only parts of the
book that turned me off. It's an action movie in book form, but it's a
good one, and while this is the first of a series of books featuring
Takeshi Kovacs, don't worry about cliffhanger endings or unresolved plots.
This is a complete story with an end, and it won't leave you desperate for
the next book.
Recommended, and given that this is a first novel, I'm guessing that I'll
be able to recommend Morgan's later work even more strongly.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2005-10-13: The Forever Machine
Review: The Forever Machine, by Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Copyright: 1956
ISBN: 0-88184-842-5
Pages: 351
Originally published under the title They'd Rather Be Right,
The Forever Machine was the winner of the second Hugo award for best
novel. It's probably the most obscure and difficult-to-locate Hugo winner.
There are good reasons for that.
I'm not sure that it's the worst book to ever win a Hugo. There are other
Hugo winners that I found more offensive failures, like the nihilism of
A
Case of Conscience or the arrogant stupidity of
To
Your Scattered Bodies Go. The Forever Machine doesn't try hard
enough to reach that level of failure. It is, instead, an example of the
sort of preachy, cliched story that was once a mainstay of science fiction
and would now be difficult to find a publisher for.
The Forever Machine is the story of a telepath living in a future
United States that has become locked in a straightjacket of scientific
orthodoxy, a country in which any new theory that contradicts accepted
knowledge is rejected and ignored. He uses his abilities to coordinate a
team of scientists who normally would never work together, showing them
that they had the necessary ingredients to build a better-than-human AI if
they could coordinate their efforts. The rest of the story documents the
public and government reactions to this AI, the strange powers that a
thoroughly logical intelligence apparently gains, and the resulting
shake-up in culture.
Not a bad idea. Hide-bound scientific thinking isn't a common threat to
warn against, but this book was written in a much different era and perhaps
it was a more relevant criticism then. AI development is a long-standing
SF theme, as is telepathy. Unfortunately, they're put together into a
story that, when it isn't ridden with cliches and preaching, goes out on
scientific limbs that are simply bizarre.
The cliches are the worst, and this book is a litany of them. Early in the
story, the poor misunderstood telepath (abusive father, loving but blind
mother) is saved from suicide by the unconditional love of a cute little
puppy. That sets the tone for the rest of the book. There is a hooker
with a heart of gold, a likeable street-wise con man, an aging professor, a
practical engineer, and even a principled, industrious, trustworthy
corporate leader straight out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Even
the telepath, who's the most fully-fleshed character in the book, serves
primarily as a philosophical mouthpiece and never achieves any depth of
character.
The plot is adequate, if you can tolerate the cliches, but it's presented
in a style that thankfully has almost disappeared from published science
fiction. Clifton and Riley relentlessly tell the reader what's happening
and why rather than letting the story tell itself, interrupting it for
philosophical asides and essays on the (over-simplified) nature of
humanity. It reminded me of reading early Stan Lee comic books, the ones
that in one's memory have transformed into the great stories of one's
childhood but that, on re-reading, are surprisingly painful at a mechanical
level. We've since been spoiled by much superior storytelling technique
and older works feel forced, blatant, and far more distant from the reader;
the narrator is too visible, too obviously telling a story rather than
letting the reader watch it, but also not taking a place in the story as a
character.
The science of The Forever Machine also suffers, not only from the
standard and forgivable failures of extrapolation, but also from one
particularly bizarre extrapolation of psychosomatic reactions. The
perfectly logical AI can become the perfect psychiatrist, and apparently
the perfect psychiatrist has to treat mental illnesses of one's entire
body. Every individual cell is a mess of neuroses and hangups, you see,
not to mention being worn down by the relentless pressure of gravity, and
all of that trauma has to be exposed and resolved. Once it has been, the
result is not only a perfectly balanced human but an immortal body, with a
reversal of aging thrown in free. I kept wondering when Clifton and Riley
were going to start mentioning thetans.
There aren't specific glaring flaws in this book so much as a general lack
of merit. I'm sure that it was an early exploration of various themes that
have since been done better by others; most work of that era that isn't
"spaceman defeats pirates and rescues girl" was. However, it's simply not
very good. Completism on Hugo winners is the only reason to bother; it is
an eminently forgettable novel published in a time when the standards for
SF are far lower than they are today. That it was even considered for a
Hugo shows how much stronger the genre has become.
Rating: 3 out of 10
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