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Lord of Light runs Zelazny's trickster-god antihero through a proper epic this time, using Indian mythology as a front for a story of rebellion against decadent power, and the role that the super-powered can play in liberating the common people. While some of the orientalism and sexism hasn't aged particularly well, the plot is a proper mythological thriller, the setting is top-notch, and the characters seem to fit the scope of the action; unlike the constrained and dying world of Call me Conrad. Zelazny's wordcraft is topnotch as always, and there are some long philosophical passages which I would have marked, if I weren't reading in bed.
On a distant colony world of a dead Earth, man has separated into a race of gods based on Hindu mythology, and a mass of ordinary peasants. The gods are the First, the original colonists from Earth, exceptional men and women who use a combination of psionic powers and super-science to rule a world forced into medieval squalor. The Wheel of Karma is very real, used to concentrate and promote conservative and obedient brahmins towards the heavenly city, while banishing Accelerationists and other radicals to the oblivion of true death. While once the world was a vibrant place full of adventure and danger (Rakshasa energy demons foremost among them), now it is a playground and brothel for the decadent gods. Sam, a rebel among the First, uses a version of Buddhism and his own political wiles to wage war against the gods.
A lot stuff comes together real well. The slow revelation of the setting, and the realization that this was set up by people who know about as much about Indian mythology as I do (selections from the Mahabharata in comparative religion class ages ago), but who think it's a fricking metal framework for supernatural powers. Sam and his foil, the deathgod-scientist Yama, as super competent individuals who must use cleverness against the even greater forces that oppose then. It's not so much about any specific technology, but about the idea that given the power to create a paradise, what kind of paradise will people create?
On a distant colony world of a dead Earth, man has separated into a race of gods based on Hindu mythology, and a mass of ordinary peasants. The gods are the First, the original colonists from Earth, exceptional men and women who use a combination of psionic powers and super-science to rule a world forced into medieval squalor. The Wheel of Karma is very real, used to concentrate and promote conservative and obedient brahmins towards the heavenly city, while banishing Accelerationists and other radicals to the oblivion of true death. While once the world was a vibrant place full of adventure and danger (Rakshasa energy demons foremost among them), now it is a playground and brothel for the decadent gods. Sam, a rebel among the First, uses a version of Buddhism and his own political wiles to wage war against the gods.
A lot stuff comes together real well. The slow revelation of the setting, and the realization that this was set up by people who know about as much about Indian mythology as I do (selections from the Mahabharata in comparative religion class ages ago), but who think it's a fricking metal framework for supernatural powers. Sam and his foil, the deathgod-scientist Yama, as super competent individuals who must use cleverness against the even greater forces that oppose then. It's not so much about any specific technology, but about the idea that given the power to create a paradise, what kind of paradise will people create?
Stand on Zanzibar is an densely textured psychological study of a civilization on the brink of suicide. Even now, more than 45 years after it won the Hugo it still has the capacity to shock with predictions and insights that just smell right. However, it is also a triumph of style over story, a handful of Freudian buttons pushed until overload, and a wandering brick that would be well served edited down into a small shorter novel.
It is some point in the middle of the 21st century, and an overpopulated world has gone mad. Cities are packed warrens, despite strict eugenic controls on births. The fundamentals of human ecology (food, water, power) are on the brink of collapse and sabotage is a spectator sport. Pretty much everybody is on either tranquilizers or hallucinogens or both. 'Muckers, ordinary people driven into homicidal rage by the pressure of modern life, strike two or three times a day in major cities, along with countless ordinary murders. Mr and Mrs Everywhere are "you", always there first, watching computer edited news and hoping that their children turn out all right. An all-powereful computer named Shalmaneser runs everything. Meanwhile, the fate of the world may depend on developments in the fictional countries of Yatakang (Indonesia, roughly) and Beninia (a sliver of a country in West Africa). And rogue sociologist Chad Mulligan drops by with truthbombs out of his best seller "The HipCrime Vocab".
The setting is presented in vignettes, post-modern fragmentary depictions of the chaos of life, with it's drugs and violence and meaningless sex and obsession with genetic purity. I'd be impressed with the style, except that it takes 450 pages out of 650 for the plot to move out of first gear. The story, such as it is, follows a pair of roommates, an executive with the megacorp General Technics and his attempt to redevelop Beninia, and a sleeper agent of the US government sent to retrieve the world's leading geneticist and pioneer of a cutting edge eugenic technique from Yatakang. It's a pretty good thriller, but one buried under a ton of literary rubble.
There's a strand of thought that science-fiction can predict the future, and whatever else I can say about Brunner, he has the touch. His future New York is entirely insane, and entirely coherent. We're not there yet, and we might never get there, but the obsession with reproduction, birth, health, and competition is a clear lens into something which people care about deeply, but rarely speak about. It's a single trick, but one executed again and again with such verve that I want to admire it, even as I see through the artifice.
It is some point in the middle of the 21st century, and an overpopulated world has gone mad. Cities are packed warrens, despite strict eugenic controls on births. The fundamentals of human ecology (food, water, power) are on the brink of collapse and sabotage is a spectator sport. Pretty much everybody is on either tranquilizers or hallucinogens or both. 'Muckers, ordinary people driven into homicidal rage by the pressure of modern life, strike two or three times a day in major cities, along with countless ordinary murders. Mr and Mrs Everywhere are "you", always there first, watching computer edited news and hoping that their children turn out all right. An all-powereful computer named Shalmaneser runs everything. Meanwhile, the fate of the world may depend on developments in the fictional countries of Yatakang (Indonesia, roughly) and Beninia (a sliver of a country in West Africa). And rogue sociologist Chad Mulligan drops by with truthbombs out of his best seller "The HipCrime Vocab".
The setting is presented in vignettes, post-modern fragmentary depictions of the chaos of life, with it's drugs and violence and meaningless sex and obsession with genetic purity. I'd be impressed with the style, except that it takes 450 pages out of 650 for the plot to move out of first gear. The story, such as it is, follows a pair of roommates, an executive with the megacorp General Technics and his attempt to redevelop Beninia, and a sleeper agent of the US government sent to retrieve the world's leading geneticist and pioneer of a cutting edge eugenic technique from Yatakang. It's a pretty good thriller, but one buried under a ton of literary rubble.
There's a strand of thought that science-fiction can predict the future, and whatever else I can say about Brunner, he has the touch. His future New York is entirely insane, and entirely coherent. We're not there yet, and we might never get there, but the obsession with reproduction, birth, health, and competition is a clear lens into something which people care about deeply, but rarely speak about. It's a single trick, but one executed again and again with such verve that I want to admire it, even as I see through the artifice.
Ringworld is an adventure of immense cosmological scope, held back by style and characterization that are at best, journeyman-like, where the sheer imagination of the ideas don't quite fit
The plot is simple: two aliens and two humans mount an expedition to the Ringworld, an artifact of massive size and unclear purpose. Damaged by defensive systems, they must crash land and make an escape, surviving the hazards of the ringworld and uncovering it's mysteries. The real star is the title character, the ringworld itself: A megastructure one astronomical unit in radius and roughly 1 million miles wide, the ringworld provides a habitable environment with an area equivalent to billions of Earth. It is BIG; in human terms bigger than Earth, and Niven does a great job conveying the scale, the mystery of its purpose and the decline of its civilization (human savages living in the ruins of floating cities), and its plausibility as an engineered structure. Even if some smart aleck MIT grads proved that the whole thing is dynamically unstable and requires exotic materials, the basic math of it holds together in the novel. I also really enjoyed the glimpses of Terran culture, the visible aliens in the predatory cat-like Kzin and survival-oriented Puppeteers, and the absent aliens of the gas-giant dwelling Outsiders and supertech Slavers, with their stasis shields, variable swords, and disintegration guns. What is left implied is more amazing than what is stated, and I mean that as a compliment.
Three of the characters are quite interesting. 200 year old explorer Louis Wu is our eyes and ears. Nessus is a bipolar Puppeteer and sponsor of the expedition. Speaker-to-Animals is a Kzin ambassador, and as a diplomat is only moderately murderous. The problem is the last character, Teela Brown. A 5th generation product of the human reproductive lottery, she's implicitly been bred for luck as part of a Puppeteer covert op on humanity. Incredible luck isn't a bad power, per se, except that in a authored work 'coincidence' is a terrible excuse for why things happen, and Niven proffers the explanation (via Louis Wu) that the whole novel happened because Teela Brown really need to be exposed to a dangerous place to meet a Hero and find her Destiny. I really think the whole thing would've been better and more tightly plotted as a straight up adventure minus Teela Brown's luck.
Which leads to my other complaint, which is that this book is notably weird on sex. I get that in a culture with solid life-extension, a 180 year difference in age is no big thing, and I could forgive Teela having no skills or personality beyond luck and innocence, but the other female character is Prill, a ringworld ramscoop crew-person (prostitute), driven half-mad by isolation and then enslaved by the pleasure weapon Nessus carries. Both Kzin and Puppeteer have non-sentient females. The whole thing is just... weird, beyond standard locker-room misogyny. But it's never particularly ugly, and aside from that this is a really cool book.
The plot is simple: two aliens and two humans mount an expedition to the Ringworld, an artifact of massive size and unclear purpose. Damaged by defensive systems, they must crash land and make an escape, surviving the hazards of the ringworld and uncovering it's mysteries. The real star is the title character, the ringworld itself: A megastructure one astronomical unit in radius and roughly 1 million miles wide, the ringworld provides a habitable environment with an area equivalent to billions of Earth. It is BIG; in human terms bigger than Earth, and Niven does a great job conveying the scale, the mystery of its purpose and the decline of its civilization (human savages living in the ruins of floating cities), and its plausibility as an engineered structure. Even if some smart aleck MIT grads proved that the whole thing is dynamically unstable and requires exotic materials, the basic math of it holds together in the novel. I also really enjoyed the glimpses of Terran culture, the visible aliens in the predatory cat-like Kzin and survival-oriented Puppeteers, and the absent aliens of the gas-giant dwelling Outsiders and supertech Slavers, with their stasis shields, variable swords, and disintegration guns. What is left implied is more amazing than what is stated, and I mean that as a compliment.
Three of the characters are quite interesting. 200 year old explorer Louis Wu is our eyes and ears. Nessus is a bipolar Puppeteer and sponsor of the expedition. Speaker-to-Animals is a Kzin ambassador, and as a diplomat is only moderately murderous. The problem is the last character, Teela Brown. A 5th generation product of the human reproductive lottery, she's implicitly been bred for luck as part of a Puppeteer covert op on humanity. Incredible luck isn't a bad power, per se, except that in a authored work 'coincidence' is a terrible excuse for why things happen, and Niven proffers the explanation (via Louis Wu) that the whole novel happened because Teela Brown really need to be exposed to a dangerous place to meet a Hero and find her Destiny. I really think the whole thing would've been better and more tightly plotted as a straight up adventure minus Teela Brown's luck.
Which leads to my other complaint, which is that this book is notably weird on sex. I get that in a culture with solid life-extension, a 180 year difference in age is no big thing, and I could forgive Teela having no skills or personality beyond luck and innocence, but the other female character is Prill, a ringworld ramscoop crew-person (prostitute), driven half-mad by isolation and then enslaved by the pleasure weapon Nessus carries. Both Kzin and Puppeteer have non-sentient females. The whole thing is just... weird, beyond standard locker-room misogyny. But it's never particularly ugly, and aside from that this is a really cool book.
You can't watch cult classic The Room without one big question: who the fuck is Tommy Wiseau? In this book, Greg Sestero (the real life Mark) chronicles his strange decade long friendship with Tommy Wiseau and the utterly disaster filming that culminated in the movie we all know and love.
On the one hand, there aren't really many surprises here. Wiseau is exactly as strange you'd imagine him-a very damaged man with an immense dream who has somehow turned failing forward into an art form. But even if we all know how it ends (tearing me apart, Lisa) this is an in-depth and loving portrait of the movie industry's most lovable loser.
On the one hand, there aren't really many surprises here. Wiseau is exactly as strange you'd imagine him-a very damaged man with an immense dream who has somehow turned failing forward into an art form. But even if we all know how it ends (tearing me apart, Lisa) this is an in-depth and loving portrait of the movie industry's most lovable loser.
There is a specter haunting contemporary politics; a specter called 'neoliberalism.'
In Undoing the Demos, Brown goes full bore for the origins and nature of the current crisis of faith, an ideology which consumes labor, democracy, law, education, and life itself in the quest for every higher profits for a small group of elites. Brown offers a strong definition of neoliberalism, capable adapting to it's protean forms, as the "economizing of spheres and activities" in policy, practice, and rhetoric, and everything which casts life as a matter of competition rather than community or exchange, and takes as it's best model the building of a diverse and exponentially expanding investment portfolio. The ultimate form of neoliberalism is the transformation of human beings, political entities with defined rights who form self-governing communities and live and die, into human capitals, value-increasing portfolios of skills, assets, and social networks, who are combined into ever greater portfolios for the purposes of wealth expansion.
Brown tackles this neoliberalism mostly with a dissection of theory, looking at rights and democracy across time, and ably interlocating Foucault's lecture on biopolitics. Case studies include the rise of 'governance' as a mode of regulation and power, the Citizens United decision and speech as capital, and the erosion of the liberal arts in higher education. Academic readers will appreciate it for its (relative) clarity and definiteness on a variety of subjects. More causal readers may enjoy it for the truly epic amounts of shade that Brown throws on the present. Witness discussing Obama's 2013 State of the Union, which called for job creation as the North Star of American policy.
"Attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce--these are the goals of the world's oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century... Striking in it's own right, this formulation means that democratic state commitments to equality, liberty, inclusion, and constitutionalism are now subordinate to the project of economic growth, capital positioning, and capital enhancement. These political commitments can no longer stand on their own legs, and the speech implies, would be jettisoned if found to abate, rather than abet, economic growth."
Damn, girl. Damn.
In Undoing the Demos, Brown goes full bore for the origins and nature of the current crisis of faith, an ideology which consumes labor, democracy, law, education, and life itself in the quest for every higher profits for a small group of elites. Brown offers a strong definition of neoliberalism, capable adapting to it's protean forms, as the "economizing of spheres and activities" in policy, practice, and rhetoric, and everything which casts life as a matter of competition rather than community or exchange, and takes as it's best model the building of a diverse and exponentially expanding investment portfolio. The ultimate form of neoliberalism is the transformation of human beings, political entities with defined rights who form self-governing communities and live and die, into human capitals, value-increasing portfolios of skills, assets, and social networks, who are combined into ever greater portfolios for the purposes of wealth expansion.
Brown tackles this neoliberalism mostly with a dissection of theory, looking at rights and democracy across time, and ably interlocating Foucault's lecture on biopolitics. Case studies include the rise of 'governance' as a mode of regulation and power, the Citizens United decision and speech as capital, and the erosion of the liberal arts in higher education. Academic readers will appreciate it for its (relative) clarity and definiteness on a variety of subjects. More causal readers may enjoy it for the truly epic amounts of shade that Brown throws on the present. Witness discussing Obama's 2013 State of the Union, which called for job creation as the North Star of American policy.
"Attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce--these are the goals of the world's oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century... Striking in it's own right, this formulation means that democratic state commitments to equality, liberty, inclusion, and constitutionalism are now subordinate to the project of economic growth, capital positioning, and capital enhancement. These political commitments can no longer stand on their own legs, and the speech implies, would be jettisoned if found to abate, rather than abet, economic growth."
Damn, girl. Damn.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a book with a fantastical premise brought down by, well, everything but the premise. Humanity, all 37 billion of us, plus some prehumans and alien visitors, is resurrected along an immense river alley, hemmed in by Himalayan mountains. Magitech grailstones provide three square meals a day, along with tobacco, whiskey, and marijuana, as ten thousand years of human history try to make sense of what's happening to them. Our viewpoint character is Richard Francis Burton, Victorian explorer, spy, and diplomat par excellence.
Unfortunately, that's where things go awry. I only know what on Burton's wikipedia page, but he seems like a fascinating character. Unfortunately, his internal voice is as middle-American as it can get. He's a hyper-compentent linguist, leader, and warrior, but there's no sense of the man who infiltrated Mecca in disguise when it was death for a westerner, or who wrote the first frank discussions of homosexuality in the Victorian period. The Robinson Crusoe survival story has little tension, since starvation is avoided through grailstones and death involves resurrection somewhere else along the valley. The maximum allowable technology tops out at the neolithic, with social structure also reaching the warrior-king phrase and stopping. There's little to be said about the recreation of culture in this new place.
Burton encounters Hermann Goring again and again, but the appearance of this villain is another missed opportunity to think about the nature of personality and evil. Is Hermann Goring evil because he's a senior Nazi, or did he become a Nazi because of his personality problems? What does it mean to get a second chance in this place.
There are hints of something bigger here, in the new church that arises among the resurrectees that seems to be the only novel cultural development, and Burton's encounters with the Mysterious Stranger, a representative of the powers that constructed the Riverworld as a moral test for humanity, but as with so much else, the novel backs away from the ambitious to leave us with Farmer doing little more than historical fanfiction, bashing together historical personages like action figures.
Unfortunately, that's where things go awry. I only know what on Burton's wikipedia page, but he seems like a fascinating character. Unfortunately, his internal voice is as middle-American as it can get. He's a hyper-compentent linguist, leader, and warrior, but there's no sense of the man who infiltrated Mecca in disguise when it was death for a westerner, or who wrote the first frank discussions of homosexuality in the Victorian period. The Robinson Crusoe survival story has little tension, since starvation is avoided through grailstones and death involves resurrection somewhere else along the valley. The maximum allowable technology tops out at the neolithic, with social structure also reaching the warrior-king phrase and stopping. There's little to be said about the recreation of culture in this new place.
Burton encounters Hermann Goring again and again, but the appearance of this villain is another missed opportunity to think about the nature of personality and evil. Is Hermann Goring evil because he's a senior Nazi, or did he become a Nazi because of his personality problems? What does it mean to get a second chance in this place.
There are hints of something bigger here, in the new church that arises among the resurrectees that seems to be the only novel cultural development, and Burton's encounters with the Mysterious Stranger, a representative of the powers that constructed the Riverworld as a moral test for humanity, but as with so much else, the novel backs away from the ambitious to leave us with Farmer doing little more than historical fanfiction, bashing together historical personages like action figures.
Everybody knows Isaac Asimov, author of Foundation and I, Robot and Nightfall and The Caves of Steel. What most people don't remember about him today is that all the great books I listed were written prior to 1955. For most of the 1960s, Asimov made his name as a pop historian and science writer. 1972's The Gods Themselves is a return to hard-SF form: three linked novellas around a single fascinating breakthrough.
The Electron Pump is the source of clean energy for a devastated and demoralized Earth. Discovered by accident, it involves an interdimensional exchange of Tungsten for Plutonium. The accidental discoverer of the Electron Pump, Dr. Hallam is a scientific thug, jealous of his power and privilege, and unwilling to see the exact mechanisms of the pump investigated, because that might reveal that he was a mere conduit for the aliens. Worse, long-term use of the pump would change the workings of the strong nuclear force, causing the sun to go nova in decades. Hallam, and the comfortable people of Earth, refuse to stop the pump, despite concerning messages from the intelligent para-Universal beings on the other side.
The second section of the book concerns those para-Universal beings, an imaginatively constructed three-sexed species. The Soft Ones are divided into Rationals, Emotionals, and Parentals, with each mated triplet needing one of each. Photosynthetic Soft Ones flow like smoke, and can meld and penetrate each other and physical objects. Hard Ones are enigmatic, long-lived, the true power on their dying world. With the sun dying, they have invented the Electron Pump, first to exchange energy with humans, and then to borrow energy from a sun gone nova.
The third section takes place on the moon, following Dennison, the disgraced co-discoverer of the Electron Pump as he adapts to lunar society with the help of the beautiful (and Intuitive, with a capital I) tour guide Selene. They enjoy lunar sports like the melee and slope gliding, and Dennison invents a counter to the Electron Pump, that draws from a universe with a weaker Strong Force, general energy while preserving the balance of forces around Earth.
There's a lot to like here. The depiction of a senior scientist not as a genius, but as a grasping and jealous politician, is one area where Asimov's life experience as a professor and science writer paid off. I wonder if Hallam was based on anyone specific. Maybe Edward Teller or James Watson, or just a particularly obstinate department head. The alien Soft Ones are a fascinating species that is, I think, just on the limits of reliability. The third section, with lunar life, is weaker and a retread of ideas better developed by Heinlein, but the overall themes of sustainability, the long-term safety of technologies our civilization depend on, is quite well-developed. Not the best Asimov, but a good book regardless.
The Electron Pump is the source of clean energy for a devastated and demoralized Earth. Discovered by accident, it involves an interdimensional exchange of Tungsten for Plutonium. The accidental discoverer of the Electron Pump, Dr. Hallam is a scientific thug, jealous of his power and privilege, and unwilling to see the exact mechanisms of the pump investigated, because that might reveal that he was a mere conduit for the aliens. Worse, long-term use of the pump would change the workings of the strong nuclear force, causing the sun to go nova in decades. Hallam, and the comfortable people of Earth, refuse to stop the pump, despite concerning messages from the intelligent para-Universal beings on the other side.
The second section of the book concerns those para-Universal beings, an imaginatively constructed three-sexed species. The Soft Ones are divided into Rationals, Emotionals, and Parentals, with each mated triplet needing one of each. Photosynthetic Soft Ones flow like smoke, and can meld and penetrate each other and physical objects. Hard Ones are enigmatic, long-lived, the true power on their dying world. With the sun dying, they have invented the Electron Pump, first to exchange energy with humans, and then to borrow energy from a sun gone nova.
The third section takes place on the moon, following Dennison, the disgraced co-discoverer of the Electron Pump as he adapts to lunar society with the help of the beautiful (and Intuitive, with a capital I) tour guide Selene. They enjoy lunar sports like the melee and slope gliding, and Dennison invents a counter to the Electron Pump, that draws from a universe with a weaker Strong Force, general energy while preserving the balance of forces around Earth.
There's a lot to like here. The depiction of a senior scientist not as a genius, but as a grasping and jealous politician, is one area where Asimov's life experience as a professor and science writer paid off. I wonder if Hallam was based on anyone specific. Maybe Edward Teller or James Watson, or just a particularly obstinate department head. The alien Soft Ones are a fascinating species that is, I think, just on the limits of reliability. The third section, with lunar life, is weaker and a retread of ideas better developed by Heinlein, but the overall themes of sustainability, the long-term safety of technologies our civilization depend on, is quite well-developed. Not the best Asimov, but a good book regardless.
Markoff has recovered a remarkable hidden history of the origins of the personal computer in the fertile soil of Palo Alto in the 1960s. Linking together the immense vision of Douglas Engelbert that a computer could be under control of a single mind, renegade psychedelic psychiatrists and bohemian artists, and anti-war activists attempting to liberate technology in the shadow of the military industrial complex.
The structure is of many small narratives linked together, a few names appearing again and again. Douglas Engelbert, Stewart Brand, and Fred Moore are the protagonists, with lesser engineers and activists coming in to solve a problem and then disappearing to a commune or Xerox PARC. The scattered oral histories make the overall narrative somewhat hard to follow, but the stories are simply incredible. This is the time the entire lab tried LSD. This is the time the lab joined a yoga cult. This is the time when anti-war activists laid siege to the building.
Two bits that I especially enjoyed were “The Mother of All Demos” Englebert’s 90 minute presentation of a networked interactive personal computer system. It’s worth being reminded that there was a point when all this was experimental and very hard, and cost real money. The journey of Fred Moore, committed pacifist, member of the People’s Computer Company, and founding member of the legendary Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club, is a fascinating look at the social origins of computers as we use them, rather than as specialized military-scientific tools.
The argument of the book, that human-computer augmentation, psychedelic exploration, and radical politics, all flourished together, is more associational than causal. Certainly, a lot of people thinking in new ways were in the same place at the same time, but is LSD the reason the PC was born on the West Coast instead of around Route 128? Hard to say, but I do know that I had almost as much fun reading these stories as the participants had in 60s.
The structure is of many small narratives linked together, a few names appearing again and again. Douglas Engelbert, Stewart Brand, and Fred Moore are the protagonists, with lesser engineers and activists coming in to solve a problem and then disappearing to a commune or Xerox PARC. The scattered oral histories make the overall narrative somewhat hard to follow, but the stories are simply incredible. This is the time the entire lab tried LSD. This is the time the lab joined a yoga cult. This is the time when anti-war activists laid siege to the building.
Two bits that I especially enjoyed were “The Mother of All Demos” Englebert’s 90 minute presentation of a networked interactive personal computer system. It’s worth being reminded that there was a point when all this was experimental and very hard, and cost real money. The journey of Fred Moore, committed pacifist, member of the People’s Computer Company, and founding member of the legendary Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club, is a fascinating look at the social origins of computers as we use them, rather than as specialized military-scientific tools.
The argument of the book, that human-computer augmentation, psychedelic exploration, and radical politics, all flourished together, is more associational than causal. Certainly, a lot of people thinking in new ways were in the same place at the same time, but is LSD the reason the PC was born on the West Coast instead of around Route 128? Hard to say, but I do know that I had almost as much fun reading these stories as the participants had in 60s.
Burndive is a story of a traumatized boy growing up, and a hope that a long war is coming to an end. I read this without reading Warchild first, so I might be missing some context, but it seemed to make sense. There's a lot going on in this book, and it's fun and fast moving, but has some major structural flaws which I'm going to gripe about.
The first is the protagonist, Ryan Azarcon, child of privilege, child of a broken home, and traumatized survivor of bombings and assassination attacks. Ryan starts out in a bad place: depressed, angry, using drugs and trying to destroy everything around him. Generally, we know that the story is going to be about Ryan growing up and finding himself. that's what stories about 19 year old boys are about. And towards the end, there's some great stuff about old wounds healing and breaking preconceptions, but I'm not sure Ryan earns it. He's too smart and perceptive to be an unreliable narrator, and too mean for me to like.
Second is the FTL and the war. I'm a bit of a nut about the relationship between transit and governance, but I'm not sure that I buy that the ships, stations, and drives implied in the setting would give the plentiful pirates the setting entails. Basically, space is big, pirates need to intercept and board their targets, and FTL ships should just be able to leap away. It probably makes sense somewhere, and most people won't care, but I wasn't able to link up the politics, economics, and technology of the setting in my head.
Third is the Send, the omnipresent news network that invades Ryan's life again and again. His mother is a PR officer, and he has a tempestuous relationship with the news and it's combination of warmongering and celebrity gossip. Since this novel came out in 2003, I think this is a commentary about cable news and the War on Terror, but it could be a lot more pointed, or a lot darker. The divide between the Earth centered Send community, and the personal ties that define the ship-bound pirate culture could have been brought forward more.
There is some other stuff which readers may like or dislike according to their whims. Minor minus was the neologisms. For example, computer hacking is called 'Burndiving' for no apparent reason. Interestingly, this book is also super bi. Ryan has seems to prefer females, but has no problem hitting on men and being hit on in return. Again, I can't tell if it's deliberate or yaoi, but it's a neat point.
So if I griped so much, why four stars? Well, I had a lot of fun reading it, and if the pieces didn't quite come together the way I wanted them to, the individual sentences were really good, enough so to convince me to check out the first book.
The first is the protagonist, Ryan Azarcon, child of privilege, child of a broken home, and traumatized survivor of bombings and assassination attacks. Ryan starts out in a bad place: depressed, angry, using drugs and trying to destroy everything around him. Generally, we know that the story is going to be about Ryan growing up and finding himself. that's what stories about 19 year old boys are about. And towards the end, there's some great stuff about old wounds healing and breaking preconceptions, but I'm not sure Ryan earns it. He's too smart and perceptive to be an unreliable narrator, and too mean for me to like.
Second is the FTL and the war. I'm a bit of a nut about the relationship between transit and governance, but I'm not sure that I buy that the ships, stations, and drives implied in the setting would give the plentiful pirates the setting entails. Basically, space is big, pirates need to intercept and board their targets, and FTL ships should just be able to leap away. It probably makes sense somewhere, and most people won't care, but I wasn't able to link up the politics, economics, and technology of the setting in my head.
Third is the Send, the omnipresent news network that invades Ryan's life again and again. His mother is a PR officer, and he has a tempestuous relationship with the news and it's combination of warmongering and celebrity gossip. Since this novel came out in 2003, I think this is a commentary about cable news and the War on Terror, but it could be a lot more pointed, or a lot darker. The divide between the Earth centered Send community, and the personal ties that define the ship-bound pirate culture could have been brought forward more.
There is some other stuff which readers may like or dislike according to their whims. Minor minus was the neologisms. For example, computer hacking is called 'Burndiving' for no apparent reason. Interestingly, this book is also super bi. Ryan has seems to prefer females, but has no problem hitting on men and being hit on in return. Again, I can't tell if it's deliberate or yaoi, but it's a neat point.
So if I griped so much, why four stars? Well, I had a lot of fun reading it, and if the pieces didn't quite come together the way I wanted them to, the individual sentences were really good, enough so to convince me to check out the first book.
I'm a little disappointed in The Co-Vans. This book was sold to me as the real story of the advisory war, and the more factual companion to Bing West's The Village, but it's basically an average memoir with only a little bit of insight in the bigger picture.
In 1970, Miller returned to Vietnam as a USMC Major, adviser to a VNMC Battalion. His previous combat tour as company commander and 3-month Vietnamese immersion course only partially prepared him for his new job. Unlike Army advisers, who deployed with a small team for backup, Marine advisers served alone, living on Vietnamese rations, with only the radio net and occasional trips back home as connection with the world. It's these experiences that Miller focuses on, and they're a lot like any rifleman's except a little more adult. Meals are sketchy chicken cooked by an enlisted VNMC "cowboy" servant rather than C-rations. Officers get drunk and get in trouble in Saigon, if a little less frequently than privates. There's the same political games with idiotic superiors, except that they have flag rank here.
Miller's tour overlapped a key period in Nixon's 'Vietnamization' draw-down, when the Vietnamese would have to take over fighting the war themselves. By and large, by this point the Vietnamese were experienced veterans, and Miller's duties apparently consisted mostly of coordinating logistics and air strikes, which were still American run. Most tellingly, Miller took a week off for R&R in the middle of Operation Lam Son 719; the critical test invasion of Laos by RVN forces in 1971. Only one adviser was allowed over Laos at a time, so there was little that Miller and his comrades could do aside from shelter from NVA artillery at Khe Sanh and listen to the radio, but even a professional and committed adviser like Miller seemed fairly checked out at this stage in the war.
I was really hoping for some sort of insight into the advising relationship across cultural barriers, but aside from some awkward moments of "He speaks our language?" from both Vietnamese and Americans, the details of the advisory relationship remain opaque. I was also hoping that Miller would rebut, confirm, or at least expand upon the common charges that RVN forces were cowardly, corrupt, and incompetent, but his assessment of the Vietnamese military is confined to about 10 pages at the end of the book, where he notes that Vietnamese officers tended to run their units out of their hip-pockets as personal fiefdoms, so for example a battalion was more of an over-sized company. This worked on light-duty counter-insurgency missions, but the absence of a command structure made it impossible to coordinate combined arms missions across multiple units in battle, making the VNMC less than the sum of it's parts. Commanders' personal charisma mattered a lot, the phrase 'mandate of heaven' is invoked, but units tended to fall apart if their commanders broke or became incapacitated. The worst criticism is reserved for ARVN General "Old Bloody Hands" Lam, who ordered the VNMC to act as a rear-guard for Lam Son 719 without a plan for their extraction except 'die to a man', apparently as the end-stage of some decade-long political feud in the RVN armed forces.
Anybody with a passing interest in the Vietnam War knows that the advisory system never really worked, and that in the end ARVN was defeated by the NVA. But this is not the book to provide much context for why that happened, except that by 1970 it was probably too late for everybody concerned.
In 1970, Miller returned to Vietnam as a USMC Major, adviser to a VNMC Battalion. His previous combat tour as company commander and 3-month Vietnamese immersion course only partially prepared him for his new job. Unlike Army advisers, who deployed with a small team for backup, Marine advisers served alone, living on Vietnamese rations, with only the radio net and occasional trips back home as connection with the world. It's these experiences that Miller focuses on, and they're a lot like any rifleman's except a little more adult. Meals are sketchy chicken cooked by an enlisted VNMC "cowboy" servant rather than C-rations. Officers get drunk and get in trouble in Saigon, if a little less frequently than privates. There's the same political games with idiotic superiors, except that they have flag rank here.
Miller's tour overlapped a key period in Nixon's 'Vietnamization' draw-down, when the Vietnamese would have to take over fighting the war themselves. By and large, by this point the Vietnamese were experienced veterans, and Miller's duties apparently consisted mostly of coordinating logistics and air strikes, which were still American run. Most tellingly, Miller took a week off for R&R in the middle of Operation Lam Son 719; the critical test invasion of Laos by RVN forces in 1971. Only one adviser was allowed over Laos at a time, so there was little that Miller and his comrades could do aside from shelter from NVA artillery at Khe Sanh and listen to the radio, but even a professional and committed adviser like Miller seemed fairly checked out at this stage in the war.
I was really hoping for some sort of insight into the advising relationship across cultural barriers, but aside from some awkward moments of "He speaks our language?" from both Vietnamese and Americans, the details of the advisory relationship remain opaque. I was also hoping that Miller would rebut, confirm, or at least expand upon the common charges that RVN forces were cowardly, corrupt, and incompetent, but his assessment of the Vietnamese military is confined to about 10 pages at the end of the book, where he notes that Vietnamese officers tended to run their units out of their hip-pockets as personal fiefdoms, so for example a battalion was more of an over-sized company. This worked on light-duty counter-insurgency missions, but the absence of a command structure made it impossible to coordinate combined arms missions across multiple units in battle, making the VNMC less than the sum of it's parts. Commanders' personal charisma mattered a lot, the phrase 'mandate of heaven' is invoked, but units tended to fall apart if their commanders broke or became incapacitated. The worst criticism is reserved for ARVN General "Old Bloody Hands" Lam, who ordered the VNMC to act as a rear-guard for Lam Son 719 without a plan for their extraction except 'die to a man', apparently as the end-stage of some decade-long political feud in the RVN armed forces.
Anybody with a passing interest in the Vietnam War knows that the advisory system never really worked, and that in the end ARVN was defeated by the NVA. But this is not the book to provide much context for why that happened, except that by 1970 it was probably too late for everybody concerned.