With To Say Nothing of the Dog Connie Willis significantly improves on Domesdays Book by writing a tolerable and even gripping parody of Victorian comedy-of-manners, as well as engaging with some paradoxes of time travel.

Ned Henry is a time travelling historian with a major problem named Lady Shrapnell, a wealthy eccentric who is trying to reconstruct the destroyed Coventry Cathedral in honor of her great-great grandmother. He's been sent back to Coventry in 1940 in search of some monstrous piece of art called the Bishop's Birdstump so many times that he's totally and completely time-lagged, which comes with symptoms like Difficulty Hearing and Excessive Sentimentality and Speaking in Rhyming Couplets. He's sent back on an easy mission to 1888, just drop off a something with someone somewhere (difficulty hearing, again), and relax for two weeks until the time lag clears.

Of course, nothing goes easy. Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler has brought a cat forward in time. The whole space-time continuum may be on the very of unraveling, and Ned has to set it right before he's grandfather paradoxed himself (and possibly the entire universe) out of existence. Meanwhile, he has to entertain a love-besotted Oxford student, an absent-minded professor, adorably pushy animals, an airheaded debutante, and a Spiritualism obsessed matron. The plot careens through various comedic situations before resolving in a spectacular flurry of precisely plotted time-travel.

This book is a lot more fun and convincing than Domesday Book, probably because Willis is able to draw so heavily from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, P. G. Wodehouse, and a host of English comedic writers. The exact extent of the derivation is left to readers more familiar with the genre. She also engages with the time travel aspect of the plot, with time lag as a humorous complication, a debate about what matters in making history-individuals or grand forces, and a reasonably coherent explanation for the durability of the space-time continuum based around the anthropic principle and the forcing of co-incidence in a complex system where everything is connected.

However, the time travel is about as deep as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, without some of the truly weird stuff that happens when you can run timelines non-linearly. The book takes about 150 pages to get going, and spends far too much time cooing over dumb animals. And on a personal note, To Say Nothing of the Dog beat Bruce Sterling's Distraction for the Hugo in 1999, which makes me want to time travel back to WorldCon and Kanye-Swift the ceremony.

There has to be some long German word that describe the sensation of reading this book. It's like watching a trainwreck in slow motion, with optimistic spin by the conductor and passengers, while you know exactly how the metal is going to crumple and who's going to be impaled on a luggage rack.

As part of the PR for Dune, the production company arranged for reporter and scifi fan Ed Naha to hang around on set and interview the cast and crew. The idea was to convince true fans that was going to be a faithful adaptation. Don't worry guys, David Lynch is a visionary, Raffaella De Laurentiis is an organization genius, the cast and crew are dedicated professionals. And at a glance all of that is true. But behind the scenes, chaos reigned.

I've never worked on a movie, but I hear that they're stressful at the best of times. Mexico City, 1983 was not the best of times. The Churubusco Studies were huge but dilapidated. Power and phone lines worked intermittently. Film, paint, parts for special effects and costumes got held up in customs for weeks. The entire cast and crew came down with stomach bugs, respiratory ailments, and various forms of insanity. The $40 million movie was stretching over 3 hours, and David Lynch kept improvising new scenes. Kyle MacLachlan had never been in a movie before. Raffaella was trying to prove something to her dad.

And the filming itself. Jesus, the filming is indescribable. Artificial duststorms and choking clouds of smoke from tire fires to get the right effect. Extras passing out in their stillsuits and Sardukar uniforms. Costumes made out of 50 pounds of rope. Elaborate sets made out of solid wood, and then miniatures made out of wood, because that was what the Mexican crew knew how to work with. One sound-stage was set up as 150 foot artificial sand dune. Which made sense, because desert filming nearly killed an actor from heatstroke. The other major outdoor location was a dump that the crew had to clear before they could film, and then post guards on to keep the locals from throwing more trash there. Kyle MacLachlan went out to fight a training robot with the friendly advice "Don't get killed." And finally a warehouse full of vital models burnt down.

Somehow through it all, the cast and crew interviewed keep up their spirits. The most jarring part of this book is how convinced everybody is that Dune is going to be great, that it's going to replace Star Wars as the great science fiction movie. Instead we got... Well, personally I love Lynch's Dune. I know it is not a good movie or a good adaptation, but it might be a great one. The Making of Dune is a fascinating look behind the scenes of a massively flawed masterpiece, a great piece of Hollywood ephemera, and chock full of cool stories of great actors and the heyday of practical effects.

Ender's Game is a lightning bolt, a burning bush of a science fiction novel about war, about personal greatness, and about the price of doing what is necessary. A few centuries in the future, mankind is locked in a war against the insect-like buggers. Humanity survived the first two invasions by the barest margins. To win the third, the International Fleet is training a cadre of military geniuses. Young children forced through an intensive regime to become the very best.

Ender Wiggin is the best of them, Earth's last hope. At six years old, he is plucked away from his family, distant parents, loving sister, monstrous brother, and brought to the Battle School. Battle School is a continual test centered around the Game: zero-gravity laser tag between teams of 40 children. Ender is separated from his peers by his teachers, particularly the enigmatic Colonel Graff, because his fulfillment as a leader requires that he be absolutely alone, unable to rely on anybody else. Ender faces down his demons and his enemies, whom he destroys utterly even as he wants them to love him. He's rushed through Battle School at double pace, because {SPOILERS} the Third Invasion is the human attack against the buggers, and Ender needs to lead the fleet. He thinks that it's one last game, a holographic video game, but it's all real, and Ender turns a weapon of mass destruction against the bugger homeworld and destroys them, utterly.

There is so much to love about this book. The writing is clear like a glacial lake, perfectly readable on the surface but full of subtext that rewards rereading. The setting, as dribbled through details and extrapolations, is wonderful: Strict population control, dueling superpowers held together by a half-believed bugger threat. The International Fleet as a force unto itself, using arcane super-technology. The B plot, where Ender's earthbound siblings plot world domination by clever blog posts, seems unrealistic today, but it shows a better understanding of the power of computer networks than last year's winner Neuromancer.

Where this book shines in its character study of Ender. He is intelligent, moral, decisive, but ultimately empathetic. He understands his enemies, fighting dispassionately and without false mercy. He even begins to understand the alien bugger. He wants to do something good, but is being shaped into a weapon of terrible purpose by men who believe that only total war can ensure survival for humanity. Ender doesn’t want to be a murder, but his skill and training towards total victory lead him to kill his bullies, twice. And then at the end of a brutal course of training, burnt out and bone tired, Ender makes a terrible choice. “The enemy’s gate is down”, as the book says, and seeing it as an escape from the rules of the military game that has trapped him, Ender directs what he believes to be a simulation to destroy the enemy’s home world, committing a crime on an interstellar scale. The book ends with a dream-like coda of Ender trying atone for what he’s done in the new human galaxy.

It’s impossible not to like Ender, even when he becomes monstrous or saintly. I think his story of alienation, of being set apart from the crowd, has a lot of resonance for scifi fans. The tiredness, the bone dead tiredness of having to run a rat race over and over and find meaning in something meaningless, also has wide appeal. I read Ender’s Game to pieces as a teenager. It’s a book that means almost as much to me as Dune. But looking back at it with adult eyes, it’s a fantasy that because you’re a little smarter and different from the people around you, that you’re better than them. It might be a necessary defense mechanism, but it’s also the worst kind of nerd elitism.

Military history is another hobby of mine, and I both love and hate how Battle School is presented. Card’s introduction talks about leadership as the key element between a victorious army and a defeated mob. Future wars in space will require new leaders, and new forms of training. Compared to Starship Troopers, which takes a very Citizen Soldier approach to elite infantry, Ender’s Game sifts for the future Alexander or Napoleon. But I want to see the chain of reasoning that lead to ‘and now children will command the battlefleet’.

And on the final word, these days it impossible to talk about Card without mentioning his descent into deep homophobic bigotry and right-wing extremism. People have psychoanalyzed Ender’s Game for closeted homosexuality and weird fascist tendencies. But regardless of what Card has become, Ender’s Game is a wonderful, humane, and humanistic book, and I prefer remember the young man who wrote a true masterpiece.

Plaxco is a strong introduction to astrobiology, an undergraduate level textbook that is on the 'science' side of 'popular science'. Defining life as "a self-replicating chemical system capable of evolving such that such that it's offspring might be better suited for survival", Plaxco and Gross launch into a history of life on Earth from the Big Bang, and the prospects for the future discovery of life.

As a chemist, Plaxco is biased towards chemistry as the most important part of the question about life. Starting from the fundamental constants of the universe, he argues that elemental abundance and the energy required for chemical reactions means that life will likely be carbon-based and require liquid water. From that, the chemistry gets rather complex. The Miller-Urey 'primordial sludge' experiments show that amino acids are spontaneously generated from pretty basic elements, but doesn't explain how they can link into self-reproducing chains. There was probably a primitive 'RNA world' which has been entirely erased by the exponentially more potent metabolisms and evolutionary capacities of modern bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. The sections on the evolution of metabolism and genetics are a slog of chemistry. The last bit, surveying the potential for life on Mars and gas giant moons is a good run down of contemporary science, although this field advances one probe at a time, and some observations may be substantially updated since then.

The over-all impression is that some kind of micro-biological life is probably quite common. Detecting it, particularly at stellar distances, is another matter entirely.

Chabon is one of those indisputable geniuses, who manages to garner praise from the literary elite, genre audiences, and the popular press. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a stylish alternate history novel and noir thriller centered around Jewish Alaska and human destiny.

Yeah, Jewish Alaska. In 1940 the United States decided to settle Jewish Refugees around Sikta, a plan that in our timeline was blocked by Anthony Dimond. With the influx of refugees, the Holocaust only killed 2 million Jews, Israel lost its war for independence, and the timeline diverged in a thousand small ways. Though they live in Alaska, the Sitka Jews certainly aren't Americans, and in two months their Yiddish-speaking quasi-nation will cease to exist, as it reverts back to the United States at the end of the 60 year treaty.

Meyer Landsman is a homicide detective with the Sikta police force, who's slow-motion suicide via plum brandy is interrupted when one of the other residents in his fleabag motel is murdered. It's just another heroin junkie dead, but he's a neighbor, and Meyer makes it a mission to give the young man some peace, despite the warnings of his partner and cousin Johnny Berko (a massive half-Indian Jew) and his new boss and ex-wife Bima, who's trying to hand the transition authority a clean desk. Meyer stumbles into something much bigger than he is. The dead man is Mendel Shpilman, estranged son of the Orthodox Rabbi/Organized Crime Boss, and a plausible candidate for Tzadik ha-Dor, a potential Messiah born every generation. Hardboiled detective work mixes with international espionage, applied eschatology, and the blend of love and betrayal that means family.

The idea that is at heart of this book is "a twist in his soul", a beautiful phrase used to describe the dead Mendel, which refers to both his Messianic blessings, his easy genius, his homosexuality, and his eventual addiction and death. The twist is in Meyer, in his obsession with homicide work, the deep wounds that he believes he inflicted on his father and ex-wife, in the whole topsy-turney world of Jewish Sitka and the deals that threaten to make it and unmake. Chabon writes in a way that implies that we are all twists; little vortexes in the great flow of life.

And of course, he's a fantastic descriptive writer, a miracle worker of his own with metaphor and the senses. Jewish Sikta feels alive in a way that is rare in literature, in all of its rich contradictions. It's a modern city and an overgrown shtetl where everyone is related and tied into a rich web of gossip; the chief divine is also the chief gangster; and escape from the past is impossible even as it's being obliterated.

I could gripe (I always can), that perhaps the pastiche of noir is little more than pastiche, that the women in this world, Meyer's ex-wife Bina, dead sister Naomi, and the Rabbi's wife Batsheva, are more interesting than the men, and sadly under-served by the story. Perhaps even that the alternate history is a mere gloss that does little to expand the discussion of Jewishness. But this are minor complaints against the power of this masterpiece.

*****

August 2012 review

One part Philip Roth Jewish kvetching, one part Raymond Chandler hardboiled detective, and a dash of Philip K Dick alt-history, this book is a wonder. I won't ruin the plot, but all I can say is that Chabon is an undisputed grandmaster of sensual writing. Jewish Sitka is one of the realist fictional places I've read about, the predicament of its fundamentally lost characters all too familiar.

Who needs sleep when you have literature?

Barrayar picks up right after Shards of Honor, in much the same way that a JATO-powered VW bug picks up after a horsedrawn wagon. Cordelia has one a few months to enjoy her marriage before Aral Vorkosigan becomes Regent of Barrrayar and she's thrust back into the fatal whirl of Barrayaran politics. Aral has to hold the planet together for 15 years, until Prince Gregor comes of age, and Cordelia has to hold Aral together. Meanwhile, she's dealing with medieval culture shock, the confused love-lives of her favorite staffers, and Sergeant Bothari's brittle sanity.

The action kicks off almost immediately with a Soltoxin gas assassination attempt that she and Aral survive by the thinnest of margins, but which grievously maims her unborn child. Immediately after, Lord Vondarian launches a military coup against the Vorkosigans, and Cordelia has to flee to the hills with the Child-Emperor until Aral can organize the resistance. And even though this book is over 20 years old, I hesitate to spoil the final third, which has some of the best raiding and most satisfying comeuppances I've read.

I said in my review of Shards of Honor that I didn't buy Cordelia as a lover, but I absolutely believe in her here as a fiercely protective wife and mother, as a clever and capable leader, and above all, as a fount of honor. Barrayar won the Hugo, and is everything that a great sci-fi novel should be.

*****

Updated from August 2014, for the Hugo read-through project.

In the final third, Cordelia takes her personal retainers into the palace on a desperate raid to end the rebellion before the embryonic Miles' uterine replicator tank fails. This is some of the most intense, heart-stopping action that I've encountered, because the personal and political stakes are so high. In the end, Cordelia confronts Vondarian and has Bothari kill him with a sword in the burning palace. It's an incredible moment, one where a very capable person takes a step into the realm of mythic archetypes. It makes me wonder a little bit about what Miles was told growing up. "Yeah, mom and Bothari killed a crown prince and a man who wanted be emperor."

As always, Bujold's talents are in characterization, and there are three major focuses here. Cordelia herself and her journey into motherhood, feels a little like one of those author-insert moments, but I don't mind because Bujold has some genuine humanistic wisdom to share about the responsibility of bringing life into the world. In a lot of ways, Cordelia is what Jubal Harshaw from Stranger in a Strange Land wishes he could be. The second are Kou and Drou, respectively one of Aral's officers maimed by disruptor fire and now trying to rebuild his life in a world that hates cripples, and the Crown Princess's bodyguard, a female commando officer from a society where war is a strictly masculine pursuit. The awkward young-adult romance is both cringe-worthy, and a lot more fun from the outside. Finally, there's Bothari. The psychopathic killer, war criminal and rapist, and mind-wiped for his sins. A man with barely any personality of his own, Bothari becomes what those around him need him to be, and Cordelia needs a hero. It's an interesting look at the kind of limited redemption a monster can achieve.

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be plausible.

Pham Xuan An was the man every reporter knew in wartime Saigon. From his favorite coffee house, the Givral, An had a deep network of sources at the highest levels of the government, and a talent for explaining the complexities of Vietnamese politics to American reporters. He wrote under his own name for Time, and checked the work of a decade of legendary journalists. At the same time, he was also the focal point of Intelligence Network H.63, a lone agent providing top level strategic intelligence to the Viet Cong, three times Hero of the People's Armed Forces, and a Colonel (later General) in the Communist intelligence system.

Berman focuses his biography on two major topics. An's Vietnamese patriotism contrasted against his love of America and Americans (An regarded the best years of his life as the ones he spent at Orange Coast College in California in 1958 and 59), and his ongoing relationships with his friends after the war ended and he shed his cover. The relentless justification of An as a good man can be somewhat wearying--and I agree with the assessment that he was essentially a good person. He told the truth to both Americans and Vietnamese, and his strategic intelligence was about the direction of American strategy and the personal qualities of ARVN commanders rather than tactical intelligence that would lead directly to Americans getting killed. (With one notably exception of An personally reconnoitering Saigon for the 1968 Tet Offensive). General Giap put it best, due to An it was as if the Communists were in the American War room. There was no such insight on the American/GVN side. Intelligence didn't shift who died, or why, but it made those deaths matter for strategic ends.

The Fall of Saigon was the most fraught time for An. He sent his family out of the country on a Time plane, and helped his old friend Tran Kim Tuyen, head of counter-intelligence for Diem, escape on the last helicopter out of Saigon. Resolutely American in his style of thought, An didn't thrive under the hard-edged North Vietnamese Cadres who ruled the united Vietnam. He escaped the worst of the re-education camps due to his service, and brought his family back in 1979 ("The worst decision of my life", An says), but never reclaimed his contacts or position of influence.

I wish Berman had done a better teasing apart the similarities and differences of being a reporter and a spy, and gone a little bit more into the actual business of intelligence work. But I can also sympathize with difficulty of pinning down a subject who spent his whole life living with two loyalties, or really driving the question home on an old friend and old man dying of emphysema. This book didn't grab me as much as I wish it had, but it's a fascinating picture of who really won and lost the Vietnam War.

Everything Change is like the title says, an anthology of climate fiction based on a large contest (743 stories from all over the world), sponsored by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, and headed by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Climate fiction, a sub-genre of science fiction concerned with climate change and adaptation, is necessarily and sadly political. In an era when a prominent climate denier just won an election, stating the truth of anthropogenic global warming is an act of courage. Imagining a future beyond catastrophe takes even more courage.

There is a definite theme to these stories. Children, growing up in a drowning, diminished world. Adult, trying to hold on to the good parts of the past, without bitterness as the industrial civilization that got us into this mess. The stories that stuck out, Sunshine State, Acqua Alta, On Darwin Tides, were quite exceptional, the rest more middling. I couldn't shake the sense of despair, though. I could believe in the characters of these stories; I couldn't believe in the kids.

The authors aren't quite Names yet, but they're above the level of talented amateurs, and many have some publishing or workshop experience in their past. I expect to see at least one of them break through in the next year. If you're looking for climate fiction, and can deal with the thematic similarities, this collection can't be beat.

*Disclosure: I am an ASU PhD graduate and know the editors, but was not involved in any way with this collection.

Neil Gaiman intended this book as a kind of gothic homage to The Jungle Book, a coming of age tale about a boy raised by the dead and by supernatural monsters. The final product is frightfully twee, and that is about the extent of the frightfulness. It's a a horror novel for people's who limits of the uncanny end at the door to Hot Topic.

The story begins promising enough, with a mysterious man by the name of Jack knifing a family in their sleep, minus a wandering toddler who escapes to the safety of a nearby graveyard. The friendly ghosts their decide to raise the human child as one of their own, and young Nobody "Bod" Owens learns history from people who lived it, as well as supernatural powers like Fading, Haunting, and Dream Walking. He befriends ghosts and narrowly escapes death at the hands of ghouls. Brief encounters with the world of the living, as Bod tries to buy a gravestone for the ghost of a witch, and attend school while dealing with bullies, showcase his strangeness.

The real hazards from the beginning come back at the end, as it turns out that the murderous Jack is a member of a paranormal fraternity, the Jack of All Trades, and a prophecy describes how young Bod will end their order if not killed. Bod, and a living friend, lure the Jacks into the graveyard and disable them in various ways, finally entrapping the murderous Jack with an ancient Celtic grave-guardian.

As usual, Gaiman has some lovely images; a brief trip to hell with the ghouls and the danse macabre between the living and the dead being standouts, but the book as a whole feels lifeless, sketched out, overly stylized rather than dealing with real characters, living or dead.

We live in a world made of things. And far too many of those things are clumsy, stupid, painful to use, subtracting seconds, pleasure, and safety from our world. In this updated version of the classic The Psychology of Everyday Thing Things, Norman offers a quick introduction to human-centered design, a field that he pioneered, and to design as a discipline which can make the world better for human beings.

There are lots of examples and exhortations to be better designers, but the actual guidance is surprisingly light. Norman describes designed things in terms of affordances: the relationship between an objects, its environment, and users that describe what a thing can and cannot do, signifiers: which indicate the presence of affordances, mappings: which descriobe the relationship between controls and actions, feedback: which indicates the success or failure of a given course of action, and conceptual models: how a user imagines a device to work.

To these, Norman adds a seven stage action cycle. Starting with a goal, users plan, specify, and perform, executing a task in the world. Then they evaluate (perceive, interpret and compare) to see if the goal has been accomplished. People often make mistakes in this cycle, particularly due to the fallibilities of short term memory, or missing important information which is buried or not provided properly.

The acme of a designer is to stay as close to the customer as possible through this cycle, to understand what their goals really are, and their pre-existing cognitive models, and then come up with a thing that helps them achieve it. Marketers and engineers and bosses will be driven by what is possible, with matching the competition feature for feature. Designers need to advocate for their customers, for the idea of a more elegant world.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a fine introduction with a solid bibliography that deserves more attention. It seems a little basic for a design class, but I could definitely see using in an intro STS course.