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mburnamfink
That was fucking incredible!
Harry August is an Ouroboroun, a member of an immortal subtype who live the same life again and again. Ouroborouns have organized their shadow society under the banner of the Cronus Club, which exists to aid their members through the first few agonizing "wait, what?" of their repeated lives, and aid their members through the boredom of a childhood where they already know everything and then escaping the disaster of history. The Cronus Club is a kind of anti-illuminati, self-policing members to avoid meddling in history.
But then a message is passed down through time, a young child appearing at the deathbed of a member to say "The world is ending, the future is shortening, and we don't know why. Please stop it." While Ouroborouns are difficult to kill through linear means, they can have their memories erased, losing centuries of knowledge, and can be eliminated permanently by preventing the circumstances of their birth.
The first half of this novel is a leisurely exploration of the Ouroboroun existence, the second a rocket of intrigue with Harry matched up against another member of his clade who wishes to create a device called the quantum mirror, a machine which will give perfect knowledge of the universe. The man who is creating the mirror needs technology far in advance of his time of the late-20th century, and his meddling may be driving the end of history. This novel was too good to blemish the review with spoilers, but I greatly enjoyed it.
Harry August is an Ouroboroun, a member of an immortal subtype who live the same life again and again. Ouroborouns have organized their shadow society under the banner of the Cronus Club, which exists to aid their members through the first few agonizing "wait, what?" of their repeated lives, and aid their members through the boredom of a childhood where they already know everything and then escaping the disaster of history. The Cronus Club is a kind of anti-illuminati, self-policing members to avoid meddling in history.
But then a message is passed down through time, a young child appearing at the deathbed of a member to say "The world is ending, the future is shortening, and we don't know why. Please stop it." While Ouroborouns are difficult to kill through linear means, they can have their memories erased, losing centuries of knowledge, and can be eliminated permanently by preventing the circumstances of their birth.
The first half of this novel is a leisurely exploration of the Ouroboroun existence, the second a rocket of intrigue with Harry matched up against another member of his clade who wishes to create a device called the quantum mirror, a machine which will give perfect knowledge of the universe. The man who is creating the mirror needs technology far in advance of his time of the late-20th century, and his meddling may be driving the end of history. This novel was too good to blemish the review with spoilers, but I greatly enjoyed it.
These days we take the news for granted. The mix of factual reporting about things that happened recently, editorial commentary, and subscriptions advertising for financial support, seems obvious and permanent, whether it's in legacy print media, 24/7 cable, or radio supported by listeners like you. But of course, this wasn't always the case. There was a time when news itself was novel.
Russkaja - Here Is The News
Pettegree walks through the technological and social revolution that created news as we know it, from the 14th century to the 18th century. This revolution relied on two key bits of technology. The first was the printing press, and mechanical reproduction of text. The second was the postal service, as the ad hoc communication systems of the Middle Ages were converted to reliable and rapid courier routes that blended imperial political authority with commercial needs.
The social revolution is more diffuse, but roughly tracks with the rise of the bourgeois. Initially, the class of people who had to be informed of events was the relatively small political elite of the aristocracy, their religious counterparts in the leading figures of the Catholic Church, and a handful of international merchants. But through the early modern period, this grew to encompass the rising urban bourgeois, as well as those who saw themselves ideologically linked with the new conflicts of the Protestant Reformation.
The mature newspaper appears only at the end of this period, but Pettegree traces several intermediates. The first are printed pamphlets, a common and profitable venue for print shops which had filled out local demand for bibles and Greek and Latin classics. Pamphlets covered a single topic in detail, which could be news-like, such as significant recent battle, but often were astonishing and monstrous occurrences (fire in the sky, animals born of women, etc), and lurid accounts of murder that could be reprinted for decades after the actual event.
Another format was the avvisi, a hand-written account of significant events dispatched to a distant place. Avvisi's were born in Italy, and were narrow insider accounts of political maneuverings, private intelligent subscribed at great cost for an elite audience. But the information of the avvisi penetrated into the public sphere of oral accounts and rumors, passing from the great and influential to the small and often drunk. "What news?" became a greeting on the strength of reliable and distant truths in avvisis.
The newspaper, a serial, subscribed, and printed account of news only emerged in the late 17th century. Newspapers rapidly fell into two camps. One was anodyne official gazettes which collected foreign news and avoided domestic reporting aside from pro-government propaganda, whatever that domestic government might be. A second form was the journal, an opinionated, specialist periodical, whether for men of philosophy, fashionable gentlemen, or those engaged in a particular branch of commerce. Journals were often one-man shows, and lasted until the writer-editor-publisher-circulation agent burnt out under the constant need for new content. Journals also pioneered the combination of advertising and reporting which is the devil's bargain of news. Much like the posts, which relied on government subsidy and commercial access to enable reliable transmission of letters, ordinary people are unwilling to fund the peacetime infrastructure to get the facts they need in moments of crisis.
The book ends just as it gets interesting, with newspapers playing a key political role in the democratic revolutions in America and France that ended the 18th century. I think there's a really sharp 100 page monograph in here, which is covered over with interesting, but vaguely irrelevant details. For me, this book answered a question which had been raised in Anderson's Imagined Communities about the role of newspapers in creating nationalism, by showing how newspapers created themselves and their readership.
Russkaja - Here Is The News
Pettegree walks through the technological and social revolution that created news as we know it, from the 14th century to the 18th century. This revolution relied on two key bits of technology. The first was the printing press, and mechanical reproduction of text. The second was the postal service, as the ad hoc communication systems of the Middle Ages were converted to reliable and rapid courier routes that blended imperial political authority with commercial needs.
The social revolution is more diffuse, but roughly tracks with the rise of the bourgeois. Initially, the class of people who had to be informed of events was the relatively small political elite of the aristocracy, their religious counterparts in the leading figures of the Catholic Church, and a handful of international merchants. But through the early modern period, this grew to encompass the rising urban bourgeois, as well as those who saw themselves ideologically linked with the new conflicts of the Protestant Reformation.
The mature newspaper appears only at the end of this period, but Pettegree traces several intermediates. The first are printed pamphlets, a common and profitable venue for print shops which had filled out local demand for bibles and Greek and Latin classics. Pamphlets covered a single topic in detail, which could be news-like, such as significant recent battle, but often were astonishing and monstrous occurrences (fire in the sky, animals born of women, etc), and lurid accounts of murder that could be reprinted for decades after the actual event.
Another format was the avvisi, a hand-written account of significant events dispatched to a distant place. Avvisi's were born in Italy, and were narrow insider accounts of political maneuverings, private intelligent subscribed at great cost for an elite audience. But the information of the avvisi penetrated into the public sphere of oral accounts and rumors, passing from the great and influential to the small and often drunk. "What news?" became a greeting on the strength of reliable and distant truths in avvisis.
The newspaper, a serial, subscribed, and printed account of news only emerged in the late 17th century. Newspapers rapidly fell into two camps. One was anodyne official gazettes which collected foreign news and avoided domestic reporting aside from pro-government propaganda, whatever that domestic government might be. A second form was the journal, an opinionated, specialist periodical, whether for men of philosophy, fashionable gentlemen, or those engaged in a particular branch of commerce. Journals were often one-man shows, and lasted until the writer-editor-publisher-circulation agent burnt out under the constant need for new content. Journals also pioneered the combination of advertising and reporting which is the devil's bargain of news. Much like the posts, which relied on government subsidy and commercial access to enable reliable transmission of letters, ordinary people are unwilling to fund the peacetime infrastructure to get the facts they need in moments of crisis.
The book ends just as it gets interesting, with newspapers playing a key political role in the democratic revolutions in America and France that ended the 18th century. I think there's a really sharp 100 page monograph in here, which is covered over with interesting, but vaguely irrelevant details. For me, this book answered a question which had been raised in Anderson's Imagined Communities about the role of newspapers in creating nationalism, by showing how newspapers created themselves and their readership.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. There's a magical school for wizards, which is currently attended by a great hero, and someone laboring under a chosen one prophecy. There's adventure, romance, magical discovery and unending rage at the class injustice of wizarding society and the fatal gauntlet that is school life.
*freeze frame, record scratch, how did I get here, etc*
Novik takes some incredibly tropey nonsense and remixes it into a fantastic deconstruction. Galadriel (call her El) is a student at the arcane academy, the Scholomance, where there are no kindly teachers, no trips home, and a whole lot of dangerous monsters looking to eat young wizards. As bad as school is, with it's 50% survival rate, wizards outside have about a 5% chance of seeing their 18th birthday.
One thing that's tilting the odds in their favor is the presence of Orion Lake, a monster slaying prodigy who kept hundreds of students alive, including El, not that she's grateful or anything. El is as prickly as a porcupine. As revealed in the first person narration, that's because she just rubs people the wrong way, possibly because they can tell she's a walking weapon of mass destruction with an innate talent for ripping the mana out of other wizards and using it to power killing spells. Her mother, Gwen, is some kind of hippie idealist living outside of wizard society. All of which has left her in a very precarious state. And that's before the prophecy that she might destroy everything.
Which is a problem, because wizard society is stratified between Enclavers, who have magically isolated communities to live in and resources to draw upon, and independents, who have to scrabble to survive, and exist mostly in the hopes that their lives will be a useful shield so that their children might make it in to an enclave. The politicking sucks, and El sucks at it in that special way of a combative, idealistic teenager.
There are monsters, challenges, weird magic, fraught friendships, and part one of what promises to be an incredible story.
*freeze frame, record scratch, how did I get here, etc*
Novik takes some incredibly tropey nonsense and remixes it into a fantastic deconstruction. Galadriel (call her El) is a student at the arcane academy, the Scholomance, where there are no kindly teachers, no trips home, and a whole lot of dangerous monsters looking to eat young wizards. As bad as school is, with it's 50% survival rate, wizards outside have about a 5% chance of seeing their 18th birthday.
One thing that's tilting the odds in their favor is the presence of Orion Lake, a monster slaying prodigy who kept hundreds of students alive, including El, not that she's grateful or anything. El is as prickly as a porcupine. As revealed in the first person narration, that's because she just rubs people the wrong way, possibly because they can tell she's a walking weapon of mass destruction with an innate talent for ripping the mana out of other wizards and using it to power killing spells. Her mother, Gwen, is some kind of hippie idealist living outside of wizard society. All of which has left her in a very precarious state. And that's before the prophecy that she might destroy everything.
Which is a problem, because wizard society is stratified between Enclavers, who have magically isolated communities to live in and resources to draw upon, and independents, who have to scrabble to survive, and exist mostly in the hopes that their lives will be a useful shield so that their children might make it in to an enclave. The politicking sucks, and El sucks at it in that special way of a combative, idealistic teenager.
There are monsters, challenges, weird magic, fraught friendships, and part one of what promises to be an incredible story.
The Golden Enclaves did not stick the landing.
We pick up right where book two left off, El on the outside with her book of precious enclave building spells, the monsters of the world lured into the Scholomance which has been abandoned in the void, and Orion Lake still inside. Fixing El and fixing the world is going to have to wait, because something is attacking enclaves by destroying their foundations.
There's a whirlwind tour of the wider wizarding world, and it is pretty cool to see the various unreal places and what a senior witch looks like. But the basic purity of plot and characterization gets lost in an ethical metaphor with is about as subtle as a slap to the face.
See, magic takes power, which can be generated in two ways. One is strict mana, internally from the caster and willing allies, on banked reserves which accumulate at a trickle. The fast and easy path is malia, pulling energy from living things, which escalates from "harmless" beetles and patches of grass to bloody human sacrifice. Each act of malia creates a wound which generates a monster, which will be trouble for another wizard later on, especially a young one without much power or knowledge.
In particular, enclaves are built on a foundation stone in the void, and the act of setting that foundation requires a human sacrifice and the creation of a maw mouth, the implacable worst horror in the world. The home that every wizard wants is built on unspeakable polluting evil.
We wouldn't know anything about the foundations of our lives being a toxic mess for our children
Oh, and there's also some stuff about Orion Lake being a human maw mouth, a monster wearing the skin of a boy, and his mother being the most evil witch in centuries. But this doesn't really matter, and El completes her shift from protagonist to Young Adult Main Character, living in a world defined by how much people understand and appreciate her immense power and morale clarity.
On a sentence to sentence level, this book is fine, but the series proves that questions are better than answers. I spent my time with The Last Graduate racing to see how it ended. I put this book aside for the night with two chapters left because I knew it could only go one way.
We pick up right where book two left off, El on the outside with her book of precious enclave building spells, the monsters of the world lured into the Scholomance which has been abandoned in the void, and Orion Lake still inside. Fixing El and fixing the world is going to have to wait, because something is attacking enclaves by destroying their foundations.
There's a whirlwind tour of the wider wizarding world, and it is pretty cool to see the various unreal places and what a senior witch looks like. But the basic purity of plot and characterization gets lost in an ethical metaphor with is about as subtle as a slap to the face.
See, magic takes power, which can be generated in two ways. One is strict mana, internally from the caster and willing allies, on banked reserves which accumulate at a trickle. The fast and easy path is malia, pulling energy from living things, which escalates from "harmless" beetles and patches of grass to bloody human sacrifice. Each act of malia creates a wound which generates a monster, which will be trouble for another wizard later on, especially a young one without much power or knowledge.
In particular, enclaves are built on a foundation stone in the void, and the act of setting that foundation requires a human sacrifice and the creation of a maw mouth, the implacable worst horror in the world. The home that every wizard wants is built on unspeakable polluting evil.
We wouldn't know anything about the foundations of our lives being a toxic mess for our children
Oh, and there's also some stuff about Orion Lake being a human maw mouth, a monster wearing the skin of a boy, and his mother being the most evil witch in centuries. But this doesn't really matter, and El completes her shift from protagonist to Young Adult Main Character, living in a world defined by how much people understand and appreciate her immense power and morale clarity.
On a sentence to sentence level, this book is fine, but the series proves that questions are better than answers. I spent my time with The Last Graduate racing to see how it ended. I put this book aside for the night with two chapters left because I knew it could only go one way.
Writing software is easy.
Writing software that doesn't suck is actually hard.
4 of 5 developers enjoy code review
And maybe I'm cranky because I've spent 13 hours in meetings these past few weeks with the only take-away being that people still do not understand basic elements of our technology stack, but writing software in a modern, collaborative, agile, corporate environment is really hard. And it's rarely the tech these days, it's the people.
I was introduced to Domain-Driven Design in Architecture Patterns with Python, and thought the concept was interesting enough to be worth some research. This is the short (100 page) version of Evans (400+ page) big book.
Brevity is a blessing and a curse. Certainly, this book is very approachable, but the basic idea of isolating business logic in domains such that a mental model of a business process is easily mapped to a software object, and then using abstract repositories so that you're not tied to specific implementations of a technology, is pretty obvious. The jargon of aggregates and immutables could use some better explaining.
And the actual work of getting fundamentally confused people from many units to work together is left as an exercise for the reader.
Writing software that doesn't suck is actually hard.
4 of 5 developers enjoy code review
And maybe I'm cranky because I've spent 13 hours in meetings these past few weeks with the only take-away being that people still do not understand basic elements of our technology stack, but writing software in a modern, collaborative, agile, corporate environment is really hard. And it's rarely the tech these days, it's the people.
I was introduced to Domain-Driven Design in Architecture Patterns with Python, and thought the concept was interesting enough to be worth some research. This is the short (100 page) version of Evans (400+ page) big book.
Brevity is a blessing and a curse. Certainly, this book is very approachable, but the basic idea of isolating business logic in domains such that a mental model of a business process is easily mapped to a software object, and then using abstract repositories so that you're not tied to specific implementations of a technology, is pretty obvious. The jargon of aggregates and immutables could use some better explaining.
And the actual work of getting fundamentally confused people from many units to work together is left as an exercise for the reader.
Chasm City might be my favorite Reynolds. Here, he steps down from the cosmological stakes of Revelation Space to explore a classic noir revenge plot across three timelines.
Tanner Mirabel is a security specialist aiming to finish one last job. His mistakes lead to the deaths of his employer Caheulla and Caheulla's wife Gitta at the hands of wealthy aristocrat Reivach. Reivach is fleeing the war-torn planet of Sky's Edge for the wealth and safety of Yellowstone, the capitol system of human space, which means that Tanner has to follow.
After a classic action-packed escape from a space elevator cut by a nuclear bomb, Tanner awakens in orbit above Yellowstone and discovers several uncomfortable truths. First, he's lost his memories. Second, he's dreaming of the mythical founder of Sky's Edge, Sky Hausmann, likely due to infection by an indoctrinal virus. Third, Yellowstone is no longer a shining wonderland, but in the near-lightspeed transit time there, has been devastated by the nanotech Melding Plague. But even with all that has changed, there's still the mission of revenge.
Tanner gets sucked into the underworld of Chasm City, centered around a healing drug called Dream Fuel, and a deadly human hunt played by bored immortals. Meanwhile, we uncover more of Sky's journey on a generation ship, and the paranoia and crimes which led to the permanent war on Sky Edge. And Tanner explains the events back home that lead to all this.
The revelations of identity at the climax are a little a pat, and the dialogue stilted noir clichés, but something about the journey is greater than the sum of the pieces.
Tanner Mirabel is a security specialist aiming to finish one last job. His mistakes lead to the deaths of his employer Caheulla and Caheulla's wife Gitta at the hands of wealthy aristocrat Reivach. Reivach is fleeing the war-torn planet of Sky's Edge for the wealth and safety of Yellowstone, the capitol system of human space, which means that Tanner has to follow.
After a classic action-packed escape from a space elevator cut by a nuclear bomb, Tanner awakens in orbit above Yellowstone and discovers several uncomfortable truths. First, he's lost his memories. Second, he's dreaming of the mythical founder of Sky's Edge, Sky Hausmann, likely due to infection by an indoctrinal virus. Third, Yellowstone is no longer a shining wonderland, but in the near-lightspeed transit time there, has been devastated by the nanotech Melding Plague. But even with all that has changed, there's still the mission of revenge.
Tanner gets sucked into the underworld of Chasm City, centered around a healing drug called Dream Fuel, and a deadly human hunt played by bored immortals. Meanwhile, we uncover more of Sky's journey on a generation ship, and the paranoia and crimes which led to the permanent war on Sky Edge. And Tanner explains the events back home that lead to all this.
The revelations of identity at the climax are a little a pat, and the dialogue stilted noir clichés, but something about the journey is greater than the sum of the pieces.
I got turned on to this collection by a truly glowing review by Matthew Claxton in his Unsettling Futures newsletter, and I can confirm this book delivers. Sycamore Hill is an invite-only science fiction writer's workshop, the post-graduate version of Clarion and its ilk. Given that Bruce Sterling is my favorite living science-fiction author and I recognized a handful of names on the cover as heavy writers with big ideas and serious chops, I figured I'd give it a look.
I was really too young to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!
What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.
Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.
As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading!
I was really too young to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!
What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.
Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.
As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading!
I've been trying to read more literary fiction, and Distant Star was on a cart outside a local used bookstore (my kryptonite). This novel is nominal about the relationship between the unnamed narrator and Carlos Wieder. Wieder infiltrated the narrator's student poetry workshop under an assumed name, and each chapter reveals a new and uncanny element to Wieder's personality: The aspiring poet, the Peronist hatchetman, the truly brilliant aviator, the avante-garde poet who skywrites his messages on the most insubstantial medium of them all, the hidden literary figure publishing under assumed names, the vicious serial killer using politics as an excuse for his crimes.
The novel loops elliptically through biographies of lies, alternative selves under different conditions, and the twinned meanings of art and crime and meaning itself. It's well crafted, breezy, yet clever. But ultimately, not my cup of tea. I may pause my project to improve my reading habits.
The novel loops elliptically through biographies of lies, alternative selves under different conditions, and the twinned meanings of art and crime and meaning itself. It's well crafted, breezy, yet clever. But ultimately, not my cup of tea. I may pause my project to improve my reading habits.
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
"Buy Now"
You've probably hit that little orange button on the world's largest e-commerce platform, but have you ever thought about the complexity and orchestration that is required to make whatever you want appear at your doorstep in no more than two days? Mims is a technology journalist by trade, and he traces the journey of a hypothetical USB charger from a factory in Vietnam to a house in the United States. This book is a fascinating tour of many facets of Logistics Space, and the people who make it work, with the book structured around extended interviews. And with global supply chains snarled by COVID-19, war in Ukraine, and the occasional shipping accident in the Suez Canal, the ability of things to (mostly) arrive today is a wonder.
Container cranes at the Port of Rotterdam. Wikimedia
The journey starts via cargo ship and shipping container, the omnipresent 40 foot boxes which contain pretty much every finished product we use, and the massive ships which carry them. There are nods to The Box by Levinson and Ninety Percent of Everything by George, but this is mostly prelude. The first bit of real action comes at the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach, where immense cranes rapidly unload containers onto automated carriers, which constantly shuffle containers to make sure that the ones which are to be loaded onto trucks and railcars immediately are at the top of the stack. The port is overseen by dwindling ranks of longshoremen, who's union made a Faustian bargain for some of the only decent wages of anyone in this story in return for unlimited automation that constantly cuts their numbers.
Long-haul trucking is the next branch. There are millions of commercial truckers who are vital to making things move, and they have tough lives driving massive big rigs in traffic and spending long weeks on the road. Trucking was substantially deregulated in the 1970s, lowering costs, but also cutting salaries from six figures in contemporary dollars to an average of $48,000 a year. I'm interested in following up with sociologist Steve Viscelli, who is producing scholarly work on truckers.
The truck finally arrives at an Amazon fulfillment center, and this is where Mims launches into the rhetoric of the technological sublime as it relates to logistics and its culminating ideology, Bezosism. More than the scientific management of Taylorism, or the integrated production line of Fordism, Bezosism is a a total transformation of the solidity of stuff into the fluidity of an endless stream, weaving across shipping lanes and warehouses to be distributed evenly and precisely over the world. Bezosism is also a system of psychological management, not one of drill sergeant-like abuse, but of precisely calibrated metrics that ensure that a worker is moving as fast as they safely can, that they handle the sticky bits of sorting random loose items and stacking boxes that a child can do, and a billion dollar robotics program cannot. Mims' assessment of Amazon is based on his own interviews and On the Clock by Guendelsberger (one of my favorite books of 2021), as well as The Everything Store by Stone, but has its own unique spin.
Mims is a Wall Street Journal writer by day, and while he is captured by the sublime of logistics and the coolness of new technologies making it ever faster, he's also about as critical as he can be. In many respects, these are awful jobs: psychologically tedious and alienating, physically strenuous, and paying peanuts. The broken families of truckers and sailors, and the rising tide of people disabled by repetitive stress injuries in warehouses, are hidden social costs of a system which is reliable, fast, and cheap. Mims' sympathy has an aspect of the Great White Hunter tsk'ing 'shame' over a freshly killed tiger, and then reloading his rifle for another shot. Crocodile tears aside, this is a fascinating story about the people and tools of moving stuff in 2020, both engaging and deep, and synthesizing many books I like and ones I want to read into a cohesive whole.
You've probably hit that little orange button on the world's largest e-commerce platform, but have you ever thought about the complexity and orchestration that is required to make whatever you want appear at your doorstep in no more than two days? Mims is a technology journalist by trade, and he traces the journey of a hypothetical USB charger from a factory in Vietnam to a house in the United States. This book is a fascinating tour of many facets of Logistics Space, and the people who make it work, with the book structured around extended interviews. And with global supply chains snarled by COVID-19, war in Ukraine, and the occasional shipping accident in the Suez Canal, the ability of things to (mostly) arrive today is a wonder.
Container cranes at the Port of Rotterdam. Wikimedia
The journey starts via cargo ship and shipping container, the omnipresent 40 foot boxes which contain pretty much every finished product we use, and the massive ships which carry them. There are nods to The Box by Levinson and Ninety Percent of Everything by George, but this is mostly prelude. The first bit of real action comes at the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach, where immense cranes rapidly unload containers onto automated carriers, which constantly shuffle containers to make sure that the ones which are to be loaded onto trucks and railcars immediately are at the top of the stack. The port is overseen by dwindling ranks of longshoremen, who's union made a Faustian bargain for some of the only decent wages of anyone in this story in return for unlimited automation that constantly cuts their numbers.
Long-haul trucking is the next branch. There are millions of commercial truckers who are vital to making things move, and they have tough lives driving massive big rigs in traffic and spending long weeks on the road. Trucking was substantially deregulated in the 1970s, lowering costs, but also cutting salaries from six figures in contemporary dollars to an average of $48,000 a year. I'm interested in following up with sociologist Steve Viscelli, who is producing scholarly work on truckers.
The truck finally arrives at an Amazon fulfillment center, and this is where Mims launches into the rhetoric of the technological sublime as it relates to logistics and its culminating ideology, Bezosism. More than the scientific management of Taylorism, or the integrated production line of Fordism, Bezosism is a a total transformation of the solidity of stuff into the fluidity of an endless stream, weaving across shipping lanes and warehouses to be distributed evenly and precisely over the world. Bezosism is also a system of psychological management, not one of drill sergeant-like abuse, but of precisely calibrated metrics that ensure that a worker is moving as fast as they safely can, that they handle the sticky bits of sorting random loose items and stacking boxes that a child can do, and a billion dollar robotics program cannot. Mims' assessment of Amazon is based on his own interviews and On the Clock by Guendelsberger (one of my favorite books of 2021), as well as The Everything Store by Stone, but has its own unique spin.
Mims is a Wall Street Journal writer by day, and while he is captured by the sublime of logistics and the coolness of new technologies making it ever faster, he's also about as critical as he can be. In many respects, these are awful jobs: psychologically tedious and alienating, physically strenuous, and paying peanuts. The broken families of truckers and sailors, and the rising tide of people disabled by repetitive stress injuries in warehouses, are hidden social costs of a system which is reliable, fast, and cheap. Mims' sympathy has an aspect of the Great White Hunter tsk'ing 'shame' over a freshly killed tiger, and then reloading his rifle for another shot. Crocodile tears aside, this is a fascinating story about the people and tools of moving stuff in 2020, both engaging and deep, and synthesizing many books I like and ones I want to read into a cohesive whole.
Void Star is classic cyberpunk, dense and evocative without being a Gibsonian pastiche.
Irina is an AI whisperer, a unique talent with an implant that gives her perfect recall and the ability to link directly with computers. Kern is a favela slum-dweller, an autodidact martial artist seeking a warrior's perfect discipline. Thales is a damaged young man, the son of an assassinated politician who's health is balanced on the same kind of implant Irina has, but his is failing.
Irina and Kern both take ordinary kinds of jobs; Irina to debug an AI that has become abstracted from the will of its corporate master, immensely rich aspiring immortal Cromwell, and Kern to snatch a cellphone from a man in the San Francisco favela. These jobs draw them into an immense web of technological intrigue and sudden violence, involving AI, immortality, and absolute power.
The standout in this book is the prose: densely textured eyeball kicks in the finest tradition of the genre. This world, of buzzing drones, mutable favelas, private spa clinics, life extension as treadmill installment plan, powered armor guards at the gates of cities which have broken free of nations, drowned cities, abandoned mega-projects, underground fighting rings, all of has great imagination and specificity. I have high, but not infinite tolerance for dense and abstruse jargon and shifting points of view, and while Mason pushed my tolerances, he never abused it.
Irina is an AI whisperer, a unique talent with an implant that gives her perfect recall and the ability to link directly with computers. Kern is a favela slum-dweller, an autodidact martial artist seeking a warrior's perfect discipline. Thales is a damaged young man, the son of an assassinated politician who's health is balanced on the same kind of implant Irina has, but his is failing.
Irina and Kern both take ordinary kinds of jobs; Irina to debug an AI that has become abstracted from the will of its corporate master, immensely rich aspiring immortal Cromwell, and Kern to snatch a cellphone from a man in the San Francisco favela. These jobs draw them into an immense web of technological intrigue and sudden violence, involving AI, immortality, and absolute power.
The standout in this book is the prose: densely textured eyeball kicks in the finest tradition of the genre. This world, of buzzing drones, mutable favelas, private spa clinics, life extension as treadmill installment plan, powered armor guards at the gates of cities which have broken free of nations, drowned cities, abandoned mega-projects, underground fighting rings, all of has great imagination and specificity. I have high, but not infinite tolerance for dense and abstruse jargon and shifting points of view, and while Mason pushed my tolerances, he never abused it.