This is where I think the series begins slowing down. There are some wonderful moments (the opening on the Cricket pitch), and repeated jokes (what Paul McCartney could buy with a Krikkit folk song), but you know, it lacks that frenetic energy. Still amazing, though.

Definitely the lowest point in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. Not that it's bad, or anything, but the frenetic humor pauses for a bit to explore a question that I don't think anybody was ever interested in: what is Arthur Dent's love life like? The ending, with God's final message to creation, redeems everything, however.

The question of "what did Heinlein really think?" is open to debate. Is he a free love hippie, a la Stranger in a Strange Land? The ur-fascist militarist of Starship Troopers? The staunch survivalist of Time Enough for Love? The creepy racist and incest fan of books which shall not be mentioned?

I think that the 'real Heinlein' is on display here, in Space Cadet. Sure, it's one of his juveniles, but it deal with big issues, like what kind of people and institutions can be trusted to police a solar system and control forces which could wipe out all of humanity. The main characters are appealingly competent, well-meaning problem-solvers who through ingenuity, endurance, and diplomacy overcome the hazards of Space Patrol training, the asteroid belt, and the swamps of Venus. The book is solidly hard sci-fi, some hand-waving aside (waste products from nuclear rockets, the short range of radios, swamps on Venus), both in technology and sociology.

Now, the only open question I have is, is this a better book than Have Spacesuit, Will Travel?

One sentence review: cost-benefit analysis should be used for everything.
Second sentence review: because it means you can avoid real policy analysis by reducing everything to money at the highest levels and telling somebody else to do the important work.
Third sentence review: if every economics department in the country were to catch on fire, would anybody care?

The last book in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, a return to form for Douglas Adams, and all told, my favorite volume in the series. Perfect blend of humor, pathos, philosophy, and finishes with a bang.

Forgive me for going on a tangent here, but in grad school, which is ostensibly about producing a dissertation as part of becoming a scholar, we rarely are assigned to read other dissertations. I think this might be the first dissertation I've read.

Liachowitz advances the position that disabilities are not physiological or medical per se, but rather the results of public policies that make people disabled by consigning them to institutions, discouraging education and employment, and involvement in the community. This is a worthwhile thesis, and one I agree with, but the specific evidence here is not well mustered. If poor policies are a result of pre-existing prejudice against the disabibled, then prejudice is the object of investigation. If it is outdated legal precedents, then those need to be fully traced from their origins to the present, not simply alluded to. The most interesting scholarship is the most distant, Colonial and Revolutionary era laws concerning care of the handicapped. As the work moves into the Industrial and Progressive eras, the work becomes scattered and unfocused.

This stuff (PhDing) is starting to look disturbingly hard.

I'd put off the Red Mars trilogy for years, for some various bad reasons, but finally got around to it, and well--God. Damn. This is an amazing book!

KSM explores the consequences of colonizing Mars in the best traditions of hard science-fiction, blending both imaginative and plausible technology with the realistic tensions of ideology, power, and politics that arise when ambitious people reach a frontier. The 'areology' of Mars is beautifully realized, the stark, cold, dusty planet is very much a character in it's brutal transition to life. Sure, this book is perhaps a little longer than it needs to be, too many similar reveries about isolation and freedom and change from characters who are little too much alike. But the magisterial vision of space colonization and its problems makes up for all that.

This book has to be history, because nobody could make up something so bizarre.

Scion of a wealthy Pasadena family, Parsons was one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry (JATO, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, castable fuels), despite a lack of formal training or credentials. At the same time as he was turning rocketry from a pursuit for cranks into a pillar of the Military-Industrial Complex, Parsons was deeply involved in black magic, and was the high priest of the a Crowleyite Satanic lodge, where wife-swapping and sex magic were performed with an every changing crew of Hollywood types, leftist radicals, and science-fiction freaks, including L. Ron Hubbard (yes, that L. Ron Hubbard).

Pendle charts Parsons' rise through the mirrored worlds of rocketry and magic, and then his tragic and sudden decline as his bizarre lifestyle proved incompatible with top secret research in the paranoid political climate of the late 40s, and a series of bad decisions (most involving L. Ron Hubbard) shattered his social circles and finances. Parsons' death in a mysterious explosive accident seems the only fitting end for this forgotten figure of spaceflight, and the 'occult Che Guevara'.