Recently I stole the soapbox in another person's review of Shampoo Planet to pontificate about my personal reader's theory of Douglas Coupland. JPod was the first Coupland novel I read, and it is also my favourite. We all react to Coupland differently—i.e., JPod is my favourite, but some of my friends hate JPod with a passion and love Girlfriend in a Coma or Eleanor Rigby. Despite the fact that Coupland always deals with the same themes, his variations are subtle and diverse enough to create those kinds of reactions. And so, for me, JPod created in my mind the Platonic form of the "perfect Coupland novel", and every other experience I have with Douglas Coupland is like a junkie attempting to replicate the first perfect hit: I need something as good as JPod.

Player One comes close. As a story it doesn't endear itself like JPod. Yet its short length conceals a profound message, Coupland's attempt to answer the novel's subtitle: What is to become of us? Coupland delivers the novel in real-time over the course of five hour-long lectures that collectively form the 2010 Massey Lectures. You can't listen to them for free, unfortunately, but you can purchase the series on iTunes or CD if you care to listen to Coupland read the story aloud. I stuck with the printed version, but I kept in mind the novel's intended purpose. As I read, I imagined it would be like to hear those words projected in a dark theatre as a shared experience with hundreds of other people, or to hear them over the radio. (There is something profoundly connective about radio that even the Internet doesn't match.) This added an atmosphere to the entire experience of reading this book.

The OED's first recorded use of zeitgeist is from 1848, but this must be a mistake, because I feel like that word must have been invented to describe what Coupland is doing. He is chronicling the zeitgeist of our generations, this strange transition between the industrialized twentieth century to the post-industrial information society of the twenty-first century. And I really can't do his books justice in trying to go into more detail here, because I feel like deconstructing his work would just destroy the magic.

As anyone who has read more than one Coupland novel can attest, comparing Coupland Book X with Coupland Book Y is difficult because of how much Coupland reuses his motifs and themes. Still, I have to say it: Player One has a lot in common with his previous novel, Generation A. I liked Generation A but didn't love it, and now I want to go back and read it again to see if I missed anything. Both novels have several protagonists, with the narrator alternating among their limited perspectives. Both novels put the protagonists together in an isolated place and have them share stories and form bonds. Both are set in a somewhat apocalyptic world—Generation A more "post-apocalyptic" than Player One's decidedly apocalyptic setting. Finally, both involve a study empathy as part of a larger exploration of what it means to be human. This is the question that recurs throughout Player One: what separates humans from animals, from everything else in the cosmos? What makes us unique as a species—are we unique? Or are we merely just another expression of life—is the universe programmed to generate life over and over in a near-infinite variety of combinations?

If we want to analyze the characters in this book, we can do so in terms of how they empathize. Rachel is easy: she doesn't. Her various medical classifications mean she lacks the ability to express or interpret emotions, irony, humour, etc. She can't appreciate art. Her reason for going to the airport hotel lounge where our five characters end up is typical Coupland absurdism. Rachel is probably the character we would identify as the most "different" of the four, because of her medical condition. Sometimes though, she feels like she's the most human.

Luke and Rick are very similar because, as they themselves observe, their jobs both involve listening to people's confessions. Luke was a pastor, until he stole the church's renovation fund and skipped town the same afternoon that he lost his faith. Rick is a recovering alcoholic tending bar. Priests and bartenders alike listen to things people don't feel comfortable confiding in ordinary conversations: bars are a home to a tension between anonymity and intimacy that must be very welcoming at times.

Karen empathizes with everyone: her fifteen-year-old "she's going through a goth phase" daughter, Casey; the kid with the iPhone who takes a photo of her on the airplane; Warren, the man she flew out to meet in the bar after meeting him online; and then when the price of oil skyrockets and the world ends for a day or so, she empathizes with everyone in the bar. She even empathizes with the sniper who kills Warren and whom they eventually tie up inside the bar. I really like Rachel, but if I had to pick a favourite character I might choose Karen. Coupland gives her two excellent lines:

I think if people had real courage, they'd wear their Halloween costume every day of the year. At the very least, you'd make a lot more friends more quickly. Like, 'Hey, I like togas, too!' Or, 'Star Trek? I'm in.' Your costume would be a means of filtering down to the people you'd probably like the most.

I love this because that's exactly what we do online, and it's why I find it so much easier to be social online than I do offline. When interacting offline, it is very difficult to share information with other people. Until we start talking, clothing and body language are about the only indications of who we are and what we like, hence Karen's idea that we should all wear our Halloween costumes. On the Web, however, the "profile" is king. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, or my own website, when someone visits my profile, he or she can learn immediately whether we share similar interests. It's a very effective filtering mechanism.

Karen also asks her Internet date Warren whether he feels like his life is a story and then mentions that she thinks "the story part" or her life "is over".

Karen has noticed that young people no longer seem to care if their lives are stories. Not Casey, and not that little pervert on the flight earlier that afternoon. He'd probably no more view his life as a story than he would view his life as that of a sea cucumber. He and Casey inhabit a world of screen grabs, website hits, and precisely tabulated numbers of friends and enemies.

I think my life is a bit like a story, but Coupland has still hit upon truth here. When critics label my generation "apathetic" or "lazier" compared to previous generations, they are judging us using obsolete criteria. Anyone who grows up using the Internet actually learns differently from people who came before; our brains are wired differently. This has happened before: urbanization changed the way people think as children grew up in the suburbs instead of on a farm. Now it's happening again. Knowledge is no longer linear, no longer acquired by rote, and yes, we generally don't retain facts the same way that older people do, just as people in the twentieth century couldn't hold a candle peasants from the twelfth century (pre-literate oral memory for the win!). We don't memorize; we contextualize. Our lives are not linear; they are circular, elliptical, hyperbolic, and hypertextual. We are turning the Web from interconnected repositories of knowledge into an extension of our own minds.

And this is why I think that one of the reasons Coupland's more recent novels, such as JPod and even Generation A, resonate with me more than his older works. He has started to include the Internet and the Web in his meditations upon humanity. I spent my adolescence online. It is now a part of me and of my experiences in a very intimate way—after all, I'm using it now to convey these thoughts to anyone who happens to read them. Plenty of writers have meditated upon the effects of the Web on humans and human consciousness, and posthumanism is old hat in the science fiction community. Yet few do it the way Coupland does … Coupland studies these changes in a way that is almost spiritual. He is interested in how this technology alters us as beings and as a society of individuals.

Indeed, Player One is a microcosmic study of individualism in the digital age. What does it mean to be an individual when there are so many of us? What does it mean to be an individual if we are all connected?

And we're all waiting for It now, aren't we? Good old 'It'—the It who rains, the It we mean when we ask what time is It? I suppose It is the arrival of the Sentience. The arrival of the metamind that is us and yet much more than us. It is the Sentience that will eclipse us, that will encourage us, and shame us and indulge us. It is out there waiting. I'm certainly waiting—it's why I'm here, talking to you before I enter the New Normal, too.

I think it's possible and tempting to interpret Coupland's writing as prophetic at times, like in the passage above. Yet I am always wary of applying "prophetic" to people's words, because we are terrible at predicting the future. Rather, I think Coupland is merely describing and interpreting present-day trends. This is where he sees us going from where we are right now—not our inevitable future but the already-changing and shifting present. Because he's right that we are waiting. Some of us are literally waiting for the Singularity, or its religious equivalent, the Rapture. (I used to think I might be one of the former, but now I am not so sure.) Others are just waiting to see what is going to happen in a world of almost 7 billion people. This is what should happen:

Here's to all of us reaching out our hands to other people everywhere, reaching out to pull them from the icebergs on which they stand frozen, to pull them through the burning hoops of fire that frighten them, to help them climb over the brick walls that block their paths. Let us reach out to shock and captivate people into new ways of thinking.

With four characters in five hours, Douglas Coupland succinctly gets at what makes us human—part of what makes us human. We are different from other forms of life because we have the capacity for self-preservation not on the level of the individual or the pack but of the species entire. This has driven us to develop the tools to direct our own evolution, to direct the development of our consciousness, our minds, and our bodies. And it is making us increasingly connected, because as the world grows more crowded, how could we become anything else?

At times the extent to which Player One extrapolates this idea of inter-connectedness approaches Lovelockian proportions. Various characters float or espouse a Gaia-like hypothesis about the Earth or the universe. You don't have to agree with every idea in Player One—and I think, from the way he characterizes them on occasion as "woo woo" or "New Agey", that Coupland is not serious about them either. He includes them, rather, because they are essential to the subjects being discussed, and in order to challenge and provoke thought. I'm glad I don't agree with everything in this book, because it means I'm not praising it simply because it reflects what my pre-existing beliefs and opinions about life, humanity, and technology.

My edition of Player One clocks in at 246 pages. The last 31 of these pages are "Future Legend". Many of the terms described therein will be familiar: invariant memory (Platonic forms), memesphere ("the realm of culturally tangible ideas"); or, they will feel familiar even if we didn't have the vocabulary to articulate them so succinctly, e.g., "karaokeal amnesia" ("most people don't know the complete lyrics of almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear"). It's possible to read this glossary from start to finish, but it would be a chore (trust me, I tried). The book is over at this point, and this is an appendix, Coupland's demonstration that we have stretched our vocabulary to its limit and must invent more terms to describe the shift happening in our own lifetimes.

Last year I took a course called Philosophy & the Internet (online, obviously). In the second week we read a blog post by Clay Shirky: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable", in which Shirky points to the Internet as the death knell of print newspapers and argues that this is evidence we are in the midst of a revolution. Discussion sprang up over whether we agreed with this assertion. I was very vocal in my support of Shirky and this idea that we are experiencing a revolution. Even if I weren't, however, I think Player One would have convinced me. In five hours in an airport hotel lounge, Douglas Coupland could totally do that. What's even more amazing is the sense of unbridled optimism he manages to bundle along with his argument. Player One happens during a crisis of global proportions, and at the novel's end the world is not as it was; oil remains expensive and rationed, but people somehow adjust—they always do, is Coupland's message. The end of the world proves to be the dawning of a new world, and like the old world, the new one is a mixture of the good and the bad, of happiness and suffering, of crazy families and criminals and mothers and priests. Despite the fact that there's a sniper on the roof, a body outside the door, and a chemical explosion poisoning the air around the lounge, Coupland manages to persuade us that it's all going to work out fine. Somehow, against all odds, these people are going to make it out alive, and life will go on.

I needed that. Sometimes the panoply of information that reaches me is overwhelming. We are nearly 7-billion strong on this planet, but problems always seem to scale better than their solutions. Don't get me wrong: there are no assurances in this book that we will ascend, as a species, to a better place. There is still every chance that we will collectively stumble, faceplant, and give way to the next big evolutionary thing. But I feel like with Player One, Douglas Coupland is saying, "Not today." There is a very good chance we will, as a species screw up—but there's always a chance we won't. It's a very infectious sort of optimism, the same kind of optimism that's the reason I love Doctor Who so much. ("Let's get in a big blue box and see what's out there! Let's poke it with a stick! Let's be so very human!")

It's also an optimism that has to steep, which is why I am glad I write reviews. Initially Player One left me with a warm but vaguely befuddled feeling—typical "Coupland, man, he's weird". So I sat down to write about how I liked Player One, but…. And then, as I sometimes do when writing reviews, I discovered that there isn't a "but". At every turn, despite my most valiant efforts, it eluded me. That is a powerful thing for any book to do.

I’m not exactly up on the Chinese history; it’s not a subject that we covered much in school. Most of what I know comes by way of hazy pop culture references and exposure via the slightly counterfactual nature of science fiction and historical fiction. Moreover, having been born and raised subsequent to the Cold War and the height of anti-communist sentiment in the West, not to mention just after the Tienanmen Square incident, the history that features in Prisoner of the State belongs to that middle part of the twentieth century I fondly call the "lost years". If it happened after World War II, we didn’t really talk much about it in school. So I try to remedy that oversight by reading about it on my own time. I can’t quite recall what put Prisoner of State on my radar. It’s been on my to-read list for a few years now. My public library in Thunder Bay didn’t have a copy, so I had relegated it to the "to buy, eventually" shelf. Fortunately, I managed to find a copy in the Suffolk library system, so I jumped at the chance to read it now. And … it isn’t quite what I was expecting.

What strikes me the most about Zhao Ziyang is his unwavering focus on economic reform. From the title, not to mention the fact that he composed these thoughts while under house arrest, set me up to expect a more politically-focused tract. Knowing precisely nothing about Zhao, or indeed the structure of the Chinese leadership, prior to this point, I wasn’t prepared for Zhao’s intense, detailled discussions of how China’s economy changed in the latter part of the twentieth century. At times the minutiae become tedious, the trees threatening to rise up and swallow the forest. For the most part, though, Zhao’s account is enlightening.

Zhao’s discussion of the different paths that China could take in the 1980s provides an important context to the China that exists today. I now better understand the paradox of the People’s Republic of China: a country ruled by One Party where personal freedoms are constrained, but economic freedom has expanded markedly. Much of this is thanks to Zhao and his supporters, for they believed that the strict, centralized planned economy inherited via Stalin and Mao was doomed to failure, at least for a country the size of China. Zhao repeatedly explains that he could not abide the waste and inefficiency that resulted from a top-down, planned economy, and he saw more free-market solutions as the only way to drag China towards a twenty-first century where it could compete and interact at an international level.

That Zhao was not more interested in the political side of things might seem surprising to an outsider like me, but he also offers some insights into why this might be so. He admits that he was, at least until they came for him, fairly conservative regarding the possibility of the Party abusing its power. Like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he is complacent about the system until it turns against him. This is most evident when he contrasts himself and his associate Hu Yaobang, who shared Zhao’s zeal for economic reform but was also much more interested in bringing a more open democracy to the country. Zhao’s caution allowed him to remain even when Yaobang was removed by more conservative opponents—though, of course, that same caution and lack of political deftness contributed to Zhao’s own eventual downfall.

It’d be inaccurate for me to represent Zhao as completely devoid of political leanings. Importantly, Prisoner of the State shows his growth in this area. Even before his house arrest, Zhao begins to understand that economic reform is difficult without political reform. The "beloved" Party elders are slow to retire—they like to hang on to power, unsurprisingly, and the cult-of-personality-style political system has encouraged reverence from their followers to the point of deference. The most conservative elders are very opposed to Zhao’s reforms, but there are no checks and balances to remove their influence. Similarly, once they begin to turn against Zhao and investigate him, he experiences firsthand the way an authoritarian government can trammel upon the rights of an individual, Party constitution or no.

The Zhao who speaks in this journal is a different Zhao, a Zhao who understands that China’s future is as much about political reform as it is economic reform. Just as he recognized the terrible inefficiencies that plagued a centralized, planned economy, Zhao began to understand the inefficiency inherent in political power concentrated within an oligarchy. His personal journey towards these revelations, recounted with a small dose of hindsight, provides intimate insight into China’s political climate in the late twentieth century. I definitely emerged from this book with a better understanding of how the people in power thought and the way communism was operating in China during those years.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to a general audience. It’s somewhat technical at times—economics isn’t my best subject, whereas Zhao clearly lives and breathes such theory—and packed with historical, geographical, and ethnographical detail that can overwhelm at times. For students of Chinese history or political science in general, though, this would be a fascinating firsthand account. Prisoner of the State is less about Zhao’s own personal gripes with house arrest—he gets past that after the first chapter or so—and more a meditation on what he dreamed China could be versus what it has turned into. It is at times cynical and at times hopeful, for even though he spent the last years of his life in a gilded cage, Zhao still dreamed of a China that could change.

Some books inspire, invigorate. Some books infuriate. The Painted Man does both. I simultaneously like and loathe this book, with its tired writing but interesting plot. Peter V. Brett manages to create a fascinating story about a world where demons manifest every night and the only protection is that of a warded circle/building. He explores how this would affect a pre-industrial society, the way it would shape travel and technology and career choices. I read this book very quickly, and finished it after reading well past my bedtime, because I was hooked. So I’m even more frustrated that I want not to like it, if that makes any sense.

I very nearly put the book down, because the first few chapters are syrupy-sweet fantasy in all its icky glory. Arlen just screams stereotypical farmboy hero Called to a greater destiny. When he saves his mother from a demon attack, berates his father for being a coward, and then runs away before he can be married off to a nearby farmgirl, convinced that he is "right" and everyone else is stupid, I groaned and wondered if I could survive such an unbearable protagonist. Then I remembered I’ve read The Sword of Truth, all ten of them, and this is nowhere near as bad as that. So I soldiered on. Fortunately, Brett introduces two other main characters: Leesha and Rojer. Both are insufferable in their own ways, but decreasingly so, and I find it much easier to sympathize with both of these characters. Leesha realizes there is more to the world than her village, and after a close and personal encounter with the female double standard, she hits the escape button as quickly as possible. Rojer loses his parents when he is a child and is raised by the man who left them to die, which would screw anyone up.

The characterization in general just feels off. All the minor characters are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts, goodies and baddies who alternatively either help or hinder the protagonists in their development and aims. And it feels like all the conflict is, much like Arlen’s first outing, very stereotypically within the realm of the standard fantasy buffet: lose your parents, leave your village, learn you’re Special, slay a few monsters, become the Chosen One. For example, I want to feel horrible for the way Leesha’s mother abuses her and sides with her lying fiancee—but duplicity and cruelty are her mother’s only traits; she never displays a redeeming quality that creates enough complexity to make her character anything more than cardboard. This diminishes the sympathy I can feel for Leesha and makes the conflict feel less like a challenge and more like a perfunctory box on a checklist: "abusive mother who doesn’t believe in my self-worth", check.

I wasn’t a fan of the portrayal of the female characters in general. The continuing decimation of the human population has placed a greater emphasis on reproduction than there was even prior to that; motherhood is virtually regarded as a sacred duty. So there are very few women in this book who are not all, "I want the babies nao, plz". And I get that there is a plot-related reason. But it seems like motherhood-mode is the default lens through which the various women n this book get viewed. This includes Leesha, who is otherwise a somewhat well-rounded female character. To be fair, it seems like Brett is trying to capture the hegemonic power relations inherent in this kind of agrarian society beset by nightly demon attacks. Yet this is where his characterization talent lets him down, because the effort comes off shallower than was probably intended.

Case in point: near the end of the book, Leesha, who is a virgin at this point, gets raped by bandits. She’s a little shaken by this, and one might expect her to continue to avoid male attention as she had been doing up until that point. But no, she instead has sex with the next guy she meets. I might be wrong, but it seems unrealistic that someone who has lost her virginity to a rapist would, by the next day, be eager to get naked and muddy with a tattooed guy she has just met and beg him to put a baby in her. However, I am not a woman and, indeed, like everyone else on the Internet, I have not actually met any, so take my incredulity with a grain of salt. I might be making mole mansions out of molehills.

I could spend plenty of paragraphs finding more fault with the characterization, but I’ll stop here because I think it’s getting tedious and repetitive, and I’d like to say some good things about The Painted Man. The plot of the book partially redeems itself—it certainly kept me reading, despite my reservations about the people involved. At times it was painfully predictable; it was pretty obvious from the second chapter or so that Arlen was going to be the second coming of this Deliverer dude, that he’d find some fighting wards and walk around killing demons. Yet Brett’s portrayal of this transformation, and particularly Arlen’s struggle with the moral dimension to it, is very compelling. In particular, I loved Arlen’s decision to consume demon flesh and the revelation, a little later in the book, that fighting demons has super-charged him to the point where he is feeling the same attraction towards the Core that the demons do at the end of every night. I’d be interested to see where Brett takes this, if I read the sequel.

I’m on the fence about continuing the series. Though I want to know what happens next, I’m not sure if I’m willing to subject myself to the writing again. In many way, The Painted Man reminds me of an L.E. Modesitt, Jr. story: flat characters and somewhat predictable plot, but a stupidly enjoyable story. Brett clearly has some exciting stories up his sleeve, and The Painted Man showcases his incredible imagination. Though it hews closely to the traditional ideas about fantasy literature settings and character roles, this is one of the most original fantasy stories I’ve read in the past few years. I just wish that the writing itself held up in the same way. Alas, I am torn over my mixed reaction to this book. You’ll just have to make up your own mind.

Journey into Space frustrates me. I didn’t like it very much. Its characterization is fractured and shallow. It is brief where it should be verbose, tarries when it should be moving on. About the only thing it has going for it is the fact that it takes place on a generation ship. This is where the frustration sets in, because as much as I didn’t enjoy this book, I can appreciate how Litt depicts some of the pitfalls of a generation ship. He uses it as an effective device for illustrating the ability for a group of humans to enter catastrophic failure mode. It’s kind of depressing.

This slim novel follows three generations aboard the ship. August and Celeste are cousins born in flight. Like everyone else in their generation, they have never walked on a planet. All they know is the kilometre-long Armenia, the ship they call home. Unlike others in their generation, however, August and Celeste have taken the obsession with life on Earth to a new level. They’ve invented a game where they mutually construct a planet, roughly modelled after New England, using only words. Its a hypnotic, addictive process made all the more powerful by Litt’s careful attention to the descriptions. I’ve had to teach descriptive writing to some students as part of their coursework requirements, and I would have loved to quote some pages from this book to show how it can be done. Litt goes on, literally for pages, as he builds a picture of a scene where the only thing happening is weather. No people, no intelligence. Just weather.

August and Celeste don’t settle for weather, though. They end up having sex, having a baby, and there are complications as a result of their consanguinity. The second part of Journey into Space follows the first few years of baby Orphan’s childhood, letting us see how the small ship (and the people back on Earth) react to news of August and Celeste’s incest and try to punish the two accordingly. As the book goes on, Orphan becomes a singularity, a presence that simultaneously destabilizes yet unites the crew as it faces numerous setbacks. Ultimately, the crew aboard this ship engages in an atavistic retreat into sex, religion, and nihilism in an attempt to combat the oppressive sense of loneliness and futility that has taken over their mission.

On one level, the regression of humanity modelled in the crew of the Armenia is sickly fascinating. It’s a kind of cautionary tale: despite our hubris and technology, we are not all that advanced. It’s also a reminder that we are fragile, as a species. We depend on the Earth to keep us alive—space travel is a difficult, all but untenable endeavour with an ambiguous endgame, if any. Generation ships are perhaps a practical but not realistic method of surmounting the obstacles to interstellar travel. The major challenge of generation ships, according to Journey into Space, is that you can take the human out of the planet, but you can’t take the planet out of the human. It all begins when August and Celeste become obssessed with describing Earth, and I can’t really blame them.

It’s an interesting tangent to the nature-versus-nurture discussion. One can certainly socialize a human being to become accustomed to a particular environment. My life in Canada, or now in the UK, is very different from someone who lives in Ecuador or rural China. Transposed, I would be very hard-pressed to feel like my situation is “normal”. So, to some extent, one’s nurturing influences one’s ability to operate in a particular environment. Nevertheless, it seems like our versatility exists within a range of parameters, and that range is pre-programmed for “planet”. Kilometre-long ships just don’t cut it.

Litt makes some good stabs at the issues inherent in generation ships. Likewise, his exploration of failure modes of humanity is often fascinating. There is a certain satisfaction to watching the descent into madness. But his characters are little more than veneers over stock types—and he makes no secret of this. This is curious.

I hate showing off my genre snobbery, but Journey into Space reads like a literary fiction author intruding into science fiction. Litt grasps the generation ship motif as an effective setting for his tale. Genre fiction, particularly science fiction, often suffers complaints that its characters are thin and mostly stock, there only for the author to abuse as they explore the concept du jour. Literary fiction authors know better, of course; they are all about character. These conventional stereotypes would expect Litt to produce a deep, intense novel about a generation ship with multiple, detailed character sketches across all three generations. We get the opposite.

There is certainly something to be said for beautiful prose and memorable description. However, beautiful prose alone does not suffice for me. I also need characters who can make the story come alive. Three almost does this in the last act, with her incredible patience in learning how to make paper and ink. But it’s not quite enough. Journey into Space is a technically accomplished, well-written novel, but it isn’t all that satisfying as a story.

I came across this book while browsing the science section in Waterstones, because that’s where they hide all the good mathematics books as well, and I was looking for an appropriate math book to give to a fellow math friend for her birthday. (I opted for Ian Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures.) Having read Dava Sobel’s explication of John Harrison and the marine chronometer in Longitude, I snapped this up without a second thought. Later, I discovered it was already on my to-read list. Serendipity!

A More Perfect Heaven is a biography of Nicolas Copernicus. As such, it reveals so much more about him than his importance to the adoption of heliocentric theory. I knew that Copernicus was a Polish mathematician who lived in the early 1500s, and that his work was largely adopted on a mathematical basis rather than a physical one. That was about it. I had no idea of his extensive involvement in the Church, including his canonry and relationships with local bishops. I didn’t know that he developed most of his theory early in his life but held off on publishing until a Lutheran mathematician showed up out of the blue to persuade him to share his theory.

So in this respect, Sobel fills in some very large gaps. She brings Copernicus to life, giving names to his parents and friends, setting up the relationships and geography that would define him and influence him as he considered the movements of the heavens. As I mentioned in my review of Longitude, I’m sceptical of the “Great Man” theory of history. It’s undeniable, however, that Copernicus’ book influenced a great many astronomers and mathematicians, a case Sobel makes in the last chapters of the book, with Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and others. Copernicus was neither the first nor the only great proponent of helocentric theory, but he was in the right place at the right time, and he had the right help, to put it forth. While most of the world wasn’t quite ready to accept it, the idea was now there, ripening in the collective unconsciousness of a generation of scientists.

Speaking of which, I felt smug during much of this book. As I read about the Church’s attempts to stifle suggestions that the Earth revolves about the Sun, I mentally giggled at the amount of power religion could wield in the face of scientific discovery. But I laughed much too soon, because while it’s true that heliocentric theory has won the day, there are plenty of contemporary issues that have inherited its political controversy.

The sad truth is that not much has changed in the past five centuries. Though the Catholic Church itself is much more friendly towards scientific discoveries than it once was, other elements of religion continue to push against science they see as inimical to their worldview. These deniers rail against everything from global warming to evolution to vaccines. These positions aren’t just quaint throwbacks; they’re actively dangerous. Human nature and human society has not changed all that much since Copernicus’ time, and we should not be fooled into thinking so simply because our scientific understanding has changed since then.

Fortunately, A More Perfect Heaven also tells us that, eventually, science will prevail. Copernicus’ calculations were just so accurate that they became the gold standard. That wasn’t quite enough for astronomers to accept his model as fact (cognitive dissonance is a really awesome phenomenon). But it kept the Copernican ideas alive long enough to reach the ears of people like Galileo and Kepler. The former’s discovery of Jupiter’s four largest satellites was a philosophical blow to the idea that everything in the skies must orbit the Earth. The latter’s obsession with finding a beautiful mathematical explanation for certain types of orbital problems led him to expand the Copernican model based on all the data he could obtain from Tycho Brahe’s careful observations. A few centuries on, Copernicus was vindicated, and opinions began to shift.

This is probably the exciting part of the story, the part that seem most relevant today. But most of the book is about Copernicus himself and his involvement in Varmia, the Prussian province of his canonry. Sobel recounts Nicolas’ various administrative duties throughout his life as a Varmian canon. I was amazed to learn of his wide interests in everything from medicine to economics, though I shouldn’t be have been so surprised. Copernicus even wrote extensively on money reform! He might not have been a Great Man, depending on your point of view, but he was a great man.

Sobel departs from the typical biographical style by presenting the middle of the book as a two-act play, “And the Sun Stood Still”. She dramatizes the interactions between Rheticus and Copernicus that persuade the latter to finish and publish his overall theory. Since little in the way of documentation survives, Sobel has to take certain artistic license with this interpretation. It’s an interesting way to do it, and I was a little sceptical I would enjoy the sudden arrival of a play in the midst of a non-fiction experience. Much to my relief, the play is interesting, easy to follow, and actually rather entertaining.

Sobel does it again. Like Longitude, A More Perfect Heaven is the perfect type of popular science history. It’s not too long, yet it’s amazing in its wealth of information. Sobel communicates with a passion for her subject that can’t help but be contagious. She takes the time to lay out exactly why these giants are indeed giants, people who made such a significant and lasting contribution to the way we think and operate in this world. These are the types of books that get me excited and thinking about science even as I marvel at the history of such discoveries.

My roommate, Julie, got this for me as a birthday gift. (She also gave me a rather nifty silicone baking pan with Doctor Who–themed moulds in each of the cups.) We share an affinity for Doctor Who; I feel particularly lucky to be living in England during the 50th anniversary year. I’ll get to go watch the anniversary special in theatres on the night it premieres (in Canada, because my city is not particularly blessed, I’d have to wait until Monday to see it in theatres, and then what’s the point?). More generally, living in England has given me a different perspective on Doctor Who by exposing me to elements of culture that have helped shaped the show. Of course, it goes the other way too—elements of Doctor Who have seeped into British life, and arguably the success of the show affected the lifestyles of families in Britain.

So I was quite excited to read Fifty Years in Time and Space: A Short History of Doctor Who. It’s from an independent publisher out of the way and is, in fact, signed by the author. And this provenance shows in some aspects of its production: the typesetting is very minimalist, with no running headers or footers aside from page numbers, and a few typos here and there that more careful copy-editing might have spotted; I am sceptical that much editing of any sort happened, which I’ll address shortly. However, Frank Danes delivers exactly what he promises on the cover: it is a history of the show, and it is relatively short. Indeed, he goes somewhat beyond that, delivering a very detailed history despite its brevity.

Danes takes the show mostly in chronological order. He expresses his hope in the introduction that readers will "forgive me for jumping around and pursuing the bits I’m most interested in", adding that his analysis "coloured by my own critical preferences". And, fair enough. So are my reviews. So Danes starts with the origins of Doctor Who, the First Doctor, the concept of regeneration, and each Doctor thereafter. He points out some of the most significant episodes, explains why certain companions or Doctors chose to stay or go, and gives interesting behind-the-scenes information on costume and prop designs, production and script development, and the show’s reception in the eyes of fans and the BBC itself.

This chronological order makes a lot of sense at face value, but it also leads to problems. Danes claims his secondary objective is to chart the way Doctor Who’s attitudes towards politics and the presentation of current events changes. One would think that a chronological approach would be the most conducive to such a survey. Yet the staggering amount of history to Doctor Who belies such a simplistic method. It results in much repetition from Danes, and what he doesn’t end up repeating, the reader needs to retain and recall when it becomes important again, fifty pages on.

A more ambitious yet more effective approach would involve a more deliberate organization based on themes, characters, and issues that recur throughout the fifty years of the show. Instead of a chapter, roughly, for each Doctor, Danes could have tracked the evolution of humour, of the monsters, of the role of the companion, etc., within each chapter. He could have spent a chapter talking about regeneration and the various ways the Doctors have been cast, and a chapter devoted solely to the series’ tumultuous relationship with its parent company. There would inevitably be some overlap and repetition, but with some careful authorial choices, it would be manageable. And the result would likely be a more coherent book than this.

For, regardless of its considerably informational value, Fifty Years in Time and Space is pages upon pages of a wall of text. Open the book to any page, and you are confronted with truly massive, back-breaking paragraphs. Danes wrings every detail out of his discussions, carefully noting story titles, dates, actor names, etc. I commend his commitment to such fidelity, but it comes at the cost of readability. It took me several days to read this book, and while I’m used to non-fiction taking longer, I felt noticeably slowed down by slogging through the writing here.

Having finished all 272 pages of this, I rather feel like I’ve spent several hours trapped in an elevator with a Doctor Who fan with encyclopedic knowledge of the show. He knows a lot about the show, so much so that he can’t resist sharing it with you in a long, rambling, unbroken series of lectures that you just can’t stop. You learn lots of interesting things along the way, but once you escape from the elevator and the fan (who follows you once you leave the elevator, because you regained your freedom in the middle of his dissertation on the production problems of Colin Baker’s last season, so you have to lose him by doubling-back and hiding in a nearby restaurant) you realize that you will probably forget most of it, and that you really want to watch some Doctor Who.

No regrets whatsoever about swallowing this walrus, but it’s left me interested in seeing what someone can do with a little more consideration and more careful editing.

I don’t often read novels set in my favourite television or cinematic universe any more. I have fond memories of when I was much younger, and I had the time and freedom to virtually camp out in the library, of borrowing whatever Star Trek novels they happened to have available that day. After I became more comfortable with original SF and fantasy, I started to shy away from media tie-in novels. As I grew up and started to follow those television series with more interest, I found it difficult to enjoy the books, because I couldn’t visualize the actors from the show doing and saying what the characters in the books did and said. And for me, the actors are an integral part of realizing those characters. It’s the same reason I’ve eschewed the Buffy, Angel, and Firefly spin-off comics.

In the case of Doctor Who: Shada, I bought this for my roommate’s birthday, knowing she would enjoy it. This is a curious novel, because it is technically a novelization, but owing to industrial action and other production issues, the script itself never finished shooting. So this novel is all we really have of a story that was originally created for television. It’s set in the era of the Fourth Doctor, as portrayed by Tom Baker, with Romana II and K-9 still gallivanting around the galaxy, ostensibly on the run from the Time Lords and the Black Guardian. I’ve seen a few stories from the Tom Baker era, and maybe this unfamiliarity with the characters helped me get over my apprehension of tie-in books. It also helps that Shada was originally written by Douglas Adams, one of my favourite authors. And until I get to watch the Doctor Who stories he wrote, this is the closest I get to seeing Adams’ Doctor Who.

Shada is unmistakably Adamsian in its humour and plotting. Gareth Roberts has done a fantastic job assembling a cogent story from a script, preserving the flavour of Adams’ humour while expanding the plot and characters into something approaching a novel. The Doctor and Romana arrive on Earth in the early 1980s in response to a distress call from a fellow Time Lord, the ancient and befuddled Professor Chronotis (groan at the name), who has retired to Earth and been living at Cambridge University for the past few centuries. Chronotis took a book with him from Gallifrey, a powerful book that could be very dangerous in the wrong hands—which, apparently, is what will happen if the Doctor and Romana don’t act fast. But the book has already found its way into the possession of a young physics graduate student, who is unaware of its alien origins or the fact that a megalomaniacal villain is on his way to steal the book at any cost.

As the plot unfolds, Roberts jumps from character to character, sometimes following the Doctor, Romana, Chris Parsons, etc. Much like in the show, it soon becomes apparent that the Doctor always seems to be teetering between not having a plan and having an incredibly brilliant, complicated plan that will most likely go horribly wrong. It seems like he himself is continuously surprised by his ability to get into (and out of) trouble. The Fourth Doctor is definitely the right Doctor for Douglas Adams, because Tom Baker’s mad, scarf-toting Doctor sounds like something straight out of Hitchhiker’s. They were made for each other, as this story showcases.

Shada also provides some interesting tidbits and insight into Time Lord history and society that might not always be apparent from the TV show. Romana, as another Time Lord, is a very interesting companion and a departure from the Doctor’s previous, human companions. In Shada, it sometimes seems like there are Time Lords running around all over the place. But it was nice to see the Doctor, Romana, and Professor Chronotis discussing and arguing about Gallifreyan history and its relevance to their particular problem. As a fan who came to the show through new Who, and hence as someone who hasn’t spent much time on Gallifrey, I really enjoyed this aspect of the book.

The story itself is lovely. The villain is not so much over-the-top as he is capable to the point of absurdity. In fact, aside from his delusions of God-like grandeur, I’d argue Skagra doesn’t truly tip over the brink of insanity until he tangles with the Doctor. It’s not until the Doctor starts undermining Skagra’s vision by taunting him about getting “that mad gleam in your eye” that Skagra finds his atavistic desires to crush the Doctor too strong to resist. That the Doctor proves rather difficult to kill only exacerbates this problem, eventually pushing Skagra over the edge from cool customer to James Bond–like supervillain.

If you like Doctor Who and have some familiarity with the older show, I’d recommend this without reservation. It is, essentially, a “lost”, unmade episode from the Tom Baker era. If you like the show but haven’t seen the Fourth Doctor, haven’t met Romana or K-9 or learned much about the wider world of the Time Lords, then I’d be more hesitant to point you in the direction of Shada. You might like it, but there is also much in here that would be confusing to the newcomer.

I’m not going to be rushing out to buy more Doctor Who novelizations or even original stories; I’ll stick with my DVDs for now. As far as tie-in novels go, though, Shada is an example of how to do it right. Roberts does justice to Adams’ particular brand of storytelling genius, and both of them do a fine job of delivering yet another exciting adventure with the Doctor.

I am not in the habit of reading actor memoirs. In fact, I think the only actor memoirs I’ve read are from Star Trek actors: Shatner’s, one of Nimoy’s (I think I Am Spock as opposed to the more bitter predecessor volume), and now Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek. I added this to my to-read list years back, when Wil Wheaton first surfaced on my social networking radar on Twitter and here on Goodreads. While I don’t regularly read his blog, I dip in here and there when one of his posts comes to my attention.

Just a Geek is different from the other memoirs in that this book doesn’t actually focus much on Wheaton’s time in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Rather, it’s the story of his struggle with life after TNG, the stark and steady decline in his acting career, and his battles with the voice of Prove to Everyone that Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t a Big Mistake. The book consists of a series of posts from his blog interspersed with additional context and commentary, as well as confessions about how much of the blog material—at least in the early days—was exaggeration and fluff while Wheaton was in the thrall of Prove to Everyone.

The subtitle of this book is Unflinchingly honest tales of the search for life, love, and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise, and this isn’t false advertising. Wheaton comes across as the type of actor who is incredibly grounded and self-aware—in other words, the majority of actors who are not massive A-list celebrities. The struggles he shares with us are the struggles of an everyday person, the major difference being that most everyday people meet these struggles while working a steady job.

The first section of the book chronicles Wheaton’s failure to get work after TNG, and the simultaneous birth of his blog. Thus emerges the two major, polarized themes of the book: Wheaton’s declining career as an actor and rising career as a writer. The journey he depicts here is his realization and acceptance of these two truths.

The subsequent sections show Wheaton’s struggle to find a balance between Wesley Crusher’s legacy and his own attempts to find a future for himself. He vacillates between wanting to do Star Trek conventions and events—for the money, for the fans, for the business it brings his comedy group—and wanting to avoid such events because of his desire to distance himself from Wesley. He shares the conflicting emotions he had around portraying Wesley one last time in Star Trek: Nemesis, only for his role to be cut entirely from the finished product.

It’s 2013, and I’m writing this the day after the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. I’m still tingling with my enjoyment of the 50th-anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, and I’m eagerly anticipating the Christmas special, when Matt Smith’s Doctor will regenerate. But I’m not eagerly anticipating Matt Smith’s departure. As with David Tennant, I’m not ready to see Matt Smith leave. But clearly he is ready to leave; he has a career on the rise and a desire to act in other movies, to take on other roles.

What I’m trying to say is that I think that we, as intense fans of shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who, often have trouble empathizing with the more mundane aspects of these actors’ lives. I’m not referring to the tendency of a minority of diehard fans to conflate the actor with the character (which is just … awkward, I think). It’s just difficult for us to understand the actor’s experience of portraying that character when all we see is the finished product, and not all the hours of rehearsal, makeup, travel, and standing around on set.

Just a Geek, then, provides a tiny glimpse into this flipside of the actor’s world. It’s a reminder that, except for the small upper echelon of actors, celebrity is a less constant thing. And for Wheaton, it’s a brave and honest reflection on the choices he has made since that first choice, the one that changed everything, quitting Star Trek. It’s a great privilege to be let in on the conversations he shares here, to peek behind the curtain for a moment and see things from the actor’s perspective. I hope this book provided the closure he seemed to be seeking.

To paraphrase Mr T, I pity the fool who doesn’t see the beauty of mathematics inherent in the world around us. As a teacher, I feel rather complicit at times in robbing children of the joy of mathematics. The systemic, industrial tone of education does not often lend itself well to the investigation and discovery that should be the cornerstone of maths; I find this particularly true in the UK, where standardized tests and levels are the order of the day. There are times when I am conflicted about how to cover subject matter. I have to find a balance between a breakneck schedule and a desire to achieve the comprehension that only comes with time and careful practice, strive to find the equilibrium between exploring interesting lines of inquiry and curtailing those lines in order to teach what’s on the test. I hope that as I become more experienced finding this balance becomes smoother. For now, though, it’s a struggle.

Because the secret that everyone learns as a child and then has beaten out of them by the endless grind of daily mathematics lessons is this: mathematics is not numbers. It is not arithmetic.

There, I said it.

I gave my students a test today on our statistics unit, which involved data collection: designing surveys, selecting sampling methods and sample sizes, etc. As they worked through the test, a few questioned its connection to mathematics. "This is words!" they protested, as if I were somehow an imposter trying to sneak extra English content into their day. Somewhere along the line—I don’t know precisely where—they developed this notion that mathematics is solely about manipulating numbers.

Really, though, mathematics is about relationships between things. Mathematics is a process for understanding the world, as well as understanding theoretical constructs that, while not directly observable in the real world, can still have useful and fascinating properties. Math can be numbers, but it’s also truth, in one of the most fundamental ways possible.

This is what Robert P. Crease attempts to communicate in A Brief Guide to the Great Equations. He foregrounds each equation and carefully explains how it became a part of the great canon of mathematics. He also explains why the result is so exciting, not just to mathematicians but to the population at large. I’m pretty enthusiastic about all this crazy math stuff, but Crease manages to stoke even my considerable flames of fanaticism and set my heart racing. The way he breathlessly extols the beauty and utility of Maxwell’s equations or Einstein’s relativity … it’s like a BBC Four documentary in paper form.

When it comes to books on popular mathematics, I always try to anticipate how a layperson would receive the book. As a mathematician, I don’t have a problem following the equations and explanations; it comes naturally. It still staggers me how some people are able to understand the intense nuances of some of the higher-level mathematics involved in quantum mechanics and relativity; I’m somewhat reassured by Crease’s claims that physicists often rejected new developments that required them to learn a lot of complicated new math. Yet I still know what Crease means when he carelessly bandies around certain terminology, expecting his reader to keep up to speed based on a high school education alone.

As far as pop math goes, A Brief Guide to the Great Equations is not the most friendly book. I’d probably hesitate to recommend it to casual readers, preferring maybe Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. For someone very interested in the history and philosophy of science, however, this book would appeal even if one’s math knowledge isn’t quite up to snuff. Crease recounts without fail some of the more interesting scuffles and disagreements among famous mathematicians and scientists; he also carefully lays out his own views on what constitutes a scientific revolution, and the role that developments of equations can have in revolutions.

It’s easy enough to follow the history and soak up the spectacle without following the math. I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t read this unless you’ve studied math in university. If anything, Crease hopefully sheds light on how and why people can find math such an interesting occupation. By reading these stories of how Maxwell and Einstein and Schrödinger dedicated years of their lives to these problems, one gets the sense that the problems are more interesting and worthwhile than the equations themselves indicate. Crease explains how the problems consumed and intrigued these brilliant minds in such a way that, even if one doesn’t understand the nature of the problem—or its resolution—itself, one can still appreciate the passion and dedication involved.

Such passion and dedication are more universal than even the mathematics that unites the great thinkers featured in this book. One need not like math to be good at it or to succeed at it in school or in life. One need only appreciate its versatility, utility, and beauty. Crease tries and succeeds admirably in showcasing such attributes through the equations and history that he includes here.

Math is beautiful. You just need to open your mind, cast aside the "but I just don’t have the brain for it", and embrace the wonderful freedom of being able to figure out how the world works.

I always feel a twinge of pity when someone tells me, “I don’t read for pleasure any more” or “I only read non-fiction.” Most of the pity is sympathy for the fact that, in today’s busy world, we just don’t have the time. Whenever someone expresses awe at the number of books I read in a year and asks me how I do it, I say, truthfully, that I make the time to read, just as I make the time to write these reviews. So I realize that the act of reading is itself a commitment, an investment of time and energy, and it’s a shame we don’t have more opportunities for it.

Still.

The rest of the pity goes towards the smaller worlds in which people who don’t read fiction must live. Non-fiction is great. I love a good biography, history, or science text. But let’s be honest here: I would never, ever pick up a non-fiction book about the history of South America. It’s just not a topic that it would occur to me to read about, let alone something I’m interested in reading about as non-fiction. Even if someone gave me such a book as a gift, I’d probably struggle through it. I’d likely find it dry, confusing, difficult to relate to. The sad truth is that I learned absolutely nothing about South American history in school. While we focused on the founding of Canada and the various World Wars, South America itself was a big question mark on the map, dangling off the end of Mexico.

Hand me a novel set in nineteenth-century South America, though, and then we’re on more solid ground. Therein lies the power of fiction: it can be a tool of education as well as entertainment. It can create empathy for characters whose lives are incredibly different from our own. And it also exposes us to facts and ideas that we would never be interested in reading as non-fiction items. I don’t want to read a biography of Símon Bolivar. I did read a fictional account of his last days as he journeyed into exile.

So with The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez contributes to the closing of another massive gap in my knowledge of world history. Through this sliver of story I have glimpsed the genesis of the countries of South America and the remarkable role Bolivar played in their founding. I’ve also enjoyed a slow and meditative look at the mind and last days of a man of many deeds and many contradictions.

García Márquez refers to Bolivar throughout as only “the General". He could just as easily have chosen “President” or “Liberator", so in choosing the first mode of address, he emphasizes Bolivar’s military past. This is a man who is not a politician so much as a warrior and a strategist. His vision is that of the conqueror and the liberator; peace, for Bolivar, was not ever really on the table. This theme reverberates through the novel, which does not follow a straightforward chronological path; in both the past and the present, chaos seems to stalk the General at every turn.

His past is a patchwork of unrest and rebellion. Even after wresting control of South America from its absentee Spanish overlords, the General finds that pacifying his own people is itself a task of a lifetime. His dream of a unified South America recedes ever into the distance, and though every government affords him the highest honours, he is regularly the subject of assassination attempts. This mirrors the present, which has an illusion of restfulness and closure, at least within the General’s inner circle. Without, García Márquez depicts almost comical efforts to keep the General within a cocoon of misinformation: guards and servants conspire to keep him ignorant of the social unrest and protests that dog him from the start of the journey to its end. At every town, those in charge meet the General with open arms.

Of course, what makes this journey so special is the finality of it: the General is dying. Tuberculosis has ravaged his body to the point where many doubt he will survive to see Europe and exile. This spectre of mortality looms over every event of the book, as García Márquez constantly reminds us through his regular descriptions of the various ways the General’s body betrays him. For a man who stood against Spain and ruled multiple countries, the end is just as ordinary as a peasant on the streets. The General’s body slowly deteriorates, and with it so too does his sense of agency. He clings, almost desperately, to the privilege of shaving himself in the morning, despite failing eyesight and a shaking hand.

With the end of the General, so too there is the sense of an ending to the situation in South America. As long as the General travels down the river, it feels like all of South America is paused. Things are happening, yes, but they are distant and indistinct events related back by hearsay and rumour. Nevertheless, this constant murmur creates a tension that will only dissolve upon the General’s death: only then can everything rush into motion, old alliances discarded and new ones brokered along lines that have been visible for months.

García Márquez’s style is relaxing. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri in The Lowland, his reliance on artful descriptions over dialogue draws the reader into the ebb and flow of the narrative. It’s very easy to curl up with this book next to a fire and with a cup of tea and lose oneself in the General’s final journey into the annals of history. This isn’t a story in the traditional sense where things happen, one after the other, where a protagonist and antagonist do battle to resolve a conflict. Instead, it is an account, a detailed look at the last days of someone who made such a big impact on the world. García Márquez spends little time attempting to rationalize the General’s actions or intent or even trying to get inside the General’s head. As the General’s manservant, Jose Palacios, would say: “only my master knows what my master is thinking.”

And so, this is a restful book. It’s a book that invites contemplation and consideration, though it requires neither. It’s a book that offers few answers, preferring instead to offer up images and ideas, leaving you to come up with the questions yourself. It educates, but indirectly, and as discreetly as possible. It’s the perfect blend of history and literature.