I liked The Ringworld Engineers more than I did Ringworld, in the sense that I enjoyed reading it more. Yet it is neither better nor worse than its predecessor. Although full of many more interesting conundrums than the first book, The Ringworld Engineers still suffers, notably in its treatment of female characters and sex. And after a careful unveiling of mystery after mystery leading up to a climax with such great potential, the ending is disappointing and little disheartening.

This book is all about saving the Ringworld instead of escaping it (though that's still on the agenda too). Louis Wu and Speaker-to-Animals, now called Chmeee because his spoils from Ringworld earned him a name, once again return to the Ringworld with Pierson's puppeteer. This time, however, they are kidnapped. The Hindmost, formerly a puppeteer leader and also Nessus' mate, is mounting a somewhat unauthorized expedition to the Ringworld. It wants to bring those magical matter transmutation devices Louis Wu speculated about in the first book back to the puppeteers so it can get back in power. The only problems? Well, the transmutation devices don't actually exist. Oh, and the Ringworld is drifting toward a collision with the sun. Good times.

As in the first book, I was not that interested in learning who built the Ringworld so much as watching the consequences of its abandonment unfold for the inhabitants of the structure. Niven adequately delivers on both, in this case, interweaving Louis' deductions about the structure's origins with his encounters with a selection of Ringworld natives. We get to see farmers and grazers, sea people, ghouls, vampires, and of course, the City Builders. The format is almost episodic, each chapter touching briefly on the events of the last but ensconcing Louis firmly in its own narrative. This structure only begins to falter as Louis flees back to the Needle from the city library with two City Builders tagging along. The story picks up the pace, quickly reunited Louis with Chmeee so that they can all go find the Repair Centre and save the Ringworld.

I like the pacing, and the intensity, and the sense of delayed urgency. They have a little more than a year to save the Ringworld, which seems like a lot of time, but they don't actually know where the Repair Centre is. Also, someone has organized teams to replace the attitude jets on the Ringworld rim, which were once enough to keep the Sun in the centre of the Ringworld's orbit. So there is a mysterious third party lurking about the Ringworld, and we don't know if it will embrace the assistance of Louis, Hindmost, and Chmeee.

The new Louis Wu, an addict of electrical current stimulation to the brain, is a much better character than the protagonist of the first book. He's more vulnerable, and that makes it easier to sympathize with him and easier to like him. I was cheering for him as he struggled to quit the droud so he could get out from beneath the thumb of the Hindmost. Louis' recovery is a little quick, but Niven doesn't sell short the struggle, as he makes it clear that Louis is still often tempted by his desire to feel the current. Louis' recovery is a great source of character development. As his head becomes clearer, so too do his theories about the Ringworld's origins, as well as theories about how to save it.

I could have done without the obsession over sex.

On the Ringworld, apparently it's customary to seal bargains with rishathra, "sex outside one's own species." Mmhmm. Now, Niven goes to great lengths to justify both it and Louis engaging in it. Every. Single. Time.

The first time it was actually rather hilarious. Louis saves a bunch of peaceful red-skinned farmers from some green-skinned giant warriors who want to graze all their grass. He does it by posing as a god, and the green-skinned warrior leader wants to seal their new bargain with rishathra, like you do. And Louis is starting to get exasperated, because he's just thought of a plan to save the day but is stymied, for a moment, by this carnal formality. So he goes to great lengths to preserve the charade, complete the rishathra, and save the day.

Louis' libido does not stop there, and he happily acquiesces to the practice elsewhere along the Ringworld. At one point, he is ready and willing for some rishathra, but he's stuck aboard Needle with two of the City Builders. One of them is male, and the other, Harkabeeparolyn, despises rishathra. Louis muses that if this were any other place, he would just "find himself another woman," but since there aren't any others on board, he has to make do with work and exercise—except, wait a minute, Harkabeeparolyn changes her mind! Yes indeed, because when the City Builders have sex, they're guaranteed to conceive, and apparently she is in heat. So, not wanting to get pregnant, she finally takes Louis up on his oft-repeated offer. Hopefully this demonstrates what I mean when I say Niven makes elaborate justifications for the sex and rishathra in this book.

The Ringworld Engineers in general emphasized an underlying attitude toward sex and women that makes me rather uncomfortable. Kzinti females are non-sentient. The females of the green giants, with whom Louis gets to perform rishathra, are "docile" in bed and don't orgasm. Harkabeeparolyn doesn't want to perform rishathra but changes her mind, because apparently she can't resist sex but doesn't want to get pregnant. Oh, and just because the Hindmost is Nessus' mate, don't get your hopes up that it's female. The puppeteers have two kinds of male. They both implant DNA in a host female: one the sperm, the other the eggs. As the Hindmost explains: "The female contributes none. In fact, females mate among themselves in another way to make more females. They are not properly of our species…." I don't want to draw any erroneous conclusions about Niven's proclivities from this, but I feel like we are skirting much too close to someone's fantasy here, where the women are willing, able, and the man's always in charge. In the Ringworld books, women are Other, different sometimes to the point of belonging to a different species.

While enough to make me uncomfortable, sex and the portrayal of women doesn't have a large bearing on the main plot, which proceeds without many problems until the end of the book. Then Louis is faced with a moral dilemma: can he kill 5 per cent of the Ringworld's inhabitants in order to save the rest? (Keep in mind here that "5 per cent" means 1.5 trillion.)

The answer turns out to be "yes, he can." And he does. And that is so disappointing. I like my science fiction to be uplifting and inspiring. I want my heroes to find, against all odds, that third option that saves them from committing one horrific deed in order to prevent an even larger one. It's all well and good to talk about "the needs of the many" outweighing "the needs of the few," but that kind of philosophy is hard to swallow at this scale. We are talking about killing more people than, in all likelihood, the cumulative population of Earth over all of human history. Can you imagine if someone arrived at Earth and said, "Sorry folks, but in order to save the rest of the galaxy, we have to vaporize you and your planet. For the greater good."

The problem is entirely one of scale. We run into this quite a bit in science fiction: the universe is just so vast that thinking on a cosmic level is almost impossible. Discussing events on the order of billions of years is difficult when we aren't sure where we will be next year, much less next century. Deciding the fates of trillions is difficult when it is hard to conceive that by the end of this year there might be 7 billion people on our planet. So it might seem like sacrificing one life to save a hundred makes sense (and it does, if the hero is the one who elects to make the sacrifice). Killing one innocent person, though? Or ten? Or a million? We can draw a line, but it is only an arbitrary one.

And because this is fiction, Niven could have found another way if he had really wanted. He had already created the massive structure of the Ringworld, turned solar flares into meteor defenses, and explained who originally built the Ringworld. But he didn't give Louis Wu a third option; he forced Louis to save the Ringworld by murdering 1.5 trillion people. So I have to wonder what utilitarian, philosophical point Niven is trying to make. And I don't like it.

As a story, The Ringworld Engineers is good. It has a solid set of mysteries and conflicts, a great climax, and some kind of resolution, even if I didn't like it. I liked the characterization, aside from the uncomfortable sex subtext, better than in Ringworld. The more I read of Niven, however, the less he impresses me. Big concepts and big ideas are important, to science fiction as much as any other genre. While Niven excels at these, however, he does not always succeed at the other, just as crucial aspects of storytelling.

The Ringworld is a fabulous concept and, yes, simply amazing. I could easily see it on an episode of Megaworld ("It's 997,000 miles in diameter, and it's composed mainly out of an inscrutable metal called 'scrith'…"). In the end though, it is just a setting, and that is not where I look for satisfaction in my storytelling. I look to the characters, to my heroes. I look for those, "Hell yeah!" moments where I can shout with pride because my protagonist has risen from the depths of a tragedy and managed to win. I can't do that with The Ringworld Engineers; heroism, in this book, is broken.

My Reviews of the Ringworld series:
← Ringworld | The Ringworld Throne →

I have been reading a lot of heavy, "serious" works lately, works that employ a large cast of characters to deal with issues on a big, even epic scale. And while many of these works have been upbeat, some of them have also been "downers." So I thought it was time to read something lighter. Coincidentally, a new Raine Benares book came out in April, and it happened to be sitting on my shelf.

The levity of Lisa Shearin's writing is exactly what I wanted. Con & Conjure definitely has high stakes and serious issues: the narrator, Raine, is psychically-bonded to a rock called the Saghred. The Saghred feeds on souls, and in return it grants its wielders immense magical power. Unfortunately it also drives people insane. Raine, as the only link to the Saghred, is a tempting target for several powerful factions. In particular, a goblin sorcerer who was once trapped inside the Saghred wants it back, and a faction of elves led by Taltek Balmorlan want to use Raine as an excuse to start a goblin-elf war. The situation is tense, and assassination attempts on a rogue goblin prince who wants peace don't make it any better.

Despite the gravity of the situation, however, Raine's narration is delightfully flip. Shearin's world is full of epic fantasy tropes: sorcerers, soul-stealing rocks, goblins, elves, etc. Yet the novels take place in urban fantasy environments. (Sometimes this lead to use of language I might consider questionable—is "green" really an appropriate metonym for money if everyone still uses gold as currency?) The Isle of Mid, the setting since the second book, resembles a city-state of Renaissance Italy, if Florence or Venice were controlled by a conclave of elven mages. Shearin sends Raine ducking down alleys, weaving through crowds along the docks, hiding in brothels, and getting into barfights. All the while, Raine is describing the action with her characteristic wit and sarcasm. In short, Con & Conjure, like all of the Raine Benares books, is fun. In fact, while it's not the best book I've read all year, this is probably the most fun I've had reading a book so far this year. I suspected that would be the case when I started reading it, and Shearin has not disappointed me.

I love stories with con games and heist movies. These fall into a category of deception that appeals to me because they, especially con games, are very cerebral efforts. One defeats one's enemy, the mark, by winning a battle of wits, by utterly devastating him or her but leaving him or her alive to suffer the humiliation. Then there is the adrenaline of not knowing if or when the con will fall apart and leave the characters in danger. This combination of deception and suspense is attractive, dare I say even sexy. Hence my love for The Lies of Locke Lamora and movies like Ocean's Eleven and Foolproof.

So I was excited by the prospect of watching Raine pull off a con with the help of her cousin Mago. Unfortunately, Shearin pulls a Scott Lynch on us. Like Red Seas Under Red Skies, the promised con soon gets sublimated beneath ancillary action, fading into the gentle night to become a secondary plot. Though there is still plenty of deception, with Raine and her enemies both using glamours to assume various identities, the intricate test of wits that I had been anticipating was, alas, not to be.

Still, there was going to be a con, and I guess that's what matters. It just fell apart much earlier than most con games do. Instead, Raine finds herself in a series of increasingly untenable positions, at one point having several warrants out for her apprehension. And she can't just lie low, because she has to find out who is trying to kill Prince Chigaru and steal the Saghred. Raine has never, ever been the kind of person to sit on the sidelines—and the other characters are finally starting to figure this out! There is a lot less, "No, you aren't coming with us," in Con & Conjure, especially from Mychael. I find this absence most gratifying, because in the previous books it killed the pacing unnecessarily: it is pretty obvious that Raine is going to come along. She is, after all, our narrator and kickass heroine. Similarly, I appreciate that Shearin did not inject some simmering jealousy or resentment between Mychael and Raine after the former learns that one of the assassins gunning for Prince Chigaru is Raine's ex-fiancée.

The stakes for Raine have seldom been higher. Well, OK, that's not strictly true … I guess attempting to prevent the release of a demon king and trying to stop an evil goblin sorcerer from regenerating are pretty high stakes. But now we're talking war, racial war between the goblins and the elves. And both sides wouldn't mind getting their hands on the Saghred. The easiest way to do that is to get their hands on Raine, through whom they can sacrifice souls to the Saghred. Yes, through her.

Since Balmorlan revealed that plan, complete with magic-sapping manacles, to a glamour-disguised Raine, I kept having these flashes—the kind you get teased with during trailers for "next week's episode"—of Raine on a cell wall, defeated. (Of course, with most such episode trailers, what they don't show you is the immediately subsequent triumphant escape.) I won't reveal whether Balmorlan actually makes good on his threat to imprison Raine, but there are several times when she is in imminent danger of losing control, either over herself or over the Saghred. There is a very chilling scene where Raine lets loose and lets the Saghred mete out some well-deserved destruction on people we consider bad guys. And the climax of Con & Conjure might be my favourite; I like it even better than The Trouble with Demons, which up to this point has been my favourite Raine Benares book. While the climax is both much faster and on a smaller scale in this book—no epic demon battles—it's a lot more emotionally poignant. We get a guest appearance from Sarad Nukpana, and Shearin expertly manoeuvres Raine into a position where, despite her best efforts, she is on the cusp of losing everything. More impressively, Shearin goes ahead and deals Raine and our protagonists a setback that, while not wholly surprising, definitely alters the balance of power in favour of the bad guys. And it sets up the next book.

So Con & Conjure is a satisfying story filled with action, even if it doesn't quite deliver the confidence game I was expecting from the title. Shearin knows how to pace her scenes—trite phrases like "action-packed thrill ride" and "never a dull moment" come to mind, and they would be accurate. Unfortunately, Con & Conjure, like the other books in the series, share with thrillers a dearth of strong characterization. Though all of Shearin's characters are delightfully depicted and very amusing, they are, with the exception of Raine herself, rather two-dimensional. And again, we have the dichotomy where the protagonists universally love Raine and the antagonists consist of snivelling bad guys who whine when they don't get their way. Judging from the setup for the next book, this will not always be the case, as Raine and company will get a reluctant ally to help them take on Sarad Nukpana once and for all.

But that flaw is just so minor compared to the heart of the book—indeed, of the series: Raine herself. She is one of my favourite protagonists and favourite first-person narrators I've ever encountered. It's not just her voice; it's the way she has changed over the past five books, and the way she bears her singular burden. She is the only one bonded to the Saghred; she can feel the enmity radiating off the stone. She feels its desire to consume souls and escape its prison. And always there is the threat looming over her that she will cross the line, succumb to the lure of the Saghred's power, and essentially go insane and give herself up to it. Then there would be no Raine, just the Saghred and a nice, mobile bond servant to go procure soul snacks. That would be bad for everyone.

Though the threat has been real and present in all of the previous books, it's especially palpable here. Raine keeps running into scenarios where she has no good choices: if she doesn't use the Saghred, everyone dies; if she uses the Saghred, she gets one step closer to losing herself. And when she puts it that way, the choice seems rather obvious, but it's still a little heartbreaking. Once again, Shearin uses the magic of literature to distort our sense of time: Raine has grown so much since we first met her in Magic Lost, Trouble Found, even though only a month or two has passed since she bonded with the Saghred.

I wish I could say the other characters were half as interesting as Raine. As in the previous books, while they are amusing, the rest of the cast is rather two-dimensional—and we again have all the protagonists loving Raine and all the antagonists consisting of snivelling bad guys who whine when they don't get their way. Judging from the setup for the next book, this will not always be the case, as Raine and company will get a reluctant ally to help them take on Sarad Nukpana once and for all.

Con & Conjure, while an improvement over the previous book, Bewitched & Betrayed, hasn't really altered my opinion of this series. But that is fine, because my opinion thus far has been pretty damn high: I like this series, and while it has its faults, Shearin's books have always been fun and satisfying to read. That level of consistency is difficult to maintain and deserves a great deal of admiration. And if you like witty fantasy adventures, soul-stealing rocks, or kickass female heroines, then you should read these books.

My Reviews of the Raine Benares series:
← Bewitched & Betrayed

There are many ways to make it easier on oneself when constructing a protagonist. For example, a kickass, wise-cracking female heroine with magic and not one but two interested men is a good start. Couple that to a magical soul-sucking stone coveted by a mighty and nefarious goblin sorcerer on the lam, and you have both character and plot.

Not that I'm trying to suggest that these books are formulaic. Lisa Shearin, like all good authors, borrows from the fantasy tropes, but the Raine Benares series is creative and complex. Bewitched & Betrayed is no exception. Nevertheless, as much as I admire this series, I have to admit that this book didn't fulfil my high expectations.

My main problem with Bewitched & Betrayed is that it does very little in the way of advancing the main story arc. Yes, there was lots of character development, and the plot did move forward somewhat. It's for these reasons, especially for the character development, that I still enjoyed the book and think it's a good one, if not as good as The Trouble with Demons, which is now my "Raine Benares gold standard."

A lot has happened to Raine in the past three books, which span weeks. We learned about the Saghred, we learned that it could be opened with the right dagger, we saw Raine reunited with her father (who has a fancy new meat suit), and doubt on Raine's ability to resist the temptation of the Saghred remains a running theme. Bewitched & Betrayed gives us deception, body-switching, and explosions (from the bad guys), and scheming, erect nipples, and explosions (from the good guys).

What we don't get is a lot of time with the Saghred. With no one specific inside clamouring to get out, it's been reduced from setting to plot device. Sarad Nukpana once again takes centre stage as the Big Bad. While he's an OK villain as far as they go, his threat-level is still predicated on what he could do instead of what he has done. We've yet to see Nukpana do something that makes us go, "Oh shit" and realize that this guy is bad news. Yes, he kills people and sucks out their souls. Forgive me for having high standards when it comes to sinister fantasy villains.

Still, Nukpana is a credible villain if not a satisfying one. Soul-sucking really is impressive. Bureaucratic whining, on the other hand, not so much. Carnades Silvanus' role in Bewitched & Betrayed is much reduced from his role in the previous book, his threat level having been downgraded from, "jockeying for position of archmagus" to "being a nuisance while Raine & co. try to hunt down body-hopping sorcerers." The Trouble with Demons proved that Silvanus can be a great antagonist, but he didn't get the chapters needed to show us that potential again. I'm sure, however, this will be rectified in future books. Annoying mages on the Seat of Twelve don't go away, especially not after the Paladin of the Conclave Guardians steals their coach from them. . . .

With the two major antagonists more distant than present for most of the book, Bewitched & Betrayed's story becomes very linear. Reduced to a series of events punctuated by explosions (of various kinds) and plenty of quips from all parties involved, the best parts of the book come from the dialogue and the characters speaking it. Raine learns more about Mychael's past (as well as his present), and they learn to work together on a new level, as partners, instead of protector and protected. Similarly, Tam trains Raine to fight goblin-style—i.e., dirty. There are great bits of foreshadowing here that become important during the climax.

As far as the writing goes, Bewitched & Betrayed retains the consistent style of the Raine Benares series that made me a fan. Raine's voice is snarky without being too smug, confident yet vulnerable—in other words, she's a heroine, but she's well aware of her flaws. She's surrounded by people who care about her. And the people who don't care about her mostly don't want her dead or in goblin custody. In having Raine stumble into her role as bond servant to the soul-sucking Saghred, Shearin manages to avert the Chosen One trope even as she plays true to some of its consequences.

It's on this strength, and on the strength of its characters, that the Raine Benares series continues to entertain. I just wish this particular instalment had a more profound sense of progress. Although not everything is status quo at the end—far from it—and the stage is set for yet more awesomeness, the game itself remains the same: find Sarad Nukpana, kill him, and then find a way to destroy the Saghred or unlink Raine from it. After four books (really after only three), Shearin has sold me on the concept. It's time to go further, beyond goblin-hunting and soul-sucking, and take the next step.

My Reviews of the Raine Benares series:
← The Trouble with Demons | Con & Conjure →

I love fiction set in the Victorian era. Sexually-repressive mores and cool, arrogant superiority aside, the Victorians embody a sense of order and etiquette that often escapes us these days. They had protocols for social interaction—protocols embedded in unfortunate distinctions between classes, and laden with the constant threat of small talk about the weather, but protocols nonetheless. The Victorian cadence and diction are so courteous, delightful without being overly flowery. While I would never want to live in the Victorian era, I do admire them for this polished and civil approach to discourse.

So I was pleased to see Neal Stephenson invoke the Victorian zeitgeist in The Diamond Age, where the New Atlantans represent a vision of social order based on principle rather than authoritarian enforcement. Unlike the British Empire of old, the New Atlantans are but one phyle—albeit, one of the most influential—among many; those born into it are free to leave, and those not may, if accepted, take an Oath to Her Majesty Queen Victoria II and join. With such flexible notions of statehood and allegiance, Stephenson has created a middle ground between the localized countries of today and the decentralized megacorporation-states envisioned in some cyberpunk.

Through a neo-Victorian and Confucian lens, Stephenson depicts a variegated world where nanotechnology, coupled with nearly-unlimited energy, means an effective post-scarcity world—but there is still poverty, unrest, and injustice. On one level, this world seems utterly different from ours, with its own jargon, social strata, technology (of course), and conflicts. On another level, it seems remarkably similar to our world, the only difference being that post-scarcity has enabled every ideology to experiment with its own lifestyle (embodied by the phyles) without much fear of catastrophe.

Of course, this is just background. After a certain amount of fussing around with minor characters and establishing some expository details, Stephenson starts telling us a story about people whom we can care about, even when their individual needs conflict. Thus, while it is a tragedy that John Hackworth's illicit second copy of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer gets stolen before he can give it to his daughter, it is a miracle for its new owner, Nell. As much as we want John to succeed in his goal of raising Fiona to achieve greatness, we also want Nell to grow up into a strong, capable girl who can escape her abusive domestic situation.

Through delightful stories-within-the-story and liberal use of jumps across the space of several years, Stephenson shows us Nell maturing, thanks to a loving older brother and the guiding hand of the Primer. One notable aspect of The Diamond Age was its ability to surprise me: Harv was one of many characters I didn't think I would like but did. He truly cared for Nell, to the point that when he helped her into a better situation but recognized he could not join her there, he essentially threw himself back into the slums so she could stay. Despite lacking any Primer to raise him, Harv turns out a good person, even if his ultimate fate is regrettable.

The character that surprised me most, however, was Miranda. She began as a ractor with a dream of stardom and ended up acting as a surrogate mother, through the Primer, for Nell. Her attachment to Nell, like that of Harv's is endearing in its genuineness. While Nell has a good many people interested in her wellbeing—indeed, a superfluity considering how impersonal and dangerous a world Stephenson makes this seem—Miranda, Harv, and Constable Moore stand out because they care about her as a person rather than a means to an end. To Lord Finkle-McGraw, John Hackworth, Judge Fang, etc., she is just an interesting experiment. To Miranda, she is a little girl (who grows up into a young woman) who needs a mother. Amid so much technology, the characters with personal stakes are the ones who matter most.

Unlike Miranda and Nell, not every character is so well-conceived. Some, like Judge Fang, start off important and then just vanish prior to the end of the book. Others, like Carl Hollywood, begin as minor characters only to vault to centre stage during the climax. Carl vexed me: at first he is just a paternal figure for Miranda, someone who gave her advice about her role as Nell's surrogate mother. Then, suddenly, he is a super-hacker who has a role in orchestrating the resolution behind the scenes. The plot similarly starts spectacularly and degenerates into a somewhat random collection of related conflicts, none of which receive a satisfactory resolution by the time the book abruptly ends. Much as he does in Snow Crash, Stephenson elects to provide no epilogue for his characters' lives, leaving us to wonder who flourishes and who perishes. Although I don't demand that a book tie up every loose end, I feel cheated when I invest myself in a character only for his or her story to stop when it feels like the conflict is barely concluded.

The Diamond Age exemplifies both the positive and negative hallmarks of Stephenson's style. His enthusiasm for technology is evident. His descriptions of that technology, as well as cities and characters, are both full of wonder and witticism. Stephenson enjoys drawing attention to contradictions, contrasting characters' overt reactions with what they really think about a situation, and the result is usually entertaining. And while The Diamond Age, like Snow Crash, depicts humanity as an organism at the society level, it does not entirely feel like a Stephenson book until much later in the story, when Hackworth introduces the concept of the Seed.

Ah, there's Stephenson's theme of information as a viral construct that is capable of reprogramming human society. A precursor appears in Nell's Primer, when she arrives in the domain of King Coyote and begins learning about Turing machines that function on a macroscopic level. To Hackworth, the Seed is a new technology, threatening because of the capabilities it grants to its possessor. To Dr. X, the Seed is a paradigm for social order, a blueprint. To both, it means the end of interdependence of the phyles: splinters will no longer rely on the main Feeds or their Sources controlled by the neo-Victorians. In this respect, while I don't think it quite compensates for the disappointing climax, the thematic aspects of The Diamond Age become most interesting just as one's interest in the plot diminishes.

There is a CBC radio show, Spark, that discusses the impact of new technology on our daily lives (I listen to it as a podcast, of course!). Rather than a discussion about technology, Spark is aimed at a general audience and focuses on the social implications of technology. The Diamond Age reminds me of Spark, because it too is a long look at how technology (like nanotechnology) affects society. It is a serious meditation on what might happen to society as the Internet continues to evolve, as our ability to manipulate nature extends to the atomic scale, and as our desire to find solutions to waste and environmental problems increases in urgency.

Of all his recurring motifs, Stephenson's treatment of humanity as a single organism is the one that intrigues me the most. This is not a new concept within science fiction—Isaac Asimov's civilization-manipulating Foundation series or Herbert's Golden Path spring to mind—but with the rise of memes and memetics, Stephenson's ideas seem timely. Snow Crash explored the idea that information could be transmitted virally, actually compromising a society like a disease compromises an immune system. The Diamond Age focuses more on morality, asking what exactly makes one culture differ from another, and how ideologies are transmitted cross-culturally. Can one hack a society, even one that is not a Turing machine?

Although it is tempting to simplify the conflict as one of Eastern-Western philosophies, it is possible to envision two different sides. Rather than East/West, we have two schools of thought about the propagation of culture to the next generation—a timeless problem. How do you ensure children see that your way of living is the best, even though it has obvious flaws? On one side, you have people like Judge Fang and Dr. X, who see it as the duty of the entire society to ensure that people are brought up to respect the social order and contribute in a useful manner. On the other side, there those like Lord Finkle-McGraw, who grasp that there is no reliable way to educate children and simultaneously ensure their loyalty: either you end up indoctrinating them, or they push away from you and rebel. Thus the desire for an alternative, Finkle-McGraw's elusive search for a systematic subversiveness.

The Diamond Age frustrated me and fascinated me. While I don't entirely agree with Stephenson's ideas, they are intriguing. Yet often, especially because of the lack of a satisfactory conclusion, the story seems to be nothing but a thin vehicle for the transmission of those ideas—it is all substance, heavy on theme and light on the plot. Stephenson may have piqued my interest, but he has to work harder than this if he hopes to hack my mind.

This past Saturday I was Skyping with my friend Vivike, and I mentioned I had just finished Persuasion. Together, we pondered why Pride & Prejudice is the most popular of Jane Austen's work, despite the fact that some of her later efforts, such as Emma and, yes, Persuasion, are manifestly superior. We put on our literary snob hats and monocles and lamented the popular interpretation of Pride & Prejudice as a romance in the way we think about romance today, an interpretation that we feel misses the mark when it comes to perceiving that novel's true potential for greatness. And we condemned Colin Firth for reifying Mr. Darcy, an act that has very probably doomed us all to the feverish exclamations of women and men the world over: "Oh, Mr. Darcy!"

But I digress.

I have not always been a fan of Jane Austen, because I too was once young and foolish (and I still am in many ways). However, I have now seen the light; with each successive work, Austen impresses me more and more. And one day I will definitely revisit books I've read before—in particular, Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility—to see if my opinions of them have altered as my esteem for Austen has increased. Persuasion has done nothing to diminish her in my eyes, and it might be my favourite Austen novel. Perhaps that's because, as the professor who wrote the introduction to this edition insists, it is Austen's most "mature" work. I can't really speak to that; I'm not much of an Austen critic. Yet there are unique aspects of Persuasion that I find, well, persuasive.

Anne Elliot is indubitably the heroine of Persuasion, but for most of the book she is a minor character in her own life. Austen gives us privileged access to her thoughts, but we get to hear very little of what she says to other characters. Indeed, we're given to understand that she has very little influence at all; when someone does take her advice, it's usually because it only justifies the course of action he or she wanted to take in the first place. (But isn't that oh so true of life in general?) Anne's father and two sisters look askance at her because she is not as obsessed with social status as they are. When she learns her father, Sir Walter, is in some financial difficulty, she has no qualms about trimming their expenses in extreme ways, including but not limited to renting out their family estate. Also, Anne almost married a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, eight years prior to the beginning of the book. It was a love match, but "fortunately" for Anne, the kindly Lady Russell persuaded her that love was not enough: Wentworth was not good enough. Thank goodness Anne didn't make that mistake!

For those of us reading this in the twenty-first century, it is all too easy to view Anne as the only sensible character in the book. We place her on a pedestal above the vanity of Sir Walter and Elizabeth, the preoccupation with precedence that plagues Mary, and the obsession with his inheritance that motivates Mr. Elliot in all his machinations. Anne is our class-defying heroine: she keeps up her connections to Mrs. Smith, who has fallen on hard times and is no longer respectable enough for a lady of Anne's status; she rebuffs Mr. Elliot, who is in every sense but character a perfect catch; and yes, she marries Captain Wentworth. This, after all, an Austen novel. And so it isn't as simple as "Anne = good" and "others = bad". Jane Austen, last time I checked, did not write Golden Age comic books. (Though, come to think of it, that would have been awesome.)

It's tempting to read Austen as some kind of incredibly subversive diatribe against class, but let's not go all Marxist on Ms. Austen's … err … well, let's not go all Marxist, shall we? It's true that Austen is very critical of some of her contemporary society's notions about marriage and how the quality of one's character relates to one's breeding. She is, we may go as far as to say, quite satirical, and it is this wit that often makes her books so enjoyable to read. Persuasion opens with an extended description of how Sir Walter spends his time: reading his own entry in the Baronetage of England (which is tantamount to someone spending all day re-reading his or her Facebook profile) and preening in front of his massive bedroom mirror. Sir Walter is vain in every sense of the word, concerned not only with his position in society but his exterior appearance as well. So Austen begins the book in fine form, mocking the emptiness that accompanies all those in the upper class who place style above substance. Or, as Mr. Elliot pompously confirms:

Lady Russell confessed that she had expected something better, but yet "it was an acquaintance worth having," and when Anne ventured to speak her opinion of them to Mr. Elliot, he agreed to their being nothing in themselves, but still maintained that as a family connexion, as good company, as those who would collect good company around them, they had their value. Anne smiled and said,

"My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."

"You are mistaken," said he gently, "that is not good company, that is the best. Good company requires only birth, education and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice.…"

I love how Austen so deftly alerts the reader, in so few words, to the obvious inadequacy of the runner-up suitors. It's almost as if she has all the unworthy men wear T-shirts declaring, "I am a gigantic tool." Ironically, Mr. Elliot has quite a bit more personality than Captain Wentworth, who always seems rather distant up until his passionate epistolary plea for Anne's heart.

Buried among the satire, however, are gentle hints that sometimes conformity is well and good. This passage of Anne's, from the penultimate chapter, is the most obvious such incident:

I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, I mean with regard to myself; and I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. But I mean, that I was right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion.

This is an incredibly nuanced perspective. (I love it more every time I read it, particularly that phrase, "in any circumstance of tolerable similarity.") And this is why I wince when people refer to Austen's works as "romances" in the modern sense of the word; I feel like they are missing out on so much! Anne here is saying that she thinks Lady Russell's advice was wrong but that she was right in submitting to it, because that was her duty. Lady Russell was acting in loco parentis, and Anne is not such a stranger to propriety that she would disregard Lady Russell's advice just to follow her heart. Thematically speaking, that is: love does not conquer all; love tempered with reason and maturity conquers all.

So my interpretation of Jane Austen, if you will permit me such folly, is that she is neither a hardcore subversive class warrior nor a conservative champion of the status quo. She is a realist, dissatisfied enough with her society to mock it but optimistic enough to hope that some people find happiness even under the present regime. Marriage is Austen's microcosm for all these social issues, for she herself did not married, and she has her class to thank in part for that privilege and modicum of independence. And as I become more conscious of class, and of my own privileges and biases, I am more fascinated by how Austen chooses to write about her own time and her own life.

Of course, this is just a small part of Persuasion, and maybe not even the best or the most important part. It is so many things—among them, yes, a romance. Doubtless this chimerical nature is a reason for its everlasting appeal and its status as a classic. Of course, not everyone is going to like it, and I entertained myself by reading some of the hilarious 1-star reviews before I commenced writing this one. The common complaint was one of boredom, and I can't help but sigh. Maybe I'm weird. No, I am weird, and I like it. I find Jane Austen fascinating and exciting for the same reasons that I rock out to classical music, believe that science preserves our sense of wonder rather than replacing it with one of purposelessness, and dance like no one is watching even though people always are. Life is too short and too precious to spend more than an iota of it bored. So I try to find entertainment and edification in as much of literature's vast panoply as I possibly can, and while I don't always succeed, I will always make the most of it (even if all that means is a snarky book review).

Sure, Persuasion suffers from a conspicuous lack of zombies, or even sea monsters. And there are no massive CGI explosions. Not a single one! Curiously enough, Persuasion manages to step up, rise above these debilitating shortcomings, and deliver a worthwhile story of romance deferred and relationships rekindled. Go figure.

Somewhat disappointingly, this is not a story about what happens to Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity after the Rapture. It's an interstitial between the abrupt ending of Firefly and the Serenity movie, covering some of the difficulty the crew has getting work, as well as Shepherd Book and Inara's departures. We also see an old antagonist, Lawrence Dobson, return for revenge.

In case you don't remember him, Dobson was an Alliance agent on the trail of Simon and River in the first episode. Mal shoots out his eye and leaves him for dead. Now Dobson is back, and he wants Mal. He's rather obsessed about it. And now he gets a little help from the men in blue gloves. Only not that much, see, because his plan is ready to be put into action. He just doesn't have Alliance clearance, which makes his plan more difficult but not impossible. The men in blue gloves are a convenient opportunity and nothing more.

Yeah, this story is a little all over the place.

Unfortunately, Serenity: Those Left Behind just tries to do too much. It invokes several guest characters from the book: Dobson, the hands of blue, and even Badger. But the plot is messy, paced much too fast, and not all that enthralling. Mal and the crew are having a hard time getting work, but Badger supplies them with the coordinates to a spaceship graveyard left over from a famous battle in the War for Independence. This is apparently a setup, because Dobson lies in wait to ambush Mal why he's exploring the wreckage for Nazi gold. Er, Alliance gold.

It's all a little too convenient, contrived, and not at all clever. Seems to me that it would be much easier to ambush Mal on a planet. I guess Dobson, obsessed as he is with revenge instead of just eliminating Mal safely and efficiently, is not thinking too clearly. I expected something more formidable from the men in blue gloves, but they come off as a bumbling pair of incompetents.

The characterization isn't impressive either. There are some heavy-handed moments between Simon and Kaylee where the latter says something and Simon acts dense, and the mood is lost without the tone provided by Sean Maher and Jewel Staite. Similarly, any of the significance in the tension between Book and Mal or Inara and Mal suffers.

The trouble with tie-in media for my favourite television shows is that it just isn't the same. Comics and novels that continue the adventures of my beloved characters lack a crucial part of the experience: the actor's performance. When I was a child and an adolescent, this did not bother me as much (I remember that the first audiobook to which I ever listened was a Star Trek: Voyager audiobook on CD, narrated by Robert Picardo). Nowadays, I tend to avoid Star Trek novels. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is a show that was so great, sometimes it hurts just thinking about its greatness. Yet I have been in no hurry to read its continuation in comic form—the same goes for Angel, and even for Firefly. Joss Whedon is a brilliant writer, but his characters are also partly the result of the acting of his well-casted talents. And those are absent from productions such as this.

I don't mean to be a hater. There are some "special features" that almost redeem this book: Nathan Fillion's introduction, Joss Whedon's pre-production notes for Sersnity, and artwork of the characters by various artists. It's a neat little package, but it has the misfortune to be wrapped around a story that does not meet my expectations when it comes to Whedon and the Firefly universe. There are a few moments where I can see the characters shine through, such as when Mal is about to surrender the money but then chooses to pick a fight when the other thief demands his gun as well. I knew even before I turned the page that there was no way Mal would part with his gun. But that is a trained reaction I acquired after coming to know and love these characters in the TV series. This comic book had great potential, but for the most part, I got left behind.

Full disclosure: I received this book for free, though it was on my to-read list already.

I first heard about Don Tapscott on CBC's Spark, where Nora Young interviewed him about the Net Generation and "digital natives." They also have an interview about MacroWikinomics, the sequel to Wikinomics, which I will be reading soon.

Tapscott intrigued me. According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1947. Yet he talks about the effects of technology on economy and business as if he were, if not exactly a digital native, then a digital confidant. He has a confidence in the benefits of digital, networked technology that belies the stereotype of the Baby Boomers as a generation that just "doesn't get it." Given any amount of thought, this stereotype, like most others, is quickly seen to be absurd: most of the successful companies Tapscott and Williams cite in this book, not to mention pioneers of the Internet like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, were born in the 1940s and 1950s. Age is not the dominant factor in companies' resistance to wikinomics, or change of any kind. It's a willingness to embrace a paradigm shift. Those of us in the Net Generation have it easy, because we have grown up into the Network Age rather than having it thrust upon us.

And that brings me to my first caveat about Wikinomics: this book isn't really for me. I'm not its audience. Tapscott and Williams do a great job explaining their concepts, but they did not consistently hold me riveted. Most of this book seemed very obvious to me, because I grew up with it; I live and breathe it. So I found myself nodding my head most of the time, murmuring, "It's obvious," under my breath. Furthermore, I am not the type of person who would primarily benefit from Wikinomics, because I do not run companies or even work for a company. Although I think anyone could find this book useful and informative, the format is clearly intended for people who might want to implement wikinomics in their own organizations.

If the term wikinomics is not illuminating, the subtitle of the book explains everything: it's "how mass collaboration changes everything." Specifically, Tapscott and Williams contend that the capabilities provided by computers that are becoming increasingly faster and increasingly networked allow companies to leverage the contributions of a massive user/customer base (the consumer turns into a "prosumer," a producer-consumer). Moreover, those companies that do not leverage this advantage will soon find themselves in great difficulty. For Tapscott and Williams, wikinomics is all about reducing costs while remaining profitable in a market where consumers are increasingly connected, increasingly more well-informed about competitors' offerings, and increasingly eager to be involved.

As with many books of its ilk, Wikinomics uses several case studies to make its argument. It opens with Goldcorp, Inc. in 2000 and its effort to revitalize Red Lake mining operations by crowdsourcing possible locations of gold deposits. Goldcorp released its preciously-hoarded geological data online for anyone to access and advertised rewards for people who sent in analyses that located good deposits of gold for them. It worked well: not only did Goldcorp discover some of its most profitable gold deposits ever, but the discoveries happened faster and more efficiently than its traditional R&D process.

Tapscott and Williams tell the same story about IBM, Apache, and Linux. I've heard the Linux story several times now (most recently and more verbosely in Next Generation Democracy), but the IBM-Apache story was new. Basically, IBM invested a lot of money and people into open source efforts like Linux and Apache. In return, it got the use of these products at a cost much less than that of a proprietary, in-house solution. As early as the 1990s, then, wikinomics already made sense: in order to reap rewards, companies were first giving something away. It seems counter-intuitive, but I don't see how it's any different from the shaving razor model: give away the razor once, sell the blades for life (only now it's "give away the razor once, sell the blades, sell a new razor with more blades, repeat"!).

During their analysis of the open source software movement, Tapscott and Williams made a remark that struck me, as a programmer, as particularly interesting:

To understand this progression, think of the open source software movement as two oncoming waves, with roughly a decade between them. The first wave bought us the plumbing: open source Web servers, operating systems, and the various pieces of code needed to run the Internet.…

The first wave of open source provided the foundation for the really expensive and complex applications that enterprises use to run their businesses. But when it came to the enterprise applications themselves, open source hit a wall. Indeed, for almost as long as software has existed, these enterprise-proof applications have been the preserve of large software houses like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Now that's changing, with a second wave of open source.

What this passage really put into perspective for me is this: I am extremely grateful we have Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. Oh, and Linux too. I can't imagine deciding I was unhappy with the existing operating systems and choosing to write my own (for fun!). I love programming, but I have no real desire to learn the network innards of Apache or the vast, untamed lands of Linux kernel development. I have real respect for those people who can manage to operate at that level, but Wikinomics reminded me that we are lucky we have all this stuff just waiting to be used! It's true that the "plumbing" of open source continues to develop. Lately I've been reading a lot about the "NoSQL" challengers, such as Apache Cassandra, to the relational database systems. This is still very high-level stuff for me, so I continue to stick with good ol' MySQL—but it's fascinating to watch these ongoing developments in the plumbing. Ten or twenty years ago, a lot of what's available to programmers like me just didn't exist; one had to go and spend money and time to develop it from scratch. Now, one has the option of doing that, and sometimes it's the best solution. However, there also exist resources one can use to bootstrap development, saving costs and time. And those resources exist thanks in part to mass collaboration.

But I digress. You can tell I'm passionate about this kind of thing, though more from the technical side than the economic side. Tapscott and Williams are also passionate, and that brings me to the second caveat: they might be too passionate. I certainly cannot accuse them of failing to communicate their enthusiasm and excitement for their subject matter. Wikinomics has lots of interesting insights into the economics of mass collaboration, but it also contains an unwavering optimism about the changes happening the industry. There are token attempts to address the critics—chapter 10 is devoted entirely to this—and, to be fair, they do refute several of the common challenges to wikinomics and mass collaboration. They make compelling cases about how open source software and digital downloads of culture do not have to mean an end to intellectual property (but they are the same arguments I've seen elsewhere). Regrettably absent from these rebuttals are any that address the growing digital divide or the potential for wikinomics to further degrade the balance of power between consumer and corporation.

Both of these issues have weighed heavily on my mind since I took a Philosophy and the Internet course last term. For my final essay, I defended James Tully's view that the Internet reinforces imperialism and hegemony as the most convincing interpretation we had studied. Tully convinced me that the manner in which the Internet has developed, from its origins in the power grids and communications networks of the dominant, imperialist nations, that the Internet is not the great democratic equalizer we would like it to be. Despite the amazing services springing up around mobile devices in places like Kenya, developing countries are still seriously behind when it comes to Internet access. Indeed, even a place like, oh, say, Canada, has sub-par broadband penetration (I think about the North here, and poor Labrador, and all my friends who live just far enough outside my city that they only have dial-up). So Tapscott and Williams tune that those companies that embrace wikinomics will profit and those that won't will decline is all well and good, but it makes me wonder about those who aren't so lucky to be so well connected. It makes me wonder if this will just exacerbate the digital divide. And while I think, personally, that wikinomics holds great potential for allowing developing nations to help bolster their economies and improve their connectivity to the world, I wish Wikinomics had covered more of that.

In my philosophy class we also discussed "immaterial labour," i.e., production of knowledge and information. If you're on Facebook, MySpace (hah, MySpace…), or yes, even Goodreads, then you're a participant in this labour. If you search using Google, Yahoo!, Bing (hah, Bing…), then you contribute to immaterial labour. We give companies our personal data, whether it's our birthdays and photos and what we did or read last night or our interests, destinations, gift ideas, etc. In return, the companies give us services—but they also use that data for profit. They improve their targeted advertising and improve their offerings, and often they do not compensate us, the providers of that information, for the time we spend. Tapscott and Williams take the rather uncritical line of, to paraphrase, "Participation from mass collaborators will help these companies deliver better products and better services." I'm not so convinced the truth is so simple, and again, it would have been nice to see a more thorough treatment of the dangers of letting companies harness us as unpaid knowledge workers.

Wikinomics is a well-structured, well-written roadmap for the tumultuous present and probable future of economics and corporate R&D in the digital era. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams sometimes grow excessive in their praise for wikinomics or their certitude of its benefits. However, they are absolutely right about one thing: there are no rollbacks here. The infrastructure of our age is such that returning to an insular, closed-door model of competition just will not work. So if wikinomics isn't the answer, and that's always a possibility, then there must be something even weirder and wilder. But that will be the province of companies and people who challenge themselves to innovate. The companies that metaphorically stick their fingers in there ears, continue with the same business practices, and expect different results while implementing no real changes? Yeah, those companies will get left in the dust. Even if you end up disagreeing that wikinomics is the way, Wikinomics provides a good wake-up call and a great starting point for thinking about where our digital future is taking us.

As I go to review this, I realize I never got around to putting it on my "currently reading" shelf. Weird.

I love Bible stories and parodies of Bible stories, and Lamb is no exception. From the first page, Moore greets me with the snappy dialogue that endeared me to him in Fool. Lamb also reminds me of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!, by Jonathan Goldstein. Both books take a tongue-in-cheek, anachronistic approach to chronicling the relationship between humanity and God, and both employ a liberal amount of physical humour. As I said in my review of Fool, this is not usually the comedy that impresses me, but once again, Moore manages to persuade me to make an exception. His dialogue, characterization, and simple storytelling ability all contribute to make Lamb more than just a series of flatulence, sex, and bacon jokes (although there are plenty of all three).

This book is a great example of where a frame story works well. Biff, our narrator, is a "forgotten disciple" of Jesus. An angel, Raziel, whom we're given to understand is not all that bright (he wants to be Spider-Man), resurrects Biff on twenty-first-century Earth on the orders of Heaven: Biff is going to write his own gospel, and he's going to tell the story of Jesus' childhood. The four canonical gospels tend to omit this part of Christ's life, focusing more on the birth and his "ministry" from when he was thirty until that whole Crucifixion deal. Biff manages to find a Bible in the hotel room where he and Raziel are staying, and he hides it in the bathroom to read where the angel won't interfere. He's understandably unimpressed with the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and eager to set the record straight. Thanks to the gift of tongues, Biff gets to do this in colloquial English, which makes it much more entertaining.

So while the main action happens two thousand years prior, we do get interjections from Biff as he is writing. Mostly, they're hilarious, as this early passage from when Biff is still acclimating to the new world order:

There were fifteen of us—well, fourteen after I hung Judas—so why me? Joshua always told me not to be afraid, for he would always be with me. Where are you, my friend? Why have you forsaken me? You wouldn't be afraid here. The towers and machines and the shine and stink of this would not daunt you. Come now, I'll order a pizza from room service. You would like pizza. The servant who brings it is named Jesus. And he's not even a Jew. You always liked irony. Come, Joshua, the angel says you are yet with us, you can hold him down while I pound him, then we will rejoice in pizza.

In addition to the humour, however, there's a note of apprehension, and that's one reason Lamb is more than just a cheap attempt at Biblical humour. Biff has the tough job of being Joshua's Fifth Business, the Dunstan Ramsay of the Bible:

"… And Mother yammering on always about how Joshua did this, and Joshua did that, and what great things Joshua would do when he returned. And all the while I'm the one looking out for my brothers and sisters, taking care of them when Father got sick, taking care of my own family. Still, was there any thanks? A kind word? No, I was doing nothing more than paving Joshua's road. You have no idea what it's like to always be second to Joshua."

That's Joshua's brother James, remarking privately to Biff after Biff and Joshua have returned from their decades-long journey to the Far East. Biff, of course, knows all about being second to Joshua; he has practically been the man's shadow for his entire life. As Joshua learns wisdom and enlightenment from the Three Wise Men who attended his birth, Biff tries to seek his own form of wisdom (such as the Kama Sutra) while also looking out for his all-too-honest and good friend. Furthermore, Biff and Joshua are both hopelessly in love with Mary Magdalene, who loves both of them back—but she would choose Joshua in a heartbeat, if he weren't obligated to remain celibate. So Biff knows all about being "the other guy," all about having to take care of Joshua so Joshua can take care of the rest of humanity.

The night before Mary's unwilling wedding to the villainous Jakan, Biff and Joshua leave Galilee to seek Joshua's destiny. To lend the story some structure, Moore has Joshua find the Three Wise Men who attended his birth. From them, Joshua hopes to learn how to be the Messiah. Of course, it doesn't quite work out that way. They confront demons, play a con game to rescue children from a sacrifice to Kali, and even become Buddhist monks and learn kung fu. But Joshua doesn't learn to become the Messiah because, in the words of the final wise man, Melchior, "Your dharma is not to learn, Joshua, but to teach."

There are plenty of exhibitions of Joshua's supernatural powers, mostly healing, but Joshua is very rarely frightening or unhuman. (There is a notable exception when, in an uncharacteristic moment of anger, he strikes blind an archer for killing a bandit.) According to Biff, Joshua is always certain that he is the Son of God but is less certain of how to handle being the Messiah. Thus, it is interesting to observe the change that both characters undergo after they return to Galilee and Joshua begins his ministry: Joshua becomes more and more sure of his path, which includes the Crucifixion; Biff becomes more and more desperate to save his friend from himself.

Moore has essentially retold Jesus' story as a buddy road movie, and I mean that in the best possible way. And I'm focusing on this aspect rather than the humour, because I think that most people who have heard of Christopher Moore have heard of him as a humourist. Extolling Lamb because of its comedy is all well and good, but the comedy is just another way in which Moore tells a much deeper story. Biff's gospel is a lot more intimate and humanizing than the canonical Biblical gospels, and Biff's closeness to Joshua brings us closer to him as well.

In many ways, I think I like Lamb for the same reasons I love Fool: it's a hilarious parody of a great work of literature, one that had me laughing out loud literally from the first page. It has wonderful major and minor characters, great episodic situations, and a story that works both on the level of comedy and as a deeper, coming-of-age tale. It worries me that, of the three Moore books I have read, the two I liked were both, in a sense, parodies of stories already told. I was less impressed with Fluke,and I hope it proves to be an anomaly rather than the rule for Moore's original stories.

And I hope Raziel gets to be Spider-Man. Poor angel deserves break. We'll see how he fares trying to grant wishes in The Stupidest Angel, but honestly, he's probably better off just watching television.

Full disclosure: I received this book in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway. Loves me the free books.

In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams argue that the Internet has irrevocably altered the way corporations and businesses will interact and develop new products and services. The proprietary, closed models of research and design are obsolete and must be replaced by mass collaboration with outside talent. Companies that do not embrace this new ethic of economics, the eponymous wikinomics, will be left behind, their innovation too glacial for a world where news moves at the speed of the trending topics on Twitter.

As I said in my review of Wikinomics, I am biased because of my generation. A lot of what Tapscott and Williams argue just feels right to me because this is how I have grown up using technology; I don't really understand any other model. My criticisms of Wikinomics were mostly directed toward the authors' style and rhetoric, and the same is true for Macrowikinomics. The books share the same effusive tone that makes me wince for how it must sound to the truly sceptical. However, this sequel has managed to win me over in a way the business-oriented Wikinomics did not. One thing I noticed with Wikinomics was how dated it felt, even though it was written only in 2006. In contrast, Macrowikinomics is a lot more topical and much more embedded within the current events of 2008-2010, yet it paradoxically feels like it will age more slowly. It owes this success to its expanded scope and more ambitious premises. By applying wikinomics in a more general setting, Tapscott and Williams make a more convincing case for its relevance.

Macrowikinomics covers several topics of contemporary importance. The CBC Spark interview covers some of them with Tapscott. After introducing their concept and bringing those who did not read the first book up to speed, Tapscott and Williams briefly cover how they think wikinomics will help to avoid any repeats of the 2008 financial crisis (more open data means more watchdogs). However, the book really hits its stride in part III: "Reindustrializing the Planet." Here, Macrowikinomics does what Wikinomics didn't: it makes me angry.

Oh, not angry at the book! No, Tapscott and Williams blithely discuss how wikinomics is beneficial for the transition away from fossil fuels, and although their conclusions and futuristic scenarios often err on the side of optimism, much of their analysis is valid. And so, the normally level-headed and mellow Ben feels the first signs of rage simmering beneath his placid surface. It's those darn global warming deniers! We know the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the atmosphere. I am convinced by the evidence that humans are a significant contributor to global warming—however, even if one is not, doesn't it make sense to curb our emissions anyway? At some point, whether or not one agrees that we have already passed it, we'll be emitting too much carbon dioxide, and the Earth will not be a happy place to live. The same goes for our dependence on fossil fuels. Maybe the opponents of the transition to clean energy are right, and there are vast, untapped reserves of oil. That does not change the fact that oil is a finite, non-renewable resource; we are using it faster than it can be replenished by several oils of magnitude. Eventually we're going to have to kick our oil habit—isn't it better to do it now, while we can phase out oil gradually?

Of course, the people who deny human culpability in global warming and the danger of our dependence on fossil fuels often do so out of a particularly insidious version of myopia. We humans are notoriously bad at our long-range planning, preferring to jump from crisis to crisis as our evolution has conditioned us to do. The result is a sort of "not in my lifetime" deferral of the problems of global warming, fossil fuel dependency, etc.—and this, of course, is where my generational bias rears its head. My generation rather worries we're the ones who will ultimately have to deal with these problems (or else)! Yet we are only just beginning to come of age and exert an influence on the conventional halls of power—corporations, governments, NGOs, etc. So understand that for us, the distributed approach to solving these problems that wikinomics champions feels natural and effective because it's largely all we have. Our governments mumble about "emissions targets" and "carbon taxes" even as our world leaders fly off on expensive jets to international summits where they talk about treaties that, if ever signed, are never really honoured. Our poor politicians are trapped between the rock of the powerful, well-funded corporate lobbyists and the increasingly-vocal youth calling out for change. Change, however, is slow in coming. And if our governments are slow in implementing clean energy, designing intelligent electrical grids, and subsidizing automobile innovation, then we are going to do it ourselves.

Our methods are as various and diverse as our demographic: we might generate our own electricity and sell it back to the grid, we might help design vehicles that are more efficient, or maybe we'll develop and contribute to apps that track our carbon footprints. One of the more reassuring points that Tapscott and Williams make is that, contrary to how I sometimes feel, one does not have to be an expert in everything. Sometimes, with all of the issues that seem to be clamouring for my attention, I am just overwhelmed by the amount of information available to me. It's impossible to become an expert in everything, so I must rely on other experts to tell me what I should think, and that always opens me up to the danger of being misled—one Andrew Wakefield, and suddenly I'm running around, not vaccinating my children! Tapscott and Williams have a suggestion to help mitigate such problems: openness and participation. Just as they believe that being open about the methods for calculating derivatives and risks will prevent repeats of the 2008 financial crisis, they are very adamant about opening up R&D for transportation and encouraging innovation in the clean energy sector. I don't need to be an expert in car design, because there are plenty of other car design experts out there who can focus on helping to build better cars. Meanwhile, I can contribute where I feel most comfortable. And that brings me to Macrowikinomics' take on education.

I am almost finished my undergraduate education. This was the last year of my honours bachelors degree in mathematics; next year I take "professional year" education courses and complete two sessions of student-teaching in schools. If all goes well, I'll be certified to teach grades 7-12 in Ontario, specifically in math and English. I've always wanted to be a teacher, even when I was a child. As I approach the attainment of that goal, I ruminate often on how I will teach. I have so many new options available to me, new technology and new strategies. As a new teacher, it threatens to be a little overwhelming, since I still have no experience. I'm sure I will find my way and develop strategies that work for me, as well as for my students. For now, I think about how I can bring my comfort and familiarity with current technology into the classroom and apply it to my teachables.

If Macrowikinomics made me angry about global warming, it made me excited about education. Tapscott and Williams tackle mostly the "ivory tower" of universities in the first chapter of part VI: "Learning, Discovery, and Well-Being", but they also mention projects in elementary and secondary schools of which they approve. Many of their proposals are controversial, and many of them seem obvious, and there is plenty of overlap between these two categories. It should come as no surprise that they want pedagogy to shift away from one-to-many delivery methods, such as the traditional professorial lecture, toward collaborative learning environments where teachers guide students toward making discoveries. They quote Seymour Papert: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery." This resonates with me. As a student, I have always loved learning, and that has made it easier for me than many of my peers. I know that I can't make every student love learning, but I can do my best. I can recognize that everyone learns differently and try to foster that difference rather than ignore it as I deliver the same lesson in the same style to the same bored faces.

Mostly, Macrowikinomics calls for a flexibility in the education system that would be as awesome as it is, at present, unattainable. Oh, I think components of their vision are very achievable—for example, I certainly hope to see open textbooks and additional platforms modelled after MIT's OpenCourseWare become more common. The success of OpenCourseWare and Khan Academy suggest that there is a niche traditional textbook and lecture-style learning is not satisfying. Some of Tapscott and Williams' suggestions are less likely to pass, at least in the near future: I think as long as universities are competing for government grants and corporate investments, it will be more difficult to collect credits from disparate institutions (through distance learning) and cobble them into a degree. Of course, Tapscott and Williams would like to see those institutions become collaborative at every level, not just when it comes to accreditation, and that would solve the problem—but the problem is a deep one, embedded with the very system itself. And I'm not going to tackle it myself … I'll be in high school, preparing the minds who probably will.

In the last two parts of the book prior to the conclusion, Macrowikinomics turns first to the dying newspaper industry and then to the effect of wikinomics on freedom and democracy. The former contains little that will be new if one has been paying any sort of attention to the news in the past five years: newspapers are dying, free is killing them, bits are cheaper than atoms, etc. It is a solid enough analysis, but it is not the strongest part of the book. I am pleased by the inclusion of the latter part, because it addresses some of the concerns I voiced in my review of Wikinomics about the absence of any perspectives from less developed nations. Again, it's not perfect, and sometimes I had to flip to the end notes to find the caveats about how the Internet can be used to the advantage of authoritarian regimes as well as a tool to fight against them. I'm still pleased by the inclusion of these topics, however, and for readers less familiar with how social networking has interacted with political activism, this part will hopefully be enlightening.

And yes, I get it: BMWs run Linux. The repetitive style that sometimes irked me in Wikinomics returns in all its glory. Also, if you have read Wikinomics, and especially if you read these in quick succession, some sections of this book will feel very familiar—in fact, some are reproduced verbatim from the first book. While I understand the need to familiarize newcomers with these ideas, and while it might be economical to save some time and effort by reusing older material, I found my attention wandering during these parts, because I had heard it all before.

Tapscott and Williams are at their best when they are discussing the new and amazing opportunities for innovation that the Internet and mass collaboration offer. They are, in a sense, charting the new techniques made possible by our new technology, both by interviewing the people who are setting trends and blazing trails and by making their own diagnoses and suggestions for how we can innovate using wikinomics. As with the previous books, they run into more trouble when they attempt to wax philosophical—their enthusiasm undermines their frequent reminders that wikinomics, the Internet, etc., are not panaceas. Similarly, their attempts to refute criticism of wikinomics and macrowikinomics are noble but unimpressive. Macrowikinomics is thorough, well-researched, and very much a manifesto.

Whether you consider this a good thing I will leave up to you. I, for one, plan to recommend this to people who I think will find it interesting, even if they might not agree with Tapscott and Williams' views. Unless you are an entrepreneur, investor, or corporate executive, I would advise you just to skip Wikinomics and go right to this book: it's everything Wikinomics is and more, and it's definitely worth reading. Macrowikinomics is neither the most insightful nor the most persuasive book about technology I've read, but it is provocative. It made me angry, and it made me inspired.

Margaret Atwood looms large in that particularly Canadian part of my literary subconscious, the part that natters at me to call stuff "CanLit" and berates me for having never read anything by Michael Ondaatje. Atwood is Kind Of A Big Deal, but so far I have managed to avoid reading any of her novels and have read, as far as I can recall, one of her short stories. Already, though, I have a bone to pick with Atwood. She has this weird bias against science fiction and insists that she doesn't write science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin has noticed and lamented this fact, and I will be a bit more generous and choose to review this book like the science-fiction novel it is.

First I must register fully my discontent with Atwood's perception of science fiction. The Handmaid's Tale is set in a future dystopian America, the Republic of Gilead, where women are largely subjugated. Fertile women who have proved troublesome, like the eponymous protagonist, are trained to become "handmaids," breeders for affluent military commanders who have yet to conceive any children with their wives. It's most definitely science fiction, at least in my books. Atwood, in this lovely interview included in my edition, disagrees:

No, it certainly isn't science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn't this book at all. The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sure, we can debate where to draw the lines between speculative fiction and science fiction, if any such lines exist, until the continents drift into another Pangaea. Yet I expect better from a feminist author who, after all, has to contend with people who associate feminism with bra-burning and "women first." I expect her to be more understanding of similar movements that have been marginalized and misconceptualized and ghettoized by the mainstream. Fortunately, I don't have to care about whether Atwood thinks she's writing science fiction (because I'm a rebel like that). The Handmaid's Tale is set in a possible future, and that's good enough for me.

This book has several epigrams at the beginning, one of which comes from Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. This is very well done, because it cues the reader that The Handmaid's Tale is satire. When I read satire, I relax certain requirements and am much more lenient with suspension of disbelief. Atwood spends very little time delving into the transition of America from shining beacon of freedom to fundamentalist, totalitarian Christian state. And if one spends any amount of time thinking critically about her society, it's easy to see flaws in her construction. Yet that's OK, because Atwood isn't striving for realism here: this is an impressionism. Atwood is exploring the sensations and feeling associated with totalitarianism and repression. As she points out in the same interview from which I quoted above, everything she depicts in Gilead has existed as part of a nation at one point in time.

The Handmaid's Tale made me think a lot about what it's like to be a woman and to be viewed as an object by both men and other women. Atwood has essentially taken the objectification of women to its extremes: women are Wives, Marthas, handmaids, daughters, etc.; they exist in relation to the men who "protect" them. This protection is very real, in the sense that yes, women are probably safer walking the streets of Gilead than they are in some urban centres. Yet "protect" is also synonymous in this case with "possess." Atwood makes that very obvious in the naming of her narrator, whose original name we never learn: to us, as to the rest of the world, she is Offred—Fred being the name of her Commander. Similarly, the Gileadean propaganda echoes attitudes prevalent in our society that shouldn't be. There's an intense flashback to Offred's time in her indoctrination centre where the new handmaids have a group confession, and one of them wails about being gangraped at fourteen—but it was her fault, of course; she must have invited it. Gileadean women must obey strict sumptuary laws based on their position, and all of them enforce a modesty intended to prevent the incitement of lust in the men who view them.

As befits satire, Atwood often exaggerates these attitudes toward the absurd end of the scale. Yet this only serves to emphasize them and make explicit the objectification of women that is just as pervasive in our society, even if it happens to be more subtle. We tend to hold women to a more restrictive standard of beauty than we do men; women are told they must take a great deal of care for their appearance in order to be acceptable. Yet we condemn women if they dress in a manner considered "too provocative" and blame them if this attracts unwanted attention. I'm aware of all of this from an intellectual perspective; I've read the articles, manifestos, essays, blog posts, T-shirts, etc. Yet knowing and feeling are two different things, and Offred's reflections on "the way things were" compared to her life in the Republic of Gilead add another dimension to how I conceive of the power relations between men and women, and between women and women.

I like that Atwood includes the oppression and judgement of women by other women as well. In The Handmaid's Tale this happens in two categories: class-based oppression and the authoritarian domination of the handmaids by the Aunts. Handmaids are, in a way, the lowest class of woman in Gilead, second only to the "unwomen" who get sent to the radioactive Colonies to clean up waste. Marthas—housekeepers—and Wives alike look down on handmaids, the former probably because they can get away with it, and maybe out of moral opprobrium, and the latter because of what a handmaid in the household means. Offred's relationship with the Commander's Wife is mostly cold and distant: Serena Joy makes it clear that she has no sympathy for Offred and takes no enjoyment from the duties she and Offred must perform to ensure the Commander fathers a child. Yet those duties create a paradoxical intimacy when Serena broaches the possibility that the Commander is sterile—the s-word is forbidden in Gilead, of course—and suggests they conspire to find another sperm donor. Of all the relationships in The Handmaid's Tale, I think I like the one between Offred and Serena the best, for it begins with the appearance of being extremely shallow and predictable and gradually reveals a greater depth and nuance.

While its subtext and themes appeal to me, I am more ambivalent about The Handmaid's Tale as a story. I think this comes down to Atwood's style. Her descriptions are extremely rich and full-bodied—she uses "palimpsest" in the first paragraph—and there is nothing wrong with this per se, but this lyrical quality combined with the sparse cast of characters makes the story seem more suitable for the stage than the page. As a drama too, this would be intriguing to see as a play. As a novel … well, it feels a lot like that other dystopian work of satire, Nineteen Eighty-Four. I know there are probably people whose opinion of this book make such a comparison blasphemous, but I think it's pretty obvious: both follow a single individual in order to depict an exaggerated form of a totalitarian society that springs from the author's worries over elements of his or her contemporary society. Both climax with discovery and capture (I won't spoil the ending by saying whether Offred suffers the same fate as Winston) and require the protagonist to judge and trust whether other characters are comrades in the resistance or spies. The Handmaid's Tale evokes the same sort of feeling of resigned helplessness as Winston experiences when Big Brother revises history.

I do not think I will ever fall in love with Atwood's style as I have with writers like Robertson Davies, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, or Umberto Eco. And I still smart from her slight against science fiction. Yet I am willing to declare a truce based on the strength of the ideas and themes of The Handmaid's Tale and place Atwood on the same intellectual plane as those other authors. Well played, Margaret. Well played indeed.