Books Reviewed 2015

Here is  housekeeping post, collecting all the books reviewed here in 2015.

Looking back at this list, I see that this year saw Terry Pratchette’s last book (a wrenching experience), and new novels by old favorites Stross, Perry, Macguire, Holt, Gaiman, among others. I also read older but still good histories by Goodwin and Graeber. I read several books about banking, Papal and otherwise, and overlapping works about Italy, fictional and (supposedly) real.

Over the year, I reviewed a sampling of important books about contemporary digital life, including cryptocurrency, the “sharing economy”, social media, and “mind change”.   These works covered a spectrum from enthusiasm to dark worry, giving us much to think about. There are many more I did not have time or energy for. (I will say more on this topic in another post)

Throughout 2015 I continued my ongoing investigation of the question, “what is coworking?”, including reviews of two recent (self published) books about coworking by practitioners. (More on coworking in another post.)

Shall I name some “Best Books” out of my list? Why not?

Fiction:

There were so many to pick from. I mean, with Neil Gaiman in the list, how can I choose? But let me mention two that are especially memorable

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Very imaginative and well written, and, for once, not so horribly dark. This book lodged in my memory more than others that are probably equally good.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Published a few years ago, but I didn’t read it until this year. A wonderful, intricate story. The flight of the parrot is still in my memory.

Nonfiction:

There were many important works about digital life, and I shall try to comment on them in another post. But three books that really hit me are:

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
From several years ago, but I didn’t read it until this year. Highly influential on the ‘occupy’ and other left-ish thinking. This is an astonishingly good book, and long form anthropology, to boot. Wow!

Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
An exlectic little self-published book about “home coworking”, which I didn’t know was a thing. Kane walked the walk, and made me think in new ways about community and coworking.

Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs
Unexpected amounts of fun reading this short book. It does an old, graying nerd no end of good to see that at least some of the kids are OK. Really, really, OK.

List of books reviewed in 2015

Fiction

A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias
After Alice by Gregory Maguire
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson
Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick
Candy Apple Red by Nancy Bush
Chicks and Balances edited by Esther Friesner and John Helfers
Corsair by James L. Cambias
Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Distress by Greg Egan
Electric Blue by Nancy Bush
Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong
Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear
Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea
Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald
Mort(e) by Robert Repino
Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Shark Skin Suite by Tim Dorsey
String of Beads by Thomas Perry
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine ed. by Jonathan Strahan
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
The Fortress in Orion by Mike Resnick
The Future Falls by Tanya Huff
The Good, the Bad, and The Smug by Tom Holt
The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray
The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
Ultraviolet by Nancy Bush
We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler
Witches Be Crazy by Logan J. Hunder
Zer0es by Chuck Wendig

Non Fiction

Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner
Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs
God’s Bankers by Gerald Posner
LaFayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Let’s Be Less Stupid by Patricia Marx
Live Right and Find Happiness by Dave Barry
Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi
Mind Change by Susan Greenfield
Mindsharing by Lior Zoref
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
No More Sink Full of Mugs by Tony Bacigalupo
Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling
Pax Technica by Phillip N. Howard
Peers, Inc by Robin Chase
Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Age of Cryptocurrency by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
The Next Species by Michael Tennesen
The Reputation Economy by Michael Fertik and David C. Thompson
The Social Labs Revolution by Zaid Hassan
The Ugly Renaissance by Alexander Lee
Twentyfirst Century Robot by Brian David Johnson
Women of Will:  Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays by Tina Packer

 

Book Reviews

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books Reviewed Third Quarter

Books Reviewed Third Quarter

A bit of housekeeping:  here is a list of all the book reviews that appeared in this blog in Q3 2015.  Mostly new or recent releases, with a few old but good thrown in.

Fiction

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick
Chicks and Balances edited by Esther Friesner and John Helfers
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 
Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore  
The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine ed. by Jonathan Strahan
The Good, the Bad, and The Smug by Tom Holt
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley 
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu 
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis 

Non fiction

Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
Let’s Be Less Stupid by Patricia Marx
Mind Change by Susan Greenfield 
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
Peers, Inc by Robin Chase
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin 
The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
The Next Species by Michael Tennesen 

 

Book Review: “Aurora” by Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

In this story Robinson lays out what we know about the challenges of generation ships. A generation ship is one of the classic theoretically possible way to get to nearby stars. The ship is a large habitat populated with a large number of people, which travels at a substantial fraction of light speed. The ship will take a couple of centuries to reach even the nearest star, so the people and all other organisms will breed at least a few generations (and many thousands of generations for the short lived species, such as bacteria).

This story follows one such journey, and shows us the deep problems of such a voyage. Constructing a sustainable biosphere in space is very difficult, and pushing it out from all sources of replenishment is even harder. What did you forget to pack? There is no way to go back or receive supplies. You’ll forget something, and that will probably be fatal.

In order to deliver humans, and to have enough genetic diversity to be a viable colony the ship must carry thousands of people, and an associated diversity of plants and animals. Nevertheless, these populations will inevitably be a small and limited sample, and very close to genetic bottlenecks.

However well built initially, the living systems in the ship form an island ecology, which we know are difficult to sustain even on beautiful, loving Earth. If nothing else, the biome will continue to evolve, diverging and mutating. Everything evolves, but not at the same rate, microorganisms will evolve much faster than plants and animals, and so on.

Whatever was carefully balanced at the start will get out of whack soon enough. Life will probably survive, but not necessarily human life, and not necessarily life that could ever live on Earth. Just keeping things viable for a few centuries is going to be a desperate, close run thing.

Robinson also shows us that there is fundamental problem if and when you reach the destination. You may find lifeless world that can be terraformed. That will take additional centuries or millennia. You have more resources, and you can grow and spread out a bit, but it is still all “under glass” for a long, long time.

Yet, this may be the best scenario. If the generation ship encounters a world with life—any kind of life—then the colonists must try to fit into the new ecology that they are not evolved for. The Earth species will be invasive pests, and the natives will treat them as disease or just plain food. Earthlings will have no resistance to native predation at any scale, and could easily succumb to diseases, allergic reactions, and starvation.

Ultimately, the colonists will need to evolve to survive on the new world. That is a very long shot, and if successful, they will no longer be human.

Finally, Robinson expends a lot of time showing us that small island societies are likely to experience dangerous conflicts among the humans. With no safety valve, and resources near the limits of survival, humans will fuss and fight, even to extinction. Even if nothing else goes wrong, human conflict can end the whole enterprise very quickly.

The basic conclusion is that generation ships are essentially suicide missions. What does this tell us about the current generation of enthusiasm for Mars colonies? Hint: they face all the same issues, at a smaller scale. (And see pp. 381-2 for some Mars-specific issues.) “Not quite as suicidal” isn’t a huge endorsement for such projects.

Clearly, this is science fiction in the classic “big ideas” tradition.

Unfortunately, the story itself is less impressive than the ideas. (Alas, this is a classic failure for this style of classic science fiction.) Just because this is a centuries long mission doesn’t mean that the story should be so l-o-n-g. Sheesh. I think it would have been just as good at half the words. A tenth the words.

The story is supposedly told by the ship’s artificial intelligence (named, wait for it, “Ship”). As such, it contains a lot of stilted writing. Worse, it contains a lot of “learning to tell a story” exercises. There is also yick-yack about “consciousness”, “self-consciousness”, “sentience” and so on, as well as uninformative gab about story telling algorithms. This all may be interesting to the machine intelligence, but they were boring to read.

The tale follows the struggles of the generation that arrives at Tau Ceti, the troubles and challenges of those difficult years. Robinson takes the opportunity to educate us about generation ships (as noted above).  Unfortunately, he goes on and on. So many details of the essentially pointless bickering, devolving into fighting. On and on about the steady erosion of the technical and biological infrastructure.

I get it already.

Perhaps it is deliberate, but the non-human storyteller lacks much sense of what makes for human interest in a story. The characters and interpersonal relations are shallow sketches, lacking plausible motivations and emotions.

For instance, I didn’t find a single love story in the whole book. And the few relationships we do see are mysteriously washed out and uninteresting.

We know that these shortcomings are not due to lack of talent, given KSR’s other works. Perhaps they were a deliberate choice (“see if you can write like an artificial intelligence would write the story”), but I hated it.

---

 

1. Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora, New York, Orbit, 2015.

 

Sunday Book Reviews