Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente ★★★★

2009-12-07T04:34:43Z

An intricate collection of fairy tales presented in the tradition of the Arabian Nights. Valente nests the stories within each other, often many levels deep, and weaves several threads of plot through the various stories for a resolution at the end. She draws on many ideas from classical stories— some of the exotic creatures she depicts are right out of medieval bestiaries and even Pliny— in creating her own richly detailed world. The frequent jumps up and down the levels of story recursion make it easy to put the book down, and it only turns into a page-turner toward the end.

Buddha’s Nature: Evolution as a Practical Guide to Enlightenment, by Wes Nisker ★★★★

2009-11-10T08:00:30Z

Wes Nisker examines Buddhist meditation practices in the light of modern scientific understanding of biology and evolution. This is not a breathless “OMG people knew all this stuff 2500 years ago” screed— it’s more a matter of noting modern scientific results that match up with the insights that meditators came up with over many years of self-examination, and suggesting ways that understanding the science can enrich your own meditative practice. The book has a friendly, colloquial tone, and Nisker gives the pleasant sense that meditation includes a lot of chances to stop and smell the flowers on the way toward enlightenment, rather than a determined trudge toward nirvana. The science was all review for me, but written very accessibly— wyvernwell, would you like to borrow it sometime?

House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds ★★★★

2009-11-07T05:26:24Z

In the early fourth millennium, humanity largely lives within the light-hour surrounding our own Sun, and a few wealthy tycoons take up galactic tourism: they clone themselves a thousand times (often with genetic variations, including gender), decanting their personality into each clone, and set out in a thousand ships to travel the galaxy at near-lightspeed, with plans to meet up later. As civilizations rise and fall across the galaxy, these “shatterlings” (with the assistance of technologies for suspended animation, life extension, and time dilation) see six million years pass, trading information and expertise to the worlds they visit.

The book has two parallel stories: a shorter one following the youth of Abigail Gentian, who grows up to spawn the thousand shatterlings called Gentian Line (or the House of Flowers, since all of them are named after flowers), and a larger one following the intertwined lives of two of her shatterlings, Campion and Purslane, who have broken the rules of their Line, fallen in love, and taken up traveling together. They arrive late at a scheduled reunion of the Line, fearing censure by their fellows, and discover that someone has attempted to wipe out the entire clan. Their challenge is to figure out who did it, and why— and to survive.

Reynolds does a good job of keeping the suspense high even as the action stretches over the decades and centuries of interstellar travel. The tale includes some reflections on recent events, including the fear of the Other and the erosion of morality in times of stress. The feel is very much in the New Space Opera style of his other works, but is not as dark as the tales in his Revelation Space universe.

It’s election day!

2009-11-03T17:38:48Z

View Poll: It’s Election Day!

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way; Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★½

2009-11-03T07:52:07Z

In the introduction, Le Guin explains that the Tao Te Ching has been an influential book throughout her life, and that over the years she has made efforts at producing her own rendition of the classic. (She won’t call it a translation, since she doesn’t actually speak Chinese, but she has done extensive research— she provides copious notes on how she chose particular renderings in the back of the book— and produced this in collaboration with a scholar of the language.) Her goal has been to distill the clarity of the classic for a modern reader who is more likely one citizen among millions rather than a leader seeking sagacious insights for rulership. The result is quite good, with a penetrating brevity I haven’t seen in the other translations I’ve read. I actually wound up reading it with another translation to hand when I wanted to get another perspective on the occasional verse, but I think the simplicity of her rendering is a good place to start before going out looking for more nuance.

Bitter Angels, by C. L. Anderson ★★★★

2009-11-01T04:51:17Z

I picked up this book based on a Big Idea post before I discovered that the author is Sarah Zettel (whom I already like) with a new nom de plume. She gives us a fine far-future intrigue, with several viewpoint characters caught up in schemes where no one really knows what’s going on. I was particularly impressed by the depiction of a society that has managed to both keep a lid on humanity’s natural warring tendencies and cope with the societal effects of radical life extension. There is a subtle metafictional element as the author hints at tropes from softer space opera genres to put more possibilities in the reader’s mind when trying to unravel the conspiracy, then eventually resolves it in a different way; I found it disconcerting at first when she rang a few “cheesy paranormal romance” alarm bells, but by the time she pulled it with a second genre I found the effect amusing.

Escaped gaming meme: Post-Information-Age society

2009-10-31T03:29:06Z

At some point, society is going to get over the novelty of the Information Age and settle into an equilibrium. Desktop information appliances will fade into the woodwork. Fancy consoles will still exist for specialists, but the average home will not have a regular keyboard. (I’m developing this for a Star Wars game as a “just so story” for the apparent lack of laptops, cellphones, and iPods, but it can apply to any high-tech setting.) I’m choosing nomenclature in accordance with Clarke’s Third Law.

The most common Galactic script is Iconic, a “universal written language” with no defined pronunciation. It is a logographic script (comparable to Chinese characters) but designed for information-age usage; the script owes more to dingbats, traffic signs, and emoji than to calligraphy. It is commonly generated by speaking to a computer, though there are also input methods that allow you to type in your favorite language’s phonetic alphabet or make shorthand scrawls that evoke a particular glyph. Iconic’s primary use is navigation and warning signs in spaceports and starships— knowing even a few dozen glyphs is useful— but it has accumulated thousands of glyphs for varying circumstances and can be used as a written language. The ordering of the glyphs can require a bit of puzzling when they’re written out by people whose native languages use different syntaxes, and for all its supposed universality, attempting to translate from one language to another via Iconic is at least as error-prone as getting the original Moby Dick back from the Emoji translation. A dialect called Contract Iconic has a formal grouping notation that makes it less natural to read but absolutely clear when you need to write out something with the precision of legalese.

Anyone old enough to read and write has a personal Sigil, which is a collection of information about them. It includes their name, contact information, affiliations, cryptographic public keys, and at least one glyph that represents them when it is written in Iconic. The glyph can be a photograph or stylized cartoon of the face, calligraphic signature, coat of arms, chop, etc., and is often printed with the person’s name in the script for their native language or a phonetic script adjacent, like Japanese furigana. The Sigil identifies the person in all walks of life, from legal documents to electronic mail to comm calls.

The personal Talisman is a gadget containing all of your personal data, encrypted and secured to your level of satisfaction. It may be integrated into a device like a wrist comlink, embedded in a bracelet or ring, or implanted under the skin (often between the metacarpals of the hand). It communicates with other devices, usually via radio frequency communication or modulating the body’s electric field. It carries the Sigils of everyone you deal with, your security permissions that open doors and start vehicles, your health and financial records, your entire library of text and music and video, and any other data you need to carry around. Other devices are used to access the data, with different security procedures for different categories of data: headphones tucked in your ear canal have immediate access to your music collection, any datapad you pick up has access to the novel you’re currently reading, your voiceprint speaking a person’s name to a commlink in your hand will look up their contact information in their Sigil, but you need to perform detailed procedures to sign legal documents or perform financial transactions. Talismans usually exchange Sigils automatically through a handshake or bow.

Crazy Wisdom: A provocative romp through the philosophies of East and West, by Wes Nisker ★★★★★

2009-10-26T04:15:13Z

I decided to reread this one since I was about to lend it to yanfali, and found it held up well since the last time I read it. baronlaw, meorime, sistercoyote, I think you’d enjoy it.

Journalist-turned-Buddhist-meditation-teacher Wes Nisker takes us on a tour of the world of “crazy wisdom”: the province of trickster gods, sacred clowns, holy fools, Taoist sages, Hassidic rabbis, Zen masters, Sufi mystics, existentialists, Dadaists, and the scientists who delve into the scales of space and time where we see the counterintuitive effects of evolution and quantum physics and general relativity. Crazy wisdom is the insight that comes from dropping away the filters of ego and preconceived notions and taking a good hard look at the world in all its banality and splendor... as well as taking the time to laugh at our own silly human pretensions.

The book is both a survey of crazy wisdom traditions from ancient times through modern and a look into its practice. It’s more of a signpost than a how-to manual, with lots of leads one can follow up on if they prove intriguing, liberally salted with quotations from sources ranging from ancient holy books to modern humorists and poets. I find the metaphysical perspective resonates well with my own aversion to dogma and hierarchy.

Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling ★★★½

2009-10-25T06:11:10Z

In 2095, the world has been through some rough pandemics and wound up run by a gerontocracy facilitated by advanced medical technology. Mia Ziemann has been careful enough to make it to age 94 before finally deciding to try a full rejuvenation treatment, and decides to try the new cutting-edge technology— which, in addition to restoring physical youth, also adds a lot of fresh new brain cells to replace the ones lost over the decades. And with a head full of fresh neurons and a body coursing with youthful hormones, the rejuvenated Mia finds that she has an all-new set of priorities that don’t match the life she led before. This carries her off on an escapade into Europe and a world of disaffected young artists who aren’t so thrilled to be in a society run by and for the aged.

The future society is very believable, and Sterling put a lot of good thought into an artistic world a century from the time the book was written. The story itself has world-sized problems without world-sized solutions; it’s a good cautionary tale that warns of what can go wrong, but only provides a basis for speculation about how to do things right.

Hold your nose and vote on Tuesday, November 3, 2009

2009-10-21T02:30:09Z

Sunnyvale City Council
Politics in Sunnyvale is getting rancorous this year. Meyering, Flores, and Kelly are all running as a slate, pooling funds to send out a single flyer (which denounces the incumbents for accepting a pay raise that was mandated in the city charter, and for voting themselves lifetime medical benefits when they actually voted to reduce preexisting ones); I feel that it undermines their credibility when they all sign on to the same deceptive statements, and that of Councilmember Dave Whittum (whom I like and respect) for promoting these candidates. Their supporters on local mailing lists (such as that of my own neighborhood association and Put Neighborhoods First in Sunnyvale) have been sufficiently acrimonious that I have become quite skeptical of the candidates. Supporters of that slate regularly tout Special Interest Watch, which is a partisan site provided by former Sunnyvale vice mayor Tim Risch and his wife Yolanda; I do not recommend according it the neutrality of a FactCheck.org or Politifact.com. (For one thing, it has a double standard on whether donations from police officers count as special interests or not, depending on whether the Risches are backing a candidate.) I like them for not being beholden to the big backers like SunPAC, but their campaign rhetoric is not impressing me, nor their preparedness for office.

The city provides Candidate Statements; I’ve linked their public filings. I’ve provided my impressions from attending the first city-sponsored candidate forum on 9/24 and the one sponsored by the League of Women Voters on 10/8; you can watch the webcasts of those (and the one on 10/13 that I missed).
- Member, City Council Seat 1. SmartVoter.
  - Tony Spitaleri. SmartVoter. Public filings. Endorsed by: San Jose Mercury, Santa Clara County Democratic Party.
    He has consistently opposed electoral reform (in a “kick the can down the road without ever taking a stance against it” way), and in his campaigning he displays an offputting mastery of political dissembling. I didn’t like him last time he stood for election, and I don’t like him this time either. The problem is that the alternative is Pat Meyering, and Meyering’s showing in the debates has been bad enough that I think he would be even worse. So I’m going to hold my nose and vote for Spitaleri.
  - Pat Meyering. SmartVoter. Public filings. He supports campaign finance reform and ranked-choice voting, and for that (and bothering to file his SmartVoter paperwork in a timely fashion— Spitaleri’s just showed up in the past four days) he would normally have my vote if he were otherwise unremarkable. (I voted for him back in 2007.) However, he has a very bad track record of working well with others when he served on the housing commission, and has an abrasive style that might work well in the courtroom but doesn’t hold up well on a council.
    Meyering keeps bringing up a vote about giving permanent health benefits to members of the City Council, claiming it as evidence of corruption. He was kind enough to provide the date, so I looked up the minutes (scroll down to RTC 07-061). The minutes show that the vote reduced city council medical benefits (which had previously been granted for the lifetime of former councilmen) to the minimum for CalPERS, saving the city money overall but not curtailing CalPERS membership entirely (which is what Meyering seems to be complaining about without actually looking at the costs of having a non-CalPERS retirement fund) [update 10/27: the Mercury weighs in on the matter and clarifies it on 10/28]; I suspect Meyering’s selective quotation is the sort of thing that sounds good if you’re a prosecutor, but I don’t like it in a city council candidate. If he wanted to make me think he’s likely to be an honest public servant, he should have been more honest with the citizens of Sunnyvale and made the case by presenting the full set of facts.
    He also has problems with his math: he claims he is going to pay for restoring 18 jobs (costing $1.79m/year, which were cut because the federal grant for them ran out) by eliminating council raises (saving $4k/year— councilmembers only get paid about $22k/year for a job that is technically part-time but practically over 30 hours per week, last time I surveyed the councilmembers) and eliminating preexisting lifetime medical benefits for councilmembers (saving $33k/year). This is not rocket science here; if he can’t do the math on the campaign trail when all the voters are evaluating him, how can we expect him to do the work on the council?
- Member, City Council Seat 2. SmartVoter.
  - Michael Anthony Flores. SmartVoter. Public filings. Endorsed by: Santa Clara County Republican Party.
    He has no experience on city boards or commissions and claims it’s because the council has been blocking him from serving. (Given how desperate the city is for people to serve, I have to wonder how he managed that.) In debates, his policy ideas are very nebulous, which does not appeal to my own policy-wonk nature. He seems technologically inept; in debates, he asks people to send e-mail to him so he can send them documents instead of just posting it on his web site. [Edited to add] On 10/25, he sent out a private attachment to the SunnyvalePolitics list followed by a request for everyone to delete it; he seems to have no grasp of the way the Internet works.
  - Chris Moylan. SmartVoter. Public filings. Endorsed by: San Jose Mercury, Santa Clara County Democratic Party, Santa Clara County League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club (Loma Prieta Chapter).
    I like his policy ideas: he supports public campaign financing (and even has a plan for paying for it), requiring new construction to be double-plumbed for greywater in anticipation of putting in more infrastructure in Sunnyvale, creating incentives to draw solar-power companies to Sunnyvale, and cleaning our water supply with ultraviolet light rather than chloramine. He has a good, wonkish command of the real-world details needed to do the job. I liked him when I voted for him in 2005, and I still like him now.
- Member, City Council Seat 3. SmartVoter.
  - Jim Griffith. SmartVoter. Public filings. Endorsed by: San Jose Mercury, Santa Clara County Democratic Party, Santa Clara County League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club (Loma Prieta Chapter).
    He has a good command of policy details and is open to prospects of electoral reform; in the race for this seat, he is the only one who has done the homework. In all his answers to questions in debate, he has good, specific answers that could solve a problem, but is not attached to them: he brings a mindset I often see in good engineers, a desire to find the best solution whether or not it’s his idea. His policy ideas show that he gets out of the lab: he wants to create incentives for a more diverse business community for more reliable city income, and gives the example of biotech companies as something that the city should work on attracting.
  - Penny Kelly. SmartVoter. Public filings. Endorsed by: Santa Clara County Republican Party.
    I like her personally and respect that she is a straight talker who readily admits she doesn’t have her opponent’s experience but is good at learning quickly on the job. I think it was a mistake for her to run the I Can Build the Town Center contest, as underscores her lack of experience when her opponent has been studying hard for the past two years. I was disappointed in her at the League of Women Voters forum on October 8, when she took a completely neutral metaphor that Christopher Moylan used about the upcoming years being an obstacle course that will need a good driver (as he was asking for voters to trust him with the keys to the car) and claimed he had made a crack about woman drivers— basically putting words in his mouth to try to make him look like a sexist. (She used a jocular tone, but if it was humor, it fell flat.) I’d rather see her in Seat 1 instead of either Spitaleri or Meyering.
If we were using the single transferable vote to elect the top three candidates to three seats, I would rank them Moylan, Griffith, Kelly, Flores, Spitaleri, Meyering.
Measures submitted to the voters
- Measure G: Parcel Tax – Fremont Union High School District. SmartVoter. Coverage on CBS 5.
  
  Supported By Opposed By
  
  MEASURE G for Fremont Union High School District
  San Jose Mercury News
  Polly M. Bove, Superintendent of Schools Silicon Valley Taxpayers’ Association
  
  Education is an investment in the future, and it improves local property prices; I won’t mind hitching the $98 per year I already pay on my property taxes to the Consumer Price Index to improve the likelihood there will still be a vibrant economy here when I retire, and more well-educated workers should I choose to start my own business. Yes.

Supported By	Opposed By
MEASURE G for Fremont Union High School District San Jose Mercury News Polly M. Bove, Superintendent of Schools	Silicon Valley Taxpayers’ Association

Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, by Olivia Judson ★★★★★

2009-10-17T02:51:53Z

A great look at the evolutionary biology of sex, presented as a collection of newspaper advice columns where “Dr. Tatiana” answers questions sent in by everything from slime-molds to vertebrates. Judson keeps the pace lively and the writing humorous, mixing the exposition of the gobsmackingly weird mating behaviors found throughout the animal world with our current understanding of the evolutionary principles that give rise to them. If you’re designing aliens for your science fiction setting, this book is full of inspirational material (in the vein of the Alien Sex panels given at local science fiction conventions by SF author and physical anthropologist Patricia MacEwen). This book could also be a good way to liven up the study of biology for a high school student with a dry textbook; if you have more academic pursuits in mind, there’s an excellent set of references in the back.

The Burning Skies, by David J. Williams ★★★½

2009-10-16T06:14:21Z

In the sequel to The Mirrored Heavens, Williams delivers plenty more action and a bit more of the big picture. Connections between many of the characters in the first book are revealed, including some interesting weird-science ideas, as well as some hints of a posthuman theme. Like the first book, there is so much action we don’t get to find out much about the world: there’s a fight over whether the world should change without much to tell the reader whether or not it needs it. The ending is on a complete cliffhanger; I’m still curious as to what we’ll see in the third volume, but unless you really like high-tech future action, it’s probably best to hold off on buying this trilogy until we find out if Williams can deliver a satisfying conclusion.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, by Charles P. Pierce ★★★½

2009-10-15T07:02:01Z

Charles Pierce is a great admirer of the American tradition of cranks: people with wild and wacky theories that challenge the status quo, whose notions are tested against reality and are either break current understanding or are broken by it. (For example, my mother grew up in an era when tectonic drift was a crank theory; it is now accepted geology.) He sees this as one of the beauties of a society with the First Amendment in its bedrock.

In recent years, however, crank theories are getting spread throughout the media without benefit of testing them against reality, and without the benefit of testing they amount to so much idiocy. Instead, they are swept up by what he identifies as three Great Premises of Idiot America:

Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
Fact is that which people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

He documents much idiocy of recent years and compares it to historical crankery (Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World being a prominent example). Pierce doesn’t have a structural solution to the problem; he calls for a return to the days when cranks were a beloved fringe element of our society rather than mass-marketed lunatics on television, propped up by anyone whose political agenda they serve, but doesn’t chart a course to get there.

The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams ★★★½

2009-10-10T05:32:50Z

I was intrigued by a Big Idea post on John Scalzi’s weblog and picked up the book. It’s 2110, there’s a new Cold War on between the United States and Eurasia (with South America and Africa as client states providing access to equatorial launch sites), and the elite operatives fall into two categories: mechanics, for their skill with weapons and powered armor, and razors, who handle information warfare. And just as the new skyhook constructed as a symbol of international détente is nearing completion, a terrorist group calling themselves Autumn Rain bring it down and set off conflicts that could start a whole new world war.

The book has lots of cyberpunk action, to the exclusion of getting much of a view of the world itself. (Various appendices wound up on the series’ web site.) The action follows four viewpoint characters through their heavily-constrained views of events; they are, very plausibly, kept in the dark about the large-scale issues by their superiors, and have to speculate amongst themselves to figure it out. The reader eventually gets a good idea about the large-scale conflict in which the main characters are instrumental, but the action never slows down long enough to get a sense of what it’s like to live in the world of 2110.

Results of the first Sunnyvale Candidate Forum

2009-09-25T05:19:34Z

Distilling my impressions of two hours of exposure to our local candidates:

For seat 1, it’s the incumbent Tony Spitaleri (currently mayor, elected by the city council) and challenger Pat Meyering. Spitaleri has never impressed me— in past council meetings I’ve attended, he’s always upheld the status quo and been resistant to change— and in this one he demonstrated a mastery of political doublespeak that I found very offputting. Meyering showed more interest in policy detail than Spitaleri, and spent a lot of time attacking his opponent as corrupt, claiming that Spitaleri was in the pocket of developers who donated to his campaign (and that there was a general problem with this on the City Council); he did it often enough that I found it offputting as well. (Meyering’s skills probably work well when he’s working as a prosecuting attorney, but they clashed with the atmosphere of the event. He was also the only candidate not to show up with campaign literature touting a web site, which struck me as a lack of preparation for the obvious.) I’m leaning toward Meyering but not thrilled with either candidate.

For seat 2, it’s the incumbent Chris Moylan (currently vice mayor, elected by the city council) and challenger Michael Anthony Flores. Chris Moylan demonstrated an impressive command of policy detail, had good green credentials to cite (including endorsements by the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club), and has usually been on my side on issues in the past four years. Flores showed good intentions, but didn’t have the detailed knowledge to back it up; most of his answers were rather vague. (Flores also suggested people visit Special Interest Watch, which is owned by the wife of former Sunnyvale mayor Tim Risch, so he’s already enmeshed in Sunnyvale politics and is not an outsider.) I think Moylan is a much stronger candidate.

In seat 3, John Howe is being termed out, so the newcomers are Penny Kelly (chairperson of my local neighborhood association) and Jim Griffith. Griffith is clearly a policy wonk and knows a lot about local issues and details; Kelly was refreshingly honest in saying she doesn’t have Griffith’s level of knowledge, but has plenty of experience in learning on the job. Much as I like Kelly personally, I think Griffith is better qualified for the position.

If we were using the single transferable vote to get the top three candidates instead of dividing them up with these arbitrary seats, I would currently be inclined to vote Moylan, Griffith, Kelly, Meyering, Flores, Spitaleri.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman ★★★★

2009-09-23T01:48:28Z

The premise of The World Without Us is a hypothetical future: what would happen to the Earth if all of humanity suddenly disappeared? To explore that, Weisman looks over our present and our past, touring the planet from deep wilderness to urban cores, history from the Paleozoic Era through the Paleolithic up to the modern day, and places where humans have already vanished, including Chernobyl and the Mayan civilization. It’s an interesting survey of our planet and the true fragility of infrastructure that seems very solid in our daily lives. The book is a tour, not a reference, and has no handy timelines for quickly generating descriptions for abandoned cities if you’re writing.

Who’s going to the Sunnyvale Candidate Forum?

2009-09-21T17:34:59Z

The first city-sponsored forum for the candidates for the City Council in this November’s election will be held on Thursday, September 24 at 7:00pm at the Council Chambers at 456 W. Olive Avenue. It will also be broadcast on KSUN-15 and webcast.

View Poll: First Sunnyvale Candidate Forum

Neverness, by David Zindell ★★★★

2009-09-17T05:08:00Z

Zindell uses the storytelling style of epic fantasy to spin a far-future hard SF tale. Three millennia into the future, Mallory Ringess is a newly trained Pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame that has the monopoly on faster-than-light travel, based in the city of Neverness on the world Icefall. He winds up in an odyssey that takes him into realms of posthuman gods and genetically revived cavemen in pursuit of a solution to the long-term survival of humankind and the mysterious series of supernovae devastating settled worlds.

The depiction of three thousand years of cultural development works manages to convey a sense of strangeness without making me reach for a dictionary like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The hero gets put through the wringer (sometimes due to his own impetuosity), so I recommend this story for when you’re up for an odyssey, not just thrilling your sense of wonder.

Some parts of the future history are already dated— the book was written at the tail end of the Cold War, back when we all lived with the spectre of Mutual Assured Destruction, and the tale of Old Earth being devastated in a nuclear holocaust already seems quaint.

Appleseed, by Masamune Shirow

2009-09-12T02:21:40Z

Book One: The Promethean Challenge ★★★½: A cyberpunk classic following the adventures of the soldier Deunan Knute and her cyborg partner Briareos, who are recruited from surviving in a postapocalyptic wasteland to come to the apparently-utopian city Olympus, which is leading the reconstruction of the planet. Olympus has a significant population of artificial humans— clones, hybrids made from multiple genetic sources, and bioroids with significant after-evolution options— and the variations on the theme of humanity set the stage for many interesting possible conflicts. This volume is setting up a larger story, with our heroes clearly being embroiled in a larger scheme.

Some of the combat scenes full of powered armor can be hard to follow, but overall the tale has me wanting to see what happens next.

Book Two: Prometheus Unbound ★★★½: As the cyborg Briareos recovers in the hospital from the assault in Book 1, Deunan goes to work in law enforcement in the utopian city of Olympus. The artificial-human bioroids created to run Olympus are developing the notion that the fundamental problem with the world is human nature itself— and this sets off a conflict where the city’s central computer, Gaia, goes out of control. And it will take Deunan and Briareos and their bioroid friend Hitomi to fix the problem...

This volume has plenty of violent power-suit action and explosions, and more of the undercurrent speculating on the problems of human nature. This still feels like setup; I’m looking forward to the resolution.

Book Three: The Scales of Prometheus ★★★: Deunan and Briareos are trying to fit into Olympus’ ESWAT team, involved in the pursuit of a rogue combat bioroid and a raid on a criminal operation in France, and Deunan isn’t so good at teamwork with anyone other than her partner. Plenty of cyberpunk action, lots of exposition via fanservice, not so much connection to the larger-scale plot laid out in the first two volumes.

Book Four: The Promethean Balance ★★½: Deunan and Briareos are on a mission for Olympus ESWAT to deal with a plot to disrupt the alliance between Imperial Americana and the Holy Islamic Republic of Munma. Naturally, this leads to large amounts of gunfire and explosions and a battle with an oversized powersuit. I found that the emphasis on the action got in the way of figuring out the actual plot, and the more philosophical side of the Appleseed story faded almost entirely into the background.

Overall, the series was a disappointment; the first couple of books raised my hopes that there would be some interesting perspectives on the human condition, but that thread of story got dropped in the latter volumes.

Public service cat blogging

2009-09-09T21:55:56Z

Since some web sites have declared this to be a Day Without Cats on the Internet, you may be missing your RDA of fluffy adorability. Yeti is here to save you.

The Disappeared, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch ★★★½

2009-09-09T20:41:33Z

Miles Flint finally worked his way up to detective in the police force for Armstrong dome on the Moon, and this week is presenting him with an unpleasant set of cases. Interstellar diplomacy requires that wrong committed against a member of an alien species be punished according to that species’ laws, and some of those laws are harsher than anything Hammurabi ever wrote down; naturally, this creates a market for illegal Disappearance services to help people evade alien justice that is, by human standards, unreasonable. He winds up having to juggle three related cases involving three different species tracking down people who used Disappearance services, and facing some very nasty moral decisions.

The story keeps up a fairly good pace and the characters well fleshed-out, but the worldbuilding seems a bit of an afterthought. There are some details about life on the moon, but even I never noticed even a nod toward the differing gravity there, or the other details of coping with an environment containing vacuum, meteorites, and radiation. I’m not expecting a rigorous work of hard science fiction here, but it would have been nice to at least see some sort of handwavium nod toward the issue.

Diaspora: Hard Science-Fiction Role-Playing with Fate ★★★½

2009-09-09T05:18:25Z

Diaspora is an instantiation of the third edition Fate system (currently best known for the pulp RPG Spirit of the Century) inspired by the classic game Traveller and updated for thirty years’ progress in hard sf storytelling. The writers for Diaspora have done a good job of fleshing out the differing scales of the system, with rules for personal combat (including more details on armor and weapons than in SotC), starship battles, social struggle, platoon-scale warfare, and developing clusters of star systems. Like SotC, there are no significant rules for advancement: character details can be shuffled around as they change, but any gain in skill has to be offset with a loss in some other skill. The writeup is a useful framework, but not as colorful as SotC (in either the setting or the stunts); if you loved Traveller but want a more storytelling-oriented system to use where you already have inspiration, this is likely to be great for you. I find it worthwhile as a playtested instantiation of Fate to compare to when developing my own game, but no story ideas are jumping off the page waving at me.

The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox ★★★★

2009-09-06T00:35:32Z

In The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, Time Magazine’s Curious Capitalist takes a look at the history of the efficient-market hypothesis— the notion that market prices reflect aggregate wisdom— in the past century. He livens up the discussion of economics by highlighting the characters involved, bringing much-needed color to discussion of the dismal science. The history shows how the idea developed in academia and found expression in finance, until burgeoning contradictions from the real world began to undermine the notion that we can just leave unregulated free markets to solve all our problems, and points the way to new developments in behavioral economics that help to explain the past and may help us to guide the future. He closes with a moderate perspective:

Where does this leave us? It leaves us with a need to find ways to temper speculative excess while acknowledging that we won’t necessarily be able to distinguish speculative excess from an entirely sustainable boom. Financial regulation will be part of that. A rediscovery of ethics and integrity ... will play a role, too, one hopes. So will memory...

If the events of recent years haven’t already convinced you that rational markets belong to the same domain of idealized tools as frictionless surfaces, massless pulleys, and perfect blackbodies, this will provide you with plenty of food for thought. If you already thought that, it’s a good history of a major current in the economic and financial thinking of the past century.

Warren Buffett on the “Ovarian Lottery”

2009-09-05T01:55:55Z

A question posed by Warren Buffett:

Suppose a genie comes to you twenty four hours before you're born and asks you to design the world into which you are going to be born— the social rules, the political rules, and so on. The catch is that you have to go to a barrel of six billion tickets, and pick one at random. The ticket identifies what you will be when you enter this world, for example, rich or poor, black or white, retarded or bright, male or female. Given the “randomness” of this trait assigning process, what kind of world would you want to design?

Through Alien Eyes, by Amy Thomson ★★★

2009-09-03T05:31:41Z

In the sequel to The Color of Distance, Juna Saari returns to Earth with two of the alien Tendu: froglike beings with an innate talent for biotechnology who have never had occasion to develop hard technology like our own. The humans living on and near Earth, however, aren’t ready to cope with a new sentient species, and there’s plenty of trouble brewing.

Thomson sets out to deal with a lot of issues, including xenophobia, ecological catastrophe, mandatory birth control on a planet stretched to its limits, the potential of the Tendu biotech ability, the reaction of the aliens to the human world, and Juna’s own family. She has plenty of interesting ideas (though the traditional dirt farm with working animals on a space station was difficult for my suspension of disbelief), but she doesn’t manage to weave all the threads together very well. There’s a lot of telling instead of showing, and some threads just get lost without any resolution. Handling them well would probably have required another book, but if the story had kept up the quality of the first book, it would have been worthwhile.