shark bytes

25. The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot (hc)

A quick and breezy guide to better comprehension of numbers like "this project will cost $x billion" or "we measured y% improvement over the course of the year". Unfortunately, I suspect the people who really need to read it won't, and many of those who do read it will find the material familiar. (They do a good job on the bibliography, though, including classics such as John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy .)

The authors do a BBC Radio show (which led to the book), and many of the examples are still British even in the US edition; I consider this a feature rather than a bug, myself.

Recommended as a quick library read, or a gift for that family member who keeps saying "but that program is so expensive!" about things which equate to about $2/week/person benefitting.

26. Saturn's Children: A Space Opera, Charles Stross (ebook)

I was lucky to have switched to reading this just before upgrading my iPod touch to 3.0, since eReader broke and wouldn't go back to the book list (it's fixed now).

Another solid effort, this one mixes a post-human robolife solar system with Heinlein's Friday and Asimov's Three Laws. In some spots, it has a Galaxy Quest-flavored tone of "poking fun, but with love" but doesn't fall into the trap of becoming an inside-joke fest. (Admittedly, the "Scalzi Endowment Museum" was made funnier by knowing about this museum visit, but it's not a requirement.)

Definitely up with the other two 2009 Hugo nominees I've read (Little Brother and Zoe's Tale), it takes on questions of identity and the Meaning of Life while still doing the "romp through the solar system" well. Recommended.

RR41. Power, S.M. Stirling, Ed. (mmpb)

This mix of short SF and "science fact" articles reads like a theme issue of New Destinies edited by Stirling. The lead story (Poul Anderson's "Snowball", which I suspect inspired the Shipstones in Friday) is really the high point of the book; the articles on how coal-fired MHD should have Saved Us All, and if that didn't then fusion certainly would, are less so. Stirling's own story ("Roachstompers", which actually did debut in New Destinies) of how cold fusion power ruined the global economy, resulting in the US's southern border becoming a war zone (apparently Pemex was the only thing keeping the Mexican economy running) has his usual deft grasp of peaceful intercultural and interracial relations, as well known by those who've discussed the topics with him on USENET.

RR42. The War God's Own, David Weber (mmpb)

Second in his "Bahzell Bahnakson" fantasy series, which contrasts with his SF by having a protagonist who is actually generally distrusted by the rest of the universe (for historical/racial reasons) rather than having the Glow of Righteous Valor that causes even some of her enemies (the honorable ones, as opposed to the Eeeeeeevil Nasty ones) to respect her. Also, there are no huge broadsides of missiles.

A good light re-read, suitable for travel, which is why I brought it along.

RR43. Rude Astronauts, Allen Steele (mmpb)

Short story collection (with some nonfiction as well) of his near-future space and alt-hist space writing, plus a few other pieces. (I tend to like his short stories better than I like his novels.) The alt-hist in particular is enjoyable, with fun parallels as well as differences (in this case, WWII ended not with nuclear bombs, but with intercontinental suborbital rocketplane bombers...and the first moon landing was still in July 1969, but with a whole lot more than two people present).

Recommended along with his later All-American Alien Boy.

Not much book reading lately. (Well, apart from looking stuff up in O'Reilly books for work; I don't count that as "reading" the books....)

RR34. The Aliens Among Us, James White (mmpb)

Not quite a Sector General book, though of the seven stories in the book one of them ("Countercharm") takes place at Sector General, another ("Tableau") predates it in the same universe (and eventually leads to the creation of Sector General), and a third ("Occupation: Warrior") was originally written as a Sector General-verse story but was de-linked by editorial request. (White later had the main character show up as a Monitor Corps officer anyway, in effect re-linking the story into Sector General continuity.)

The other four stories include two that are a bit too similar to really work well in the same collection ("The Scavengers" and "Red Alert"), the first contact story "To Kill or Cure" (which has a Sector General sensibility to it, what with the "injured aliens that need medical care" and all), and "The Conspirators" which reminds me most of Poul Anderson's Brain Wave.

I generally recommend White, though this is probably not the best starting point.

RR35. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Gene Roddenberry (ebook)

The novelization of the less-than-stellar first movie, this is better than one might expect based on the movie. It fills in some badly-needed characterization (explaining, for example, just why Kirk ever let them pry him out of a captain's chair in the first place) and also includes this classic "Take That" to slashfic writers:

[S]ince Kirk's and Spock's friendship was unusually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually indeed become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject: "I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years."

Vonda McIntyre's novelization of The Wrath of Khan is my favorite of the movie novelizations, but this isn't too far behind.

14. Carrier, Tom Clancy (ebook)

A nonfiction book about carrier operations, the training and doctrine needed, strategic implications of carrier-based air power, and so forth. Naturally, the editorial bias is in favor of the whole thing (Tom Clancy: Definitely Not a Pacifist), though there are certainly criticisms leveled at the Navy and particularly Navy aviation for becoming too insular; this led to both Tailhook and problems during the first Gulf War when the Navy's aircraft couldn't participate in the common air tasking orders and were therefore much less useful than they should have been (both in the general sense and in the "justify our budget" sense).

The book's about 10 years old, so it's out of date in various ways but the general content holds up pretty well overall. Recommended if you like mil-techy infodumps, since it's basically a book-length collection of such.

15. How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle, William Poundstone (ebook)

Much shorter and lighter than Carrier. I was interested in both the puzzle aspects and Poundstone's take on the history that led to the whole "puzzle interview" process.

I'm generally a fan of Poundstone's nonfiction, and this was as good as I expected. Some of the puzzles were familiar (like the "four people, one flashlight" bridge-crossing test; here, the four are Adam, Larry, Bono and Edge); others weren't. (Some aren't even puzzles, but rather ways to figure out what questions you'd ask about the situation as given.) Recommended, along with his other nonfiction (with the exception of the Big Secrets series; they're not as good, and at this point badly out of date).

16. The Mystery of Flight 427, Bill Adair (hc)

This is more of a narrative than Gerry Byrne's book on the same topic; it starts in media res with the crash of 427 (rather than UA585), goes into slightly less technical detail, and concentrates more on the people involved (including the husband of one victim). It appears that Adair was writing newspaper articles throughout the process, so he had significantly better access to the investigators and other parties than Byrne did (in particularly, Byrne says that Boeing was unwilling to talk to him; OTOH, Adair is much easier on Boeing than Byrne is).

Recommended over Byrne's Flight 427 for readers who might be less interested in the technical aspects; people interested in the technical details of this and other crashes should read Byrne, and look for Macarthur Job's Air Disaster series as well.

17. The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction, John Varley (ebook)

In the "air disaster/investigation" vein, Varley's Millennium is a pretty good novel (though he'd probably be the first to say "ignore the movie!") with good old SF time travel thrown into the mix. "Air Raid", one of the stories included here, was the original for the whole story, and is still my favorite of his short fiction.

As with Worlds of George O., the real gems here are the autobiographical segments between the stories.

RR30. Engaging the Enemy, Elizabeth Moon (mmpb)
RR31. Command Decision, Elizabeth Moon (mmpb)
RR32. Victory Conditions, Elizabeth Moon (mmpb)

The last three Vatta's War books. Any real discussion would get into spoilers; suffice it to say that I highly recommend the series to fans of military SF and/or Miles Vorkosigan. Ky Vatta's not Miles (she's her own person) and the mercenaries are rather more peripheral here than the Dendarii, but "smart Academy dropout goes into space, makes mistakes, learns lessons, and so on" works as a quick description.

8. The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross (ebook)

Most of my new-to-me reading has been on the iPod lately. I have loaded the Kindle app on it, but the interface is terrible and the typography isn't wowing me either; I'm sticking with eReader. Unfortunately, while Ace and Del Rey and HarperCollins are all fairly good about getting their books onto Fictionwise in eReader format (and Baen, of course, has no DRM on their ebooks), my options for current[1] Tor books are either to buy Kindle editions and read them in the (IMO unusable) iPhone app, or to do without except for the freebies and just read other publishers' books. (There's also the not-really-an-option option of buying either the Kindle or Secure Mobipocket editions and stripping the DRM.) I'm just going to do without, and spend the money elsewhere.

This is the second "Laundry" book, with Bob Howard once again facing supernatural threats; this time, it's a James Bond mode complete with goofy gadgets. Like The Atrocity Archives, the book also contains a shorter story following the main title; this time, Bob gets a new intern. Hijinks ensue.

The combination of geekery, bureaucratic nonsense, spy spoof, and general humor is more than worthwhile. Recommended, though if you haven't read The Atrocity Archives you should probably read that first.

9. Far Frontiers, Vol. III: Fall, 1985, Jim Baen & Jerry Pournelle, eds. (mmpb)

One of the various iterations of the Permanent Floating Jim Baen Bookazine, Far Frontiers fell between Destinies and New Destinies (and pretty much morphed into the latter, as far as I can tell). This volume/"issue" starts strong with Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned", which I skipped since I just re-read it recently. The rest is hit or miss, with Alexander Jablokov's "A Wink in the Eye of the Wolf" the best of the batch and Rivka Jacobs's "Morning on Venus" totally lost on me; Thomas Wylde's "Space Shuttle Crashes!" reminded me of Allen Steele's short "Mudzilla's Last Stand" in tone, and was similarly enjoyable.

RR24. Marque and Reprisal, Elizabeth Moon (mmpb)

Second in the "Vatta's War" series. After surviving a more than usually eventful first cruise as a merchant captain, Ky Vatta gets some really bad news. Soon she and her cousin Stella are dealing with some particularly nasty characters as the implications start to build up.

I highly recommend this and the rest of the series; start with Trading in Danger.

RR25. The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross (ebook)

Re-read in preparation for The Jennifer Morgue. Bob Howard, IT support drone for Britain's secret anti-occult agency, winds up on active service...but still has to deal with his bureaucratic boss as well as an ancient evil entity from another universe; it's not always clear which is harder to deal with. Enjoyable and recommended.

RR26. Flare, Roger Zelazny and Thomas T. Thomas (mmpb)

It's a disaster novel... IIIIN SPAAAAACE!! The Sun's been really quiet for decades, so nobody's bothered rad-hardening their space gear; as you can easily guess, this turns out to have been a really bad idea. I don't know how much of this was Zelazny; it reads similarly to the other Thomas I've read.

Not bad, but nothing you should spend a whole lot of time or money seeking out either.

[1] There are some eReader format Tor ebooks which date from around 2002 and are still priced at the "hardcover" level, including papersky's The King's Name and Michael Flynn's Falling Stars, but none of the previous books in either series are available....

I want to get this posted before sundown, because the timing's too good to miss. (Also, posting my last booklog post late on Saturday night probably had something to do with the dearth of comments it received.)

6. I Remember the Future, Michael A. Burstein (ebook)[1]

Happy birthday, Michael!

I'll freely admit that I'm biased in favor of both this book and its author. There are authors whose work I enjoy, and authors whose work doesn't really click with me; there are authors I like as people, and authors who I would have a hard time getting along with. Michael is in the best quadrant of the truth table: an author whose work I like, and a person I would enjoy spending time with whether or not his work met my taste.

I enjoyed reading both the stories I had previously read as well as those I hadn't; I enjoyed the afterwords to each story even more, though. (Despite (or because of) my non-writerness, I really like hearing about how stories came about or how writers approach their work.)

[1] I have this in hardcover as well, but I'm much more likely to read an ebook than a hardcover when I'm reading in snippets, and short story collections are great for that.

RR20. Microcosmic Tales, Asimov/Greenberg/Olander, Eds. (mmpb)

100 short-short SF stories. Suffers a bit from Asimov's lead-in sentences, which are often both punny and spoilery, but still a good choice for extremely quick reads.

RR21. Ambulance Ship, James White (mmpb)

One of the mid-series Sector General fixups, from the timeframe where the stories within a given book were more closely linked than in the earliest books but before the point at which each book was a true novel rather than a fixup. Notable also for the "Secret History of Sector General" forematter, later included in NESFA Press's The White Papers IIRC.

I've been sick, so falling back on lots of comfort reading that is both short and familiar.

4.1. "Damned If You Don't", Randall Garrett (free ebook derived from the Project Gutenberg version)

(Just a short story, so I don't want to count it as new read #5.)

I read this one, finally, through a concatenation of events. First, eReader 2.0 was released for iPhone OS, with my feature wishlist items included. After upgrading, I found that eReader/Fictionwise had reworked some of the ebooks with better metadata, so I wanted to re-download them; the easiest solution was to uninstall eReader, then reinstall and use "download entire bookshelf" to avoid duplication.

One of the books in my collection is The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, and I wanted to check to see if they'd fixed a typo. (There looks like a badly-done search and replace that's replaced "gu" with "Gu", probably while doing some editing of Fast Times at Fairmont High, but which results in things like "AuGust" appearing elsewhere. Not fixed but hardly a real issue.) I got to the intro to "Bookworm, Run!" and was reminded that I'd never tracked down the Garrett story that Vinge refers to.

After a quick Google search I spotted it on Manybooks.net...which eReader helpfully has a shortcut to, right in the app. Soon thereafter I had the story ready to read. This is so much better than the usual process: check ISFDB, see if it's in an anthology, find the anthology somewhere in the various library systems I have access to, request the book, wait a few days, pick up the book, read the story (in 10 minutes), then have to return the book. In this case, a lapsed copyright renewal made it free, but I'd certainly pay for this kind of stuff. (Fictionwise sells a fair number of short stories by various authors. This is a good thing.)

As for the story itself? I've always liked Randall Garrett's short fiction, and this is no exception, even if the "surprise" was muted by having already read "Bookworm, Run!" Still, it's so unbelievable. The very idea that removing huge amounts of value from one sector of the economy would cause a widespread financial crisis! Who'd believe that one?
( Rereads: Brust, Resnick, more Heinlein, George O. Smith )

2. You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, Roger Hall (tpb)

I originally requested this from the library in July, after Hall's death led to a number of blog posts and obituaries that mentioned the book. It finally arrived at the end of December. (There are still 17 holds on the book, with only five copies in the Minuteman system.) It was worth the wait, however.

This is nothing more, and nothing less, than his memoir of his days in the OSS during WW II; it starts with him transferring to the OSS, and ends with the OSS disappearing around him. The book was very funny, though not quite what I'd expected; I'd been thinking it likely to be more like Eric Frank Russell's Wasp with derring-do behind enemy lines, but in fact his adventures were generally in training facilities and the like. (His various visits to the British parachute training were quite amusing, for example.)

Naturally, his one big mission (a drop into occupied France to work with the Resistance) resulted in him winding up well behind the lines...the Allied lines. (Oops.) It was just his luck that the drop was made just after there'd been a rapid advance in that area that wasn't reported through to OSS HQ quickly enough to abort the mission.

RR3. A Matter of Metalaw, Lee Correy (mmpb)

Not one of my favorites of "Correy"'s work (G. Harry Stine's pseudonym for his fiction), this suffers badly from repeated "but if he'd only realized that he was missing the vital clue" asides and doesn't really ever gel for me. The far-future setting also seems to be weaker than his usual near-future SF (some of which is now not-so-near-past SF; Star Driver has a minor plot point hinge on the protagonist not being able to get time on the one available minicomputer!).

Of his other work, Shuttle Down (alt-hist after the decision was made not to launch the Shuttle into polar orbits from Vandenberg AFB) is probably my favorite, and gets a bit of a shout-out in David Brin's Earth. Star Driver and Space Doctor are both stereotypical Analog stories: the former portraying the invention of the Dean Drive a reactionless thruster; the latter a fairly standard (but well done) "life IIIIIN SPAAAAACE" story of medicine at an under-construction space station. Manna is what today I'd probably call Prometheus Award bait[1]; it's better done than The Probability Broach since it doesn't require a complete alternate universe, but the wonderfulness of the Republic of Mary-Sue United Mitanni Commonwealth is hard to suspend disbelief for.

Upcoming: Why Does Popcorn Cost So Much at the Movies?, as well as a re-read of Carpe Jugulum. The post may be delayed by Arisia and post-con recovery time, though. (I may get a boardgame post in about BSG before the weekend, if I'm lucky. yendi, we absolutely have to play this. It's made for your namesake House.)

[1] Looking it up, it was nominated in 1985 and lost to Vinge's The Peace War.