March/April 2020 Reading

• 4/30/2020: Food of the Gods by Cassandra Khaw - rolls up all four Rupert Wong books (the cannibal chef).  
• 4/29/2020: Food of the Gods by Cassandra Khaw - rolls up all four Rupert Wong books (the cannibal chef).  
• 4/28/2020: (actually read 5/7, playing a little catch up).  "Ahmaud Arbery Should Be Alive"  by Jamil Smith.  "Convicting his killers is the start. But the family of this modern lynching victim can’t have justice in a country with laws that protect white people who kill black people."
  • “Nothing that our legal system can do outpaces the efficiency of racism when it comes to delivering consequences.”
  • “Open-carry must be abolished. Stand-your-ground has to go. State codes that allow citizens to arrest people? Those are golden tickets for lynchings. They should be relics of an America that should embarrass us.”
• 4/27/2020: "How to prepare for big data projects: 6 key elements of a successful strategy" - Techrepublic. 
• A thorough understanding of present and future business questions the data is expected to yield answers for. 
• Data centralization (...maybe)
• ID data sources to feed central repository
• ID future data sources
• Defined data prep methodology – extract, transformed, loaded
• Effective data prep tools
• 4/26/2020: "On the Day You Spend Forever" by Adam R. Shannon.  The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/25/2020: "Godmeat" by Maritn Cahill.  The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/24/2020: "Skinned" by Lesley Nneka Arimah.  The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/23/2020: "Dead Air" by Nino Cipri. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/22/2020: "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth" by Daryl Gregory. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/21/2020: "What Gentle Women Dare" by Kelly Robson The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/20/2020: "STET" by Sarah Gailey: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• My least favorite so far....I get the angle around autonomous cars and the value of life, but didn't like it.
• 4/19/2020: "Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung" by Usamn Malik: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Extremely Cthulhuesque.  With snakes.

• 4/18/2020: "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" by Annalee Newitz: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Maybe my favorite so far...clever story about a small AI left on its own who bonds with a human and crows. Really embraces the centaur aspect of AI beyond just the human.
• 4/17/2020: "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" by P. Djeli Clark: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/16/2020: THEMATIC THREAD: RELIGION IN HORROR - Richard had a bit on The Wicker Man.  Check out  Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General.  Should be able to catch them on Shudder.
• 4/15/2020: "The Kite Maker" by Brenda Peynado: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• A bit District 9.
• 4/14/2020: " Sister Rosetta Thorpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good" by LaShawn M. Wanak: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Weird, hisorical, and really, really good.
• 4/13/2020: "Through the Flash" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Reminded me a LOT of the Heaven, Inc. story I wrote 20 years ago.
• 4/12/2020: "Variations on a Theme from Turandot" by Ada Hoffman: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/11/2020: "Hard Mary" by Sofia Samatar: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Interesting dig into what makes an AI human....useful....part of a community.
• 4/10/2020: "Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women" by Theodore McCombs: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Particularly original
• 4/9/2020: "Poor Unfortunate Fools" by Silvia Park : The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• Very little mermaid driven with a touch of The Newts.
• 4/8/2020: "The Storyteller's Replacement" by N.K. Jemisin: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/7/2020: "What Everyone Knows" by Seanan McGuire: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor 
• 4/6/2020: "Pitcher Plant" by Adam-Troy Casto: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (The Best American Series ®) - Carmen Maria Machado, Editor
• 4/5/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Methods and Functions (2 hours and 2 minutes)
• 4/4/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Methods and Functions (2 hours and 2 minutes)
• 4/3/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Methods and Functions (2 hours and 2 minutes)
• 4/2/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Methods and Functions (2 hours and 2 minutes)
• 4/1/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Statements (1 hour 15 minutes)
• 3/31/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Statements (1 hour 15 minutes)
• 3/30/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Comparison Operators (9 minutes)
• 3/29/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Object and Data Structure Basics (2 hours 2 minutes)
• 3/28/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Object and Data Structure Basics (2 hours 2 minutes)

• 3/27/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Object and Data Structure Basics (2 hours 2 minutes)
• 3/26/2020:  Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Object and Data Structure Basics (2 hours 2 minutes)
• 3/25/2020: Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Python Setup (40 minutes)
• 3/24/2020: Udemy.  Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3 - Course Overview (15 minutes)
• 3/23/2020: The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Good Mythical Morning) - enjoyable  A bit on the YA side with a weird ending, but the reading of it was enjoyable.  A bit of a scooby doo vibe (which they reference in the book).
• 3/22/2020: The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Good Mythical Morning)
• 3/21/2020: The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Good Mythical Morning)
• 3/20/2020: The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Good Mythical Morning)

• 3/19/2020: The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Good Mythical Morning)
• 3/18/2020: The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal (Good Mythical Morning)
• 3/17/2020: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (book 3 of the Jean LeFlambeur series) - loved this series.  Recommended by Dave.  The science fiction is deep hard scifi, almost to the extent you have to reread parts of it to understand what you just read.  But overall I loved it - very different.
• 3/16/2020: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (book 3 of the Jean LeFlambeur series)
• 3/15/2020: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (book 3 of the Jean LeFlambeur series)
• 3/14/2020: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (book 3 of the Jean LeFlambeur series)
• 3/13/2020: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (book 3 of the Jean LeFlambeur series)
• 3/12/2020: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (book 3 of the Jean LeFlambeur series)
• 3/11/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey - my apologies to Mr. Tobey but I hated it.  I read the whole thing, but the self interest and how it moved situationally for characters made me sort of dislike every single one of them.  And the AI didn't seem very smart or God-ish at all.

• 3/10/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/9/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/8/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/7/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/6/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/5/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/4/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/3/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/2/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey
• 3/1/2020: The God Game by Danny Tobey

Two Good Scifi Videos

Rakka by Oats, about 20 minutes:


Robot and Scarecrow by Factory Fifteen, about 15 minutes:

Fahrenheit 451

I'm not blogging because of  New Year's resolution - I never do anything because of  New Year's resolution.

We went to Fahrenheit 451 at Theatre in the Round on Friday night.  The acting wasn't superlative, and the story is a little long winded in places because Bradbury turned book lectures into dramatic monologues (he wrote the screenplay himself), but it was still very enjoyable and a nice addition to the Shakespeare and Christie we sometimes see there.  Montag and Mildred (his wife) were believable, and Captain Beatty definitely had a psycho/evangelist/true believer vibe.

The set was well done for a minimalist attack.  They papered over the props/furniture, and it was modular so they could reuse it for walls and blocks and a sofa to switch between the fire station, Mildred's living room, and outside the town.

Their choice of books to burn amused me - I wonder if they bought my company's books by the pound or if someone is a lawyer in their spare time.

The play is VERY different from the book, but I'd read the book so long ago I couldn't quite remember all the details.  Apparently Bradbury modeled the play after the movie.  I had to go check the plot notes at Wikipedia, and they confirmed Beatty was a much worse character in the book, met a much more violent end (burned alive vs. a dog, although the dog noises in the play were scary, sort of Cloverfield-ish; they're releasing Cloverfield 2 btw, trailer here), and the book memorizers made more sense because there was a threat that civilization might end, at least temporarily, so the threat of no books meant not carrying forward culture after a catastrophe.

By the way - the Wikipedia page has a section on F451 being banned if you're into irony [link to a post on some local book burning].  The idea of burning the Bible, not the actual fact of it, was what triggered the ban.

Eryn was excited because the program talked about a video game from 1984.  I told her I'd owned it (and you can get a copy for emulation on DosBox) and that what I remembered more than anything else was the dogs.  It made me appreciate that some people really miss the days of text games when the focus was on the story and not open world.  Eryn's been playing Life Is Strange lately which seems to attempt to get back to some of that story telling while not losing the modern gaming approach.

We went to Town Hall prior to the play.  We were trying to go to Ramen Kazama, but the place was absolutely packed as we drove by, with people standing around waiting for tables. It worked out, because TiTR had given us a 20% off one meal coupon we used on Eryn's steak (she's a steak fiend), and Pooteewheet tried the Three Hour Tour Chestnut (in a tulip glass despite not a high level of alcohol) and agreed with this reviewer who said: "Shit gets Cadburry real quick..."

Turn of Phrase

I've been reading H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds to Eryn lately.  The twists of the language make for some tricky reading. I find myself reading in a rather stilted manner unless I pay attention.  And there are words and phrases that aren't really in use now, like loafers, which seems to refer to someone who loads a barge.  But I suspect they're the layabouts who wait for work near the docks.  Hence, they're loafing, although I'd never think of someone waiting for work as a loafer.

But the most interesting phrase so far was a sentence I wouldn't expect to see in a modern book, "His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating."

I guess he was really startled by the Martians.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Andy Weir's The Martian (wikipedia) is one of the best things I've ever read.  And I say that right after raving about Annihilation.  I can't imagine being a publishing house getting this story and passing.  I picture a reviewer getting to the end and thinking, "This isn't a good book about Mars.  There are no Martians or discarded Martian artifacts to save him and show we're not alone in the universe."  To which I can only express my sincere gratitude to Weir.

I blew through this book.  The blurbs on the back are from Hugh Howey, Larry Niven, and Chris Hadfield.  That Chris Hadfield.  The Canadian. The singer of Space Oddity.  The author.  The Astronaut.  He liked The Martian.

It's not very often a book makes me regret a decision in my life.  But The Martian had me pining for the days when I thought I'd be a materials engineer for NASA.  No space for me, obviously, but a damn sight closer than my current role.

The hardcover has been out for about two weeks, so it might be hard to come from your local library and if your library is like mine, the reserve list means you can't renew it, but it's a fast, riveting, read.

Annihilation - II

Apparently I'm not the only one who smells Roadside Picnic and H.P. Lovecraft in Annihilation, although I went with King's The Mist instead of Lost.  Over at io9.com:

"There's more than a hint of Roadside Picnic here, the Strugatsky Brothers' magnificent novel of alien technologies and human bureaucracy. But Annihilation's mysteries also have the feel of pulp fiction, whether that's H.P. Lovecraft or something from an episode of Lost. "

Sweet pivot...

Thank you Jeff Vandermeer.  You have made up for the walk in the desert that was The Parasite and The Incrementalists.  Yes, I had Dust and the Madd Addam trilogy mixed in there, like oases.  But those two books were coloring my mood and willingness to read.  Despite inadvertently breaking my no unfinished series rule, I loved Annihilation.  It started out all Roadside Picnic (enough so that I wonder if one of the characters telling another to have a picnic was a reference).  Then it went all The Mist and Monsters.  And then it had a downright Cthulhu-esque vibe.  I read it through in a day.

The Incrementalists irritated the hell out of me when the characters got introspective and sexual.  Annhilation gets introspective and sexual.  The difference in the writing: the pace, the story, all of it - speaks to why I didn't mind in Annhilation and in The Incrementalists I wanted to reach into the book and meddle with the characters such that their brains were alpha locked and could never be unlocked and that the infinite loop destroying them would extend to the immediate text.  That's proof that I read the whole damn book.

I'm greatly looking forward to the next two books in The Southern Reach Trilogy.

Don't read this book...

I picked up The Goliath Stone on the new releases shelf at the library.  It's something like 316 pages of awful.  I can't actually believe Niven was a major part of this book.  There will be spoilers.  I'm trusting you won't read it, so it shouldn't matter.  I'll be quick.  People send nanobots to space to harvest a meteor.  Nanobots evolve while on Earth a rogue scientist spends time in jail using inmates as test subjects to perfect his own nanobots for humans that make them better, smarter, energy efficient, and only full of good thoughts lest they suffer seizures.  Add lots of lame sex humor and so much banter you'll want to yell at them all to shut the hell up.  Later the meteor comes back with the nanobots.  The augmented humans rush out to meet them and introduce them to sex.  Everyone is super happy except the reader who wants them to all shut the hell up.

Here are all the one star ratings on Amazon.  I didn't add my own, but you can trust that if I had written a review, it would have ended up here.  It makes it easy to nominate as the worst book I read this year.  Hopefully that's the end of it and I don't have to add, "so far."

I also greatly disliked The Oatmeal's How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You.  At least in that case I can attribute it to my general lack of interest in cat humor.  I picked it up because I thought Eryn might enjoy it, but I felt I should read it first to make sure it was child appropriate.  It was child appropriate.  It just wasn't Scooter appropriate.  There's plenty of office-based humor, but the cats just sort of ruin it for me.  Not all cat humor bothers me.  I like Catbert.  But I far prefer it when The Oatmeal sticks to strips about Christopher Columbus and Nikola Tesla.

The Map of Time and The Map of the Sky

I bought The Map of Time by Felix Palma when Eryn and I went to visit my sister in law while she was in the hospital.  Not too long after my own stay, as I remember parking in the handicapped portion of the ramp to visit her and how slow I was walking what seemed like half a mile to her room through hospital halls.  We stopped by Uncle Hugo's afterward, and I'm there seldom enough that I try to pick up a few books when I am, even if my choices are based entirely upon the cover and the blurb on the back.  Palma's book was one of two I picked up, having been a bit of an H.G. Wells buff in my younger years.

I enjoyed it, although it was a bit long winded in parts.  Particularly when it came to the relationships and it started to go a bit romance novel.  And here and there the author leaked through, patting himself on the back for being a clever author in the same vein as H.G. Wells. But I brushed over those bits and enjoyed the core story, which admittedly could have been half as long, despite the almost complete lack of science fiction.  Instead, it read a bit like a few tales out of The Decameron, but with a science-fiction-that's-not-really-science-fiction twist.  For clarification, if you haven't read The Decameron, it was a collection of interwoven stories about trickery, but within a science fiction/literary vein.

So when I stumbled upon The Map of the Sky at the Dakota County Library on the new shelves, I thought I'd read the sequel.  Big mistake.  Huge mistake.  The back of the book bio calls Palma "one of the most brilliant and original storytellers of our time."  And yet this book spends almost 200 pages (I estimate, I'm not going to count) retelling The Thing, strapping it to the characters from the first book, throwing in Edgar Allen Poe for no good reason I can discern, and then dumping the whole thing into "what if the invasion had been real?"  Yet maintaining the flaws from the first book I mention above.  It drags on with the invasion story, humankind sinking ever deeper into despair until...and this is spoiler for both books...H.G. Wells uses his ability to time travel (something that was completely unnecessary at the very end of the first book, and the only real bit of science fiction) to change the past, create a second timeline, and ensure the invasion never happens in the first place.  Despite overly chatty aliens, we never discover what they're really after.  Despite them being mixed among humankind for almost 300 years, there's no real depth to their interaction.  In summation, it becomes they hid in the sewers and at least one of them began to enjoy his interaction with humans, probably because he chose to mimic a priest.   589 pages of going nowhere fast while retelling old tropes, only to land on H.G. Wells made it all a dream (an alternate timeline).

Interestingly, while I'm simultaneously writing and reading here, I found this review by the AV Club which reiterates most of what I've said above.

"...this is a story that’s been told many times before, and didn’t really need another retelling...The second section of the novel plays out like any number of alien-invasion action films"

I definitely won't be reading the last book of the trilogy.

It's been a long time, and I've been meming to meme...

John DeNardo posted a meme over at the SF Signal.  It asks questions about scifi, fantasy, and horror, so I'm going to break it down into three parts.  Part I, the Scifi Book Meme:


The last science fiction book I read was:
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain Banks.  I read a lot of Banks and Scalzi.  I read Redshirts while I was recovering my card accident last year.

The science fiction book I am reading right now is:
Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson

The next science fiction book I will read is:
I'm not sure.  I'm not currently queued up and I want to finish Law 101 and getting ready for my PMP, so it'll be a short gap, even with my 50 pages a day (average) rule for 2013.

The last science fiction book I didn’t finish was:
Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle

I didn’t finish it because:
It's a mix of scifi and nonfiction about writing, so I'm reading it in chunks over a very very long period of time.  Like one chunk between each other book I read, and there are a lot of chunks.

The last science fiction I recommended to a friend was:
Banks to my wife.  The Expanse series (James S.A. Corey) to Erik.  Soft Apocalypse (Will McIntosh) to Ming.  I don't think Ming read it, although he liked 2030 when I recommended that book.

The last science fiction book someone recommended to me was: (Did you enjoy it?)
Larry recommended Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson.  I am enjoying it.  I like the quote (among many excellent pieces of writing), "You are employed by a suspicious number of douchebags!"

My favorite science fiction novel is:
Probably Orwell's 1984, although I don't usually classify it as science fiction.  But I always pair it with Zamyatin's We, and that's definitely science fiction.  I rave about War With the Newts by Karel Capek all the time.

An underrated science fiction author is:
Terry Pratchett.  He gets props for his fantasy, but The Long Earth (with Stephen Baxter) was underrated.  It was a good book and I particularly liked that my family liked it, both my wife and daughter.  Eryn liked it enough that she used it for a school project.  I'd say the same about A. Lee Martinez and Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain (also a favorite of Eryn after I recommended it).

My favorite sub-genre of science fiction is:
Hard science fiction.  I like it technical.  Technical enough to bother other casual scifi readers.  I also like historical.  Not a sub-genre as in books about the past, but rather I like reading older scifi like War With the Newts, Wells and Verne, Sturgatskys' Roadside Picnic (another candidate for favorite), and dystopias that span history and were perhaps thought of as scifi in their time.

The Hydrogen Sonata

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks was excellent.  Banks has written better, in my opinion, but I really enjoyed this one.  It was a good start to the year.  Sonata captured a lot of the themes I associate with Banks and his Culture novels: god-like ships (containers for AI) with copious amounts of attitude, other cultures that don't necessarily make much sense but are beautiful (and deadly) in their own way, the role of the little person still having an outsized impact despite the machinations of bigger powers (a modified four-armed humanoid with an almost impossible to play instrument in this case, who by chance has met the oldest individual in existence who knows things even the Minds don't know), and the meaningless of humans (and human-like entities) pushing on with politics and petty desires and vices despite the scale of things happening around them (and the sometimes deadly and strange consequences this can lead to, particularly where it intersects religion, and the meaningless when they sublime to another state of being).

Some of my favorite quotes (in addition, I liked the ideas of ships that dance as they move and an accepted table of Recognized Civilsationary Levels):

• [A ship Mind thinking about the humans that inhabit ships]: “But what babble! What to-ing and fro-ing over such simple operational matters! A bunch of dim-witted, slow-thinking bios swimming in a tube clouded with their own effluent, trying to work out what was going on around them by staring through portholes probably. It was hard for a ship, a Mind, not to feel at least a degree of contempt.” – p. 41
• “some boring people began talking boringly.” – p. 161
• “I have managed to avoid learning too many lessons. That may be what keeps me alive.” – p. 211
• [I think this captures the attitude of the Culture ships well, although below, there's a quote where a ship is taunting another ship, trying to get it to commit to an attack so it's not the aggressor, which is even more apropos : “I’m a fucking razor-arsed starship, you manic! I’m not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite.  I don’t give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.” - p. 434
•  [I liked this because I haven't seen Banks channel too much in the way of geek references, and popping his characters into this location screams Star Wars]: “We’re in the stern ventral waste disposal semi-solids holding tank.” – p. 461
•  [What I referred to above - if this was two humans or humanlike characters, it wouldn't be nearly as amusing as two kilometers long ships engaging in the behavior]: "We could start by sort of tussling with fields. I did that out at Bokri, in Ospin, with your pal the Uagren.  That was fun. Not something you get to do every day. Bestial, nearly, like locking horns. Actually, more like naked wrestling, all oiled up. I found it quite erotic, to tell the truth.  Homo-erotic, I suppose, technically, as we’re all just ships together and we’re all the same gender: neutral, or hermaphrodite or whatever, don’t you think?”  (ship being taunted attempts to attack the taunting Culture Mind/ship, “~Not even a nice try, shipfucker”) – p. 483
• [Bit of a spoiler.  Sometimes ships have names that end in an ellipse.  In this case, the Culture Mind/ship Mistake Not...'s name serves as the punchline and explains its choice to be involved in all the political machinations going on between various AIs and civilizations in Sonata]: Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome and Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans of Wrath  – p. 504

Science Fiction

I posted this link once before, to the user-defined list of favorite science fiction books over at The Guardian from mid 2011.  Today I was looking for a few new things to read and reviewing top 100 lists to see if there were some classics I hadn't read.  What I hadn't noticed in the Guardian list before was this gem about halfway down the page.  1.) I don't think I'll be adding this to my top 100 unread. and 2.) I don't think The Guardian proofread this list very well.  Feel free to make up your own Three Laws of Cocksmanship.  But I recommended leaving the "no harm" law in place.

Book: I, Rimbot
Author: Isaac Assimove
Comment: The sheer amount of cock, even for the sci-fi genre, is spafftacular. I watched the film first, which didn't have nearly as much cock. By God, I love the cock in the book.

Books - Recommendations from Various Folks

A lot of my time has been spent lately thinking about what I want to read next.  I dare say I spend more time worrying about what I want to read than actually reading.  One of the developers I work with solved part of the problem by writing his own book and publishing it on Amazon.  So I'm reading Erik Hyrkas' Tritium Gambit.  Unfortunately, it's a damn quick read and after a (week) day I'm already half way through it.  I'm enjoying it so far. Sort of Men In Black, but with aliens instead of humans, set in Minnesota.  I hear it may be free for your Kindle on Amazon this weekend.  $0.00 is a pretty good deal.


And I also read the Leviathan series - Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath - by Scott Westerfeld.  Mean Mr. Mustard recommended it.  Young adult, but well worth the read.  Puts The Hunger Games to shame in my opinion.  Not nearly so whiny.  And that's from someone with a predilection for dystopic literature (so I'd trend toward The Hunger Games).  It's a steampunk alt history novel about WWI being fought between Darwinists, who manipulate life, and Clankers, who manipulate machines.  The lines follow the political lines of WWI (Britain/Russia = Darwinists, Germany/Austria = Clankers, US/Japan = amalgam), but it's much more complicated than that.  He does a great job of interspersing actual history with his steampunk vision.  I've been harassing Eryn and my wife to read it with assurances that they'll love it.

I read this article, about what book introduced various authors to science fiction and fantasy.  I'm interested to read The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet and Planetoid, The Riddle-Master of Hed, and The World of Tiers.  I apologize with characteristic Minnesota niceness to Galen Dara, but no one should consider their intro to sci fi to be Anne McCaffrey and The Wheel of Time.

I think this article on alternative families in fantasy and science fiction only told me what not to read.

Which brings me to the icing on the cake.  David Brin wrote a damn splendid write up of his favorite sci fi books.  In categories.  Huxley.  Banks.  Vinge.  Heinlein.  Bear.  Asimov.  Niven.  Sheffield.  Wilson. Gaiman.  Mieville. Haldeman. Dick.  Westerfeld!  This is a f*ing fine list.  The only immediate book that jumps to mind that I disagree with is Harry Turtledove's Great War Series.  And to be honest, I don't know that it's a bad series.  I only know I hated the first book of the World War series so much it still makes me angry.  Mean Mr. Mustard can attest to that as I brought it up outside his workplace.  The only book that ever made me angrier was a Hammer's Slammers book by David Drake a friend game me where the protagonist was rewarded for trying to rape a lesbian by having sex with her and her partner in the end for saving their lives. Ick.  Anyway - Brin's list.  Print it.  Read all of them.  It's the best list I've ever seen.

And finally, something for the not so scifi/fantasy inclined.  Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free From the Annual Performance Trap by Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser.  It comes to late for this year's review process, and I haven't read it yet, but it came highly recommended by the speakers at the Code Freeze Conference and it's on my Kindle (iPad).

And 30 Books Everyone in Software Business Should Read (and why).  This is actually a very good list as far as software development lists go.  Spolsky's books were important to me, and I still quote them and explain to people how the ideas in his books explain much of the software we work with every day at my workplace.  I've read a number of the others on this list and I'm currently reading the Pragmatic Programmer.  While developer books can quickly show their age, if you get past worrying about the specifics and focus on the generalities of what never changes, you gain some valuable insight.

• One more: 7 Literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books You Must Read.
• 102 Essential Sci Fi Books for Your Kindle (Wired)
• A Dozen of the Best from 2011 (Locus)

Tim Pawlenty

I really hope this is easy to see.  I've been reading a lot lately.  And by a lot, I mean by mid-year I'm almost at the exact same number of pages I read total last year.  Admittedly, last year was horrible.  I blame managerialnessosity.  The state of/in which one is a manager.  And a vaguely first-year manager.  I've quit telling people "it takes two (2) years to get good at your job" because it freaks out executive management.  But it's the truth.  Year one is a total %!*/*&*%$%-fest.  Particularly if the training style is "just dive in and see how you do."  About year .75 you realize, f-it, I'm doing, not asking.  Year 1.25 you think, these people aren't necessarily smarter than me, just more experienced.  And year 1.75 you begin to believe, I'm better at this than at least one other person, unless I'm deluded, because it's possible I'm the worst manager and I only think I'm at least second-worst.  But then I could always go on sheer numbers which state, I've gone from two to twenty reports, and from a few project in one project space to four projects in four project spaces with numerous real projects within each.  Of course then I just sit in my cube, cry on my team pancakes, and wonder why no one will give me 15 contiguous minutes to code up a TFS to Open Source scanning tool using Powershell and a few business rules.

Anyway.  Reading.  Been doing a lot.  And looking for a few dystopias.  But the other day I was content to just look for whatever sort of "science fiction" the Dakota County library system had to offer.  Particularly as they now show their recent acquisitions in reverse chronological order.  I was paging through the results, and on page four (4), lo and behold, "Courage to Stand: An American Story" by Tim Pawlenty.  If it weren't ironic enough that it shows up under science fiction, it's below "Sweet Farts: Rippin' It Old School" and only just above "Night of the Living Trekkies."  Keep that in mind if you vote for him in a primary.

Eryn, Bridesmaid

When we were at the Jelly Belly factory in Wisconsin, there was a girl standing next to us in line that had a shirt on that said "Bridesmaid Eryn". Eryn's not a very common name. You certainly can't find it on keychains and coffee cups, much to Eryn's dismay and the benefit of our pocketbook. So it was exciting to meet someone who not only had the name, but had it displayed prominently on her shirt. Not that Eryn's don't exist. There's Eryn Brooke: actress, model, singer, dancer. And even another namesake. And I know from talking to people at work, that there are even other Eryn's immediately related to coworkers. HOWEVER...most of this Eryn, Sydney, etc stuff is based on trying to find a unique name by substituting a Y where normally there would be an I. That's it. End of story. That is not why Eryn's name is Eryn. I realized I had never really mentioned this, and it's probably important to note for when she gets older.

You see. Eryn's name is absolute, well, only slightly diluted, geekdom. Her name has nothing to do with liking Erin and dropping in a Y. It has to do with liking the science fiction show Farscape, in particular the character played by Claudia Black (yum), and Pooteewheet telling me it wasn't ok to name her Aeryn because teachers and classmates would call her Ay-rin, or Ay-ear-in. So the compromise was to drop the initial A and proceed as though we weren't uber-nerds. I'm still slightly disappointed we didn't use the A, because other Aeryn's exist, so it wouldn't have been that peculiar.

I quote from Wikipedia:

"Aeryn Sun (pronounced /ˈɛrɪn sʊn/), played by Claudia Black, is a former Peacekeeper pilot and officer. Although she appears to be human, she is in fact Sebacean, a species indistinguishable from humans in external appearance. At the time John Crichton appears through a wormhole in the beginning of the series, Officer Aeryn Sun is in her Prowler battling to retake the Leviathan Moya, which has been seized by escaping prisoners Ka D'Argo, Rygel, and Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan.

However, Aeryn's prowler is caught up in the stream of Moya's starburst and is towed along with the escaping Leviathan. Aeryn is brought on board Moya as a prisoner, but when she and Crichton encounter her commanding officer Captain Crais, she defends John from Crais' allegation that John deliberately attacked and killed Crais' brother, saying he isn't brave enough or smart enough to have done so. In return, Crais declares her to be "irreversibly contaminated" from spending too much time with an unknown life form, which means a death sentence. John Crichton and D'Argo soon escape the Peacekeepers again and, having nowhere else to go, Aeryn reluctantly becomes a fugitive alongside them.

Aboard Moya, she learns to think beyond the strict, militaristic confines of her Peacekeeper upbringing. Born in service aboard a Command Carrier, it is the only life she has known, and thus is very well skilled in hand-to-hand and weapons combat. She also becomes a valuable and important member of Moya's crew, and a companion and romantic interest to Crichton during the series. It is only after leaving the Peacekeepers that she can begin to find out about her parentage. In season three she discovers that her mother, Xhalax Sun, was a Peacekeeper pilot who—against Peacekeeper regulations—fell in love with an older officer, Talyn Lyczac. They deliberately had Aeryn, a child born of love, and Xhalax sneaks into Aeryn's dormitory one night to tell her so, which is strictly against regulations. To redeem her crime, Xhalax was forced by the Peacekeepers to choose between the two, and she executed Talyn so that Aeryn could live.

Aeryn evolves from a cold, detached soldier into a valuable friend and crewmate. Her relationship with John Crichton evolves also, Aeryn ultimately becoming a compassionate wife and loving mother in the end of the show. They name their son D'Argo Sun-Crichton, after their dear friend who seemingly lost his life in the Peacekeeper Wars."

Our daughter should be happy I like warrior women, which saved her from being called Zhaan.

Another List of Science Fiction

Hmm...I have to disagree that there's no need to draw a line between fantasy and science fiction. My friend Klund, he prefers the fantasy books. Me, I prefer the sci fi. And it's not a slight preference. Far and away I read more sci fi, or at least a wider range of it if not sheer pages (my doubt lies squarely at the feet of Tad Williams, whose Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series is one of the great wastes of time in my life, despite some people feeling it belongs in a top 100 list), than I do fantasy. I like both. But I like many so-so sci fi books better than I like some good fantasy books (at least what I've heard is supposed to be good fantasy).

But ThisRecording (via Fimoculous) at least has an eclectic top 100, which I respect and am intrigued by, despite my disagreements about Jurassic Park and anything by Anne McCaffrey. The fact that Roald Dahl's "Danny the Champion of the World" list, makes it unique as far as I'm concerned. I may have to check out some Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, just to see what he's excited about.

Sci Fi - Top 20 of the Decade

Fimoculous linked to this list of the top 20 sci fi books of the decade, over at io9. They're on crack. There's no Scalzi. There's no Reynolds. There's a pile of fantasy mixed into the sci fi. There's no Gaiman. And the choices below...I haven't read all of them, but most of the ones I have read I have arguments with as to their place on a list of great books between 2000 and 2010.

The Execution Channel was thoroughly unmemorable and somewhat boring. I had to go back and look, but discovered I referred to it as "so-so". Glasshouse might be good, I don't know, but nothing I've read by Stross qualifies him as a writer of the decade, so I suspect this entry is no different. I do credit him with getting me to count binary on my fingers in his sexy fembot book. Iain Banks definitely writes memorable books, but I'd argue Look to Windward isn't his best work. I didn't finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I got bored. Perdido Street Station I might agree with (I read it while at my sister's wedding in Australia), although I liked The Scar better. Vernor is a good writer, and I intend to read Rainbow's End. I don't believe the hype around The Time Traveler's Wife. Primarily because I wrote a similar story back in 2001 and if I can write it, it can't be that good. Pattern Recognition by Gibson was in no way ground breaking and common sense says there are better books. And World War Z. Really? I understand there's some sort of I want to have Brooks' zombie baby mania underway, and that he's personally responsible for the zombie renaissance, or so he'd have us believe, but there are plenty of short stories about zombies that are better written than World War Z.

• Acacia: the War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham
• Air, or Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman
• The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
• The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson
• Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer
• Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow
• The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod
• Glasshouse, by Charles Stross (Ace)
• Harry Potter Series, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury)
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
• Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
• The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller
• Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
• Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
• Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville
• Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
• Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang (Orb)
• Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
• Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton
• World War Z, by Max Brooks

Interesting Things

Freewheeling Spirit links to an article about one of my favorite beers, Dogfish. When I was visiting She Says in D.C. this summer, it was what I drank, although I can just cross the border into Wisconsin to find some. I wish by age 39 my achievements had included building a giant beer barrel out of palo santo wood at a cost that might have gotten me fired. That's much more interesting than any of my resume bullet points.

Speaking of She Says, she has a post up that identifies the gender of the blogger. I'm identified as 69% male. All that's left to question is that if it's 69% am I toe to head, or head to toe. Fortunately, you can spend a lot of time just screwing around with your blog "statistics" (quotes definitely intended. I suspect it's as much real science as astrology). Library Bytes links to a number of them. Typelyzer says I'm an ESFP Performer especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and sweet smells. Which begs the question, why am I then seen with Mean Mr. Mustard so much? Unfortunately, I also have, "qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions." Doh. The Blog Readability Test pegs me as writing like a high schooler. This can be attributed no doubt to my bad language and recommendations as to how Erik can keep his face warm. Wait...that was on Facebook, so it doesn't count. But I did check She Say's blog, and now I don't feel so bad about not being college level. Website Grader gives me all sorts of information, such as a grade of 75 (B- or C+?), my Google findable pages, and an interesting statistic that my Technorati rank of 368,739 puts me in the top 0.53% of blogs tracked by Technorati. That sounds much more impressive than just the number, which is what Technorati gives me, or the Alexa rank I get of just over four million (specifically 4,003,621 which is still in the top 13.03 % of all websites). It looks like I was once up to almost 2.5 millionth. Damn the bad economy and it's impact on my website. Finally, I can even examine individual posts at PostRank, although it seems to be about a month behind the curve. New cats seem to get the best ranking, at least on NodToNothing.

Adventure Cycling is on Facebook.

This bit was also in my Adventure Cycling e-newsletter. I protest. Scotts should not be saying things like this in case others who read Adventure Cycling mistake them for the rest of us and think we have PMS.
PTS SUFFERERS UNITE: A fellow named Scott weighed in earlier this month at the Adventure Cycling forums, where he coined a phrase for the state of mind he found himself in after riding cross-country last summer: Post Tour Syndrome, or PTS. As Scott infers, there could be worse maladies to have. Check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/6m4bn9

Boing Boing links to a Media Shift article interviewing John Scalzi about pulps, SF and the web.

Eyeteeth links to a story about MIT studying the impact of modern media on storytelling. Not what's told, but the very structure of the story. The focus is on Hollywood, but David Foster Wallace was questioning (and expanding upon) the structure of the story in The Atlantic (magazine) and Infinite Jest (book) before his death, so the impact is media-wide.

Per Cookie Queen, Gulf War Illness is official. Like anyone who knows a vet couldn't have guessed that.

CERN Magnet Meltdown

It looks like the people from the future managed to get back here and sabotage the CERN collider before it could create that mini black hole that consumes us five years down the road.

"The world's largest atom smasher which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month has been damaged worse than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday." (via Yahoo/AP)

They were very clever to implement the sabotage 36 hours later, rather than right when the collider started up. But then, they know the precise point at which the Earth-eating singularity will be formed, so perhaps they had some leeway. They probably don't get as much adulation as saviors of the planet in the future if they don't stop the problem at the last possible second. Look at the explanation of what went wrong. It certainly sounds like a line from a bad sci fi movie, or that Spock might mutter during one of the Enterprise's forays to the past. Mark my words, we'll be seeing Terminators in the street next.

"It's too early to say precisely what happened, but it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out"