Marooned in Realtime

This is Vinge's sequel to The Peace War. It was about the same quality - not as good as Fire upon the deep but still kept me turning pages. It pulled the same loose sequel trick as "Deepness in the sky" -> "Fire upon the deep", setting it a squillion years in the future, but contriving to keep one character (transformed somehow by their passage through time) to hark back to the history created in the first book.

Ho hum, It's a murder mystery, with a self-conscious Great Reveal at the end. It was still an interesting twist, looking back on the singularity Vinge loves to go on about. In this case the event also involved a mysterious mass exodus/death of most of humankind, just like in Singularity's Ring (or I should say it's the other way around, since Marooned in Realtime was published 22 years prior.)

It has the same weaknesses as his other writing - a mix of real characters and foil role players, all of whom act in overly explained rational or irrational interests as best they know how given the technology Vinge has gifted them with.

I'm coming to realize the thing I love most about his writing is every book has at least one and often several characters gaining super-human abilities. Watching big fish in a small pond is fun to me I guess. Watching little fish in a little pond, not as interesting, no matter what kind of dance they're doing.

Vernor Vinge: The Collected Stories, and The Peace War

I read two more books by Vernor Vinge recently. I still can't get enough.

The Peace War was a good read; definitely in a lower tier than his other work though. Had me turning pages to find out what happens next, but I think it showed off perhaps the one weakness I've seen in his stories. Most of his main characters play minimax optimal decision making strategies in conflict scenarios... and they take the time to explain themselves in dialog or thought as they make the decisions. It makes me want to skim through all the rationalizations, and leaves characters feeling robotic. Which I guess is a common theme in his characters - humans becoming more than human, with the aid of technology - so I guess it shouldn't be that much of a surprise.

The better of the two books was the anthology of his short stories. I'm not sure if it was comprehensive, but if it was - holy shit, I liked every single story in that book. They were all so different from each other. The other short story anthologies from single authors that I've read (Greg Egan, Jim Van Pelt) I enjoyed, but by the end of it I had a feeling that I could write a short story in their style with my eyes closed.

Vinge just keeps surprising with new ideas and plot structures in every story. My favorite part of the anthology though was his personal introductions to every story. He wrote what he thought was good writing about each story, and its weaknesses; exaulted in predictions of the future he got dead on, rued the big developments he missed. It was so impressive to hear him speak in plain words about a kernal of an idea he had for a story, and then to see the finished product so nuanced, detailed... and fresh even decades after it was published.

Steal Across the Sky

Aislinn lent me this novel by Nance Kress, and I started reading it aloud to Erin while we drove up to Seattle over thanksgiving. It starts off with a hook that had us both wanting to find out more, but then just hangs on the suspense far too long without giving the characters any new dimensions.

Probably had enough plot to make a decent short story, but there were just too many "why the hell did that happen... and wait it *never* gets explained?" moments to finish it all the way through.

The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse

I read this during mental health break tines at work since it was on the shared shelf. It was funny and a fast read, mostly dialog, totally enjoyable even in only 15 minute increments.

Also I just started reading To Say Nothing of the Dog. So far it reminds me a lot of A Scanner Darkly, but with time travel instead of drugs, and throwing in some british humour[sic].

Logicomix

I recently read a graphic novel called Logicomix that applies the theme of the superhero's quest to an alternate form of hero: the classical mathematician Bertrand Russell. While there is some degree of math and logic involved, the primary focus is one man's struggle to walk the line between ardently searching for mathematical (and therefore worldly) truth and not losing his mind like so many of his logician peers. It's an interesting biography, though it includes the small irony of taking some liberties with the historical truth of Russell's while trying to convey his quest for truth. It's also a pretty quick read, so I don't have too much to say without spoiling the story. As for the art, it avoids the manga-izing of many graphic novels, putting it more in the realm of Persepolis in terms of the serious artistic work of the genre.

Also, today I owned the Comcast support person trying to find out why I couldn't connect to the internet by applying principles learned from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm now even more convinced that the universality of that book's practical (if not metaphysical) ideas enables me troubleshoot far better than the average resetter and rebooter. That and k2's 2004 coaching in the ways of the Apple.

Rainbows End

I picked up Rainbows End this weekend so that I could read it on Caltrain commuting to work this week, and I finished it today, Tuesday. And it was a stretch, trying to make it last, by effort of will, not reading it sometimes when I really really wanted to. I had gotten it because finishing Fire Upon the Deep left me with a Vinge shaped hole in my life that I desperately needed to fill. Well the hole is back. I kind of hope I'm sick of his writing by the time I acquire and finish Cookie Monster, or who knows what I'll be forced to do.

Vernor Vinge is definitely my newest author-hero. And it's not because I see echos of his characters in myself; I find most of his characters helplessly single minded and naive actually, and their growth as a result of the numerous plot twists is usually cliche. He is a damn repetitious writer, beating you over the head with his central themes at every opportunity. And yet, every couple pages, there is solid gold. It's usually something a little kid did with his available computing (Vinge would say "automation") interfaces that we can *almost* dream of being real today. And that's why it's so goddamn addictive. I see situations in my own life where, if I was one of his characters, I could immediately have the answers to my idle questions. Was the wind really in my face both directions of my bike ride to and from the Dentist today? I could ask my wearable computer with a few gestures while biking to ping the local weather nodes and compare wind vectors on my path, and display the result on my networked contact lenses. And then there's the times when I actually feel like I'm living in that future. There are lots of queued requests on these shared servers, how many of them are from my team's code? Quick script to curl down a bunch of status pages in parallel, pipe them to grep, cut, sort, uniq: viola!

Vinge's most artfully delivered message in these novels is that the distance between intention and manifestation will shrivel away. It's already happening in the world of the wholly virtual, but step back away from that LCD for a minute and imagine the possibilities. I can't stop seeing them, and it makes me hate keyboards so hard.

Dragaeran series

I've lately been reading the Dragaeran novels by Steven Brust in the order they were written. They are very much fantasy, with magic, spells, and mythical creatures, but with each book written around a open-ended problem that gets 'solved' much like an old-school Dick Tracy detective novel. They are incredibly easy to read and more than a bit addictive.

Besides the how-deep-does-this-rabbit-hole-go aspect of the stories where the main problem always grows from something small, there are two major aspects of the set of books that I find really enjoyable. First, Burst makes no claims that he wrote the books in order, in fact in interviews he has suggested reading them in a very different order than he wrote them (and that suggested order has changed over the 20 years he has been writing these short-ish books: 12 so far) so often I end up reading a story that I know how things start in books after this story so the final state is mostly known and the story is a question of how is Brust going to get there and fills in the back story for books you have already read or you read a story that is intended to be completely independent but still drops new characters in on you that everyone seems to know and be friends with and you have you figure out what is going on, because Brust knew he would later add that character in to a book taking place before the current one. These non-linear dynamics seem frustrating, and are hard to describe, but end up being a bit of a puzzle that is above the story and fun to work out (and is making me seriously think about re-reading the first couple of books in the series when I finish).

Secondly, after the series became popular, Brust clearly started using each book to play around with different styles of telling a story, which is particularly interesting to see the same characters described differently based on the narrators viewpoint for that book. I think he does a reasonably good job of making the feel of the books different by shading the descriptions of a story through the lens of a character that had not previously been a central focus of previous books. Overall, I have really been enjoying this series.

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

This is a three book trilogy by a Swedish dude who died shortly after he finished the last book. The first one is a really solid mystery, which is a genre I'm not usually a big fan of. The second one edges closer to an action-y novel with a little bit of mystery involved, although I did guess the mystery piece of it pretty early on (to the astonishment of my book club, so maybe I just got lucky). Third one isn't in English yet.

The plot centers mostly around an investigative reporter named Blomkvist, but the real character of intrigue is Lisbeth Salander. You don't learn much about her in the first novel, but the mystery itself is interesting enough to keep you hooked. Have to admit that the second, while good, wasn't as fascinating for me, but I think it's because the first one set the bar so high.

First book has been turned into a movie that comes out in a month, so I guess this is really your "if you want to read the book first, you should start now" warning. Or a "there's a movie coming out that read pretty well as a book" warning. Whatever.

The Perfect Mile

Non-fiction. Takes place in the 1950s and follows these 3 guys, 1 australian, 1 american and 1 english, who are all trying to break the 4-minute mile barrier. The description of how these guys balance school, med-school, work and life with trying to achieve something athletically that no one, professional or not, has done before is pretty incredible. This one guy, Roger Bannister, is a full time med student, has his residency at a hospital, and still manages to train. There's this English ideal of the gentleman athlete to uphold, to carry on a full time job and make athletic prowess look easy. Kind of like how Roger Federer doesnt sweat, unbutton or untuck his shirt when he plays.
It's a really interesting book describing amateur athletes and the people who profit from them as well, NCAA stuff as well as the Olympics.
It struck a chord with me as a former runner and also as an ultimate player, a sport where the best in the world still have day jobs. The fact that none of these guys ever turned pro, they knew they had their window of opportunity and they put it all on the line. Pretty inspiring stuff. I highly recommend it.