Books and awards and humor...

This morning I read this in WaPo. Apparently "romance writing" and the "writers association" and its annual awards have somewhat the same "diversity" problem as movies and Oscars.

And this early comment:

"Riff on idea by J Jencks- Romance writer’s convention. Murder most foul. A Scottish vampire (inspired by Nora Roberts comment), and a Chinese woman who is a world famous detective, team up to disaggregate the formulaic romances churned out at an increasingly rapid (and vapid), rate. They discover the great publishing houses of romance writing have harnessed AI robots to gobble all romantic scenarios ever engaged in by humans since they climbed out of the trees; and even before. (Many deaths and injuries there but that’s another tale.) a disgruntled writer, about to disclose, is killed and our two heroes must discover why. Meanwhile, the robots start falling in love with each other. Another subset of romance lit is born. Robot Romance. Future idea: “Like a Machine; When Humans and Robots Cross Over” Wow..."

I'd read that book. Needs a better title than "Murder Most Foul"

But hmm...robot porn? Discrimination against cyborgs?


Chinese detective: Judge DeeDee? Charlene Chan (or Number One Daughter)? Mrs Wong?

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The Nora Roberts comment is in the article: “Jesus, it’s fine to have a character fall in love with a freaking vampire, but not someone of the same sex?”

(no idea who "J Jencks" is, maybe some other commenter?)

Jack Reacher books

author is Lee Child (not his real name). If you look the website, you discover that pub-date order is NOT character-chrono order. I wish publishers would fix that on the covers. I also wish they would in general put series order number on books. These have neither.

After the second movie of Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise, I decided I would read a couple. Got the first one and the last one for xmas.

They remind me of John D Macdonald's Travis McGee. And Tom Cruise looks nothing like Reacher in the books. Reacher in the books is 6-5, weighs 220-250. That's nearly a foot taller than Cruise, and probably 50-75 pounds heavier. A guy that size is going to be physically imposing no matter what.

As of this writing, I've read the first three published. Went to the used bookstore last weekend and got a couple of all the ones they had; have subsequently ordered the remainder via abebooks.com (better prices than Amazon was showing for used copies).

[Later: read a few more. Reading order seems irrelevant. They are mostly better plotted than Macdonald; "Echo Burning" felt exactly like a McGee book. McGee was essentially a "personal avenger", and Reacher is having a similar feel. Child avoids the issue of recurring characters by having Reacher constantly on the move around the country. Macdonald avoided it simply by not having them, as though anyone's life is like that; McGee lived on a houseboat but never really went anywhere in it.]

The stories move pretty fast. Good excitement, action. Not perfect, but good.

By not perfect I mean: if you're an author, and you're going to write about real places, you need to be present at those places at the time of year you write about before you say anything about the weather.

Book #3 takes place briefly in two places I lived, and makes mistakes about both. Dallas and Honolulu are the places. It's June. Author says something like "temp in Dallas was it's usual hundred degrees". Nope. Sorry. Not in June. Not Dallas. Lived there a decade. 100 degrees doesn't start until mid-July or so. Not June. And then Reacher flies to Honolulu, whereupon author says the humidity in Honolulu was just like Dallas. Nope. Sorry. Not ever. Honolulu is going to have much higher humidity, given that, well, you know, the largest body of water on the planet is one of the boundaries of Honolulu. Depending on the wind, if there is any (leeward side of Oahu, so not nearly as much as Kailua, where I lived), the temp is likely 90+, but not 100--the humidity is probably 90+ as well. But in Dallas? in June? The humidity is at its highest at ~6am, and that amount is 75%, and it's not 100 degrees F. In the afternoon, when the temp is highest, the humidity is 25%. Seriously dry. (Not the hottest place I've been, that was Tucson, summer, it was 110. Bone dry, too. Ouch.) I live in Virginia now, outside DC; it is readily possible for the weather to be 98 and 98, and *that* is uncomfortable. DC is like that. So no, the humidity in Dallas is NEVER like the humidity in Honolulu.

But yeah, please visit, or talk to a resident about this stuff...mistakes like that make you the author look lazy. And these statements are in no way critical to the plot, just throwaway lines. Still...lazy.

[Later: Number 5, "Echo Burning", is a really weak/stupid plot. That one really feels like Travis McGee. #6 is back to a better plot.]

#4 has some people getting in effect drowned in a bathtub of paint. He writes that after what is a day or two "the paint will have a skin depth of 1-1.5 inches. Clearly he didn't test this--24 hours of paint open-air in a bathtub and you might have 1/16" someplace that was really dry. I'm not sure how long 1 whole inch would take, but probably weeks to months. I've had paint remnants in cans out open to dry so I could dump them in the trash can, it seemed to take forever for that last little bit to harden.

A couple of them have really stupid plots. Then there's the several where there's a predictable "showdown at the deserted farmhouse" conclusion.

[Later later: I've read about 2/3 of them. The ones that have good plots are good stories, but none are "Where Eagles Dare", and REALLY not "The Bourne Identity". There are some very good ideas in here, but they're still small. I don't remember Travis McGee too well, but these all feel better than that, but not as good as Maclean, Ludlum, etc]

[Also: why I could never be a writer: one of them has two movie quotes. I couldn't write a novel without having A LOT of movie quotes--I can't hardly have a conversation without using movie quotes, so there's no way I could write a book without them.]

New SF reading

The end of 2015 there was this new show on SYFY called The Expanse. Based on some books I had not heard of or read.

So recently I've bought the books and read the first three, started the fourth.

Well...you know how this general sort of thing goes, it applies to music as well...every so often you make a discovery of a new artist whose work knocks your socks off. Ozric Tentacles was like that, Lana Lane was like that, Klaus Schulze was like that, ELP was like that...

Peter Hamilton was like that 15 years ago. Ron Goulart and PG Wodehouse were like that 35 years ago.

and The Expanse series is like that too. There's nothing in there that you haven't encountered before if you've been reading SF for a while. I've been reading SF since the late 1960s, so I've read it all. But The Expanse is like all those individual things rolled into one.

It's politics, except on the interplanetary scale, but not interstellar scale. It's got your kinda-typical hero, serious bad guys on a scale and detail not usually covered in SF, it's got classic space opera goings-on, unseen and incomprehensible aliens, artifacts left behind by those aliens that are either mega-nifty or mega-dangerous or both, spaceship battles...

I was impressed. So I'm reading the 4th one, bought the 5th, and awaiting the 6th.

I liked the tv show, but it was well-nigh incomprehensible without the books, and I think missed some episodes, making it REALLY hard to understand. And it was incomplete; the first tv season maybe covered the first half of book one--and THAT wouldn't have made sense without the rest of the book.

[Update: halfway through book six, not sure I can go on. SPOILER: Naomi's son decides it's cool to effectively destroy mankind on mother earth. Not yet clear how many people he murders by dropping asteroids on us. Hundreds of millions. Needs some necromancy, so he can be executed, then resurrected and executed again, at least once a day until the sun goes cold. All because he had some abandonment issues, and a manipulative daddy.]

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So this all brings to mind something else. SYFY seems to have changed their game plan ~2 years ago and has stopped making those complete trash low-budget things they were doing for so long. And now we have some far-better-production-values-and-budget shows getting created. OK, and silly stuff like Sharknado.

I like this too. SYFY had devolved into too much fairly bad stuff. Well, it still has some fairly bad stuff, but Killjoys, Expanse, Childhood's End...now if they'd just drop WWE and Ghost Hunters and that kind of dreck. There's lots of stuff better than that they could re-run, and heck they could run those old cheesy 50s monster movies too, and all the star treks, etc. The least of which is better than the low-budget crud they put on.

Martians

The Martian.

I read this a couple weekends ago. Guy at work recommended it. Mom gave me a copy because her "book club" group was reading it; I think that was because they were working on book/movie combinations.

Mom couldn't finish it. Too much sciencey-numbery stuff going on--not her cuppa.

I found three things annoying. Seriously annoying.


1. All that number chatter was distracting in the wrong way. And I understood all of it. It read too much like someone juvenile's private lab notebook/journal.


2. When you work for NASA, and you're an astronaut, and male, you are very nearly for sure an Eagle Scout. Almost all have been.

Problem is, you're also a Rocket Scientist. And when you're a Rocket Scientist, all problems get Rocket Science solutions.

So I'm on page 5, everyone else is gone, and our hero has recovered from the accident enough to walk around, and is in pursuit of repairing his radio, so he can tell NASA he's alive.

This is brainless. It's a Rocket Science solution, when he needs a Boy Scout solution. It does NOT take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.

That solution is to go outside an pile rocks up to make letters to spell out "Injured. Still alive." and a date. Granted that's one-way comm, but you do that first, before figuring out how to fix the radio. And later he can go out and spell more words.

Takes to page 160 before that occurs to him. Page 160. Or 170, I forget.

NASA has a dozen low-orbit satellites around Mars, and there's only 15 mins/day when the ground-site is not in visual range of one of them. So a REAL Rocket Scientist back at NASA would have been looking at the ground site as soon as the sand-storm passed, to see what remained. THIS NASA waits 30 days, and even then they aren't running change-detection software on the images, someone has to eyeball a detail or two, and THAT doesn't happen immediately.

And how come the spaceship that departs doesn't have a telescope/camera that can point at the landing site to look at the storm damage? No visual sensors that look backwards? Seriously? no comm to the satellites?


3. And then when he drives out to Pathfinder/Sojourner, he complains about navigating over a featureless but rocky terrain via dead-reckoning. He complains about there being no natural landmarks, and of course there's no GPS. And no compass, either, because there's no iron core to the planet, no planetary magnetic field, yadda, yadda...

What a knucklehead. Once again, you need a Boy Scout solution. If there are no landmarks, MAKE SOME. Pile up rocks every mile, in a straight line from the last couple of piles, you can go in a straight line a long ways. You're guaranteed to drift somewhat, but it'll be close. Pretty sure I learned this idea in 1970. Maybe 69.

He thinks of that on the way back. Well past when he should have been making them.

-----

Yeesh. I hope the movie is better. Well, you know he isn't going to go out and pile rocks up.

And I hope my tax dollars that go to NASA are helping them understand that they need multiple backup systems and alternatives for these sort of difficulties. The army has man-portable radios with funky antennas that fold up into tiny spaces. The landing site ought to have a wide variety of stuff dropped, with extras, especially comm gear.

recent reading, again

Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove.

It's one of those alternate history things. Actually this is "MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE" redux. This is pretty detailed on the historical accuracy...imagine what might have happened if someone had time-traveled from 2010 back to 1864 and given Gen Robert E Lee 100 thousand AK-47s and unlimited ammo. Would the south have won?

Damn right. Those guns, while not 2010 state of the art, were 100 years in advance of the standard single-shot manual-load rifles of the 1860s.

So I found this book offensive...not the part about the south winning...given the AK-47 premise, that was inevitable. This seemed overmuch like "how to write a book in 1992 in which you get to use all those words and ideas from 1864 that are clearly offensive now, like the infamous 'N-word'".

It of course opens with some history, although not enough of the history that you remember what the fight was really about, from both sides. This is more just about the battles (quite lopsided with the arrival of AK-47, which was superior to hand-loaded single-shot Enfields/etc in every way you can think of, and not manufacturable anywhere in the world at that time (the south had insufficient manufacturing to make weapons/etc as it was, so there really was no way they were going to win). The suppliers of these guns are some unhappy white folks from South Africa, who are so resentful of the black takeover there, that they think altering history will help them. They pay in gold, which has serious value, as opposed to Confederate money, which, as the saying goes, "wasn't worth the paper it was printed on".

The author clearly doesn't understand time-travel paradox well enough to explain that part. He also misses the relevant background history (Missouri compromise [1820], Dred Scott[1857], etc); it's not like that info is hard to come by.

He also mostly bypasses the "why" of confederate secession. It was, from the southern side, presented as "those people can't tell us what to do", and "the federal government cannot tell the states what [not] to do"...the one thing the federal government was trying to do was tell the southern states they couldn't allow/continue/expand slavery.

(look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_the_American_Civil_War, for the Wikipedia pages on this whole thing)

So: the south: "it's all about states' rights", the north: "it's all about slavery"

Really: it was both, of course. It was all about the right of southern states to sanction (and tax) the ownership of one human being by another.

Don't kid yourself, blacks weren't liked up north. They just weren't slaves.

So at the end of the book, the confederate government, now with Robert E Lee as president, learns how they have been manipulated by the South Africans, and learns a good bit about the future, decides that slavery must be eliminated. (That seems unlikely, to me, given that the elimination of slavery occurred because the South lost the fight. Dramatic military superiority would change the equation quite a bit--the military's strength is more or less untouchable.)

Like this is really somehow different from what the north had been arguing for some decades? "It's ok to eliminate slavery if WE decide to do it, not if THEY tell us to do it". So what happens when one of the southern states decides to secede from the confederacy? All the same arguments could be made over again ("we don't want some other states telling us what we can/can't do"). The southern states were not terribly unified amongst themselves; if you're willing to secede once, you're willing to do it again.

Author does cleverly manage to work in a variation of the infamous "battle of the crater" near the end. That was amusing...it's a little different, of course, because in the story the "civil war" is over by this time, so this battle is against the South Africans. Who, despite the radically superior technology (i.e., things more advanced than an AK-47), are numerically too small to win a war with any attrition. I actually thought this the best part of the book.

'twere better all around had no slaves ever been brought here. The real problem is that a lot of people are lazy enough want others to do their work.

Of course, the situation in the Confederacy wasn't nearly as simple as you were taught it in school. There were plenty of "Unionists" in the south who opposed the secession, and some actually fought against the South while living there.

And apparently there was something known as the "Twenty Negro Law" whereby one military-age male was exempted from serving in the Confederate Army for every twenty slaves owned on a plantation. Of course it was only the wealthier who owned slaves, and they tended to be those in state legislatures, too, and therefore could vote themselves these kinds of exemptions...resulting in the actual conscription being the poor, fighting for the rich, to preserve the rich folks' way of life of owning slaves. (see HERE, and HERE for the exact wording, which is a bit obtuse)

recent reading...

Julie Czerneda's "Stratification" trilogy 1-3, which are actually 1-3 of 9, where 4-6 were published some years ago...and she's working 7 now...kinda like Star Wars, eh?

These were pretty good...I don't remember 4-6, so I guess I'm going to have to go read those again...

Jason Bourne...

Robert Ludlum is one of my all-time favorite writers...he was a master of the conspiracy story...

The Bourne Identity was perhaps the most intense story I've ever read...

So I was excited when my wife came home with the "new" Jason Bourne story, "The Bourne Legacy", by Eric van Lustbader. Pretty sure I've read some of EVL's scifi/fantasy stuff at some point, but I don't own any...suggesting it was short stuff, or uninteresting.

Well, this book stars Bourne...but it's not Ludlum, it's not a Ludlum-style conspiracy...it's really more like a recent James Bond (hm...note the initials on both of them) film. Other than the lack of explosions at the end of the book, it really felt like Bond movie with fewer overall scene locations.

I thought Bourne got into too many fights where he got hurt a bit more than I thought appropriate. He seemed more fight-savvy in the Ludlum books.

It is based on the very early Bourne history, as David Webb, prior to his training that turned him into Bourne. Some of that didn't hang toegether as well as it needed to...

Apparently EVL has written several more Bourne books since this one...well, this story was ok, just not RL. Maybe I'll read the next one, but only as a used pb, not a new one. And maybe not any time soon, I have A LOT of other stuff to read already on a shelf here.

Stephanie Plum...pt 2

Plum book #15 was just published last month...got it and read it last week.

Classic goodness, and this time Stephanie's car blows up again. Twice...well, actually it's Ranger's car each time, but still...that was a signature event in the first 10 books, and then it stopped for a while...I emailed and got a rather stupid reply from some worker-bee who wasn't the author. But it's back.

I definitely recommend this, although if you haven't read the others, don't start with this one, you need the character background, and don't worry, the used bookstore has plenty of copies.

Stephanie Plum...

my favorite funniest book character...new book "Plum Spooky" came out in Jan...why not before Xmas I don't know...that seems poor timing by the publisher.

Anyway...this is one of those "between the numbers" books. Previously they were a little different, there was more character development in them, and less going on. This one is actually a Number book sans the boyfriends, and with this "Diesel" guy instead.

Which is just fine, it is just a screamingly funny as the numbered ones, which the other "Betweens" were not.

Looking at the length of it: 300pp, just like the numbers books, and twice the thickness of the other "betweens" titles. I got it for 30% off at Borders Express at the mall, and read it over the next 48 hours...great fun.

You really gotta wonder why Stephanie hasn't been turned into a movie. (yes, Grafton hasn't either, and V.I. Warshawski was more like VI wash-out-ski, so maybe that's it--except that Plum would be a lot funnier than those others)

Science Fiction novels

I encountered this again this past week...having begun reading David Weber's "Off Armageddon Reef" -- it's clear where an author's real knowledge/experience are, and usually clear where it's not. His seems to be nautical, and naval, in the time-frame of 1400-1850...that era of human naval battles and tech advances plays heavily in the middle of the book.

What's also clearly NOT his expertise is at the beginning. Book starts in roughly 2430 AD. i.e., just over 400 years from now. Tech advances between now and then are only vaguely imaginable right now. Think backwards 400 years. Jamestown has just been colonized the year before. Shakespeare is still writing. Galileo has NOT yet published his round-earth and heliocentric writings--the earth is still flat, in essence. Electronics, computing, nanotech--all inconceivable and unexplainable. What tech will exist 400 years from now?

At one point Weber says something along the lines of "they couldn't smuggle a computer out because it was too big". I'm sorry, in 400 years computers won't exist the way we think of them now, and they darned sure won't be big. My guess is that long before then computers will have evolved into nanites that essentially exist everywhere, in unimaginable quantities. They will run through your veins. They will BE your clothes, and will dynamically change color/style/shape. Your nanites will be DNA-reconfiguring, protective. The internet won't exist as this separate thing we now have, it will be ubiquitous.

But his book is predicated on things not happening like that...which leads to my central complaint. If you are an author, but not a tech expert, HIRE someone who IS a tech expert, and have that person read your book from early on, so you don't write something that is so far off-target.

Weber's book is enjoyable enough, kind of a Hornblower-on-another-planet story. and the premise is totally dependent on things being pre-steam-era low-tech. So the story is really about post-Renaissance but still feudal politics and religion. You've read THAT before...

But the main character turns out to have to be a recorded personality installed in a very strong robot...if such robots exist, why did they not fight the battle against the aliens that's in chapter one? Said robots don't need O2, don't need food, don't sleep. So they don't need spaceships anything like what people would need...so they could be fairly bizarre looking, incorporate much funkier designs, no worry about things like life support, radiation shielding, low-gravity propulsion...your largest issue would be micro-particles ripping holes in spaceships.

So if you can't get the tech details straight, LEAVE THEM OUT! and don't base the story on premises that couldn't possible be true...this one: the aliens nearly wiped out humanity, and will be around to finish the job if they detect any RF signals from far far away. So I expect that by 2432 AD, or 3200 AD, there probably won't be any more RF anyway. What would be the point? Networks will have evolved from copper to fiber to quantum long before...broadcast will have gone from RF to cable to fiber to __? Satellite comm will be burst-mode laser soon, and quantum eventually. So no RF to detect anyway. Sorry--premise doesn't hold water from the get-go.

favorite things...

there's only one thing I like more than reading...but I'm probably not writing about that here...primarily I read science fiction. Being an engineer and software jockey, that shouldn't be too surprising.

finally read all the titles by Charles Stross that I have (Timelike Dip, Accelerando, Glasshouse, OHMOS)...he's done more, but mostly short stories in the mags, and things under contract but not yet in print. See his FAQ for more info. a little bit of his writing is actually on his website.

Accelerando is absolutely amazing...wish I'd written it...the wild-n-crazy-idea density in this novel is almost off the scale, like nothing you've ever read. (it originated as a series of short stories) The funky ideas roll off (like the classic, oft-mentioned Heinlein "the door dilated", which was about the only time Heinlein tossed off something like that) at a pace you've never seen before. read the electronic version here.

All the stories I read have some inter-related flavor (incl use of certain phrases), they are all about "the singularity", a point in time (probably in the future, but perhaps the recent past, too) beyond which it is no longer possible to imagine what the future is going to be like, because the rate of change due to technological advances is so high that you are future-shocked continuously. Bring it on, I say--can't happen to soon.

Stross handles that all like it's a walk in the park. We are certainly approaching that time, I'd argue that it's this century, because we are basically progressing in terms of computing and biotech at an unbelievable speed, and the convergence of those two things is going to happen soon.

Timelike Diplomacy is only a little based on the singularity. Accelerando is ALL about it, OHMOS is differently based on it (mixing tech with the occult -- not hard to imagine, "sufficiently advanced tech = magic")

Stross has been a computer jockey, too...in the stories I read, he mentions two programming languages, one I consider scruffy in the extreme, the other my all-time favorite (and which I used to be *very* good with).

I haven't been this impressed with a new (at least to me) write since I discovered Peter Hamilton a few years ago.

recent reading...

Read the latest Janet Evanovich "Stephanie Plum" book two weeks ago titled "Twelve Sharp". Pretty good, but Stephanie's car doesn't get blown up--hey! You gotta stick with your conventions once you establish them. And when's the movie coming out?

and apparently Evanovich wrote some "romance" novels under a pen-name before happening onto Ms Plum and they are getting reprinted now. Not sure if I want to read them, altho they are self-described as "romantic comedies", which might be ok. I think there's a couple of other new ones by JE that I don't have, in her other series. It's about to be xmas vacation time, which means more reading. (Yeah, I know, when do I fit that in between the game-playing).

if you look at JE's website (http://www.evanovich.com/), you can see she has now gone to having fans submit book titles for the Plum series. hmm. And there's another in-between Plum book, like the xmas book a couple of years ago; this one is for Valentine's Day.