Input: [Title] New Legends [Author] Greg Bear [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1996 [Read] 2013/12/04 [Review]

Output: New Legends is an anthology of SF stories picked by Bear with an eye toward the psychological & personal lives of scientists/researchers. I purchased a copy of it to look at the novella “Radiance” by Carter Scholz and compare it with the full novel Radiance for the annotated ebook of Radiance I have been working on for a while. That will be its own review, so I will pass over it for now. An unexpected bonus for me was Gregory Benford’s contribution: not a story, but an autobiographical essay “Old Legends” on the real-life background to “Radiance” that he lived through, discussing his physics career, time at LLNL (where “Radiance” is set), experiences with other SF authors in the Reagan-era lobbying for SDI/Star Wars, the Cartmill incident, his admiration of Edward Teller, etc. Scholz clearly drew on Benford for his novella, and so it was unusually interesting for me. The collection overall is good, but not great. A number of the stories are too clearly the product of early ‘90s anxious liberalism and have not aged well since they were written in 1993 or earlier (~20 years ago), some are half-baked, and some are just bad. A few are very good. They are grouped into thematic sections. To go through them in order (there are many spoilers below): “Elegy”, Mary Rosenblum. Good. A scientist working on controlled use of squid neurons to repair human brains and cure trauma like Alzheimer’s struggles with guilt about her demented mother, fear her research will fail, and worries that the squid she uses as raw materials may be part of something far greater. “A Desperate Calculus”, Sterling Blake. Bad. World-trotting scientists struggle to organize a response to a devastating pandemic. Twist ending: the pandemic was engineered to render women sterile, stopping the threat of overpopulation, forcing humanity to dieback and live in harmony with the environment, and the (immune) protagonists were spreading it through their jetsetting, overlaid on a geopolitical forecast of Northern hemisphere vs Southern hemisphere balkanization & resentment. The engineered pandemic conceit is nice but has been done many times before, and the politics are incredibly grating. Even in 1994 it should have been obvious that overpopulation was not going to be an existential threat and that the worst of the environmental problems are often solved by additional economic growth (the Kuznets curve). This story is particularly dated; contemporary writers thinking about using global warming as their threat should consider how much they care about dating themselves. “Scenes from a Future Marriage”, James Stevens-Arce. Mediocre. An unlucky couple who screw up all their life decisions fail again, and review their choices while contemplating suicide. Set against a vaguely dystopian background. This one did nothing for me as it was so over the top. “Coming of Age in Karhide”, Ursula K. Le Guin. Great. In an ageless city where every life follows ancient finely-honed patterns, a fearful child grows into its sexual maturity and becomes an adult. This is very much a Le Guin traditionalist story with her trademark gender twist, and it does what it does very well. “High Abyss”, Gregory Benford. Good. An alien religious war about the physics of the universe, in a universe which is not ours, culminates in victory for the renegade mathematician who led the revolt with his heretical theory that the world is not a line, but another topology. A treacherous counterattack sends the prophet aloft on a hot-air balloon and he realizes that his heresy did not go far enough - that the world was a string embedded in a far grander, far larger, more spherical universe (ours?). He is simultaneously exalted and debased by the epochal discovery of the truth of the Universe. Benford throws you in the hard SF deep-end to figure out the universe (I’m actually reminded a little of The Clockwork Rocket here as a recent example). Does it work? It’s hard to say because the story is so short. I’m not sure what the “string” is even supposed to be - a superstring? How does that work with the given system of the world with ’lava’ bubbling up in the center of the world? I thought initially the story was being set underseas on a crustal fault, and the lava was literal lava and the cold abyssal waters doomed the people if they tried to leave the long line/ridge, but then “stars” came up and I had to abandon that theory. I’m not entirely satisfied with my interpretation and wish the story had been longer and explained its world a little more. “Recording Angel”, Paul J. McAuley. Mediocre. In a vastly distant post-human future, a Indian-like city’s ancient rhythms are disturbed by a human returning from an eons-long space trip. She leads some sort of revolution. Did nothing for me, as nothing about it seemed important, the world-building failed to explain what was going on, etc. “When Strangers Meet”, Sonia Orin Lyris. Bad. A mind-controlling alien (the One) celebrates, with its many servants, the festival at the end of its year, culminating in a grand dance to the death (by exhaustion) of its vaguely human-like slaves. Interspersed are occasional comments about interstellar communication with aliens (humans?). This one frankly made little sense to me. There’s some repeated lines about the dangers of the servants becoming “too familiar” to the One, but also a line about “strangers bring benefits”. The story feels ominous but nothing gels before it abruptly ends with the dance performance and another use of the strangers line. What does it all mean? I have no idea. I can barely figure out what the alien social system is supposed to be (I think it’s modeled after eusocial insects), much less any theme or message. This might have worked if Lyris hadn’t badly overestimated my ability to understand what she wrote. “The Day the Aliens Came”, Robert Sheckley. Very bad. Supposedly humorous. A writer nonchalantly accepts employment with an alien tourist, but then suddenly he’s shacking up with another alien, and suddenly the couple is having kids and merging into a group organism with other couples and then the story just ends. WTF‽ This badly needed to be rejected or at least, Bear should have rejected it and sent it back to Sheckley with a note saying “where’s the second half of this story?” “Gnota”, Greg Abraham. Mediocre. A mid-future soldier gets hit by an IED due to sentimentality; his heart is to be replaced by a clone of his heart grown inside a genetically-engineered pig. He bonds with the pig. “Rorvik’s War”, Geoffrey A. Landis. Good. A citizen is conscripted into a war against the Russians. He dies in an attack - or maybe he dies another way, and then another. War is hell, and wasteful since the militaries’ computers can all simulate the outcome of the battles, except can they really take into account the human factor? Rorvik dies again and again, is taken POW and sent to a Communist re-education camp, until fuzzily he realizes: he’s in the computer simulations. He grapples back to reality, and his conscription is over. He returns home with all his limbs, having apparently served his country without any repercussions. But will he psychologically truly recover? I enjoyed this one in part because it undercut my expectations: I was mentally a little bored with yet another war against Russians and thinking it was a little stupid, but then the story justified its choices quite nicely. “Radiance”, Carter Scholz. Great. See Radiance. “Old Legends”, Gregory Benford. Great. See opening summary. “The Red Blaze Is the Morning”, Robert Silverberg. Great. Silverberg turns in one of the best stories in this volume: an old archaeologist, almost out to pasture, strives in his Turkish dig site to make one last extraordinary find justifying his heterodox theory of the origins of human civilization, following the clue of a few out of place artifacts. He is lonely, his body is failing, but his passion to understand the past drives him on in his fruitless digs. Haunted by his continuing failure to find anything at all, he begins hallucinating visions from the end of time, the dying Earth, the ruins of the mightiest civilizations that humanity will one eon give birth to. The visions are sent by his counterpart, one of the last sapient beings left in the ruins after the Gotterdammerung, who makes him an offer: to swap their minds (shades of Lovecraft’s scholars), so the being can study the impossibly remote origins of humanity and the protagonist study undreamt-of eras. He refuses of course, and the dig continues to go poorly, he drinks more and more, until finally in the climax, a Turkish official arrives with the shattering truth: the artifacts were planted by a corrupt Turkish official for the express purpose of egging him on and motivating more work at the site. His dig is futile, was always futile, and even the slender evidence he had was meaningless. His theory will not be vindicated. Utterly destroyed by the revelation, he accepts the Faustian bargain and flees into madness - or the future? And awakes at the end of time, with endless ruins to investigate and ponder. This story impressed me as close kin to “Radiance” and showing the dark side of a quest for truth. “One”, George Alec Effinger. Mediocre. A husband-wife team set out in a spaceship to search for life. As predicted by the Fermi paradox, they fail to find any on thousands of worlds. The wife dies, the protagonist slowly goes insane, and converts to religion as he continues to fail to find life on any planets he surveys. Wholly unconvincing, I thought. “Scarecrow”, Poul Anderson. Mediocre. An almost Asimovian pastiche, of another husband-wife team whose ship crashes on the chaotic moon Hyperion. They struggle to reach shelter in the installation on the moon, manned by robots, only to discover the robots have, yes, gone insane - or become religious, specifically, having developed a religion focusing on darkness/chaos/bad vs light/order/good. The pair need to prove they follow the light and are not sinister agents of chaos. Based on the wife’s brief religious dialogue with the robots, the husband receives inspiration: he proves that they come from the light by teaching the robots about fractals and chaotic equations which nevertheless have a simple beautiful mathematical core. Having proven his theodicy - how a good and orderly god could have created the chaotic Saturn environment - they are accepted by the robots as fellow worshippers and admitted into the base. While I really enjoyed the last page, I level the opposite accusation at this story that I did some of the others: it is far too long, almost all of it could be trimmed out, and some of the characterization is very poor (the wife is wholly unnecessary and IMO is constantly irritating). “Wang’s Carpets”, Greg Egan. Great. I would put this with “Radiance” and “The Red Blaze Is the Morning” as the 3 best stories in this volume. Upload civilization fires off a bunch of copies to remote systems to look for life, in part as a final attempt to find a justification for remaining involved in the real world and pursuing the great scientific project of understanding the universe, rather than enjoying ever more abstracted or refined simulations. They discover an apparently dull giant simple ocean life form based on self-replicating carbohydrate sheets. Egan offers a truly inspired bit of worldbuilding when he suggests the sheets then are Wang tiles - which are Turing-complete, surprisingly enough, and so host entire computational civilizations of their own! A wonderfully alien suggestion. This was apparently expanded in Diaspora, which if it’s as good as the short story, is well worth the reading. I’ll look for a copy.


Input: [Title] Perseverance island: or, The Robinson Crusoe of the nineteenth century [Author] Douglas Frazar [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 0 [Read] 2014/12/13 [Review]

Output: (130k words; 2h) I read the Project Gutenberg HTML edition with illustrations. An obscure Robinsonade proper, I was recommended it when a reader mentioned it as a counterpoint to my complaint that in Robinson Cruse, Crusoe is furnished with almost an entire ship of supplies and an island of abundance. Indeed, the preface of PI runs In all works of the Robinson Crusoe type, the wreck is always near at hand, the powder dry and preserved, and the days for rafting the same ashore calm and pleasant. This unfortunate had no such accessories; and his story proves the limitless ingenuity and invention of man, and portrays the works and achievements of a castaway, who, thrown ashore almost literally naked upon a desert isle, is able by the use of his brains, the skill of his hands, and a practical knowledge of the common arts and sciences, to far surpass the achievements of all his predecessors, and to surround himself with implements of power and science utterly beyond the reach of his prototype, who had his wreck as a reservoir from which to draw his munitions. This sounded promising. While detailed how-tos and manuals can be crushingly boring, a good narrative can weave them in and be both educational & interesting. (Neal Stephenson manages this sometimes.) It starts off sensibly enough, with the expected disaster as part of a sequence of gradually worsening events that eventually strands him on an unknown island. Our protagonist is part of a colonization mission, but don’t worry, he doesn’t get a colony’s worth of equipment dumped on him: just his clothes, a few books, and an anchor. This seems like a good start. It’s surprising when he manufactures nails out of his shoes, but boots did use to have nails in them and it’s clever, so no foul there. He immediately secures his priorities of food and water, perhaps in a little more baroque fashion than expected (I didn’t really follow the pipe set up), and then he makes a… “lamp-tower”. No, not for signaling passing ships. Just so he doesn’t have to rekindle fire with his flint and nails. And the lamps are powered by oil. (The oil is from the livers of sharks he spears. Of course?) This is the first sign of trouble with the narrative. The second sign comes when instead of immediately exploring the island like any sane person would, days pass as he is made to refine his landing spot and create a dwelling and begin manufacturing tools and planting seeds. …OK? He explores the island and finds an absurd number of resources. Besides the sharks and turtles he’s feasted on, he finds wild goats (and why haven’t they denuded the island?) and even more: “Wild goats, quail, tortoise, tobacco, wild ducks, trout, sweet potatoes, mussels…Find coal and sulphur, seals, more turtles, gulls, etc.” I’m not sure what sort of tropical island yields all that and coal and sulphur. But wait, there’s more: there’s also saltpetre, iron, pearl oysters, gold mines, penguins, and sea serpents! And that’s not even covering all the stuff he makes; he apparently is some sort of superhuman genius master of all trades who can make anything on the first try without ever injuring himself. Mithridates over on Amazon puts it well: The book does not live up to this vaulted goal - but rather dissolves into utter ridiculous and pathetic shows of limitless (and impossible) manifestations of human ingenuity (or rather magical conjuring experiments of every necessary mineral, metal, technology). These progression of these chapter subject headings illustrates my point -Hat Making, Knife Hammer and Spear, Discovery of Coal, Discovery of Sulphur, Steel, Cement, Iron, Astrolabe, Rifles, Submarine (Goat Powered), Steam Yacht, and eventually Chess and Backgammon (With a Goat). I understand that this is a ‘realistic’ form of fantasy writing but there are extremes to the ingenuity of man and the availability of an island with all the resources of the world. So is Frazar actually exploring the ingenuity of man? Or rather what man could do in a fantasy world? Anyone can do anything in a fantasy world… But that said, I suppose the genre had been relatively sucked dry by his illustrious predecessors - Verne and Defoe - and showing the humanity of goats was Frazar’s cherished original idea. (One wonders what Frazar would have made of I am a Pencil…) If Frazar had dropped half of the elements and contented himself with just one of the peak technologies (steam boat would have made the most sense, although I think readers would still object at the idea of a desert island with both coal and iron reserves), the realism might have been preserved. But as it is? It’s ridiculous as any semblance of a realistic narrative. A castaway would have made a lighthouse on the bluffs of the island, and then been busied with maintenance of his food supplies, clothing, and shelter, lacking much practical experience in primitive methods of maintenance, resources, tools, economies of scale or the benefits of specialization. He would not accomplish 1/100th of what the protagonist supposedly does on his own in a decade or so. I must defend the honor of the goats, however: the narrator is perfectly clear the goats do not actually play chess or backgammon, and he has merely trained them to shake dice - which seems well within their capabilities. Reading through the rhetoric, what I think this is supposed to be is a veiled metaphor of mankind, and particularly 1800s England and America. For example, these passages together very much sound like a progressive manifest destiny: …portrays the works and achievements of a castaway, who, thrown ashore almost literally naked upon a desert isle, is able by the use of his brains, the skill of his hands, and a practical knowledge of the common arts and sciences, to far surpass the achievements of all his predecessors, and to surround himself with implements of power and science utterly beyond the reach of his prototype, who had his wreck as a reservoir from which to draw his munitions…I did not gather all these things about me without many bitter hours of loneliness and despair; but their constructions and the reading of my book, which I consulted almost nightly, kept me often from miserable repinings. I felt that I was gaining, and that I had not yet done making nature, ingenuity, and industry improve my condition and increase my comforts…On that terrible day in November I was cast on shore, with scarcely any food, no hat, no coat, and without water. With no aid but that given me by God, and by the use of my own hands and brain, I was to-day sitting in front of my home, erected by myself alone. In this short space of time, one year, I had wrested from Nature many things, showing the supremacy of mind over matter, and knowledge, over ignorance and sloth. I had in this year made fire without the aid of matches, distilled salt water to procure fresh, made myself implements of defence, and erected towers of perpetual lamps, made myself flint, steel, and tinder, bows and arrows, fish-hooks and lines; discovered coal, sulphur, saltpetre, and iron, and captured goats, fish, seals, birds, etc., and at the end of the year found myself sitting at my house door surrounded with my flock of goats, my garden and farm planted, my mill and smelting-house in running order, my canoe at my feet in the quiet water of the cove, and everything about me that could please or charm the eye. From absolutely nothing I had created everything; that is to say, the ground was now so laid out that in the future I saw no end to the daring attempts that I should make, and could make with every chance of success. I felt, now that the year was ending, that my hardest work was done; that I had so much now to do with, that all that I should now undertake would be comparatively easy; but then, on the other hand, my ambition was so great that I could see things in the dim future that would tax the strength and brain of any man to consummate, but which from my temperament and loneliness I knew I should be forced to attempt. The pirate passages particularly highlight this: My courage arose as I gazed upon the skeleton before me, and I moralized thus: You must have lived in an age when God had not granted to mortals the permission to discover and utilize many of the arts and sciences of my day; you did not live when steam was the motive power, when the lightnings of the heavens were made obedient to man to convey his demands and requests, when the paddle-wheels of floating steamers beat the waters of all the oceans of the earth. All of these things, and many others, were unknown to you. My case is not as bad as yours was, if you were shipwrecked. I, of this century, on this same island, have gathered about me, from nothing, strength and power. You, seemingly, have had only this rude hut over your head. I have chances of escape; I doubt if you ever had any from the first day of your arrival, for I cannot conceive of your having willingly remained upon this desert isle. And now, poor mortal, passed away so long ago, let us see if you can do anything for me, your living prototype. …I saw plainly that I should have to blow open the hull to get at what I wanted and expose it. In the meanwhile I was fascinated with the thousand and one old-fashioned shapes about the hull that struck my eye,—the peculiar long brass eighteen pounders, some of which lay beside her, covered with barnacles, but yet showing their shape and general formation; the blunt bows of what the pirate captain had termed a fast-sailing vessel; the comical anchors, and peculiar formation of the decks, that to me, as a sailor, were very interesting. She looked to me more like Noah’s ark than the vessel of a civilized nation. How rapidly and almost imperceptibly had we advanced in this science since this tub was called a vessel, fast, strong, and staunch; and how many hours would she have been able to keep in sight a modern clipper-ship, much less overtake her. In comparison to the latter she seemed like a ship’s jolly-boat. And so indeed she was, being about 300 tons, as against the 2,000 and 2,500 tons ship of my day and time. Inasmuch as the pirate captain died in 1781, not that long ago, and had been shot through the chest & left to die, these are rather self-satisfied comments on the narrator’s part and hence, Frazar’s. (The achievements of Western civilization are great indeed, but they owe little to God, much to other civilizations, started well before the 1800s, and are the result of countless men striving rather than a few.) So is it good or bad? We might say that one’s liking will depend on how well one likes a transition from realism to steampunk. Despite the wordcount, it’s not a long read because it’s written in the inflated prose style of the 1800s, and I for one didn’t pause to look up every technical term to figure out the exact details of the industrial processes.


Input: [Title] A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time, #14) [Author] Robert Jordan [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/01/09 [Review]

Output: So. It has come to this. WoT finally ended. I remember how the wheel of dharma began to turn for me: my mother ran a Girl Scouts troop while I was in middle school, and sometimes they met at a local town rec center. Rather than try to participate, I would sometimes kill time in the lounge reading their old donated paperbacks. One of them was remarkably thick, but the cover looked interesting, and I was hooked by the opening passages: a Tolkien-esque chapter about a young lad heading back to the Shire and haunted by a Ring-wraith. (Not so much the Prologue, which was too mystifying.) I’d read Tolkien by this point, of course, and wondered if it’d be an awful shameful ripoff like Sword of Shannara, but I kept reading. The opening was nifty enough but not gripping, at least until I reached Moiraine’s speech to the villagers about Manetheren. I was spellbound and had not been so gripped at least since Tolkien with Gimli’s dirge for the dwarves in the Mines of Moria. And the book didn’t stop there: there was the creepy interlude at the cursed city of Shadar Logoth, the even more creepy Machin Shin of the Waygates, the unusual Templar/Children of the Light, the intriguing uncertainty about which of the kids was the Main Character (you thought it was Rand, of course, as the major viewpoint, but the dreams kept you uncertain - surely the author wouldn’t throw those in if there weren’t a good chance the obvious choice wouldn’t be picked?), the good troll character who is a scholar rather than a warrior, a Western-samurai militaristic setting a whole city of female magicians, Old Tongue on every other page culminating in no less than the Green Man at the Eye of the World (just one of many nods to real-world things). I was impressed as I read it over the weeks, meeting by meeting, and soon checked out the other 6 or so. This was a long time ago. A very long time ago. Indeed, WoT could be considered Tolkien turned up. Tolkien had a cast of hundreds? WoT would have a cast of thousands! Tolkien had a few countries going to war against a dark lord? WoT would have dozens of countries and regions! Tolkien had two or three scheming magicians? WoT would have scores of scheming magicians, and they would be split into more than a dozen groups, all scheming. Tolkien had one or two trolls? WoT would have trolls too, all over the place, and they’d be the good kind, peaceful scholar; and Tolkien had a character recording events for a history, well, that’s a perfect task for one of the scholar-trolls. Tolkien had a few Ring-wraiths and a big fight against one at the end, well, WoT would have ring-wraiths in every book and they’d be a standard foe (which makes sense given all the magical powers given to every other character: you need to power up the bad guys if you power up the good guys). The Shire would be tainted by evil due to the hero & companions coming from there and eventually have to be led to an uprising? Emond’s Field would never fall and would wage epic battle against Padan Fain et al. And so on. You couldn’t say that Wheel of Time had the restrained scholarly English sensibility of LotR, but it packed a punch. If LotR was the novel, WoT was the video game or maybe movie adaptation, with everything dialed up to 11 and an unlimited budget for explosions & exotic locations. And it did this very well in the early books. In that sense, it’s an excellent ‘Tolkien for teenagers’. (In another sense, reusing the old ‘hidden prince’ trope of being born to a destiny and with arcane powers, WoT is also good for teens: they’ve long loved that trope, perhaps because at that age they desperately love the idea of being given a defined role and the (unearned) ability to fill it. This trope is perhaps a bit too narcissistic for adults to enjoy as much, although given how popular Frozen has been and how many people, child or adult, claim to identify with Elsa, I may be wrong here.) One of the lessons I learned from WoT was learning the hard way why one should avoid in-progress series: the mental suffering and time expended is radically out of proportion to the pleasure. (I am handily applying this lesson now to that other endless vast fantasy epic, GRRM. Given my pre-2007 comments that it was entirely possible that Jordan would die before finishing, I wonder how that one will turn out.) Another lesson is that length and a big cast of characters should not be taken as a goal in its own right because you descend into repetition and cliche. In some sense, Sanderson’s AMoL for me succeeds just by existing and giving me closure. I would be happy if it is not as enraging as King’s ending to The Dark Tower, or as unremittingly awful and a disgrace to all parties involved as Brian Herbert & KJA’s work in the Dune universe. Perhaps all the people on Goodreads who are leaving laudatory 5 star reviews without even reading the book and apparently are ignorant of what a “review” is feel the same way - that as long as it’s not awful, it deserves 5 stars for giving them closure. And it’s neither enraging nor terribly awful, so I am satisfied. I share a lot of the complaints I’ve seen in other reviews. Some characters like Moiraine do nothing interesting; others have compressed endings like Luc/Isam and Padan Fain. Bela dies despite an expectation that she would continue her improbable luck. The body-swapping is unprecedented and confusing, since it apparently is not due to Rand indulging in cosmic powers but a mysterious gray-haired woman who I could not understand after two reads and googling a bit. The resolution of confrontation with the Dark One was clever as far as it went, but it relied on a feature of Callandor I am pretty sure was not mentioned before and I feel a bit deus ex machina-d, although I’m relieved that the general interpretation of Herid Fel’s basic point that because of the Wheel, you have to restore the prison to how it was before the Bore (rather than patch it again, kill the Dark One, etc) was correct. There were many great bits. Rand and Matt bragging in one of their last meetings. Lan taking down Damodred (although didn’t we see the suicidal maneuver in a previous book…). Min vs spies. Demandred and Graendal make the Forsaken look less incompetent than usual. Thom casually knifing women while composing a poem. Many bad parts. The endless grinding battle - by the time I finished the book, I felt as exhausted as if I’d been pushing pikes with Trollocs myself. The worst part was, despite the endless pages of battle, the battles still didn’t feel epic or hardfought; they lacked any urgency or real drama. Perhaps WoT just massively over-indulged in battles before, or perhaps the battles were just disconnected - it’s a bad thing when you have characters lampshading the triviality of what they’re doing and asking ‘so why does this matter when the only battle that matters is Rand vs DO?’ The battles are weirdly parochial and limited to a few locations. 4 battlefronts is impressive? For the Last Battle, a worldwide struggle against the Shadow? We didn’t get so much as one point of view in, I dunno, Seanchan which was supposed to have waged its own epic struggle against Shadowspawn during the original colonization! We don’t get Waygates popping open in hundreds of locations, the entire Randland convulsed in thousands of battles… Basically, we didn’t see a world at war. We bounced between 4 locations again and again and again until it was an incredible chore to read another page. Last minute rescues are a storytelling device that work only a few times. In a chapter. Before they lose any impact. Some of the writing seems stiff and clumsy, and I liked Matt less than in the previous book so I suppose that was just an anomaly. The ‘philosophy’ bits of the Rand vs DO encounter were seriously juvenile; so Rand overcomes the DO with the Power of Love but then he realizes that to destroy the DO, he would take away Free Will! And just as any idiot could have predicted, he has to leave the DO alone and repair the prison good as new. And of course the DO whines at him and Rand has to lecture him self-righteously… Give me a break. I’m sure that this must have been Jordon’s notes, because I remember Sanderson doing better in Mistborn. I suspect people will be identifying loose ends and missed prophecies or Min-visions for years to come. At least we did sorta find out who killed Asmodean. So now that it is finished, what should I think of WoT? Would I recommend it to a younger version of me? I think I would. In bulk, WoT’s flaws are reduced. The repetition fades away like the Homeric epithets filling out lines, and the multi-million word count becomes less intimidating. The awful middle-late books, like possibly the series nadir Winter’s Heart, lose their severe aggravation when you have all the books in a pile waiting to be read instead of an unknown multi-year wait upon an author who may (and did) die on you. Without years between reads, the plots and characters will be easier to track, and even if one fails to pick up on clues or asides, the resolution will be delivered soon and one can go ‘ah!’ as one newly appreciates a new thread of the pattern. But I would accompany it with this caution: “WoT, in small chunks, is not good. The characters and writing is repetitious, the descriptions pedestrian; few passages will move you with the beauty of strangeness or exoticism that marks the best fantasy. What WoT does is take the ‘quantity vs quality’ tradeoff, and jam it all the way to ‘quantity’, to see what happens, and does so more extremely than any other fantasy series I know of. If you want to see ‘epic fantasy’, with a cast of who knows how many thousands, spread over more countries than you can keep straight, and watch this tapestry evolve over years and millions of words, then you must read WoT. If you want to maximize your enjoyment per word, if you want the heights of what the fantasy genre can deliver in terms of quality, then put away WoT for another day and instead do something like read through chronologically the winners of the Locus & World Fantasy Awards.” There have been worse obituaries for pieces of your childhood.


Input: [Title] Renaming of the Birds [Author] David Troupes [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/01/01 [Review]

Output: I’ve been a fan of the obscure webcomic Buttercup Festival since ~2005 when I discovered it and A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible (probably my 2 favorites were “Another Day” and the yeti) through Dinosaur Comics, and was pleased to see it restart in 2008. It ended in 2013 with the announcement of a Kickstarter for his book Renaming of the Birds. I will be honest, I am not a big fan of Troupes’s realistic prose and poetry as compared to Buttercup Festival, An Island People Go To, or his unfinished Green Evening Stories - for the most part, they strike me as embodying the worst sins of English poetry in the 20th & 21st centuries, while his artwork at its best nears the spare beauty of some East Asian traditions. I was not pleased to hear that it was ending in favor of a short novel, but I did notice in the announcement: Among the rewards are original Series 2 BF strips and it’s first-come-first-served for choosing strips, so if there’s one you’d really like to have hanging on your wall, better get a move on. and on the Kickstarter page: Pledge £80 [$120] or more 23 backers; Limited (77 left of 100) THE MIGHTY EAGLE: Barn Owl reward plus the the original artwork for the Series 2 Buttercup Festival comic of your choice! First backers are first choosers, so let David know your top choices in order of preference. Now that was a different story. I’ve always been a little bit impressed how effectively Troupes deployed Sharpies for his comics, and this was too good an opportunity to pass up. Plus, apparently I might get some books or something as well. I immediately subscribed and submitted my preferences: http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-120.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-101.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-14.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-5.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-114.htm http://www.buttercupfestival.com/2-125.htm Luckily, I spoke up quickly enough to get my first choice. The Kickstarter succeeded and the printing of the book went through apparently without much issue, so I received my package in early January 2014. The original of comic #120 turns out to be a sheet of stiffish paper about 29.2x20.3 centimeters, much larger than the web image. The image also doesn’t do it justice: the original is actually visibly textured with whiteout, you can see variation in the intensity of black, and between that, the stars in the stream seem to shine a little bit. So I was satisfied and just needed to find a frame for it. I scanned it to have a backup copy: https://i.imgur.com/98YSV07.jpg I also received: “Standing in the Sea” [2011] set of 6 postcards featuring David’s poetry and the fab artwork of Laurie Hastings. Hastings’s artwork was interesting but not really in my vein. David’s poetry was decent enough that I copied part of 2 of the better ones; from “Their Daughter”: “The cooling, still-warm blue of September rolls westward …Their daughter toe-steps among the twizzles of melon vine, which follow everything, seek everything, labouring now and again to fatten a soul sweet and blind.” And from “Pumpkinseeds”: “…Outside summer tumbles like a slob through the valley. We roll up our sleeves to the shoulder, we dip our children in greeny ponds. It is only for us that catbirds mock cats. It is only for us that pumpkinseeds float in weedy splendour, flecked like whittles of sun.” Not bad. I eventually wound up using the postcards for a prank. Renaming of the Birds (2013; ISBN 978-0-9927133-0-0) is a 74pg novel with ~56 black-white sketches of birds/landscapes/people as illustrations. (There is one short poem at the end, but it seems they were all split out as the companion pamphlet The Fountain along with unused illustrations.) The Kickstarter for it describes it as …an illustrated storybook about a young clerk who is assigned to rename all the birds in his town. The book is in the form of a journal kept by the clerk, and proceeds through a whole year, as he ventures farther and farther into the woods, looking for new birds to rename. He ends up sleeping outdoors, travelling all around, building a winter den and going a bit crazy. I originally thought of this as a kids’ book and kept the language within hearing of 10 to 12 year-olds, though really it’s a book for all ages, and adults will find plenty to think about. If you’re familiar with my webcomic Buttercup Festival you’ll know the sort of whimsy, humor and outdoorsiness you’ll find in Renaming of the Birds. If you’re not – I hope you’ll find out! This is not inaccurate a summary, but it overemphasizes the ‘renaming’ part: one might think it’s a sort of magical realist novel or more upbeat Kafkaesque novel or an experimental novel, but the renaming part and the new names passes quickly. Which is too bad because I thought it was a nice parody; for example, the letter with the assignment: Special Committee for the Avoidance of Bird Death Unhappiness To Whom It Will Concern: It has been determined that the recent phenomenon of Bird Death Unhappiness will best be avoided by a process of de-bird-familiarization. We are therefore undertaking to render birds less familiar, and this will be accomplished through the assignment of new bird names. The task of bird name reassignment will be passed to the appropriate local agencies, to be staffed at their discretion. Agents should rename every type of bird within their town. All necessary forms are enclosed. Agents are to begin immediately. Ever Yours, SCABDU I had to read that fifteen or twenty times before it began to sound like real words. But the gist of it, I think, is that they wanted me to rename the birds. It is Orwellian bureaucratic reasoning that would not be one bit out of place in England. Why not? So the protagonist sets about his task, renaming mockingbirds to ‘Yelling Birds’, Crows to Rattles, Gulls to Tattles, Pigeons to Ladyfriends, Mourning Doves to Vinegar Doves, Grackles to Velvet Inkdrops, and runs out. So he sets off to the woods, and of course meets a woman there. In a few more vignettes wandering the woods, he kills time and renames some more birds. He declines to rename swans, and is puzzle by sparrows. It becomes an extended camping trip: the narrator sees some more trees, watches a kestrel kill one, sleeps in trees, and winter comes. He survives the snow by making a lean-to. (No mention of where he gets food initially before learning how to scavenge roots, which was a major concern of a Maine hermit I read about recently and who I’m reminded strongly of when rereading RotB). After winter, he wanders his way back, eventually returning to his house. Wandering around some more, he re-meets the woman and together they wander out into the woods and watch birds. He still doesn’t know what to rename sparrows to. The illustrations are appropriate and well-done. The writing is fair enough. It’s not as overripe as much of Troupes’s poetry, and he generally underplays incidents and avoids too much mawkishness and invocations of God. It does indeed feel like a journal of a long camp-out, and Troupes is doubtless taking a lot of material from life. It’s pleasant, but not much beyond that.


Input: [Title] Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance [Author] Jane Gleeson-White [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2014/10/31 [Review]

Output: (56k words, 1-2h read) Popularizing overview of Luca Pacioli’s publication of double-entry bookkeeping, and some historical tracing of its subsequent spread through Europe and use in modern corporate-capitalism. As an active user of ledger for my personal finances, writer of the WP article on the Medici Bank, & reader of Nick Szabo, I thought I might find Double Entry interesting. The book sets up as a morality play, pointing to the many well-known corporate scandals in the 2000s, before quickly going to Ancient Sumeria & the invention of writing for business purposes (‘accounting’ might be a bit of an anachronism there), a few tantalizing Roman quotes & the possibility of Indian invention (although as with so many other things, the Indian dreamtime makes certainty difficult to reach), and settling down in the 1300s and sketching out Venice’s rise with its associated mercantile class, such as Datini, whose well-preserved business documentation is familiar to anyone interested in Renaissance commercial practices. This sets the scene for Pacioli: Venice’s trade throughout the Mediterranean and Adriatic and Black Sea and especially Constantinople, its navy, which Pacioli witnessed as a young mathematician traveling and tutoring. He learned well, returning to Venice in time for the Gutenberg revolution to make financially feasible an enormous encyclopedia laying out the use of indispensable Arabic numerals and, as it happens, double-entry accounting. Along the way, he hung out with Leonardo da Vinci, compiled a book of cool magic tricks like handling molten lead barehanded (apparently featured on Mythbusters), wrote the first book on chess, got that portrait done, and so on. Pacioli turns out to be far more interesting than I would have guessed for a monk known for popularizing something as dull as double-entry! We get a short introduction to double-entry; I’m not sure how well one would learn double-entry from that chapter if one didn’t already have a little experience. (It’s not that complex, but it can be tricky deciding what should be added/subtracted from what accounts.) The brevity of this section is a little odd since it is the major theme of the book: you expect a book on the history of accounting to discuss in detail accounting, like a book on physics or any other intellectual topics. It’s also not a very good overview of Renaissance capitalism either: the great fairs appear in one or two sentences, the tricky methods of interest (exploiting exchange rate variations between currencies and geographic variation) are discussed too briefly to clarify, and we don’t get a good idea of how banks and trading companies were organized as a series of yearly partnerships (for example, the Medici bank was structured as several affiliated partnerships which dissolved and reformed every year; and this was how the financial state was calculated, and new partners/employees brought on) though later Gleeson-White contrasts the yearly partnership form to the continuous joint-stock corporation form - apparently forgetting that she never really covered the original form. This leads into the Industrial Revolution. A few examples of the moralizing of good accounting are provided, but not that much. (There seems to be a lot of fertile material in the Netherlands which got omitted, judging from Soll’s article “The vanished grandeur of accounting”.) An interesting example of the effect of double-entry is provided by the famed Wedgwood pottery factory, which was staggering under financial problems despite enormous success until Wedgwood got his books in order and figured out where all his money was going. I wish Gleeson-White had provided a dozen examples in that vein: how was double-entry used in real life? The first railway bubble provided the impetus for British wholesale adoption, but I wonder how double-entry related to the Gilded Age in America? Since accounting is subjective in some senses, it would have been interesting to dig into the details of some of the collapses briefly mentioned to see what went into the differing appraisals - for example, I am intrigued by the final line of this quote, but the thread is dropped without any further discussion: In the 1920s the US construction business Kreuger & Toll became one of the largest conglomerates and multinationals imaginable, like Enron seventy years later. After its founder Ivar Kreuger died in 1932, millions of investors discovered the company’s financial statements had been falsified over many years. But because of the company’s extraordinary organisational complexity, the investigating accountants Price Waterhouse could not determine the exact extent of the fraud and so the investors lost their money. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 revealed the accounts of another titanic company, Insull Utility Investments, to be ‘grossly misleading’. Its CEO Samuel Insull was tried for fraud in 1932 and acquitted on all counts. A considerable part of Insull’s defence rested on the persuasiveness of the commonsense rationale behind his accounting practices (he had treated stock dividends as income, which was prohibited at the time, but the prosecution was unable to make a clear case against it)-and, by implication, ‘the financial nonsense peddled in the conventional accounting wisdom’. The prosecution was left without a case, unable to deny that the accounting rules of the day were controversial and unable to claim that there was any consensus within the accounting profession on the particular rule in question. The Insull case highlighted the contentious and arbitrary nature of corporate accounting, especially regarding valuation and depreciation, issues which are essentially unresolvable and continue to be hotly debated today. Significantly, some of Insull’s accounting practices, which then lay outside conventional accounting practice, are now accepted wisdom. I’m concerned because as useful as double-entry is, I don’t see a good case for identifying it as a major technology worthy of a book or marketing like ‘created modern finance’ (the Dutch would seem to have a better claim there); to quote the book: “But detractors argue that a close reading of the historical evidence does not support Sombart’s generalisation: in fact the few merchants’ books which survive from the 1300s to 1800 indicate the double-entry system was not then widely adopted in practice. As part of his career-long dispute with Sombart, economist Basil Yamey argues that the spirit of capitalism animated numerous prominent Italian mercantile ventures before they adopted Venetian bookkeeping: ‘Perhaps it is sufficient to note that the Italian enterprises of the Bardi, Peruzzi, Alberti and Medici cannot be said to have been run less efficiently and “capitalistically” before they had adopted the double-entry system than after they had done so.’” Indeed. The point is made even more strongly, inadvertently, by the emphasis on modern accounting scandals and Buffett’s observation that derivatives make a corporation’s true financial state nearly unknowable, combined with the observation that the world keeps on ticking and annual global growth continues: if modern financial reporting is so ambiguous and unreliable, doesn’t that imply that clear transparent books were never that important? The book gets weaker as it returns to the original theme of the corruption of capitalism and its focus on internalizing gains while externalizing costs. While it’s true that GDP may not be a perfect measure, can we say that it’s really that bad? (Is it really plausible that a Big Mac actually costs $200 when all externalities are priced in?) I recall environmentalist activists making a big deal of Bhutan adopting ‘Gross National Happiness’, but last I heard, you still want to live in China with its focus on GDP and not impoverished unfree Bhutan (ask the Bhutanese refugees how well things worked out for them). There seems to be little critical consideration of this topic, or of arguments for optimism about the environment from the Kuznets curve (although Kuznets is certainly mentioned often enough) & the cornucopians. One feels that in the attempt to turn a long good article on Pacioli into a short book, some rather weak material got included.


Input: [Title] Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door [Author] Brian Krebs [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2014 [Read] 2015/01/11 [Review]

Output: (2h; ~73k words) Journalistic account of Brian Krebs’s (Wikipedia, blog) experience with some Russian spammers & associates. Krebs has been engaged in a little war with Russian spammers: getting onto their forums, looking for weak points like abuse-friendly ISPs or payment processors, and blowing the whistle on them; he’s been heavily aided by the feuding community leaking lots of information and vouches to him, and the book revolves around one he’s hyped up as the ‘Pharma Wars’. All the leaks means he can do an unusually thorough job of documenting it and the principals, and the involvement of the Russian government in the e-crime scene. My own interests are mainly in the Western blackmarkets like Silk Road, and in the pharmacy affiliate networks which were one of the main routes for buying modafinil up until recently, so while Krebs doesn’t go into nearly as much detail as I would like, it’s still a fairly illuminating read. Few Westerners have as much experience with the area as he does, which makes it worth reading for anyone interested in this niche, and certainly it’s easier to read the book than try to piece together everything from his blog posts. One downside is that the book comes off as a bit stream of consciousness and disorganized: there seems to be a rough chronological order, but not much of one; and a few diagrams of all the overlapping people and organizations (as well as a flowchart of the spam process) would probably be helpful. And I used the word ‘journalistic’ deliberately: Krebs’s writing is purple and sensationalistic. Something is not ‘terrifying’, it is ‘truly terrifying’; spammers are not a nuisance, but they become “potent threats”; in describing the fall of a small plurality source of spam (~20%, I believe he estimates), “consumers all over the world were enjoying a brief reprieve” from “the spam email empire”. His overheated writing aside, his own sources make the case that spam is not that important; eg towards the end: Vrublevsky and Gusev’s Pharma Wars were extremely costly for the spam industry, and their internecine war cost everyone in their business plenty. The two are now widely reviled on cybercrime forums for costing spammers tens of millions of dollars in profits, and for focusing attention from law-enforcement officials and security experts on individual spammers. “These two fuckers killed the spam business,” Vishnevsky said in a May 2012 interview. “It was never super profitable for most guys; maybe five to ten guys earned really good money with spam. But after Pavel and Gusev started their war, everyone started thinking that every spammer is a millionaire and started hunting for spam and spammers.”…Legitimate high-tech and well-paying programming jobs are increasingly available to talented coders in Moscow, and many of his longtime employees have been hired away to legitimate jobs in Moscow’s young but promising tech sector. “Many representatives of the underground can’t find good coders now, because their salaries in Moscow are much more than you can earn with spam,” Vishnevsky said. “This business went to shit when Pasha [Vrublevsky] got busted. If Pasha and Gusev [had] not start[ed] that stupid war, everyone would be much happier.” Vishnevsky’s criticism may be harsh, but it is hardly an exaggeration. The spam industry has indeed taken a huge hit in the past few years. Prior to SpamIt’s closure in October 2010, the volume of spam sent worldwide each day hovered at around 5.5 billion messages. Since SpamIt’s closure, however, the volume of global spam sent daily has been in marked decline. According to Symantec, by March 2011, spam levels had fallen to just over one billion junk messages per day, and the total has hovered at or very close to that diminished level ever since. (If spam is at 1/5 peak and even at the peak it was ‘maybe five to ten guys’…) In other spots, Krebs makes mistakes or does not exhibit as much critical thinking as one would like: the illustration of the horrors of designer drugs is the infamous ‘causeway cannibal’ (except that that wasn’t bath salts, that was marijuana - and Krebs even acknowledges his mistake in a footnote! So why on earth does the main text confidently say he “turned into a real-life zombie after ingesting prodigious amounts of “bath salts””‽); when discussing the online pharmacies, he repeats idiotic pharmacorp talking points like “8% of the bulk drugs imported into the United States are counterfeit, unapproved, or substandard” without pointing out that no one actually cares about the fraction that are “counterfeit [or] unapproved”, and mentions that Marcia Bergeron’s poisoning death is “almost always recited in some form whenever experts allied with the pharmaceutical industry talk” without asking the obvious question if the online pharmacies are so dangerous, why is only that story ‘almost always recited’?; it’s interesting that there’s no mention of Kaspersky Lab’s connections to the FSB and why Krebs was being wined and dined by Kaspersky personally; there is a bizarre lack of mention of Bitcoin except for a throwaway line about Russian forums, which is particularly bizarre given that he discusses the rise of ransomware (now often Bitcoin-using) and seems to agree with the interviewed Russian spammers at the end that going after credit-card payment processors has effectively killed the industry (which would be an unwise prediction if they can move to Bitcoin, as many of the online pharmacies have begun to). Further reading: “PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs” “Pick Your Poison: Pricing and Inventories at Unlicensed Online Pharmacies” “Structuring Disincentives for Online Criminals” “The Partnerka—What is it, and why should you care” “Click trajectories: End-to-end analysis of the spam value chain” “An analysis of underground forums” “Folex: An analysis of an herbal and counterfeit luxury goods affiliate program” “Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace” Some key authors: Nicolas Christin Nektarios Leontiadis


Input: [Title] Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews [Author] Donald J. Albers [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2008 [Read] 2014/10/08 [Review]

Output: A collection of interviews and occasional professional autobiographies in the 1960s-1980s focusing on mathematicians who worked in the 1920s-1970s or people closely associated with the field in other capacities (Martin Gardner, while describing himself as a journalist, impacted the field majorly through his famed Scientific American columns on recreational mathematics; another interview is with a biographer of Hilbert & Neyman, Constance Reid). Some of these mathematicians one may well be familiar (Conway, Diaconis, Erdos, Gardner, Graham, Kline, Knuth, Mandelbrot, Pólya, Smullyan, Ulam), but many just made me draw a blank (Birkhoff, Blackwell, Chern, Coxeter, Halmos, Hilton, Kemeny, Lefschetz, Pollak, Rees, Reid, Robbins, Taussky-Todd, Tucker), so there’s a wide range from the famous and public intellectuals to the working mathematicians. The interest of the interviews likewise range: Smullyan’s autobiographical essay (extracted from his autobiography, apparently) is stuffed full of hilarious stories and jokes as any reader of his books might expect, Diaconis has an interesting life story in going from a traveling stage magician to a mathematician/statistician who continues to dabble in magic (like Smullyan), Knuth’s reminiscences are of interest to any programmer, while Chern’s life is an unusual look into what it’s like to bring modern mathematics to a place like early Communist China; others are just terribly dull. Another issue is that the more pure mathematicians struggle to describe to interviewers in a short approachable fashion what, exactly, they’ve accomplished and why it’s of interest, while the geometers can at least draw pictures of some sort and the ones who dabble in application and especially statistics have all sorts of immediately-interesting topics to discuss. I admit I got very little out of the pure mathematicians, aside from being a bit amused at the aesthetic prejudices on display as algebraists sniff at analysts who sniff at topologists who sniff at combinatorics and meanwhile I have hardly any idea what those specialties are much less any opinion on their respective merits. It is difficult to maintain an interest in topics you don’t know anything about and the discussants can’t explain, so a good deal of the book was wasted on me. Some topics surface repeatedly, to one’s surprise: “New Math”, a failed American program to rewrite lower mathematical pedagogy into teaching math in a much more abstract fashion, comes up repeatedly (perhaps because of the striking failure, none of the interviewees are willing to endorse it although Kline spends much time attacking it); the Hungarian Martians seem to come up in every other interview as the interviewee either taught or worked with a Hungarian, was inspired by a Hungarian, or was a Hungarian (Von Neumann, Halmos, Pólya, Erdős, Wald, and others), although none of the interviewees seemed to have any good suggestions for why the Martian cluster seems to exist (yes, Hungary was poor and so geniuses there might turn to math preferentially, but then why don’t we see similar clusters from other impoverished countries? the Hungarian per capita GDP in the early 1900s is probably equaled or exceeded by scores of countries since and present). Other tendencies in the biographies remind me of similar observations I noted in my review of Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science - academia seems to have been infinitely less cutthroat than it is now and many of the subjects seem to almost luck into jobs and positions (Mandelbrot in particular seems to have been a beneficiary as he was able to continue his tertium quid career until fractals became a phenomenon), and in every professional life there is a clear discontinuity at WWII where it seems all of Europe’s intelligentsia packed up for America and get sucked into the military-industrial complex for application to complex Cold War topics (the Cold War was particularly good to statistics, as one can see how statistics & probability are mentioned only occasionally pre-WWII but then suddenly everyone is dabbling in it post-WWII; likely the Cold War/WWII influence would be even more obvious if interviewers & interviewees didn’t step so gingerly around the topic out of a mix of patriotism & shame, the former exemplified by a mention of the cryptographic work in WWII which the interviewee doesn’t describe but assures us has been written up in abstract form for the open literature); people married remarkably young and had children immediately which would be a bit odd in this age of prolonged PhDs & multiple postdocs & ‘the two-body problem’. Other topic don’t: computers are surprisingly rarely mentioned, with the exception of one or two discussions of the four-color computer proof, and Kemeny who turn out to have been quite prophetic about computers becoming ordinary tools of scholars & to have been one of the developers of BASIC; a mathematically-inclined layman or technologist will be surprised at the general absence of topics like P=NP or Fermat’s last theorem, but of course those problems were only formulated or solved long after most of these interviews were conducted. And I did like some of the anecdotes related. For example, I learned that the origin of Wald’s celebrated frequentist sequential analysis came from an incident which for all the world sounds like Bayesian reasoning: “These two men were puzzled because a Navy captain with whom they had discussed the problem of destructive sampling of munitions had said that he didn’t see why he had to destroy so much of the evidence—that there ought to be a way whereby, after a while, an experimenter, like a savvy captain, would know that this was a good batch or a bad one and stop sampling…Since they were unable to get anywhere with it because it required very special mathematical skills, they took it to an outstanding mathematical statistician who was associated with them—Abraham Wald, an émigré from Hitler’s He was intrigued by the problem and solved it by developing a new technique in statistics that is now one of great importance: sequential analysis.” Active mathematicians may find these old interviews of great interest, but I think most people would be better off reading just a few of them: Diaconis, Knuth, Smullyan, Pólya, the 2 Gardner articles, Conway, Chern, Kemeny, Kline, and Mandelbrot (in no particular order).


Input: [Title] Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History [Author] Sarah Chaplin [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2015/02/15 [Review]

Output: (words: 110,626; ~3h) Heavily academicized discussion of contemporary Japanese love hotels, with an architectural history and history of some related locations for having sex. The prevalence of love hotels is interesting, and Chaplin backs it with a large survey she did of current love hotels. (Curiously, this survey goes almost entirely unused in the book - some photos from it, and a few statistics are mentioned like “Only one establishment in a sample of over 300 indicated room numbers and prices used Japanese numerals; the rest were all given in Arabic numerals” or how only 2 had manual rather than automatic doors, but given how huge an effort that survey must have been, it’s oddly underused.) Much of what is a pretty good book is hidden in woolly academic discussion, referring to a panoply of Western & Japanese critics and writers. For the most part, these parts are the worst, since they are either masturbatory or obscure discussions of the obvious. (Does it really require an intimate familiarity with Benjamin’s Arcades Project and its various schemas, brought up repeatedly over the book, or Arie Graafland or Hidenobu Jinnai or Barrie Shelton or André Sorensen or Donald Richie or Mitsuo Inoue in order to notice how Japanese cities have large main streets but also narrower car-free intimate back-streets with a mix of housing and small shops/businesses? Or that there are distinct neighborhoods, sometimes with physical barriers or gates demarcating them? I would think anyone with a pulse who went there, or even just consumed some jidaigeki fiction - to give a random example, the movie Fuse Teppō Musume no Torimonochō - would notice most of the neighborhood and pleasure quarters background.) It is difficult to see what discussions of how love hotels are “liminoid” rather than “liminal” really add to one’s understanding. What is good, however, is when we get down to brass tacks: what are love hotels, how do they operate on a day to day basis, how does the industry collectively respond to changing economic and social conditions, and what are the consequences of their existence? Chaplin takes a bit of an architectural focus to this, and I sometimes rolled my eyes at the attempts to divine deep meanings in various hotels’ choice of adornment or design (often, the true answer is simply that the architect liked it or was copying it from somewhere), but that focus is understandable since the bones of hotels are well documented and preserved in things like photographs while the living flesh is harder to capture. Those more-factual parts are the best parts - learning how there are 30,000 love hotels, revenue of ¥4 trillion with 1.37m couples using daily and ~2.5 couples per room per day and as high as 7 (avg ~78.8 stays per room per month) which pays for decorating costs per room as high as $150k (black-lights: $10k per, saunas $15k per) and of course bribes (easily $100k) to all the local power groups, spotting love hotel tax evasion through water utility bills, the now-familiar immigrant-based cleaning staffs (but not South/Central American, SE Asian like Filipinos), how South Korea eradicated many of the Seoul love hotels by converting them into tourist housing for the Olympics, the 1985 law quasi-banning love hotels & how they responded (as you’d predict - like squeezing air in a balloon), the automation which saves face while using a love hotel and their cutting-edge entertainment systems (as well as how they can go wrong), or how the 12-zoning system lets love hotels infiltrate regions of cities where one would not necessarily expect anything associated with the sex trade or the power dynamics of the Tokugawa shogunate fighting organized religion & redlight districts (“By the end of the Tokugawa era…temples occupied 15 per cent of urban areas”, which leads to some amusing photos of conjunctions of love hotels & temples), the grumping of old people about how before proto-love-hotels everyone had sex outside in the field and enjoyed it more and noodle shops posting signs clarifying they were real noodle restaurants, the insinuation that a number of well-known architects designed love hotels but refused to take any credit or acknowledge involvement, the occasional discursion into a related topic (the adoption of Western-style beds turns out to be unexpectedly lengthy and interesting), some of the stranger decorations (“…one popular love hotel interior, in which ‘Yamamoto Shinya [a popular porno film director] appears on the transparent wall between the bathroom and the bedroom, as if to prompt us to act out a film.’”), the rural Japanese practice of “night-courting” which reminded me of some material on early British & American pre-marriage sexual practices like “bundling”, how the Crown Prince & Disney doubled Japanese TV ownership 1958-1959, and offbeat uses of love hotels (watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup with friends on a much nicer TV, families resting during city outings & enjoying the pool). Most of this was new to me and interesting to read about, so it’s too bad that I had to slog through some deadly-dull material to get to the good parts.


Input: [Title] Selected Poems [Author] Paul Celan [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1972 [Read] 2014/06/01 [Review]

Output: Modern verse is always difficult to read, and I expect little from it since the freedom gives people far too much rope to hang themselves (“you need an infallible ear, like D. H. Lawrence, to determine where the lines should end”); Paul Celan is no exception in that most of his poems leave me simply baffled. Part of the problem is the shadow of the Holocaust lingering over many of the poems: an event too awesome and sublime to reduce to words, seemingly reducing Celan to slapping down words and fractured lines in frustration and despair, and not a little guilt, circling around the themes again and again (reminding me of Wittgenstein’s famous introduction to Philosophical Investigations). That said, a few of the poems or parts of the poems worked for me - not just the famous “Fugue of Death” (WP) but several of the others. In poetry, a few gems is enough, because they stay with one in a way that prose rarely does, and so I forgive Celan for the poems I did not like and myself for the poems I did not get. Some excerpts: “Aspen Tree…”, pg24: “Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into the dark. / My mother’s hair was never white. / Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine. / My yellow-haired mother did not come home. / Rain cloud, above the well do you hover? / My quiet mother weeps for everyone. / Round star, you wind the golden loop. / My mother’s heart was ripped by lead. / Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges? / My gentle mother cannot return.” “Corona”, p32: “Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. / From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: / then time returns to the shell.” “…We stand by the window embracing, and people look / up from the street: / it is time they knew! / It is time the stone made an effort to flower, / time unrest had a beating heart. / It is time it were time. / It is time.” “Fugue of Death”, pg33: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night / drink it and drink it / we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there / A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes / he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden / hair Margarete / he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter / he whistles his dogs up / he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in / the earth / he commands us strike up for the dance / Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night / we drink in the mornings at noon we drink you at / nightfall / drink you and drink you / A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes / he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden / hair Margarete / Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the / sky it is ample to lie there…” “Thread Suns”, pg83: “…there are / still songs to be sung on the other side / of mankind.” “I Hear that the Axe has Flowered”, pg106: “I hear that the axe has flowered, / I hear that the place can’t be named, / I hear that the bread which looks at him / heals the hanged man, / the bread baked for him by his wife, / I hear that they call life / our only refuge.” Ironically, the reason I looked up Celan in the first place was a Japanese novella (a doujin for Touhou), Iyokan & Surrounded By Enemies’s Dream and Reality, included as a running theme quotes from Celan’s From Threshold to Threshold (perhaps because Celan’s poems in Japanese bring out the repeated themes of gates/thresholds/transitions, which complements the plot of the novella & a key character). I had been particularly struck by the poem “The Guest” from Threshold: “Long before nightfall / someone who exchanged greetings with darkness / comes to spend the night with you. / Long before daylight / he wakes / and, before leaving, kindles a sleep, / a sleep echoing with footsteps: / you hear him going off, measuring distances, / and you throw your soul / after him.” And since Selected Poems was available but Threshold was not, I downloaded it to read… and “The Guest” was not in it.


Input: [Title] Before the Storm (Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, #1) [Author] Michael P. Kube-McDowell [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1996 [Review]

Output: As a kid collecting EU novels and stories, I was always puzzled by The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy. It was wildly different in tone and subject matter from most of the EU, I didn’t know whether I hated it or loved it, and it seemed to have been largely ignored by the rest of the EU (ever see the Yevetha or Black Sword Command or the White Current mentioned elsewhere?). This ignoring has happened for a number of other books like the Dark Empire comics or Crystal Star, but usually for good reasons: Dark Empire was so over-the-top and gothic that to take it seriously would undermine many other stories and so it’s usually name-checked briefly, if that, and ignored, while Crystal Star was just so terrible it can be ignored. Neither of these seem especially applicable, though, so I didn’t know what to think. Having reread the trilogy now, I think I understand it better. It’s essentially a Weber/Drake/Clancy-style military or mil-sf novel, which happens to be set in the EU and feature 2 distracting large subplots. From the great opening Fifth Fleet exercise to the equally great small subplot of discovering the Black Sword records (I’m nerdy enough to really like that, and also the various library/research issues in the Lando subplot) to the excellent finish, that’s what it really is. The problem is in large part the non-Yevethan subplots: 1. there’s a reasonably interesting first-contact story using Lando which keeps distracting from the real story and which has absolutely no relevance to the other 2 subplots and is completely unnecessary. (Another reviewer comments that it would fit nicely as a stand-alone story like the pulpy Han Solo Adventures; I agree, and actually there were multiple Lando Calrissian Adventures, so even more reason…) 2. The subplot for Luke has more justification than Lando, but is still problematic for how sheerly boring and pointless it is. The ultimate justification seems to be the White Current assistance in the final battle and revelation of how they had been working against the Yevetha all along, but this is not much of a justification. It’s probably just as well, since any real info about Luke’s mother would have been rendered moot by the prequels (and I wonder if that’s why the ending had to be so disappointing?). The positive side is that in some respects, this subplot seems to anticipate how a lot of later writers would handle Luke - so perhaps we should not criticize Luke’s hermetical ways and musings. (Some of the resemblances to the Yuuzhan Vong/New Jedi Order story-arcs are striking, although I hated them enough that I stopped reading the EU after they started coming out.) Certainly he serves as a vehicle for some interesting bits like reflecting on the death toll of the first Death Star (although the Imperial Museum in Wedge’s Gamble is still a far better scene). (One missed opportunity is Drayson; since Drayson is a key player in the major arc, and a key player in the start and end of Lando’s arc, the trilogy missed a chance to make an interesting and subtle move: have Drayson be the topic of the trilogy! It would examine his methods, choices, and beliefs as contrasted against those he manipulates and serves. Most people would not appreciate this subtlety, but that only makes it mirror the life of its subject all the more. But he plays no role in Luke’s subplot, so the interpretation fails. Too bad. The spy novel aspects were a major reason why Zahn’s trilogy was, and probably still remains, the greatest EU series.) The criticism of Leia in the trilogy is, I think, off-base. A good character is not a omni-perfect automaton who never makes mistakes; Leia needs to make mistakes, and this depicts one of them. Calling that ‘bad characterization’ is just fanboyism. I am reminded of a foreword to one of the character encyclopedias which enthused, “Check it out, Leia never misses [in A New Hope]”. I did. She does, several times.


Input: [Title] Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society [Author] Jim Manzi [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2013/01/25 [Review]

Output: Speaking as a die-hard believer in the value of randomization and meta-analysis, I’m not entirely sure how much I got from this book other than some useful assertions and interesting claims. To go through it roughly in order: 1. the first few chapters are a serviceable philosophy of science primer. We get discussion of how the Scientific Revolution was a break, we get some Popper and falsificationism, and as a very important correction, some Duhem-Quine; we get some cultural and vocation material, and discussion of the value of prediction even in non-experimental sciences. Chapter 6 is a bit of a waste as Manzi makes the standard criticism of frequentism that the basic ideal - probability as the limit of some particular set of events - is extremely imprecise since it gives absolutely no guide as to which set of events, since you can choose arbitrarily complicated events, but he does so on his own terms and without any reference to competing paradigms such as the many flavors of Bayesianism. 2. then we get into genuinely important material on the development of RCTs (he uses the term “RFT”, which I find silly). Personally, I could wish for a whole book on the gradual development and refinement, and many more examples of the superiority of RCTs to other approaches; his summaries of things like the US social program experiments is short and in many ways inferior to, say, Rossi’s “metallic laws”. ch9’s example analyses read like columns folded into the chapter, but I still enjoyed them as fun examples of critical thinking and how analyses can reach any goal. 3. with ch10 we finally get into Manzi’s own career. This section is… weirdly lacking in many examples, even though it’s the section where you would expect Manzi to just lay the smack down with countless scores of anecdotes and stories and statistics about how experimentation is the ne plus ultra of epistemology and exactly how much money it made all these corporations. There’s a few, like Capital One and some Internet companies, but it is not very thematically separate from point #2. 4. he issues some policy recommendations. Hard to argue with some of them: why not let in some immigrants as part of randomized experiments? It can hardly be worse than the current system. Fairly anodyne. So overall good, and maybe great for people who aren’t familiar with the topics. But I think in general if I wanted a layman to appreciate statistics and its pitfalls and experiments, I might actually be better off giving them Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise (although they’re not totally comparable, of course). People seem impressed by his Hayekian libertarian arguments using genetic algorithms as arguments. I don’t think they’re as well supported as they may seem. Just to name the obvious, society has changed massively over short time-spans, corporate mortality is astonishingly high, corporations do not replicate with high fidelity (“corporate culture” is fragile) etc; evolution, as it happens, can only filter out so many mutations per generation so past a certain point, a genome just decays. This, along with other considerations, strongly suggests that corporate ‘evolution’ is nothing but a poetic metaphor.


Input: [Title] Game Programming Patterns [Author] Robert Nystrom [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2014/05/18 [Review]

Output: (I read the online version.) This book follows the standard pattern for design pattern books: short chapters on each particular style, with definition, pros & cons, simple pedagogic example, comparisons with other design patterns, and possibly some discussion of real-world implementations & game engines. I haven’t heard of any other place where one could find this sort of game-oriented programming design advice, and in that respect, this book is unrivaled. While far from encyclopedic, the chosen design patterns all seem like reasonable choices for video game programmers: there are some architectural ones like Flyweight & Singleton which everyone needs to know, and then a good helping of high-performance or game-specific patterns (eg. Data Locality/Object Pool/Dirty Bit & Double Buffer/Game Loop/Spatial Partition, respectively), as well as a few fairly exotic patterns which often show up in games but not that many other areas (for example, Byte Code shows up in a lot of games to support modding, but you’ll otherwise spot such things only in a few extremely-extensible applications like text editors or programming languages). The actual chapters are surprisingly brief (from my non-game-programming perspective, anyway), and come across more as unusually long blog posts than meaty book chapters. Nystrom mentions several times he was trying for brevity, but I would say he’s taken simplicity to simplemindedness. I would have liked to see more of everything: more examples, more real-world applications, more benchmarks, more comparisons to other languages (especially to higher-level languages like Python/JavaScript/Haskell, which as hardware resources increase, game programmers will increasingly use; us Haskellers say that design patterns are simply flaws in the language, and I’m curious how much of Nystrom’s writing is simply due to working around C and Java issues). The web presentation is in standard 2.0-style: big font, lots of whitespace. Not too bad for reading, although the sidebar notes were annoying since a lot of them would have been better off incorporated into the text or simply axed, and their relation to the text could be very confusing if there were 2 or 3 on the same page. The web presentation also omits a major advantage of being online: comments! I started reading the site solely because I saw one of the chapters submitted to Hacker News & found it interesting. By a quick count, there’s 18 relevant discussions on Hacker News and another 37 on Reddit, yet someone reading it has no idea. There were many interesting comments and suggestions in those submissions, why not excerpt the best? Or at least link them at the end of each chapter as a “further reading” or something?


Input: [Title] The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason [Author] John V. Fleming [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/08/09 [Review]

Output: The title might lead one to believe that Fleming is trying to show an inherent duality to science and the Enlightenment in general - its reliance on irrational methods or its oppression or inherent contradictions, say, perhaps an updated (and more factual) Foucault. But while it’s a clever play on words, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment boils down to some short biographies of minor figures in Europe: the obscure English faith healer Valentine Greatrakes, the French Jansenists, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, Cagliostro, and Julie de Kruedener. If one looks for any sort of demonstration of a duality to the Enlightenment, one will be disappointed, as all the examples seem amply explained by simply pointing out that alchemists and religious types and fraudsters have always existed, and the case studies simply show that the Enlightenment did not sweep them away instantaneously, lock stock and barrel; one is surprised to note Fleming’s lack of emphasis on the more famous examples of the coexistence of religion & science, like Isaac Newton. Perhaps this is to ascribe a failure at goals that Fleming never aimed at, but regardless none of the sections are particularly compelling: while the Rosicrucian and Freemason sections seem like reasonable overviews of their subjects for people who don’t know anything about the topic, Greatrakes and Kruedener left me completely bored and wondering why Fleming considered them interesting enough to write a good chunk of a book on them summarizing other people’s books on them, and the Cagliostro section seems rather apologetic (although I have only seen passing references to Cagliostro before and know little about him). Fleming’s medievalist traits show in his resentment for the low modern opinion of the Dark Ages, which is a little amusing, and his predilection for using very old and obscure books as sources. But this is the cause of the best aspect of this book: Fleming’s genuine appreciation that even in the Enlightenment, a great many people thought very differently than we do today, centuries later in a completely transformed age, and his attempt to lay out the forgotten background and bring home the difference in consciousness. For example, Fleming points out the absurdity of claiming that Milton either subconsciously or consciously wrote Paradise Lost with the Devil as admirable, given the intense religious convictions of that age and Milton’s own strong beliefs, and he does a credible job of conveying how so many Europeans and Catholics could seriously and factually believe that Napoleon Bonaparte was the literal Anti-Christ foretold by John in Revelations who would usher in the end of the world and sketching the gematria-based arguments Christian occultists concocted to ‘prove’ this. Getting in the “mind” of past ages is always hard, and I appreciate any author who gives me a little insight, even if much of the rest of his book left me feeling like I was wasting my time.


Input: [Title] Drift Into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems [Author] Sidney Dekker [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/05/08 [Review]

Output: (101k words) Somewhat disappointing. Dekker focuses on how the occasional rare disaster is very complex, which they can be, but never gets off his high horse, instead spending a whole book talking about how everything is terribly terribly complicated. He sets up a strawman in which attempts to improve things evidences a naive and naturally wrong “Newtonian worldview” in which tragic cases of reductionism run amok guarantee disaster, and particularly mocks the swiss-cheese model of failure. The problem is, the more he rails against it and runs through the stereotypical case-studies like Challenger, the more apt that model seems, and the less Dekker seems to be trying to understand ‘Newtonian’ views or acknowledge that improvements are possible, that drift into failure is not inevitable. For example, in discussing the recommendations produced by an aircraft investigation, like making a hatch easier for mechanics to see into, he asks rhetorically how all these fatally flawed designs and procedures could possibly have gone unnoticed before the accident; the answer is, of course, that airplane accidents are vanishingly rare and so a contributing cause can be responsible for a large fraction of the current accident rate and that flaw be unnoticed before the accidents - if only 0.001% of planes crash and a too-narrow hatch is responsible for a full 10% of all crashes, then the hatch is a risk of only 0.0001%, and it’s entirely understandable that no one would notice that, and also true that fixing the hatch is worthwhile! And one might think that he would devote great attention to the steady decline in aircraft fatalities; I kept waiting for that to come up, and on pg150, it finally does in the mouth of one of his students, and his response is… global warming. I’m not making this up, that is what he says, he ignores the fatality question and starts talking about global warming. Give me a break. More generally, there never seems to be an economic perspective taken: what is the right number of disasters? Why must there be zero disasters and any disasters are a failure of ‘Newtonian’ thinking? I experienced a similar bit of shock to see how much space he devoted to the Gaussian copula; the Gaussian copula, for those who don’t recognize it, is an obscure bit of financial modeling which, after the housing bubble burst in 2007/2008, a few people blamed its assumption of independence for causing underestimates of the probability of housing prices falling, but you haven’t heard of it since because it quickly became apparent that this was a ridiculous theory which didn’t explain anything and was picking out an incidental surface feature while ignoring the real underlying drivers of the crisis. Overall, I don’t think I learned much from this. If you’re interested in disasters and complex systems, you’re probably better off reading more standard texts like Feynman’s “Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” or even just random post-mortems like the 2001 report “The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot”.


Input: [Title] Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t [Author] D. Jason Slone [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2004 [Read] 2015/02/11 [Review]

Output: (56k words; 1.5 hours) A short book on some of the possible psychological predispositions to religious thinking as indicated by intuitive thinking. He diagnoses overactive theories of mind; teleological thinking; intuitive ontologies of what kind of people and things there are in the world; cognitive biases related to the birthday paradox, gambler’s fallacy, and confirmation bias, as major causes of religious thinking. I was mostly disappointed by this naturalistic account; Slone spends a completely unnecessary and insulting amount of the book going over vaguely related historical background like Durkheim and the idea of ‘postmodernism’ or explaining things like ‘deductive reasoning’. You could well skip the first 3 of the 7 chapters in their entirety without losing much at all. Chapter 4 gets more interesting, as it covers the historically recent creation of modern Protestantized & philosophized Theravada Buddhism which has become popular in the West; this is going to be surprising to those not familiar with it, but you could see David Chapman‘s blogging on the topic for online coverage of the material. (It’s out of place, though, since that particular form of Buddhism is only relevant as a counterexample and he hasn’t yet presented his account of the psychological origins of superstition/luck/religious practice.) Chapter 5 does another short case-study in looking at the great religious awakenings in America in the 1800s and argues basically they resulted in more intuitive forms of theology becoming more widespread - the argument running basically ’Calvinism is unintuitive; Calvinism became a minority belief in America; that was because of the unintuitiveness; unintuitiveness is important’, pointing out that the Puritans were Calvinist but now few people are; now, I’m not an expert on American religions or demographics, but I am fairly sure there were more people in America than the Puritans, and other people may have come from other countries at some point too… Chapter 6 discusses luck and the statistical illusions that power it. Though the book is supposed to be about the psychology research, there’s little account of the research or the methods or caveats attached to the research. Instead, he writes at tremendously abstracted levels about the results: we hear repeatedly how believers are “theologically incorrect” in that they perceive gods as more limited, agent-like, and human-like than their theologies say… how they perceive them, what studies show this result, and what the results mean - well, for that, you’ll just have to look up all the citations and read the papers yourself! (The one result I remember being discussed in any meaningful detail was asking very young children about whether they thought a mouse that had been eaten would later be hungry, or have thoughts or beliefs; no to the former, but yes to the latter.)


Input: [Title] On the Road [Author] Jack Kerouac [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1976 [Read] 2004/01/01 [Review]

Output: A curious book: an unusual stylistic effort which in some passages reach great heights of beauty, combined with the most malign content. The strange thing reading it is wondering how this could ever have inspired a generation or been received as a model rather than a warning - it is one long crime spree by the characters, particularly Neal Cassady, even if the author is too in love with him to have the slightest perspective or critical thought or to realize that there is no redeeming value or spiritual meaning to any of their experiences other than as a warning against nihilistic hedonism and how charismatic conmen exploit voids. ‘Conman’ might well be too light a word for it; consider the following excerpts from ‘The Great Sex Letter’: She (her name Patricia) got on the bus at 8 PM (Dark!) I didn’t speak until 10 PM – in the intervening 2 hours I not only of course, determined to make her, but, how to DO IT. I naturally can’t quote the conversation verbally, however, I shall attempt to give you the gist of it from 10 PM to 2 AM. Without the slightest preliminaries of objective remarks (what’s your name? where are you going? etc.) I plunged into a completely knowing, completely subjective, personal & so to speak “penetrating her core” way of speech; to be shorter (since I’m getting unable to write) by 2 AM I had her swearing eternal love, complete subjectivity to me & immediate satisfaction. I, anticipating even more pleasure, wouldn’t allow her to blow me on the bus, instead we played, as they say, with each other. Knowing her supremely perfect being was completely mine (when I’m more coherent, I’ll tell you her complete history & psychological reason for loving me) I could concieve of no obstacle to my satisfaction, well, “the best laid plans of mice & men go astray” and my nemesis was her sister, the bitch. …In complete (try & share my feeling) dejection, I sat, as the bus progressed toward Kansas City. At Columbia, Mo. a young (19) completely passive (my meat) virgin got on & shared my seat. In my dejection over losing Pat, the perfect, I decided to sit on the bus (behind the driver) in broad daylight & seduce her, from 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM I talked. When I was done, she (confused, her entire life upset, metaphysically amazed at me, passionate in her immaturity) called her folks in Kansas City, & went with me to a park (it was just getting dark) & I banged her; I screwed her as never before; all my pent up emotion finding release in this young virgin (& she was) who is, by the way, a school teacher! This quote, or for that matter the entire plot, would fit without anyone noticing any discrepancy as a case study in Cleckey’s psychopathy examples in The Mask of Sanity.


Input: [Title] 空ろの箱と零のマリア 1 [Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria 1] [Author] Eiji Mikage [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2009 [Read] 2014/10/23 [Review]

Output: (55k words, ~3-4 hour read; read the Baka-Tsuki translation.) Time loop mystery. Those familiar with novel/light-novel series like Hyouka or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (particularly “Endless Eight”) will be at home here: yes, there’s a Japanese high school classroom, yes there will be a beautiful long-haired girl who interacts with the narrator, yes there will be a silent mousy short-haired girl who looks an awful lot like Rei Ayanami/Yuki Nagato in it who is inexplicably popular with the protagonist & readers, yes there will be a goofball sidekick. But the core of Hakomari is not tired romcom tropes, but rather a somewhat intelligent exploration of time-loops/Groundhog Days: besides the obvious like being able to acquire many skills and ‘predict the future’, how would you detect the center of such a time-loop and escape? What happens to people over many loops? Perfect time loops are too boring since by definition they cannot change, so what kinds of imperfect time loops are there? Are the ‘awake’ people really as powerful as they seem, or might the loopers be powerful in some ways themselves, as they can keep doing the same thing indefinitely and can be guaranteed to do so? The answer to each question may seem to be pretty obvious, but Mikage lets the reader infer an answer and then yanks it away several times, using reasoning that would not be out of place in Death Note or Hyouka, using the out-of-order chapters to, like Memento, maintain suspense and mimick forgetting - mysteries are often as much about figuring out why something happened in the past as what happened in the past. (In this respect, it’s a trickier exercise than “Endless Eight”, where there’s multiple bits of time-travel but they’re all straightforward to understand.) By the end, it seems all mysteries have been tidily resolved, and the answers are good. The riddle aspect works well, but the characters and setting otherwise leave me unmoved. The writing is unremarkable, setting is arbitrary, the characters are (as already indicated) stereotypes, and the ending is both a partial copout in averting a death which had been giving it pathos/depath and also a blatant gimmick for continuing to write the series if the first one sold well enough (which given there’s 6 of them now, it must’ve). The mystery part is fun, but like Primer it’s too lacking in the other departments to be more than good.


Input: [Title] The Ocean at the End of the Lane [Author] Neil Gaiman [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/06/28 [Review]

Output: A Gaiman novella of ~54236 words. It uses the device of a frame story around a flashback which is the meat of the novella. The frame story is a sad divorced English artist returning to where he grew up for a funeral, and recollecting the circumstances. This aspect is dry, mannered, and reminscent of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green or Kazuo Ishiguro. The flashback is vintage Gaiman, with a plot predictable by anyone’s who’s read his young adult works (particularly Coraline): an ordinary person meets uncanny folk, gets inadvertently involved in deep matters, goes through hell, defeats the enemy, and survives more mature for it. The narrator is wry, with many acute observations (indeed, why do so many people destroy pea by overcooking them when they’re tasty on their own?), and the antagonist is exceedingly cruel & clever in seducing & turning the protagonist’s family against him. It’s a quick read of perhaps 2 hours, and is not especially complex: the work is almost entirely set at the protagonist’s home or the Hempstock farm, and shows its origins as a short story. What makes this more than Gaiman going back to the well of mythos he has drawn from so many times before (oh look, another triune of mysterious powerful women! oh look, the fairy tale motif of the one forbidden action & of course the character does it) is the frame story’s tone of sadness and loss and wasted opportunity which otherwise shows up rarely in Gaiman’s fiction - it’s comparable to the death of the Sandman. By the end, the protagonist is pitiable: it was his fault, time and again, and ultimately the sacrifice was for him, and what has he done with his life? Little enough. As the shadows warn him, “There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.” At the end, the best the trinity can say for him is that he’s growing a new heart. Not that he’ll remember even that faint progress report. It’s an interesting combo, and helps excuse some of the lamer bits. (Talk of electrons is jarringly out of place in a Gaiman work, and some aspects are too explicit about fantasy elements better left for the reader to wonder about.)