The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu (author), Joel Martin (translator)
Science fiction
Earlier this year I gave a thumbs up to The Three-Body Problem. I wasn't the only person to do so, either. It's not necessarily an effortless read, but it's worth the effort. So I was definitely looking forward to its sequel, The Dark Forest.
I ended up liking this one, too--but it wasn't always easy, and I have more reservations about it. It's a choppier read, for one thing. Maybe it's the author, maybe it's the culture, maybe it's the (different) translator, but I found the prose somewhat harder to swallow in The Dark Forest. There are more large chunks of exposition, more dialogue that sound like monologue, more plot threads that go nowhere, and more jarring shifts of time and content. I also have to say that Cixin Liu has some extremely odd notions about human motivation.
Part of the problem is structural. The Dark Forest has some of the the same problems that Neal Stephenson's Seveneves has: an elongated and somewhat disjointed timeframe, a lot of technical detail, and a looming disaster that nonetheless isn't an immediate plot driver. There's also, in both cases, a lack of focus on a central character. Indeed, in The Dark Forest, I think Liu chose the wrong character as his protagonist.
The end of the book, however, is good enough to tilt me into thumbs-up territory. The central problem is addressed in a way that's both intellectually and emotionally engaging. It's clever, it's perfectly well foreshadowed, and it's even fairly (not perfectly) original. I have a nagging feeling that it could have been done earlier in the internal timeline, but I could argue myself out of that.
As to whether you should read it ... it depends. If you couldn't get into or didn't like The Three-Body Problem, don't bother. If you liked it but don't feel the burning desire to find out more--a pardonable reaction; the first book stands alone quite well--then maybe The Dark Forest isn't for you. On the other hand, I suspect a lot of readers will be more engaged in the large-scale saga of The Three-Body Problem than in the characters and situations. If that's your reaction, you're going to want to find out how it ends.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Book Review: Death Ex Machina
Death Ex Machina (An Athenian Mystery)
Gary Corby
Mystery
Murder mystery set in Periclean Athens. This wasn't published as a young-adult novel, but--aside from a small amount of "adult content"--that's about its level. It's competently written, it has a moderate level of period detail, it doesn't go overboard in trying to convey the real alien-ness of ancient society, and the characterization is simple (one character, one adjective).
As a mystery, it's ordinary. If you don't spot the villain and the motive about fifty pages ahead of time, you're not paying attention.
Gary Corby
Mystery
Murder mystery set in Periclean Athens. This wasn't published as a young-adult novel, but--aside from a small amount of "adult content"--that's about its level. It's competently written, it has a moderate level of period detail, it doesn't go overboard in trying to convey the real alien-ness of ancient society, and the characterization is simple (one character, one adjective).
As a mystery, it's ordinary. If you don't spot the villain and the motive about fifty pages ahead of time, you're not paying attention.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Book Review: Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow
Biography
Alexander Hamilton is on the U.S. $10 bill. I'd be willing to wager a good many of those bills that most Americans have no idea why. He wasn't president. He wasn't Benjamin Franklin. He doesn't even have a big old memorial. What makes this guy important?
Ron Chernow's book will tell you that, for starters, if he hadn't done a brilliant job as the nation's first Treasury secretary, there wouldn't be a U.S. $10 bill. There might not be a United States. Alexander Hamilton is big, it's exhaustive, it's very well-written, it's often insightful--and it makes an well-argued case for Hamilton's genius and his contributions.
If the book has a weakness, it's that--like many other books of its stripe--it gets a little too sympathetic towards its subject. Chernow is not out to do a whitewash job; we get a full view of Hamilton's personal failings and his political missteps; but Chernow invites us to infer that Alexander Hamilton was never wrong on matters of policy.
Perhaps that's inevitable. We do, as has often been pointed out, live in Alexander Hamilton's American rather than Thomas Jefferson's. We're not a loose agglomeration of sturdy, independent yeomen; we're an industrial, mercantile society with a strong central government. Yet I don't think it's wrong to say that we're living with the defects, as well as the virtues, of the Hamiltonian vision. I suspect, for instance, that Jefferson would regard Donald Trump as a perfect exemplar of Homo hamiltonensis: a speculator, a crony capitalist, a would-be autarch, a demagogue, and a moneyed corruptor of public virtue.
That's not a concession that Ron Chernow makes. Jefferson, like the other actors in this book, appears only in so far as he impacted Hamilton; his own views are not brought forward, and reading this book will not give you a sense of their merits (whatever they might be).
Similarly, Hamilton's own views are presented through a slightly rosy lens. His enemies often accused him of being an aristocrat and of favoring a monarchy. Chernow goes to great lengths to counter these charges. And yet ... Hamilton's friend Gouverneur Morris wrote, in his own private diary and in preparation for delivering Hamilton's formal eulogy: "He was on principal opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government." I'm not so sure that we can dismiss this evidence, as Chernow does, by saying that "Morris distorted and exaggerated Hamilton's views no less than his Republican enemies".
On the other hand, Chernow does show just how deep those distortions were, and how baseless. Perhaps his most telling point is that Hamilton's most vicious opponents, the ones who accused him of wanting to establish an American aristocracy, were southern slave-holding landed gentry. How much more aristocratic can you get? It's hard not to agree with Chernow's point that their real objection was that a Hamiltonian aristocracy would be one of earned merit, rather than birth.
I can't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone who isn't at least a bit familiar with revolutionary-era history. It's 722 pages long; it's not suitable as an introduction! However, if you are interested in the subject, Alexander Hamilton is not only a good book, but an important one. Hamilton was as crucial a figure as Washington or Franklin or Jefferson. It's certainly time he got his recognition.
There are so many good histories and biographies of the Founding Fathers that I couldn't possibly list them all. Specifically, however, Chernow's own Washington: A Life, David McCullough's John Adams, and Joseph Ellis's Passionate Sage and American Sphinx shed more light on some of the other dramatis personae.
Ron Chernow
Biography
Alexander Hamilton is on the U.S. $10 bill. I'd be willing to wager a good many of those bills that most Americans have no idea why. He wasn't president. He wasn't Benjamin Franklin. He doesn't even have a big old memorial. What makes this guy important?
Ron Chernow's book will tell you that, for starters, if he hadn't done a brilliant job as the nation's first Treasury secretary, there wouldn't be a U.S. $10 bill. There might not be a United States. Alexander Hamilton is big, it's exhaustive, it's very well-written, it's often insightful--and it makes an well-argued case for Hamilton's genius and his contributions.
If the book has a weakness, it's that--like many other books of its stripe--it gets a little too sympathetic towards its subject. Chernow is not out to do a whitewash job; we get a full view of Hamilton's personal failings and his political missteps; but Chernow invites us to infer that Alexander Hamilton was never wrong on matters of policy.
Perhaps that's inevitable. We do, as has often been pointed out, live in Alexander Hamilton's American rather than Thomas Jefferson's. We're not a loose agglomeration of sturdy, independent yeomen; we're an industrial, mercantile society with a strong central government. Yet I don't think it's wrong to say that we're living with the defects, as well as the virtues, of the Hamiltonian vision. I suspect, for instance, that Jefferson would regard Donald Trump as a perfect exemplar of Homo hamiltonensis: a speculator, a crony capitalist, a would-be autarch, a demagogue, and a moneyed corruptor of public virtue.
That's not a concession that Ron Chernow makes. Jefferson, like the other actors in this book, appears only in so far as he impacted Hamilton; his own views are not brought forward, and reading this book will not give you a sense of their merits (whatever they might be).
Similarly, Hamilton's own views are presented through a slightly rosy lens. His enemies often accused him of being an aristocrat and of favoring a monarchy. Chernow goes to great lengths to counter these charges. And yet ... Hamilton's friend Gouverneur Morris wrote, in his own private diary and in preparation for delivering Hamilton's formal eulogy: "He was on principal opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government." I'm not so sure that we can dismiss this evidence, as Chernow does, by saying that "Morris distorted and exaggerated Hamilton's views no less than his Republican enemies".
On the other hand, Chernow does show just how deep those distortions were, and how baseless. Perhaps his most telling point is that Hamilton's most vicious opponents, the ones who accused him of wanting to establish an American aristocracy, were southern slave-holding landed gentry. How much more aristocratic can you get? It's hard not to agree with Chernow's point that their real objection was that a Hamiltonian aristocracy would be one of earned merit, rather than birth.
I can't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone who isn't at least a bit familiar with revolutionary-era history. It's 722 pages long; it's not suitable as an introduction! However, if you are interested in the subject, Alexander Hamilton is not only a good book, but an important one. Hamilton was as crucial a figure as Washington or Franklin or Jefferson. It's certainly time he got his recognition.
There are so many good histories and biographies of the Founding Fathers that I couldn't possibly list them all. Specifically, however, Chernow's own Washington: A Life, David McCullough's John Adams, and Joseph Ellis's Passionate Sage and American Sphinx shed more light on some of the other dramatis personae.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Book Review: The Great Sea
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
David Abulafia
History
Long long ago, in my college days, I read Fernand Braudel's classic book The Mediterranenan and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. I remember thinking that Braudel suffered from a classic academic (and, arguably, specifically French) disease: the need to reduce everything to The Grand Theory. Down with the tyranny of events! Away with the outmoded historiography of great men! Long live the vast socio-meteorological-economic forces that are the true engines of history!
David Abulafia commits the opposite error. He's full of details, but he has no overarching theory. Worse, he has no real narrative structure. As a result, The Great Sea is full of enormous paragraphs explaining that, for example:
Braudel's work, while fascinating, is too academic for most readers. Simon Winchester's Atlantic does a better job with this sort of narrative, albeit for a different ocean (nor is it his best book).
David Abulafia
History
Long long ago, in my college days, I read Fernand Braudel's classic book The Mediterranenan and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. I remember thinking that Braudel suffered from a classic academic (and, arguably, specifically French) disease: the need to reduce everything to The Grand Theory. Down with the tyranny of events! Away with the outmoded historiography of great men! Long live the vast socio-meteorological-economic forces that are the true engines of history!
David Abulafia commits the opposite error. He's full of details, but he has no overarching theory. Worse, he has no real narrative structure. As a result, The Great Sea is full of enormous paragraphs explaining that, for example:
... Between 1960 and 1973 the number of annual visitors to Majorca rose precipitously from 600,000 to 3,600,000. By the start of the twenty-first century, tourism accounted for 84 per cent of the Majorcan economoy ... Majorca and Spain (excluding the Canaries) accounted for 25 per cent of British foreign holiday-making in 1964, and 36 per cent in1972, while holidays to Italy fell from 16 per cent to 11 per cent ...The effect is to bury the reader under a mountain of data, without providing any actual information. From Abulafia's long chapter on the Middle Ages, for instance, I retained basically two items:
- Everybody traded with everybody.
- Everybody fought with everybody.
Braudel's work, while fascinating, is too academic for most readers. Simon Winchester's Atlantic does a better job with this sort of narrative, albeit for a different ocean (nor is it his best book).
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Book Review: Underlands
Underlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Landscape
Ted Nield
Geology, memoir
I'm a sucker for personal-theme books.
By "personal-theme books", I mean "books that are a combination of memoir, philosophical investigation, and some factual content into a coherent whole, united by some thread." I've read several this year. Done well, these books tie together the small scale and the large, the personal and the abstract, in a way that sheds light on both.
In Underlands, the unifying thread is ... not history, exactly, but a sense of beginnings, of foundations. Nield weaves together his own family history in the south Wales mining areas with the history of those mines and the geology that produced them, throwing in some social history and some archaeology along the way. An old church is built of a particular rock because it's the only suitable building stone in the region; a layer of sediment goes from seabed, to hillside, to quarry, to abandoned; a mining disaster spares a young Ted Nield because his family has moved. Every is is founded on a succession of was.
It's a quirky book. Like most good "personal-theme" books, it's decidedly meditative in tone and digressive in substance. If you're looking for a straightforward fact-learning exercise, this isn't it. It's more of an invitation to ruminate. As a non-professional but habitualruminant ruminator, I like that very much.
For poetical geological writing, you can't not read John McPhee. The book that I kept thinking about while reading Underlands, however, is Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air, which--although less memoir-ish--can be read as an extended riff on the theme of "connectedness".
Ted Nield
Geology, memoir
I'm a sucker for personal-theme books.
By "personal-theme books", I mean "books that are a combination of memoir, philosophical investigation, and some factual content into a coherent whole, united by some thread." I've read several this year. Done well, these books tie together the small scale and the large, the personal and the abstract, in a way that sheds light on both.
In Underlands, the unifying thread is ... not history, exactly, but a sense of beginnings, of foundations. Nield weaves together his own family history in the south Wales mining areas with the history of those mines and the geology that produced them, throwing in some social history and some archaeology along the way. An old church is built of a particular rock because it's the only suitable building stone in the region; a layer of sediment goes from seabed, to hillside, to quarry, to abandoned; a mining disaster spares a young Ted Nield because his family has moved. Every is is founded on a succession of was.
It's a quirky book. Like most good "personal-theme" books, it's decidedly meditative in tone and digressive in substance. If you're looking for a straightforward fact-learning exercise, this isn't it. It's more of an invitation to ruminate. As a non-professional but habitual
For poetical geological writing, you can't not read John McPhee. The book that I kept thinking about while reading Underlands, however, is Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air, which--although less memoir-ish--can be read as an extended riff on the theme of "connectedness".
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Book Review: The Hog's Back Mystery
The Hog's Back Mystery
Freeman Willis Crofts
Mystery
The most marked effect of The Hog's Back Mystery was to make me realize what a good writer Agatha Christie was.
That is not a conventional literary judgment, by the way. Most critics sneer at Christie for "two-dimensional characters", for a "flat" prose style, for lack of psychological depth, for--a cardinal sin, this--being Just Not Literary. A standard comment is that a Christie novel is nothing but a puzzle, a thought exercise perfunctorily wrapped up in a novel-like package.
These critics--and they are many, including the appalling Edmund Wilson--have clearly never read a mystery that really is a pure puzzle. The Hog's Back Mystery is such a one. As a puzzle, it's quite accomplished. As writing, it's ... well, Crofts was trained as an engineer; he seems to have approached the writing as one of those pointless-but-necessary things that clients require to bridge the gaps between the really interesting bits, such as finite-element analysis or object-functional decomposition diagrams or (in this case) elaborate timetables.
The result is, at best, awkward. Christie, for example, knew how to convey a clue so subtly that the reader never notices. Crofts does things like writing an entire scene in descriptive text--except for three lines of stilted dialogue, which needless to say are A Vital Clue. More generally, he uses narration when he should use speech; he uses speech when he should use narration; he's constantly telling us what the characters feel, rather than showing us; the characters themselves are not even two-dimensional; and there's not a trace either of descriptive writing or of humor. The detective, Inspector French, is positively featureless; I couldn't tell you anything about what he looks like, or how he approaches a case, or his personality.
And then there are lines like this:
Agatha Christie gets no critical love because she used her gifts in ways that are conventionally deemed worthless. It doesn't follow from that that she wasn't gifted, or indeed that her choices truly are worthless. (Also, she was perfectly capable of going outside her usual lines. Think of And Then There Were None.) Freeman Willis Crofts was a careful constructionist and not much else. The difference is striking.
Dorothy Sayers's The Five Red Herrings is clearly Croft-esque, but Sayers was a vastly superior writer (and had a vastly superior central character to work with). If you're looking for an unjustly-overlooked master from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, check out the witty and devilishly clever Cyril Hare.
Freeman Willis Crofts
Mystery
The most marked effect of The Hog's Back Mystery was to make me realize what a good writer Agatha Christie was.
That is not a conventional literary judgment, by the way. Most critics sneer at Christie for "two-dimensional characters", for a "flat" prose style, for lack of psychological depth, for--a cardinal sin, this--being Just Not Literary. A standard comment is that a Christie novel is nothing but a puzzle, a thought exercise perfunctorily wrapped up in a novel-like package.
These critics--and they are many, including the appalling Edmund Wilson--have clearly never read a mystery that really is a pure puzzle. The Hog's Back Mystery is such a one. As a puzzle, it's quite accomplished. As writing, it's ... well, Crofts was trained as an engineer; he seems to have approached the writing as one of those pointless-but-necessary things that clients require to bridge the gaps between the really interesting bits, such as finite-element analysis or object-functional decomposition diagrams or (in this case) elaborate timetables.
The result is, at best, awkward. Christie, for example, knew how to convey a clue so subtly that the reader never notices. Crofts does things like writing an entire scene in descriptive text--except for three lines of stilted dialogue, which needless to say are A Vital Clue. More generally, he uses narration when he should use speech; he uses speech when he should use narration; he's constantly telling us what the characters feel, rather than showing us; the characters themselves are not even two-dimensional; and there's not a trace either of descriptive writing or of humor. The detective, Inspector French, is positively featureless; I couldn't tell you anything about what he looks like, or how he approaches a case, or his personality.
And then there are lines like this:
Once again French registered a vow that he would not rest till the devil who was guilty of this ghastly crime had paid for it on the scaffold.Ouch.
Agatha Christie gets no critical love because she used her gifts in ways that are conventionally deemed worthless. It doesn't follow from that that she wasn't gifted, or indeed that her choices truly are worthless. (Also, she was perfectly capable of going outside her usual lines. Think of And Then There Were None.) Freeman Willis Crofts was a careful constructionist and not much else. The difference is striking.
Dorothy Sayers's The Five Red Herrings is clearly Croft-esque, but Sayers was a vastly superior writer (and had a vastly superior central character to work with). If you're looking for an unjustly-overlooked master from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, check out the witty and devilishly clever Cyril Hare.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Don't Boldly Go There
On an airplane last night, I saw that the in-flight video system was offering up (among others) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It had been many years since I'd last seen the film. So I decided to give it a rewatch.
This was a mistake.
(A full confession is perhaps in order here. I have never been among those who thought that The Wrath of Khan was a top-notch film. In fact, it's not even my favorite Star Trek movie. Still, I was predisposed to, at least, find it a diverting way to spend two hours hurtling across the North Atlantic.)
Put plainly, in a lot of ways, The Wrath of Khan just isn't all that good. It has good bits, but as a whole suffers from a multi-level Idiot Plot. I'm not talking about trivial inconsistencies--seriously, who cares? No, I'm talking major "Chuuuuuwhah?" moments here: places where the movie doesn't make sense even by its own internal premises. For example:
This was a mistake.
(A full confession is perhaps in order here. I have never been among those who thought that The Wrath of Khan was a top-notch film. In fact, it's not even my favorite Star Trek movie. Still, I was predisposed to, at least, find it a diverting way to spend two hours hurtling across the North Atlantic.)
Put plainly, in a lot of ways, The Wrath of Khan just isn't all that good. It has good bits, but as a whole suffers from a multi-level Idiot Plot. I'm not talking about trivial inconsistencies--seriously, who cares? No, I'm talking major "Chuuuuuwhah?" moments here: places where the movie doesn't make sense even by its own internal premises. For example:
- Starfleet sends out one of its front-line, newly-upgraded vessels on a training cruise, with a crew consisting of almost 100% cadets. Let me know the next time the U.S. Navy sends out an aircraft carrier crewed exclusively by Annapolis plebes.
- The cruise is apparently supposed to take place at sub-light speeds, within Earth's solar system. Nonetheless, they are the only vessel in the area when they get a distress call from space station Regula I. Apparently this station, for security and safety reasons, is located in a remote and little-traveled sector very near Earth.
- The distress call is clearly being jammed, and it's obvious from the content that something funny is going on, and the hijacked U.S.S. Reliant goes out of its way to approach Our Heroes in an unnecessarily suspicious fashion. Nobody notices.
- Apparently the Federation relies on clay tablets for record-keeping. Hence, they can enter a solar system without registering that one of its planets has exploded, much less remembering that, oh yeah, this was that place where we dumped that ship-load of highly dangerous genetically-enhanced super-criminals a few years ago. (Also, apparently, they can't count; they land on the fifth planet from the sun, under the impression that it's the exploded sixth planet. It's a wonder they can even find it.)
- When you have beamed down to a planet, and you realize that you need to escape immediately, do not run outside to investigate the weather. Use the magic words "Two to beam up immediately." Remember that teleportation system that got you here? It works both ways!
- Oh, noes! The Plot Device is going to blow up, and we're all doomed! Kirk: "We'll beam aboard and stop it." David Marcus: "You can't." (Well, wonder boy, why not? Apparently just ... because.) Missing next line of dialog: "OK, then, let's just photon-torpedo it into its constituent atoms, then phaser the remains."
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