Book Review: Old Venus

Old Venus
George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois (editors)
Science fiction, anthology

The idea is a lot of fun: collect stories set on Venus the way it should have been--the lush jungle planet, steaming in the rain and teeming with life, of Golden Age science fiction.

The stories, regrettably, are not a lot of fun. In fact, the stories mostly range from mediocre on downward--boring, poorly structured, and unimaginative. There are only three that I'd recommend:

• "Frogheads", by Allen Steele, is competent.
• "Greaves and the Evening Star", by Matt Hughes, is a flat-out P. G. Wodehouse parody--a gimmick, but largely successful as such.
• "Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan", by Ian McDonald, is quite enjoyable to read. I found the ending a bit predictable, though.

To the other authors: You might want to consider the quaint tradition whereby your protagonist has some, you know, role to play. As in does something, or makes a decision, or has any function other than to wander around being a viewpoint. Also, there's this thing called a "climax" or "resolution" that you should maybe look into.

Book Review: The Glorious Deception

The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer"
Jim Steinmeyer
Biography

William Robinson was a popular music-hall performer. He did stage magic under the persona of Chung Ling Soo. He died, on stage, when one of his illusions went tragically wrong.

That's The Glorious Deception. There's really nothing more to say. If that sounds like something you'd like to read more about, you'll enjoy reading this book. If it doesn't, you'll probably find it slow and somewhat repetitive. There are a lot of descriptions of magic tricks, and a lot of fairly quotidian biography. I mildly enjoyed it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it far and wide. 

Book Review: The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park
Sinclair McKay
History, biography

Want to know how they broke Nazi codes at Bletchley Park? There are a number of good books on the subject. Want to know what it was like to live and work there? That's harder. With the exception of Andrew Hodges's excellent Alan Turing: The Enigma (the exceedingly approximate source for The Imitation Game), biographies and social histories of Bletchley seem surprisingly sparse.

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers is a nice attempt to rectify the disparity. It's not super-deep, but it's a good overview and a quick read. It might not appeal to readers with no interest in the subject, but for the rest of us it's a lively portrait of a very particular place and time. It would be great preparation for a visit to Bletchley--an activity which I can't recommend highly enough. (We have some tips if you're interested.)

Book Review: Waterloo

Waterloo: Wellington, Napoleon, and the Battle That Saved Europe
Gordon Corrigan
History

After the first couple of chapters, I had very high hopes for Waterloo--entertainingly written, with some witty asides, and providing a clear and thorough context for the battle.

The rest of the book isn't bad, but it doesn't live up to the initial promise. Corrigan spends a lot of pages detailing the armies, the equipment, their organizations, the order of battle, capsule biographies of the major commanders, etc. He spends some more on talking about things like the importance of staff work and logistics. 

Actually, I rather liked most of this, because it adds background, nuance, and depth that would be missing from a simple blow-by-blow account. However, it limits the scope a good deal. Then, too, Corrigan overplays his hand somewhat. The witty asides pile up until they stop being funny and start being tiresome. The quibbles about this or that cherished historical myth similarly multiply, which is of no use to a reader who doesn't start out with any knowledge of the myth in question. On the other hand, he does very little to convey the human dimension of the battle.

So in the end, the book is a special-interest rather than a general-interest one. Waterloo is good for military history buffs, war-gamers, and students of the Napoleonic period in general. Other readers can give it a miss.

Book Review: Why Does the World Exist?

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story
Jim Holt
Philosophy, physics

First, a confession: I think of the titular question as a meaningless noise. It's like asking "Why are there round things?" or "Why is there no positive integer less than one?"

Or perhaps a better analogy would be "What's north of the North Pole?" If you answered "nothing," isn't that a different kind of nothing than the nothing of "There's nothing in my pocket"? The phrase "north of the North Pole" is nugatory; it's not even wrong.

The reason that's a good analogy is that that's how cosmologists think of time and space. There's no "before the Big Bang" for the same reason that there's no "north of the North Pole": the Big Bang is where time began to exist.

Put another way, why should we assume that there's any way for the universe to not exist? There's no a priori reason, and precious little empirical support, for any such idea. Even the language is murky. I can say, with a fair degree of confidence, that there does not exist a perfect three-foot cube of solid gold with the complete works of Shakespeare translated into Sanskrit inscribed on it. That means that, as it happens, there's no such thing in the world. What would nonexistence not exist in? And, speaking of nothingness, what would it mean to say that something whose fundamental, definitional property is the property of not existing "could be the case"?

Oh, the book? I liked it very much. It's a series of clearly-written, intelligent-but-not-stuffy interviews with people on every imaginable side of the question--from those who take my point of view to religious thinkers to philosophers to the novelist John Updike--interspersed with the author's own musings. It is, in other words, a book of thought problems. As a kid I loved books full of logic puzzles; I think this is the adult equivalent.

Book Review: Rust

Rust: The Longest War

Jonathan Waldman

Engineering

I write software for a living. But my major headache isn't writing it; it's maintaining it. Software, like any other engineered object, is subject to corrosion.

No, it doesn't literally corrode. It just behaves as though it does. Take a working piece of code. Leave it for six months. Try to run it. You'll almost inevitably find that something has changed. A file isn't where it used to be, or its format has changed, or the database is different, or something that I'm depending on doesn't work the same way, or a calculation has changed, or some assumption is invalid, or ... the list is endless.

The process is sometimes called "bit rot".

So I really liked Rust. Entropy is an absolutely inescapable portion of any engineer's life. It's manifestly stupid not to plan for it--and yet many engineers (or organizations) don't. Rust explains, in gory detail, why they're wrong. Plus I'm a sucker for any kind of book that takes some overlooked aspect of our world and delves into it.

I have a couple of quibbles. The chapters are individual essays--stories of people who are involved with corrosion in some way, including a pipeline engineer and an artist. They don't really link up into an overarching story. I wouldn't have minded more chemistry and physics, either.

Quibbles aside, though, this is a fine read. A couple of other books of the same sort spring to mind:

• Does the subject of the now-ubiquitous shipping container sound boring to you? Then you haven't thought enough about it; read The Box, by Marc Levinson.
• Similarly, does a book about human waste sound like something to make smirking jokes about? After you read The Big Necessity, by Rose George, it won't seem very funny.

Book Review/Essay: Valediction and the Spenser Canon

WARNING: Contains some modest spoilers. Also, this is more essay and less review than is customary in this space.

Valediction
Robert B. Parker
Mystery

I started thinking about Robert B. Parker after a close friend of mine reread The Godwulf Manuscript. 

Parker wrote no less than forty novels featuring his iconic private eye, Spenser. The first eleven, written between 1973 and 1984, are all at least good; the best among them--I'd pick Promised Land, Looking for Rachel Wallace, and Early Autumn--are among the best novels of any sort I've ever read. They're morally complex; they're ambitious; they have both lovely descriptive writing and super-taut dialogue. Valediction is the last of these "classic Spenser" novels. 

The rest range from OK to lousy.

We're not talking gradual decline here. It's a sharp, clean break, and the breaking point is the twelfth novel, A Catskill Eagle. Put plainly, it's awful. Parker's marriage broke down about this point, and A Catskill Eagle is a revenge-therapy wet dream. Spenser's long-time girlfriend Susan Silverman leaves him; her new lover turns out to be not a mere bad guy, but a megalomaniac militarist would-be dictator. So Spenser gets to kill him and kill off most of the private army he's building in the wild, remote, unexplored hills of Connecticut (whose nickname is not "The wild, remote, unexplored hills state"), and Susan comes back, and admits that he was right and she was wrong and she made a terrible mistake and never again and ... just take my word for it, it's embarrassingly bad.

From that point onward, Parker stopped taking risks with his novels. Increasingly, they read like drafts or outlines of books, not finished books.

One way to see this is simply by comparing the language. Here's the opening of The Widening Gyre (1983):

I was nursing a bottle of Murphy's Irish Whiskey, drinking it from the neck of the bottle sparingly, and looking down from the window of my office at Berkeley Street where it crosses Boylston.

It was dark and there wasn't much traffic down there. Across the street there were people working late in the ad agency, but the office where the brunette art director worked was dark. The silence in my office was linear and dwindling, like an art-perspective exercise. The building was pretty much empty for the night and the occasional faraway drone and jolt of the elevator only added energy to the silence. 

By contrast, Now and Then (2007) opens with a seven-page chapter which is almost 100% dialogue. No mood, no scene-setting. It's pretty good dialogue, but the older books had dialogue that was just as good, plus they had the other stuff.

That's symptomatic of the changes in the novels. Chapters get shorter. Descriptions disappear. Everything except dialogue and action is pared away. 

And, in this paring away, Parker loses the things that make his early novels so brilliant. It's not just language. He loses the depth, the complexity, and the humanity that the language was there to support.

Classic Spenser has two interlinked stories. The "outer" story is the crime/mystery plot. The "inner" story is something that affects Spenser himself, personally. 

• In Mortal Stakes, Spenser investigates a real-estate developer's missing wife, but ends up having to confront questions of his own relationship with Susan, and the larger question of what marriage and commitment really entail.
• In Looking for Rachel Wallace Spenser is hired as a bodyguard for a prominent lesbian author, and fails--and so he has to think about what it means to be masculine, and what it means to be a good man.
• In Early Autumn, Spenser ends up informally adopting the neglected son of squabbling, divorced parents--not because he wants to, but because all the alternatives are worse--and has to figure out what that means for himself, for the boy, and for Susan.

After A Catskill Eagle, the "inner" story vanishes. Spenser is generally secure, to the point where he starts getting smug. When he and Susan come into conflict, he is always right, and she is always wrong, and she always ends up admitting it. (This happens all the time in real-world relationships, I'm sure.) The early Spenser uses violence sparingly, and there are always consequences; in Mortal Stakes, for instance, he spends a good three pages in the final chapter trying to work out his own conflicted feelings after shooting two thugs. The later books almost always end in a gunfight, which Spenser treats as routine. Even Spenser's relationships with the secondary characters--Hawk, Lieutenant Quirk, and others--become sketchy: the early books have tension and conflict there, where the later books have everyone acting like members of the same Secret Boys' Club.

Well, so be it. I've never written anything as good as the first eleven Spenser books, and I'm in no position to criticize a working author for writing books that will sell, and in any case I think any author has a right to be judged on his best work instead of his worst. I think of the later volumes as the story of a deutero-Spenser, another character who has somehow taken up the identity of the originals. Some of them are tolerable enough for me to have reread. But the original Spenser is incomparable.

As for Valediction itself, it's not the best of the classics, but it's good. It has the inner story (Susan takes a job in San Francisco) interlinked with the outer one (a possessive client hires Spenser to find his girlfriend). It's got a very good, very tight character portrait of a man trying to function when he feels like he's got no reason to function. It's got a good take on love and romance. 

And it's got an arresting last sentence, which to my mind is indeed a valediction of sorts: the last sentence of the original Spenser:

And the two of us sat alone and far, and laughed carefully together at the verge of different oceans.