2312

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 is a solar-system wide political drama set (unsurprisingly) in the year 2312, after humankind has colonised most of the inner solar system, with a terraformed Mars and Venus and Titan in various phases of being terraformed. The protagonist is over 100 years old, somewhere in between female and male, and is from Mercury, and over the course of the story she comes to realize who she is and what she wants and deals with her inner demons while being a key player in effecting huge political changes to the solar system's political order. If you've read any of Robinson's other work, you'd agree that's a pretty normal kind of plot line. It feels like it is a sequel to the Mars trilogy, but that's not made explicit and apparently Robinson says that they are different timelines. But there's nothing in the book that makes that explicit, so you can quite happily read it as a continuation of Mars, set 120 years after the end of that trilogy.

For a novel that contains so many committee meetings, 2312 is a very rewarding book. It reflects on a lot of the issues facing us today (on Earth, the sea levels did end up rising 9 metres, there were mass extinctions, and the planet is still beset by chaos and occasional fighting), and possible solutions to those problems. It's well worth a read just for the bird's eye view of today's problems, but some of the potential solutions, and a sense of a potential future for humanity throughout the Solar system is fascinating. And it's written from a much personal viewpoint than the Mars trilogy, so it's a much more readable and relatable book than the Mars books were.

The Martian

I was considering seeing the movie, so thought it made sense to read the book. It was recommended to me several months back as well by Anna, who thought it would be right up my alley. She was right.

Andy Weir's The Martian isn't like any novel I've read before. It is written as the journal of Mark Watney, and astronaut stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew evacuate in a storm. And it really reads like the journal of an engineer stuck on Mars. It's long on detail on the endless number of things that Watney has to fix, and the specific technical problems that he is solving. It contains a great amount of complaining about boredom and the limited amount of entertainment available. And it doesn't delve deep into the emotional troubles of a man stranded alone on another planet for years. I work in software engineering, and it feels exactly like what myself or a colleague might write in this situation.

And for a novel which is almost entirely about technical troubleshooting, it's really edge-of-your-seat suspense. Whenever things start to stabilize and things seem safe, something catastrophic inevitably happens. I spent an entire miserable sickly day reading this, and managed to finish it within two days, which is something I rarely do.

Well worth a read if you've ever done any technical troubleshooting, or if you want to get a sense of what it's like to do so.

Lock In

I'm not normally a fan of cop stories, but John Scalzi can make any genre into an entertaining read. Lock In is set in the near future after a virus has rendered left numbers of people locked in - conscious, but unable to move in any way. Society's response was to develop brain scanning technology, and let the locked in people live in virtual worlds or control androids. 20 or so years later, locked-in Chris Shane is a detective trying to solve a weird murder that has big implications for people like himself.

It's a good mystery, and an entertainingly nefarious plot is uncovered through the course of the novel. Well worth a read, like the bulk of Scalzi's oeuvre.

Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses

I tend to avoid reading much about British history - firstly because it's a very small part of the world that only really became relevant in the last few hundred years, and secondly because there are plenty of people out there who already know it. The world doesn't need yet another person who can name all the Plantagenets but has no idea who the Sassanids were. But "The Wars of the Roses" is a very cool name for a series of civil wars, so I thought I'd give it a go (there was a bit of influence from a well-known Wars of the Roses fanfic that I've enjoyed reading).

It's hard to make history really interesting, but Alison Weir's Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses makes a good effort. It's well researched and notes the primary sources frequently without being overly footnotish. She makes good attempts to get inside the heads of the main protagonists - you end up with a good sense of who Margaret of Anjou, and Warwick were, not just what they did. Edward IV and Henry VI are less well-rounded, but Kings tend to be that way. The book starts out rather dry but picks up steam as it gets going - the first half took ages to read, but the second half I got through quite quickly.

But the actual wars themselves were rather pointless and depressing. There's no sense of a great historical change happening here. It's just cousins thumping each other with armies and playing Musical Thrones. Henry VI was a bit of a gumby and probably should have abdicated much earlier in favour of someone competent. Edward was a bit of a tool, bit at least he was competent. Warwick and Margaret might've made good rulers, but Warwick wasn't in line for the throne and so had to scheme and plot and switch sides all the time, and Margaret was a woman, and so had to rely on her gumby of a husband for legitimacy. And then at the end, the whole thing was rendered completely pointless by Richard (he of the Princes in the Tower) who ruined everything.

Hav

Hav, a compilation of Jan Morris' books Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons, is a strange beast. It reads like a travel memoir, but tell the tale of the author's visit to Hav, a fictional city-state adjoining Turkey. It's quite elegantly done: Jan Morris weaves her city into the history of the Mediterranean world, and into the lives of a variety of real-world historical figures who visited at one point or another. I'm not generally a fan of travel literature, so it was tough going at first, but the book gradually drew me in. I've said of various fantasy and sci-fi authors that they would have been better not attempting to tell a story, but just doing their worldbuilding - there are quite a few authors who create a fascinating world but make boring things happen in them. Jan Morris has done almost exactly that, creating a small geographical and historical fiction without burdening it with a plot or detailed characters. Not the most amazing thing I've read, but certainly a novel approach and an interesting read.

Revelation Space

Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds, takes a while to warm up. It gently introduces a collection of largely unlikeable characters, but then unfolds an intricate plot with some very impressive worldbuilding. It does suffer a bit from empty-world syndrome - there isn't a clear sense that there is much out there in the universe beyond the few places the protagonists have visited. But the universe it builds, and the depth of history it presents, is very well done, and worth further exploration. I'll definitely give Chasm City, the sequel to Revelation Space, a read.

The Honey Month

This was another from the collection of weird fiction I bought last year. Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month is an odd, sometimes magical little book. It's written as a series of poems and short prose pieces each inspired by a different honey. Each day for a month, the author tastes a honey and briefly describes it, then launches into a vignette of love and longing and hurt. Some of them did nothing for me, but quite a few were beautiful and haunting.

In the Shadow of the Sword

I do love a good history book, and Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword is brilliant. It was recommended by Robin Pierson on his History of Byzantium podcast (I've been reading and listening to a lot about Late Antiquity lately), and is a fantastic look at the birth of Islam. I've read a bit about the traditional view of Islam - as emerging essentially fully formed from a town in Arabia, and exploding onto the world stage due to its own internal force, and the latent power of the Arab people; but this is a very different story of the Arabs and their rise to dominance. They had been largely unharmed by the Black Death (which had repeatedly decimated all the surrounding civilizations), and stepped into the power vacuum created by the mutual destruction of the two great superpowers of the age, Persian and the Byzantine Empire, and then harnessed the infrastructure of those empires to set up their own new superpower, the Caliphate. As they did this, their new religion developed. Archaeological evidence contradicts the traditional view of how Islam developed, showing that early Arab rulers mixed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim symbolism, and what are now considered standard, fixed parts of the religion were in flux for at least the first century, being shaped by an ongoing theological struggle between theologists and the Caliphs.

Holland does a great story of explaining this historical account that has been developed by modern historians in recent years, and in the end it's a much more satisfying account of the emergence of the rich and unique Islamic culture from the melting pot of cultures in the Middle East of late antiquity.

Interface Design for Learning

This is an excellent introduction to a rather obscure topic - designing interfaces to applications that support learning. There's a lot of detail and a lot of examples of best practice. The target audience is both technical people like myself, and more designey folks. It attempts (and I think succeeds) to bridge the gap between interface design and UX, and educational theory, in order to help people develop software and websites that engage students and help them actually learn. I only finished reading it a week ago, and already it's enabled me to give a very knowledgeable take on gamification in a conversation. If you're even remotely working in this field, this is a worthwhile read.

Disclaimer: Dorian Peters is a colleague of mine. She is brilliant, nevertheless.

World of Ice and Fire

The World of Ice and Fire is a companion to the Song of Ice and Fire series that began with A Game of Thrones. It's pure nerd-candy - a history of the world created for that series. It's written as though compiled by one of the maesters of Oldtown, so the reader is presented with the world from a Westerosi viewpoint and the biases that entails. It's very enjoyable, if you're a serious fan of the series - it details the history of each of the kingdoms that comprise the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, as well as the Free Cities and other areas of Essos. There is a lot of detail in here not covered in the main series, and a few details that would reveal secrets in the main plot are coyly sidestepped (including one "we won't go into details here, because everyone knows this"). The illustrations are nicely done, and it adds a lot of depth to what is already a fantastically detailed world.