Mission of Gravity

I rarely delve into older science fiction, and I'm often rather unimpressed when I do - while there are often some interesting ideas in there, the characters and plots tend towards the flakey and unbelievable (well, more so than modern scifi). Mission of Gravity, written by Hal Clements in 1954, was a refreshing change. It deals with some interesting ideas (mostly, aliens that are basically intelligent centipedes, and a planet with huge gravity that is rotating very quickly which has lots of interesting physical effects), but the characters are also quite reasonable and not ridiculous. The plot wanders a bit (it was written to be serialised in magazines, so it's rather episodic), but retains a vague overall arc and comes together surprisingly well at the end. Overall, it was quite an enjoyable read, even though parts of it read a bit like a high school science lesson.

Rapture of the Nerds

I'm starting to get the feeling the Singularity subgenre only really has one good book in it. It's an amazing and powerful idea, but most of the novels based around the idea simply don't do it justice. That's partly because the actual implementation of the singularity would be incomprehensible for us mere humans, but I don't know whether than is really a good enough explanation for the silliness that these books tend towards.

Stross & Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds has a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but in lots of ways those are rehashed from previous books in the genre. The characters are the usual wild and wacky types you get in a singularity novel, battering up against forces for more powerful than themselves and fighting to retain their humanity in the face of an overwhelmingly digital world. But the plot of the novel tended towards the deus ex machina and the Chosen One trope, so it was quite unsatisfying and occasionally annoying.

The Difference Engine

I wasn't as impressed as I had expected to be by the Difference Engine - it's certainly an interesting idea, and full of clever ideas; and it's pretty much the origin of the whole Steampunk movement. But as a story it was a meandering collage of happenings across a collection of not-very-engaging characters.

It's an alternative history in which Charles Babbage successfully built his Difference Engine and went on to build an Analytical Engine, creating a world in which steam powered computers were functional and becoming widely used. Many other fancies of the steam age also came to pass - fast steam cars and the like. Britain's hereditary nobility were then overthrown by Babbage and Lord Byron, who instituted a new regime in which the Radical Lords ran the country. It's a very interesting alternative world, and it's no wonder that the Steampunk genre has so adherents.

As a novel, though, it left a lot to be desired, and the central conceit (only revealed right at the end) is vague and confusing, and leaves the reader wonder what the hell it was all really about.

Dangerous Women

This was a fun read - an anthology of fiction, mostly Fantasy, but some crime and historical fiction, all related to the topic of Dangerous Women. Some of it was fantastic, some terrible (note to self: never read any of the Dresden Files novels). Some stories were entirely populated by ass-kicking women; some were men dealing with the consequences of women being dangerous. Wikipedia has a good list of the stories contained.

I bought it mainly for George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire short story, "The Princess and the Queen, or, the Blacks and the Greens" - about the Dance of the Dragons, a civil war fought in Westeros 200 years before A Game of Thrones. It was good, if a bit dry and history-textbookish. But many of the other stories are fantastic, and well worth the read.

Being Alive

Tim Ingold's Being Alive was a thought-provoking yet frustrating read. Ingold is an anthropologist, and the book is an attack on the way anthropologists approach their subject, and in a larger sense, on how westerners think, and interact with the world. It's extremely low-level, challenging the reader on how they think about objects and motion and walking. Most of a chapter is spent discussing the action of sawing a piece of wood, and what that means.

Fundamentally, he argues that we think about the world around us as being comprised of objects. We mentally model the world as being a collection of "things" that have "properties", and have relationships. It's a world that can be represented as a set of connected points. He then argues in many ways and from many points of view, that we should be thinking of ourselves as lines (or bundles of lines) rather than as points, and that the lines interact with each other in many ways. He refers to a number of cultures that think about the world like this, and explains how our western way of thinking about the world blinds us to a real understanding of how these cultures work. Animism, the beliefs of many hunter-gatherer societies around the world, is in this picture not a world view where everything is imbued with a spirit, but is rather a world view where animals, people, rocks, and everything in the world are parts of stories, and there is no rigid separation between "living things" and "non-living things". That distinction isn't needed because they don't see the world as being comprised of objects, and so they don't need to imbue certain objects with the property of "living" in order to explain their ability to act in the world.

I don't think I've read anything that is quite such a fundamental attack on the way the western world  thinks, and it left me intellectually reeling in a number of places. I hadn't even considered the possibility of not thinking of the world in this way.

On the other hand, there is a lot about the book that frustrated me. There were an awful lot of straw men used to support his arguments - stating that people generally think of things in a certain way, which was clearly (to me) a blatant simplification of how actual people think. Plenty of unsupported arguments. And the most fundamental problem was that he never really explained what his alternative world-view was. He explained some of the properties of this world view, but never what the "lines" really actually represented - what they meant. So while I often agreed with his position that there are other ways of thinking about the world, I couldn't bring myself to embrace his position, because it wasn't ever stated. And lastly, as a mathematician by training, I found his statements about things "not being points, but rather, being lines" seemed rather trivial - there are plenty of things that can be represented as lines or points depending on how you want to view them - it's a simple transformation, not a fundamentally different thing.

I think Being Alive will give different things to different people. I can understand how it would appeal to humanities folks much more than it did to me. In many ways, the most important thing it contains is the questions it asks - many of which I've never heard asked before - rather than the answers it attempts to give.

Tarnsman of Gor

I've wanted to read a Gor book for ages, based on their weird reputation and the fact we had a bunch of them in the Sutekh library way back when. It's famed for it's misogyny, taking the usual Fantasy/Sci-fi gender roles to extremes. Tarnsman of Gor is the first in the series, so it seemed like a good place to start.

At first glance, it's actually very John Carter of Mars-esque - young academic Tarl Cabot is mysteriously transported to another world. It's like our world in some ways, but it's trapped in some equivalent of out ancient world - battles are fought with swords, spears, and archers. But it's also different in various fantastical ways - the world is rules by mysterious priest-kings; warriors fly about on giant pterodactyl-ey creatures called Tarns (hence the title of the book, Tarnsman of Gor), there are giant talking spiders in the forests, etc. It's not too bad (or at least, not much worse than other similar portal-into-a-world-with-a-bunch-of-random-sci-fi-and-fantasy-devices-thrown-in novels). The misogyny and extreme gender roles are relatively mild in this one - dodgy in a few places, such as the submissive slave girl business, and the long-winded justification the author felt Tarl Cabot needed to go through in order to hug his father and be happy about seeing him); but not as ridiculously horrifying as the later novels in the series get (it's now up to 30 novels).

I'd recommend this only if you're super-keen on both Conan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and have run out of anything like that to read.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a dark and sombre look at drug culture in the near future (at least, the near future of the near past). It's unlike most of Dick's other stories (at least those I've read) in that it really is a study of character under pressure, rather than a series of shotgun blasts of ideas. It's a eulogy to friends the author lost to drugs in the sixties - not praising, not condemning, but looking sadly at the effects of drugs on the psyche.

The protagonist, Bob Arctor, is an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the drugs scene. To fully immerse himself, he has become addicted to Substance D, a powerful drug, and the drug starts to take its toll on him as the story progresses. We witness this from his perspective, which is often abrupt and difficult to follow, particularly so once his perspective becomes more and more warped by the drugs. It's very well done, and well worth a read.