Reviews and Comments

A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.

It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.

It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Not so much a thematic collection as the three stories that have both entered into the public domain and already been transcribed at Project Gutenberg. Plot and characterization are just enough to explore, or at least express, the concept.

War No. 81-Q: Short, bird's eye view of a "war" fought entirely using remote controlled drones...on a designated battlefield with a time limit, like a tournament, with spectators. So you want to settle your international disputes with violence. Why harm actual people?

Scanners Live In Vain: Very much worth reading. The main character is a "scanner," a man who has had all his senses and emotional centers surgically cut off so that he can endure the "pain of space," a neurological effect that prevents normal people from traveling across deep space except in suspended animation. Between missions, they can use a wire to literally reconnect to their humanity for short periods of time. He's called up for an emergency meeting while "cranched," a meeting that calls the scanners' whole purpose into question. And he's the only one there who's in a state to understand how disastrously people would react to the course of action they choose.

The Game of Rat and Dragon: Not as serious a story as "Scanners..." but fun and still thought-provoking. There's something malevolent out in interstellar space preying on our starships. Something disrupted by bright flashes of light, but only detectable by telepaths -- and it's faster than human reflexes. Fortunately, not all telepaths are human. It starts off being very coy about the "Partners," but manages to avoid "tomato surprise" territory by making the big reveal in the middle of the story, at the point where exposition gives way to plot.

Cross-posted from my website.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.

It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

(Slightly condensed from my website.)

Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader's interest.

Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone wants to believe. There are plenty of established tropes in science-fiction and among serious space enthusiasts, but a lot of them have major gaps in them when you start pressing for details. What happens to a fetus in microgravity? Can you scrape together enough soil nutrients to supply agriculture for a whole Mars city, or do you need to constantly import fertilizer from Earth? How do you make sure you have enough medical supplies on-hand?

The authors wanted to write about what we know about space settlement. But it turns out it's a really good primer for what we don't know and need to research before we can get serious.

It's also an interesting companion to Under Alien Skies, which takes the approach of "assuming we're able to work out the details, this is what it would be like there." And, well, we have a lot more details to work out.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

This collection of three early novels in Le Guin's Hainish series initially looks haphazard, as if they were only collected because of writing order and not being as well-known as her later works.

• Rocannon's World is a serviceable fantasy quest wrapped in sci-fi trappings.
• Planet of Exile is a tighter story of isolation and people forced together by an invasion.
• City of Illusions involves a stranger seeking his identity in a post-apocalyptic Earth controlled by unseen alien masters.

But common threads tie them together. Not just her frequent themes like culture clashes, critiquing colonization, challenging racial stereotypes (both in-world and real), and just getting people to communicate. The second and third novels form a thematic duology:

• A single city of Earth colonists struggles to survive and adapt to a primitive world.
• A single city of alien colonists controls a primitive Earth they've adapted to their own desires.

And you can watch her craft growing stronger over the course of the three novels.

I wouldn't recommend someone start reading Le Guin here, but I would recommend it to someone who's familiar with her work.

A fun, fast read, parodying the James Bond Villain archetype. The main character is dropped into the deep end of supervillain society, complete with double-crosses, triple-crosses, assassination attempts, blackmail, framing...and of course the secret volcanic lair, superlasers, talking dolphins (who are really unpleasant and cranky) and a management layer of typing cats (who are much less so, depending on how well you feed and pet them).

Everyone knows he's way out of his depth and wants to take advantage of him. But he knows it too -- and between a background in business journalism and a willingness to listen to people with expertise (always considering that they have an agenda that might not be his own), he's able to manage better than anyone expects.

Of course, the skills that get you to the top of the backstabbing, chaotic world of villainy...aren't necessarily the best for financial stability. Or stability of any kind.

Cross-posted at my website.

A fun collection of short cartoons about nature (not just birds!) collected from the cartoonist's website, Bird and Moon. Most of them are funny, riffing on oddities of various animals and plants, or on misconceptions people often have, but there are a few serious ones in there about climate change. Some of the longer ones are easier to read online because they've been shrunk down to fit on the small page size.

Some of my favorites from this collection include: - Red-Tail Blues - I've seen crows trying to hassle a less-than-impressed hawk on several occasions! - Attenborough - Ironically, I read this one in David Attenborough's voice. - When I Grow Up - It's good to have goals. - Versus - Monarch vs Milkweed! - Northern Pygmy Owl

Cross-posted from my website.

Thanks to @sohkamyung for inadvertently letting me know about the collection by reviewing it a few weeks ago!

With an immortal carnivorous sourdough starter named Bob (who may or may not count as a familiar).

In case that's not enough to convince you:

Teenage assistant baker Mona's only magic talent is with bread. She can make it staler or fresher, keep it from burning, make gingerbread men dance, and occasionally something more dramatic like Bob. (Bob was an accident, but he's quite handy around the bakery.) She wasn't prepared to be suspect number one in a rash of wizard murders, live on the run, or to protect the city from a threat as its only remaining mage.

Fun characters, fun concepts, and a quest that runs through the city's worst slums to the palace. Mona has to navigate both from her comfortable shopkeeper's life, learning what happens when the system she relied on to protect her is turned against her. And how the system can be manipulated against itself. She makes mistakes in the process -- sometimes annoying mistakes, but the kind that makes sense for a teenager to make.

Also: Lots of creative uses of very specific magic abilities. One mage can only work with water...but they can use it to make two surfaces vibrate in sync to transmit sound. Another can only work with air...but is able to use smell and gases to strong effect. Another can only reanimate dead horses.

My 12-year-old son loved it, so of course I had to read it too. Definitely recommended!

Cross-posted from my website.

The sequel to Lock In is a fast read with an interesting mystery, fun characters, and intriguing concepts. More than the first book, it fully explores the societal impact of both large scale lock-in and the technology used to deal with it.

It continues with the POV of locked-in FBI agent Chris Shane, this time investigating the death of a locked-in athlete.

In this near-future, 10% of the world's population have been locked into their brains by a pandemic. Virtual reality and remote robot piloting enable them to interact with the world, and there are even specially designed "threeps" (named after a well-known droid) for different tasks. Among them: the battle threeps used for a sport more violent than could be played with real human bodies.

Hadens spend most of their lives interacting through simulations or mechanical avatars, which changes a lot about identity presentation, travel, location, disability and prejudice. It's the kind of thing that might be nodded to in another book that wanted to focus on the technology, but all these implications are woven throughout the story and key to a lot of it.

(Adapted from the Mastodon posts I made back when I read it, cross-posted here and on my website)

Semiosis is a fascinating take on space colonization, intelligence, and language. The multi-generational story starts with the founding of a small human colony on an alien world where, as they soon discover, plants have evolved intelligence and use animals for tools. Needless to say, things don't work out the way the colonists intended, and their descendants find ways to adapt to a world where they can't forget that they're only one part of the ecosystem -- and not a necessary part, either. And the plants have their own ideas!

Each chapter picks up a character from a different generation. Burke gives them all distinct voices and attitudes, and while each looks back at the previous narrator from this new perspective, their stories are their own.

I found the middle chapters the most interesting. At this point the colony has established itself, and all the founders have died off, leaving only those who grew up on Pax don't have memories of the life they left behind on Earth. These chapters get into how the plants communicate with each other, what kind of worldview sapient bamboo might have, and how the bamboo and the humans figure out how to communicate with each other and negotiate how to share a city and the surrounding area.

The bamboo primarily communicates with other plants through chemical transfer via roots -- much like plants in the real world do, only a lot more complex -- and over long distances by encoding messages in pollen grains. Neither strategy is going to help it talk to humans.

I was reminded at times of Robert Charles Wilson's BIOS and Ursula Le Guin's early novel Planet of Exile. The latter in particular, since both involve human colonists several generations down the line in a one-city colony, incomplete adaptation to local biochemistry, trying to warn people of danger that they dismiss as smaller than it is (oh, they never attack in groups that big!), and an extended siege against the colony in the later chapters. It's kind of weird that I read this book so soon after that one.

(Cross-posted from my website)

Modern archaeology has drastically increased what we can learn from ancient ruins, and Newitz turns this lens on the history of how cities form, how they thrive, and how they die. The writing is engaging and accessible, flowing through what we know, how we know it, how certain we are about it, and the author's first-hand experiences with archaeologists at the actual sites.

The book has added a lot to my understanding of Pompeii and Angkor. Çatalhöyük is fascinatingly weird. And I'd really like to know more about Cahokia. (So would the people studying it!)

Satellites and Microscopes

There's a recurring theme of re-examining what we thought we knew, using either new technology or new perspective. Angkor is perhaps the best example: LIDAR surveys in the last 10-15 years have revealed the remains of building foundations and an irrigation network outside the walled temple complexes. It wasn't a medium-sized city crammed into those stone walls. It was a large city built around them. And mundane records of things like workers' shift assignments and rations, previously ignored by Western archaeologists, hint at changing political conditions in later years as the infrastructure failed.

Even Pompeii, with its ruins remarkably preserved under volcanic ash, and written records still available of not just administrative details but first-hand accounts of the eruption, benefits from taking a new look at records we already have: Cross-referencing census and death records for Pompeii and nearby towns reveals where survivors resettled.

There are no written records of Çatalhöyük (in modern Turkey) or Cahokia (in modern Illinois), only ruins and artifacts, but sometimes those artifacts have stored surprisingly detailed information: There are indications of a drought during the time the city was inhabited...and sure enough, residue from stews in cooking pots indicate that the people shifted to eating animals that need less water, and that the animals ate more drought-tolerant plants, around the same time.

Lifecycle of a City

Newitz makes a point of drawing parallels to modern cities. (Pompeii had fast food carts, ads, and sports riots!) Çatalhöyük is the most alien. It's one of the oldest cities known, and it seems people were still figuring out how to make one. All the buildings are basically cubes attached to each other, accessed through doors in the roof, and they all seem to have pulled multiple duty as bedrooms, kitchens, storage, etc. Kind of like a Minecraft house, if you could bury your dead relatives under your bed. (Sometimes they'd keep the skull in a wall niche, though!)

It's easy to think of these ancient cities as dead ends where civilizations failed. Unlike, say, Rome, where you can see a continuous line from the ancient city to the modern. But they weren't all cataclysms, and the people didn't just disappear. Cahokia seems to have been wound down when people were done with it, Çatalhöyük and Angkor slowly emptied out as people moved, and even Pompeii had survivors who resettled nearby.

They're not dead ends. They're stops along the way.

Cross-posted on my website.

A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.

It starts with worlds we know the most about -- our moon and Mars, where we have plenty of direct measurements and photos from the surface -- and works its way out through asteroids, gas giants and their moons, and finally Pluto.

The second half of the book delves into more speculative situations. Types of places we know exist, like star clusters and nebulas and different types of stars. Plait links these to specific locations where possible. We know a system of planets exists around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, for instance, and we have a rough idea of how big, how far, and how fast the planets are that we've spotted so far. From there he imagines: if one of the three planets in its habitable zone is enough like Earth to visit, what would it be like to experience a red sun, multiple planets with visible phases, and so forth.

There's some repetition, but I think part of that is trying to make each chapter stand on its own in case you want to jump ahead to, say, visiting a black hole. (You do not survive the encounter.) And while there's a lot that I knew already from following space exploration from a distance, there are newer discoveries I'd missed, things I'd known pieces of but never really connected, and a deep dive into topics I'd only skimmed the surface of before.

Also, there's an insert in the middle of the book with photos. I didn't notice it until I got there, so I'd been looking up NASA and ESA pictures of the specific comets and asteroids on my phone while reading!

Some fun facts: 1. Martian sunsets are blue! 2. The biggest asteroids are like miniature planets. The smallest are like bags of rocks without the bag. (Or a really unpleasant 3D ball pit.) 3. Saturn's rings are surprisingly thin. Like, millions of miles across but only 40 feet thick in places. 4. The Orion Nebula is a bubble at the near edge of an even bigger cloud of dust. We can only see it because it broke through on our side! 5. It's entirely possible for a planet to have a stable orbit around one star of a binary pair -- or both! Sunsets on a world like Tatooine would actually look like they do in the movies! 6. I'm still amazed at how much we managed to get from a single high-speed fly-by past Pluto.

Review cross-posted on my website.

Still relevant despite recent advances in AI-generated imagery and text, because the new systems still work on the same principles as the ones that were around three years ago. They just have a lot more data and processing power. This also means they have the same limitations and blind spots. What was it trained on? How was it trained? (This is the most obvious way human bias can leak into an AI model.) How well is the goal specified? And of course, did the AI actually latch onto relevant details, or did it notice that all the training pictures labeled sheep had green fields and blue skies, and completely ignore the actual sheep?

These are things to keep in mind as we enter the landscape of generative AI tools like ChatGPT: You can train an LLM to write a book review, and it'll give you a great piece of text that reads like a book review -- but it's not going to have actually evaluated the book. For that, you'd have to train another AI to categorize books as good, bad, interesting, dull, and so on. But even that can only be as good as its training data. (I don't remember whether the classic phrase "garbage in, garbage out" is used anywhere in the book, but it still applies today!)

The author has a blog/newsletter, AI Weirdness www.aiweirdness.com/, where she pushes AI over the edge to sometimes hilarious results.

hyperborea.org/reviews/books/aiweirdness/