Angela Ambroz

So Martian Chronicles was a religious experience for me, and I still consider it the very pinnacle of aesthetic/intellectual speculative delight. I still can't digest just how freakin' amazing it was. What a story! What a mind to create such a story! What a everything! Daamn.

And, indeed, when I read it last year, I remember also being pleasantly surprised, since I had always grouped Bradbury into the Good Ol' Boys' Club of Golden Age-era science fiction. My relationship with this era/club is predictable. Some person or algorithm tells me that I'll simply loooove this book by Arthur C. Clarke/Isaac Asimov/Ray Bradbury/Alfred Bester/etc because it SHAKES THE VERY FOUNDATIONS OF YOUR WORLDVIEW, and my reading habits are all about that, ya know. I pick up book. I read book. Worldview foundations are not only unshaken, but very firmly hammered back into place, because the aliens came, and they found 1950s Americana, a setting so white-washed as to feel reeeeeally tedious and stodgy and oppressive to an emancipated lady such as myself. Where would a me fit into this world? Cooking dinner for her Wonder Husband, while fretting or looking on in wonder at his wondrousness? Dude. No thanks.

Usually, finishing such highly-acclaimed, highly-disappointing sci fi provokes in me a femrage rant, so I usually stick to 1970s New Wave stuff and re-read Ursula Le Guin to feel better about the world.

Alas, then. The Illustrated Man is meant to be Bradbury's other other masterpiece, aside Fahrenheit 451 and Martian Chronicles. The title is even pretty cool (illustrated people!), drawing you in. I was pumped, at least. Unfortunately, I found the stories blah, and the writing sooo deeply meshed in a narrow whiteoldman worldview - honestly, I'm tired of saying it. I'm getting tired of MY OWN REVIEWS in this regard. But, there you have it. I just found it uuuuggghhh and meh. Sometimes eye-roll-inducing (esp. with the wife-murder-fantasy story, which, come on, is sooo gratuitous and dodgy as a sub-genre in and of itself). But I was mostly sad, cuz I was all like, “Ray, I know you can do better! You've done so much better in the past!”

Oh well.

I do have a soft spot for capitalist self-help books like this, or Dale Carnegie, or tales from Warren Buffett's many adventures. I legitimately enjoy reading the Harvard Business Review.

But! This short treatise was just bleh. It's a lot about playing to your strengths, not trying to fit your round self into the square hole, and how longevity means people need to switch careers (be active!) and knowledge working means people need to keep learning or be left behind to wither in the relentless Machine Age (never stop!). The usual late capitalist stuff, real basic b stuff.

Honestly, I listened to it on the way into work today and I'm already forgetting its wisdoms (it's lunch!), so that speaks for itself.

Aghh. This is hovering between a did-not-finish (at 69%) and a “want to read” for me. I might pick it up again.

Basically: I picked this up because I had two goals - (1) I wanted to write a toy programming language for my CS50 final project, and (2) I wanted to do more C.

Unfortunately, this book started strong but then lost a lot of steam for me. Plus, I found Destroy All Software's A compiler from scratch video, which was basically the final nail in the coffin.

This book has two goals, and they're admirable: first, introduces people to the basic theory behind how programming languages are interpreted/compiled, and, second, it teaches them C. The process is very similar to Destroy All Software's video: you read in some input string, you tokenize those strings according to your language, you parse them into an appropriate tree structure, and then you pipe that tree into the compilation language. In the case of this book, you do all of that process: input, tokenize, parse, and compile in C. In Destroy All Software, he does the inputting, tokenizing and parsing in Ruby and then - mysteriously/wackily - compiles to JAVASCRIPT (what in the world). I'm planning to parse/tokenize/etc in Python and compile to C.

I made serious headway with the book, but eventually found myself just pecking out 100s of lines of C without understanding what the eff was going on. And the reason is that I think this book's second goal - to assume it's understandable to C beginners - isn't really realistic. I have about ~20 hours of C under my belt (i.e. 5 problem sets in CS50), and I have a shaky grasp of pointers and memory allocation, and this book quickly got away from me. I ended up just blindly trying stuff, but then I was - well - struggling with C concepts, rather than compiler concepts. With the DAS video, instead, I've switched to Python and am finding it much easier to follow - now, instead of getting lost in the syntax of my parsing language, I can just focus on building a compiler.

Oh yeah, and another point: the author abstracts some of the tokenizing away from you with a custom-built C library he wrote called mpc. I'm not sure about the pedagogy, but - in general - I don't like it when books provide custom-built libraries that you need to do to work, e.g. Allen Downey (who I generally admire very much!) did this with Think Stats and it kinda killed the book for me - let the reader build from the smallest building blocks! Don't give us a half-built contraption upon which we're meant to build more - that just means we spend more time trying to figure out the contraption!

Anyway, I feel bad saying all this. I think the book would be GREAT for people that are already up to speed with C. Also, it's free and the author offers a lot of humor and encouragement. Bah!

An inspiring account of Ye Father of American Conservationism John Muir's blissed-out trip through Yosemite in the summer of 1869.

Brimming with 19th century Romantickal feelings about Nature and the sublime, this book is really great if you're either already an outdoors-person, or even a proto-outdoors-person. His enthusiastic descriptions are so inspiring that they make you want to put down your Kindle, put on your hiking boots, book flight tickets, and go hike the eponymous trail RIGHT NOW. It's no wonder he inspired politicians and got the whole national parks thing going. Here's a pic with Teddy Roosevelt (who, btw, doesn't Teddy look cartoonish? yo, no offense).

Yeah. So Muir basically spent those three months of 1869 in a constant state of ecstasy, and he also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world (which is, yikes, really impressive). What this means is that you're like 90% carried along by his enthusiasm and gorgeous descriptions of gorgeous nature, and you're like 10% a little eyes-glazed-over at his effusive “oh, heavenly glorious!” proclamations over the chipmunk. (Though I did find myself taken in by his effusive proclamations over the rat. Surprising!) Muir also leavens his writing with occasional sardony, especially re: the “silly sheep” he's meant to be accompanying, and the grungy, Californian shepherd who is kinda smelly and totally “blind” to all the natural beauty around him (philistine!).

Free version over at Gutenberg.

Even though I'm Buddhist and “converted” nearly 20 (!!!) years ago (MAN I'M GETTING OLD), I've always had trouble with the more typical pop American Buddhist books: the stuff by the Dalai Lama, Pema Chodron, and Thich Nhat Hanh. For an example and better explanation of my orneriness, see my review of The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down. So I began this book with Great Skepticism.

But I was pleasantly surprised! This was actually a very consoling and comforting little book! And, while the advice was the usual advice that is easy to give and hard to do (live in the present moment, find comfort in sitting/meditating/following your breath, just sit), I found Thich Nhat Hanh's writing - for once! - ringing very true. Oh my gosh, is this an age thing? Have I aged into the target demographic? I used to find his writing always so generic and bland (again, see my above review about why that pop Buddhism never worked for me), but here it DIDN'T.

Anyway, if you have trouble relaxing - say, if you have a pathological inability to relax - then this might be a teeny, tiny, nano-sized comfort. (And that's saying something!) I read this via my library app's ebook loan, but I'm planning to buy a hard copy just so I can cuddle it.

This has been a super durable book in our bedtime reading rotation. It is quite sweet. Kind of a haiku. Every page is like one word, maybe two. A girl gets a baby brother. A realistic look at siblinghood. Some of the short declarations have wormed their way into my brain, so I find myself muttering, “Admired. Inspired!” when one kid imitates another kid. The portrayal of labor is, “Oh - ow? Now!!! Wow.” Accurate. My kid loses their shit at “NO, NOT THE VASES!”

2.5 stars, rounded up. A sweeping, opinionated “God's eye view” on humanity - this book starts strong, loses steam, and is generally less than the sum of its parts. It's also a little bit false advertising, the beginning is SO good that it's a pretty big letdown when the rest of it starts to flounder.

It opens with a fun, insightful look into the homo genus - homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and homo sapiens - and evolutionary psychology and basically how we should all be on a paleo diet. I loved learning about the mediocrity of pre-“cognitive revolution” homo sapiens as mid-level hunter/gatherers on the food chain, hovering near hyenas and other scavengers. Haaaaa very humbling!

After we hit the cognitive and agricultural revolutions, and a VERY insightful and fun look at anthropology and homo sapiens's ability to weave elaborate fictions that allow for larger tribes/communities (the fiction of laws, the fiction of justice, the fiction of big gods, and so on), things start to - well - take a turn. A big fat chunk of the middle part of this book should be renamed Imperial Apologetics: Making the Trains Run on Time. I started to lose interest here, and also do various things with my eyeballs: side eye, rolling of eyes, etc. Eventually, I was shouting “CITATION NEEDED, BUSTER” because he was just making sweeping mansplainy generalizations that just screamed “heyo I'm so smart, omg it's amazing”. But I started getting stuck on things - like when he says we should attribute South Asian independence “not just to Mahatma Gandhi but to the British” and how wonderful and peaceful that was, in particular, and how, gosh, there have been zero post-colonial wars. He stuffs this (crazy) argument with a bunch of straw men examples, and I was like, “wtf has this history prof forgotten Partition?!” And what about Pakistan/Bangladesh?!

He wraps the book up with, first, a lot of stuff about how we should count our blessings for living in this WEIRD (Western/educated/industrialized/rich/democratic)-valorizing world since everyone before us died of bubonic plague sores or by getting murdered for land. And then there's a lot of bright eyed stuff about our post-human future - THE SINGULARITY IS NIGH - and so on. I guess an extensive plug for his sequel, Homo Deus.

Okay. So. This is why this book is less than the sum of its parts: I feel like most of these points have been made before, and better, and without such pomp and citation-free self-important provocateuring. Specifically:
- On imperial apologetics and a WEIRD-friendly vast “God's eye view” of history: A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich. That one WAY MORE blew my mind about things like Culture and Civilization &c &c
- On big gods and game theory and humans being able to tolerate a big tribe: Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict by Ara Norenzayan
- On our post-human future/the Singularity/cyborgs and DARPA and stuff like that: Andrej Karpathy, this AI researcher out of Stanford and now at Tesla, seems to always be happy to dump ice showers on you with HIGHLY PLAUSIBLE and HIGHLY FREAKY near futures where deep learning has eaten our humanity away. Here you go. Rudy Rucker's Postsingular struck me, I remember, long ago with his plausible and strange ideas of nanotech WiFi ingested into our bodies. Internet of flesh! Also I haven't read it yet, but Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence freaked Elon Musk out so that's something.
- But the evolutionary psychology/homo genus stuff - NOW THAT WAS VERY VERY INTERESTING.

Good Lord. Why did I hate this so much? Even I don't know. Talking dolphins; space opera; strange planets and a cool intergalactic hierarchy of “master” races “uplifting” their lessers. Ostensibly these are all good ideas. I guess I just hated that every character seemed to have one voice, and that voice was Obnoxious.

My Hugo-Nebula mission meets its first major challenge. But then, life's too short for asshole dolphins. I put the book down about 2/3 into it. If I want underwater spec fic, that one TV show with Roy Schneider will just have to do.

Hmmm. So: it's a high fantasy political intrigue thing, featuring a hard-assed lady, Baru Cormorant, trying to rise the ranks and take down the Evil Empire (here, “the Masquerade”) from within because (1) they took over her island home (VENGEANCE!), and (2) disappeared one of her dads, cuz he was bi and the Masquerade is like, wow, big time homophobic.

They're also eugenicists and basically an 18th century colonial super-power (with smallpox blankets, without slavery), and thus very easy for a Modern Person to despise. Too easy! And that's kinda the problem with this book: it's a book about nuance, subtlety and intrigue, all presented in LOUD, BLUNT, ALL CAPS EXCLAMATIONS OF TELLING (not showing!). Much like Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, we have a Modern Person juxtaposed against a caricatured historical setting, and all our Modern Ideas - about sex, about gender, about politics - are put into conflict that feels facile. (Like, yo, marriage being about love and sexual fulfillment is a very recent (Victorian?) idea, so why all this terrible fuss about who Baru's gonna marry?! Lady, it's Medieval Hyper-politics Land, you marry the duke with the most land and then you do whoever you want! Who cares! argrhghgh)

And speaking of “facile” (instead of “easy”): It also dresses up this really blunt, declaratory storytelling with a thing I can't stand: an over-reliance on $1 words, in the style of Gene Wolf. This is a cormorant, people. “Abeam” means you're looking out the side of the ship. And other tedious roadblocks to my reading experience. :/ And don't get me started on how everyone had the same voice... and how there's the grizzled spy Duke, the grizzled philospher Duke, and the grizzled Duke we meet this one time on the road. Good Lord!

Beyond the ALL CAPSness of this book is the coded story between the lines (in SMALL CAPS, shall we say). Dickinson passes Bechdel with flying colors (yey), and there's some wonderful subverting of gender norms: like, imagine lots of strapping naval officers in dashing naval uniforms, imagine corpulent rulers with limited morals and outsized personalities, imagine Rohirrim-type/Genghis Khan-type warriors of the steppes. You're probably thinking of dude, dude, dude. But they're all ladies! That was nice, I +1 that with my heart.

But then the niceness evaporated when Dickinson beat me over the head with his THIS EVIL EMPIRE OMG stick.

But let me recap the plot (briefly): Baru Cormorant is a super-genius “savant” type girl who grows up in Haiti Oppressed Tropical Home, has her family unit destroyed and shamed by the homophobe imperialists, and is raised in an imperialist school (one-room!? white-washed walls?!) where she aces the civil service exams and is sent to be the Federal Reserve person ODI Fellow Imperial Accountant at this other land of mountains, steppes, and mighty, rowdy, throwback Medieval types. Much is made of basic economics: like, Baru's SAVANT-LIKE GENIUS to realize that money is the source of all power - and money > tribe in conflicts. Even when people think it's about tribe. No, srsly, it's money. MONEH. See Paul Collier for much more on ideas of this nature.

Baru has various political designs, figuring out these Medieval people who also have political designs, and eventually she becomes the figurehead/leader of this big ass rebellion. There is much high fantasy fighting stuff: horses! rape and pillage! banners flapping in the wind! If you're into that, there's also a veeeery long climax fight in the end which is basically like the last scene in Henry V where they fight in the mud for like half the film (yo, and I'm into that scene).

I couldn't help but compare this book, somewhat not favorably, to a slew of other high fantasy political intrigues featuring interesting sex/gender politics: Floating Worlds is probably the closest (also featuring a hard-ass lady subverting a Medieval steppe warrior people in a quest to overthrow a larger-scale evil empire), but I also felt shades of Ancillary [something] in its sneaky gender surprises, sneaky non-white hegemony and parallels with colonial history, and even The Goblin Emperor, also fairly blunt political high fantasy. And, of course, the Great Masters of this genre: Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson.

So I love me a good political high fantasy/spec book that subverts gender/sex norms, hence - perhaps - my acute disappointment. What Le Guin and Robinson always did so well was show, not tell; and not cast judgment so obviously. There was a LOT of gray on that crazy Red Mars, or that crazy planet called Winter; even if, at core, they were making socially/politically liberal/left-wing points, there was no use of straw man stuff. The Evil Empire-analogue in Le Guin's The Dispossessed is also kind of a stupid, sexist place (and an obvious commentary on 1960s America); but we're not beaten over the head with it, and the alternative (that crazy anarchic moon from whence the protagonist comes) is presented in rich, three-dimensional variety (including the shortcomings). I just didn't feel that same grayness in Oppressed Tropical Home, or in the book as a whole.

I'm surprised by the negative reviews of this! The low star rating! I mean, it's fine. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I had fun diving deep into early 19th century England (it's been a while); it's such a rich portrait of the times and people.

Anyway, while this book is ostensibly about Ada Lovelace - Matron Saint, along with Grace Hopper, of all things women and computers these days (e.g. adafruit, Ada Lovelace Day, the Ada Initiative) - it does indeed spend a lot of time on her collaborator, Charles Babbage, and her parents, Lord Byron (of Byronic poet fame) and Lady Byron. I thought this was fine; it's a short-ish book, and still manages to be enriching, and it contextualized a lot when you heard about how (in)famous Lord Byron was during his own lifetime and how much of a troubled grump Babbage was. I was also a little starstruck at having Dickens and Darwin wandering around the parties too. Here is my favorite Charles Darwin quote - ah! I find it so encouraging. I also find his daily routine so inspiring too.

I think the most interesting - intoxicating, even! - aspect of Ada and Babbage's story - and one others have picked up on - is the “what might have been” aspect. They were on the cusp of augmenting the Digital Age about a hundred years early and in a totally different country. That's amazing!!! It blows your mind!!!! The book doesn't dwell too much on this, but does point it to a couple different things: (1) Babbage having a super shitty meeting with the Prime Minister of the time, and basically shooting himself in the diplomatic foot, and (2) Ada's genius getting constantly derailed and squashed by the patriarchy and hum drum bullshit responsibilities. You do wonder what they could have accomplished if they had been unleashed!

Some stuff I didn't like about the book: in almost all the Ada sections, it's written defensively. As in, “She really IS a genius, despite what some sexist naysayers might have you believe.” DUDE. I do NOTTTT care what sexist naysayers are saying, so please spare me the time and spare yourself the pages and let's get back to building the Difference Engine! It just seemed like an inordinate amount of energy was spent on defending Ada's intellect and this was so, so discouraging and disheartening.

Also, goddamn these people were rich.

I was anti-Seuss for my whole life, without ever having actually read any of it. But I had seen Grinch stuff and this cat in my peripheral vision sprinkled throughout the culture, and I just hated the aesthetic and didn't get the vibe. Not my jam, okay!!

Well, these books cycle through our neighborhood Little Free Libraries and so they end up in our house. And I ended up reading it to my kid. And, okay, it was a lot of fun. Kid was entranced. I kinda loved the rhythm and the vibe. Apparently it IS my jam. I love anxiety fish. I love the chaos neutral cat. I love that the mother's return is greeted with extreme horror and anxiety. I love that you don't SEE the mother's face (this drives my kid crazy - “WHERE IS SHE?! WHY SHE NO COME INSIDE?!”).

I love the cat's voice. Oh, what a shame, what a shame, what a shame.

A solid, likable mix of near future sci-fi, from the usual crew of writers (Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, etc.). As with all anthologies, it's hit and miss. Maybe the best story is the first one, by South African author Lauren Beukes, about some semi-post-human athletes. It had shades of Pistorius's story, as well as the usual near future developing country dystopia stuff, and some David Cronenbergian body-horror that was very impressively gross.

Other notables: Cory Doctorow's story felt very “one Cory Doctorow fits all” templated, borrowing its major themes from, well, any of his books. You know: super-smart, anti-authoritarian teen boy protagonist (young Cory stand-in!) who is good with computers, and snarky. This story ain't had NOTHIN' on “Chicken Little”, which is maybe Doctorow's best short story - and one of my fave all-time - but it was decent, and a nice send-up of our algorithmy, data science-driven world.

The rest were mostly exposition-heavy declamations featuring thin characterizations and thinner plots. But - meh. Near future is fun, cuz it's all, like, whoaaaaa that could be usssss sooon.

Three stars for the actual book, four stars for my warm fuzzy feelings about sci-fi.

A survey of post-revolution Iranian history, grafted onto the bio of an upper-middle class girl growing up to become the NYT's (only?) journalist on the ground in Tehran. Moral(s) of the story: Iranian society is a lot more nuanced than is regularly portrayed; being a journalist is soooo baller.

So I read this after Emily Bazelon suggested it on the wonderful Political Gabfest. Emily RAVED about it, but my feelings are more “OK, that was strong-ish!” with a side of meh. It was good, sure. The tale of Iran is a deeply interesting one. I had recurring visions of A Separation, one of the most brilliant films ever and a wonderfully rich, humanizing look at classism and domestic strife in modern Iran. Iran tends to get caricatured in American culture (“the great Satan” and all that, oh dear), so it's always nice to get some primary docs from the inside.

But this book? I think my problem was that the writing often went a little flat, and was structured along the lines of: [event from my life] - [long-ish digression explaining a detail about Iranian politics/history/culture] - [incorporating that detail into the next thing that happened in my life] - [next event from my life]. So there was tons of really interesting stuff happening, and I learned a lot and was often deeply moved, but I just had trouble with the narrative structure. It kept throwin' me!

A good/OK pop econ book by Nobel Prize-winning Al Roth, about market design and matching algorithms and such. As Roth says, even Hayek - HAYEK - didn't believe markets are given to us by some (invisible) hand of a libertarian God, and thus market design is a powerful/worthwhile investigation and technocrats should be employed. Another nice parallel is evolution: natural selection != “progress” or the best, it just means the most survivaly. Thank you, Khan Academy, for blowing my mind about that, actually.

Roth gives several compelling examples of markets being broken and then fixed (and then sometimes broken again): school choice in New York and Boston; medical residency applications (complicated by married couples!); online dating; kidney donations; THE INTERTOOBS (i.e. Uber), and, perhaps my favorite, the great/hilarious drama that is law students applying for clerkships with Federal judges. There are detours into “repugnance” - i.e. while everything COULD have a price, we are unfortunately not Ferengi, we are humans, and thus our Rules of Acquisition are complicated by social/moral feelings of disgust and taboo (e.g. most countries don't let you sell your organs - except Iran does, btw!).

Natural/organic markets can have all sorts of crap happen to them: you want them to be thick and fast, not congested (like the market for academic economists trying to figure out their careers at the 3-day annual AEA meeting) and unravelled (like the market for judicial clerkships, where law students get offers before they even start school). It's all game theory - i.e. agents behaving strategically in a multi-stage game - and so there ARE some stable equilibria solutions. The “devil is in the details” in finding them.

Welp. I love market stuff and I love game theory and I love learning about Internet economics and I love the Ferengi, and so I was looking forward to this, but I found myself strangely unsatisfied. Often, it felt too pop; other times, it felt strangely abstract. Oh well.

Well, since I reviewed The Silver Spoon, may as well do my other go-to cookbook: MAANGCHI.

I don't know how I found Maangchi, but - like most people? - I found her on YouTube. She's awesome. I love her. What a hero. Her name means “Hammer” in Korean, I think she used it for some MMORPG games? I dunno. She's hilarious.

Anyway, I've always been daunted by Korean cooking. Bibimbap seems very mysterious to me. What is this magic? So I was amazed and surprised and VERY HAPPY to learn, via cooking Maangchi's stuff, that (1) Korean cooking is super unexpected, yes, in its ingredient combos, but (2) it's SO EASY, and (3) oh man, such easy hits. This book definitely has the highest attempt:success ratio than any other cookbook. I lived near an HMart for a while, which made buying more niche Korean ingredients super easy. Now I think I'll have to depend on the intertoonbs. Maangchi has some recommendations on where to get stuff: glutinous rice flour, rice syrup. Kimchi you can get anywhere.

Anyway, the hits:
- Savory-sweet black beans, oh man yum. So easy. And a good example of the ingredient combos that made me go, “This'll never work...” and THEN IT WORKED: soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, garlic. Okay, I guess that sounds pretty straightforward actually.
- Zucchini pancakes.
- Kimchi pancakes.
- A kimchi + beef soup thing.
- This amazing porridge that was surprising and different (for me) and SO GOOD and VERY WARMING. Perfect for the winter.
- Fried tofu with soy sauce and scallions. Every time I make this, I batch-make it for a week of work lunches and then just eat it all on Sunday afternoon. DISCIPLINE FAIL.
- Jajangmyeon, MMMMMM SO GOOD.
Sorry, I'm not looking up the other recipe names. Honestly, everything I've tried has been easy and amazing. I'm also a big fan of the indiscriminate use of a soft boiled egg on everything. YES PLEASE. Also, I think, it's so nice because much of the stuff is (a) nice and spicy and tasty and (b) actually quite light!

Yaaa, downgraded to 3 stars cuz, OK, it's your pretty standard femrage fair. I was properly enraged by the end. But it's also short and had no mind-blowing-ness to it. It was basically like, sexism exists and it sucks, amirite? And I was like, YOU ARE RIGHT!!!! ARRGHHHH I AM SO ENRAGED NOW ABOUT SEXISM!!! The end.

So yeah, meh. Why do I have to live in a historical time period where this even has to be an issue? Why do I even need to waste brain cells on people who don't see sexism or still believe in bio gender differences or whatever bullshit? WHY!?! WHY AM I NOT LIVING IN THE UTOPIA OF STAR TREK TNG?! WHERE WE CAN ALL FOCUS ON BETTER SHIT?!!

SEE NOW I AM MAD AGAIN
WHAT IS THE POINT
WAGRHRHGDSJKHVSK

Ugh, okay, I'm going to be the asshole here and discuss how much I didn't like this book, even though its heart is clearly in the right place and it has Good Values (or, let's say, values I agree with and like to see in sf).

But! I had sorta seen other reviews that mentioned this is kinda like Firefly and the SJWness is too SJWey, but my responses were, “Well, I liked Firefly!” and “aw man, if it angers right-wing sf nerds it's goin STRAIGHT TO MY TO-READ PILE”. But, now that I've read it... yeah, this is basically just a pedestrian regurgitation of Firefly with REEEEALLY heavy-handed clunky SJWness.

To wit: The book centers around a literal motley crew of the starship Wayfarer. There's the studly rakish captain, Ashby (i.e. Mal Reynolds), his (platonic) reliable Strong Female first mate, Sissix (Zoe Washburne), the manic pixie dream girl mechanic, Kizzy (Kaylee), the wise and elderly Doctor Chef (Shepherd Book), the ethereal navigator Ohan (River) and SO ON and SO FORTH.

Like the good ship Serenity, the good ship Wayfarer lives from job to job, journeying across a quirky galaxy that has some darkness - but not too much darkness. Like the good ship Serenity, the Wayfarer eventually gets a job to go waaay out to the far reaches of the space civilization, and (LIKE THE SERENITY) there they confront some of the Core Values of that civilization, and - by the power of their everyday tolerance and multi-species diversity - impart galaxy-wide lessons that everyone can learn from.

I mean, like. Obviously everything is a remake of everything. That's fine. There's nothing original anymore, blah blah. But this was SUCH a copy as to be really dull, and I spent the entire book just pushing through, wanting it to be over so I could go read something more interesting. The dialogue was clunky and obvious, EVERYTHING was clunky and obvious. The few departures were also very sigh sigh. For example, one “new” character is Rosemary Harper, the secret corporate-princess with a heart of gold, freshly escaped from a greedy 1980s Martian dynasty. (Side note but I love how future colonial Mars always devolves into becoming a corporo-fascist 1980s nightmare state - see Floating Worlds, Arnold's arrghgrhgrh eyes popping out, and, of course, all the violence and corporate nightmares in Red Mars). Anyway, Rosemary is naive and new to this universe (hello, infodumping!), but also competent and (early on) described as pretty. In other words, a Mary Sue. I mean COME ON!!!

Again, I repeat the disclaimer: I feel like an asshole here, the book's HEART IS ALSO CLEARLY MADE OF GOLD. But!

But aaghhh, the sf was so frustratingly unimaginative: with the random-number-generator ID numbers or e-mail identifiers or EVERYTHING IDENTIFIERS that are pointless and meant to just lazily signify Future Technology. Or the 1990s-style chattering news reporters - like, most young people don't get their news from chattering news reporters TODAY, in 2017, so why in the Lord are far future people watching 1990s-style TV news reports?! Why do they have to wait for a “morning” and “evening” edition when we are talking about a multi-sun civilization!?!?! Why is the whole book about diversity and social progressivism, as understood by 21st century American standards, but the captain of the ship is still a dude and the first “comfort food” meal is still a meat and potatoes Anglo-American standard? (WHY NOT IDLY AND SAMBAR, EH?) Why would anyone choose to write a manic pixie dream girl!? Why are all the moral dilemmas so obvious and so... not dilemmas?!! Oh my Lord, and yes, okay, right now, we are living in a historical period where whiteness vs. people of color racism is a thing and it's bad and insidious and devastating to our social and economic potential and so forth. But shitty whiteness is a fairly recent phenomenon (let's say about ~500 years old) and so WHY OH WHY is there that clunky stuff in the beginning about how Ashby, like “most future humans” is a pastiche of “races”, while Corbin, the scientist and only intolerant asshole on the ship, has his whiteness remarked upon. Like, yes, okay, I was certainly reminded of some privileged white guy asshole scientists I know. But, from a meta level, can we be less obvious?! And, from the within-the-narrative level, why would race be remarked upon like this in ~500 years time?! Who KNOWS what people will find remarkable! (I'm reminded of the Gene Roddenberry response to journalists asking why Picard was bald - wouldn't they have “cured baldness” by the 24th century? No, they wouldn't care.)

And now, because I simply must, here are some socially progressive sf that I would recommend in this book's stead, stuff that covers the same issues but does it better:
- If you liked the far future discussion of bodies and existing outside a gender binary for humans: Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312
- If you liked the stuff about exploring non-gender binary and “weird” social relations among alien species: Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness
- If you liked the motley crew, the quirky universe, the human Exodus, the living job-to-job, the sexy captain, watch Serenity and enjoy Nathan Fillion's one-bloodshot-eye space cowboy; and then watch all of Firefly
- If you liked the discussion of “how are AIs different than humans?”, “can you fall in love with an AI?”, then read/watch anything you find in the sf shelf
- If you liked the primary documents, the quotidian worries of just trying to (economically) get by in a quirky, weird universe, and the snarky humor, Fred Pohl's Gateway

Insane. Insanely fun. Kinda akin to Brandon Graham stuff, except a little lighter and more approachable. Basically loved it, though it was apocalyptifluff.

Read this on a long drive from Essen to Berlin, and was really struck by how powerful and insidious the Stasi was. It basically blasted away any Ostalgie I could have been susceptible to - I just kept thinking of those lives destroyed in such covert ways. Ugh. 4 stars just cuz I found the author's presence often intrusive (this was written with a bit of gonzo first-person asides).

A sweet, sensitive rite of passage YA novel, featuring that most magical of places to be a teen: Pittsburgh. Seriously. This is speaking from experience: and fellow Pittsburgher Chbosky likewise tics the boxes of a 1990s Pittsburghese teendom - the Rocky Horror midnight showings, the beautiful and profound experience of driving out of Fort Pitt tunnel to see the city at night (“I feel infinite” indeed!), its rich and varied cultural scene. And, of course, the vibe of living in a (post?) working class steel town. I love it. Chbosky loves it. And Chbosky tender narrator, Charlie, loves it too.

Written in the form of confessional letters that Charlie sends to an anonymous “Friend”, we learn about his first year in high school. The usual torments of being a freshman are compounded by Charlie's particular, personal tragedies: a friend who recently committed suicide, a beloved aunt who was killed in a car accident years ago. Like Holden Caulfield or the kid from “A Separate Peace” (two novels which are both featured in the story and act as obvious genre predecessors), Charlie is sensitive - he suffers keenly. Unlike Holden Caulfield - and refreshingly - Charlie is a lot less narcissistic/obsessed with authenticity/being cool. Charlie is almost saintly in his other-oriented ego: he is constantly empathizing. In fact, my only critique of this wonderful book is that Charlie seems almost unbelievable... plus, he made me feel like a jerk.

Indeed, if Charlie's empathy-machine-like abilities are a subversion of the more selfish Holden Caulfield paradigm, then the book takes even larger (and more important) swipes at other cherished (but damaging) teen myths. For example, the Crush - usually treated reverentially in youth fiction, here it's quickly dismantled by Charlie's crush, Sam, stating that she doesn't want to be anyone's crush. A crush is fantasy, a projection. She wants to be liked/loved for who she really is. Other pearls of wisdom - “We accept the love we think we deserve...” - as well as a generally humanistic, progressive and compassionate attitude toward all the characters and all issues make this book a gem, something that soothed even my supposedly-past-this, nearly-30something heart. These are truths that we need to hear, even when we're older. Highly recommended!

Overall: Disappointing that this should have won the Hugo/Nebula. For a number of reasons.

THE GOOD

Bacigalupi's worldbuilding is great: he imagines a far future Kingdom of Thailand, where risen sea levels + GMO mayhem have managed to destroy the planet. This biopunk dystopia feels desperate, immediate and urgent, and, on a meta level, it's a scathing commentary on (fair) trade, ag subsidies in the US/Europe, the American food industry and people (such as myself) burning up the atmo in environmentally-unsound jet planes. In Bacigalupi's future history, we arrogant, over-happy, over-traveled 21st century citizens are living during the brief “Expansion” era - soon to be followed by a violent and unpleasant “Contraction” where no one will travel any further than where their feet can carry them. Bacigalupi's future Thailand is just after the Contraction, now poised on the edge of a possible second “Expansion”, using resurrected woolly mammoth (OK, megodonts - but wtf is a megodont) strength and methane composting to fuel industry.

THE BAD

Bacigalupi may be an inventive worldbuilder, but he is not an inventive writer - nor even a particularly good one. He violates the sacrosanct Law of Good (or at least Decent) Writing, which is “show us, don't tell us” - often bluntly introducing characters as “terrifying” or “charming”. Um, why not save some word count and just say, “The villain entered.” Another tiresome authorial tic was repetition: if I saw Emiko the Cyborg Lady described one more time as exhibiting “telltale stutter-stop herky-jerky” movements or a character described by their (often “pale” or “icy” or “watery” blue) eyes... oh my God. Oh. My. God.

THE UGLY

This was the dealbreaker. I forced myself to finish this book, as I have a spiritual obligation to all Hugo/Nebula joint winners, but wtf is up with this thinly-veiled retrograde Orientalist male chauvinist fantasy? To whit: Chapter 1 introduces Anderson Lake, the blond/blue-eyed American male hero who will guide us through this exotic (EXOTIC) foreign land of small, shy, deferential, and pitiably incompetent Asians. Chapter 2 introduces Anderson's Chinese sidekick, Hock Seng, a survivor of an Islamic fundamentalist genocide against ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. Hock Seng is embittered, often described as scheming or cowering or untrustworthy, and he spends the entire book lamenting his victim state and attempting (but always failing) to make a better life for himself. Just in case it's not clear: Hock Seng has no agency. Chapter 3 introduces the titular “windup girl”, Emiko, a Japanese sex slave robot woman who is repeatedly raped (described in - DARE I SAY IT - loving (!?) detail), works in a stereotypical Miss Saigon-style brothel, and dreams of a better future where New People (i.e. windups) live free and unmolested. She has also been programmed to serve (one geneticist character speculating she has Labrador DNA in her!) and is repeatedly described as a “dog”.

Unsurprisingly, when Anderson isn't planning to overthrow this “little country” in order to make room for American profiteering GMO interests (from the Midwest! the Heartland!), he falls hard in love with the poor, bruised, whimpering, helpless Emiko. Various scenes of rescue and damsel-in-distress ensue.

OK, I'm assuming Bacigalupi has never been exposed to post-colonialism/Orientalism/feminism, because this entire premise just reeks of unreconstructed American/white/male hegemonic views. Not only is it alarming and disappointing that this type of story still has any sort of currency at all (but then, alas, my beloved scifi genre is one of the most unreconstructed in this regard...), but it's also incredibly tedious, unnecessary and unrealistic. I'm a scifi writer and fan, and a lady, and all I can hope for is to read about other future-ladies being... victims, objectified and sexualized? (Even Mai, Hock Seng's sidekick, is a little girl who does little more than cry out in alarm as plot twists promise ruin.) The only woman who enjoys any sort of agency in this story is Kanya, a Ministry of Environment official who is described as an unsmiling hardass (also, wait for it, a victim! her village was destroyed by evil men!) and, surprise, a lesbian.

Bacigalupi excuses himself from any potential attacks re: his portrayal of the Other by noting that this is THE FUTURE and thus not really Thailand at all. He then recommends a number of ethnically Thai authors. Um, I have no problem with writers of one ethnicity writing about other ethnicities, as long as they're respectful and informed and not idiotically exoticizing about it. I even don't have too much of a problem of white/male authors writing about non-white/non-male issues - fraught as that may seem, given the world we live in - because I'm sure it can be done well. What I CANNOT STAND is lazy narratives of romanticized victimization and macho Orientalist fantasies. And for that, I hated this book and am disappointed that it was so lauded by the arbiters of good sf.

Oh my God, I couldn't wait for this book to end. So disappointing: I was hoping to find something to get my femrage on. Instead, it was near-unreadable self-indulgent pap.

Short novella about a quasi-robocop private eye lady, full of damaged parts and cybernetic parts (cool), hunting for a serial killer who kills fancy prostitutes. Some stuff about blackmailing high-level Chinese politicians. Some stuff about Boston's Chinatown.

Meh. This didn't connect with me at all. I found Liu's writing full of telling, telling, telling, and very little showing. I'm also not a huge fan of serial killer/dead prostitute stories, so that was a barrier.

A wonderfully written book about this recent, horrifying social phenomenon of Twitter pile-ons of moral outrage and indignation, often carried out in the name of some noble cause like stamping out racism or sexism. But mostly it's just people being awful to people they don't know, and feeling very good about it. Remember Justine Sacco?

Anyway, Jon Ronson is a wonderful writer. He manages to be very funny and very informed, while giving quite a layered look at all sides of a very complex social phenomenon.

Makes you want to abandon social media. Makes you think twice about reviewing books on Goodreads, even!

A fun and informative book on applied Bayesian modeling in Python.

Assumes knowledge of Python and, honestly, I wouldn't recommend this - alone - as an intro to Bayesian stuff. But if you combine this with Allen Downey's Think Bayes or Khan Academy's Bayes Theorem video or a course (!), you would probably be able to get off the ground with a couple initial models quite quickly.

This book is pitched towards people a bit beyond noob but not total hackers yet on both the PyMC spectrum (Python's most popular (?) Bayesian modeling library... after PySTAN?) and on the Bayesian stats spectrum. For example, the author intentionally hand-waves away Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling as being much too mathy for this book's purposes, which is... meh, fine. There's a bunch of intuition on what the MCMC sampling is doing and why we use it. (Though I would have introduced conjugate priors earlier, juxtaposing “easy” Bayesian models that can be solved analytically versus hard/annoying models that need sampling.) If you want a bit more mathiness, I thought mathematicalmonk's video was helpful.

There's a good section on multi-armed bandit models (i.e. A/B testing when your sample sizes are super small), which was informative and kinda mind-blowing.

The book is open source and you can read it for free (and make contributions) on their GitHub repo. This is very nice and forward-thinking/Star Trek TNG of them, thank God, but it also means that the later chapters are a bit sloppy. I cloned the repo a couple weeks ago and was gifted with a previously-unseen Chapter 7, which turned out to be a bunch of TODOs. Oh well. There's also some typos, maybe a bit too much Personality (heh), and the nagging feeling that, gosh, I guess I could edit their book for some open source software street cred - but then I thought, WHAT ME BE A GLORIFIED SECRETARY AGAIN NO THANK YOU, and lo, thus dideth the number of women contributors to open source code remaineth at the 5%, the Devil's percent.