Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Title: Little Brother
Author: Cory Doctorow
Genre: Science Fiction

Not only is Little Brother the most important book I’ve read this month, it may well be the most important book I’ve read in ten years.

I have always found Cory Doctorow’s work both entertaining and thought provoking. Little Brother is all that and more. It’s a great story that shows (rather than tells) us how important our civil rights are, both online and in real life, through Marcus, a cocky, seventeen-year-old hacker who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a traumatizing detention with the Department of Homeland Security, Marcus finds that his entire city is turned into a police state that makes his school’s intrusive security practices look like a pre-9/11 Canadian border. He turns his hacking skills toward creating an underground network intended for his peers by hacking his Xbox. His efforts to exploit weaknesses in DHS security escalate into a cyber arms race with the feds.

It’s not easy to work an explanation of the false-positive paradox, public-key cryptography, or DNS tunnelling into a work of fiction, let alone an explanation that most people could understand and not yawn halfway through. More than any other fiction genre, SF is likely to suffer from the fact that a) the science aspects require a lot of exposition, and b) it’s hard to understand the story of you don’t understand the science. Doctorow has actually managed to get around this in that you can still enjoy the story if the technical exposition doesn’t quite make sense to you.

But more importantly, this book brings up a lot of ideas that are important for kids to know and think about, especially kids who take it for granted that schools can force them to walk through metal detectors into camera-monitored classrooms; search their lockers, backpacks, and persons without a warrant; and expel them for heinous offenses such as possession of aspirin or diabetes supplies. If this is their normal environment, what will they be willing to accept when they’re out of school? We adults ought to be pondering the implications of that carefully, given that a lot of high school kids will be able to vote in the next election.

Another point that Doctorow slips in is how much we really own our tech toys. iPhones and Xboxes come with security measures to ensure that we can only load manufacturer-approved software on devices that we have not only paid for, but that we continue to pay to use. Sure there are hacks out there, and there’s always going to be a hacker who enjoys cracking those systems. But we all take it for granted that manufacturers can lock the devices down in the first place. Doctorow points out that most security doesn’t actually make us more secure. (I took this point to heart in particular. On the day I started reading Little Brother, someone used my home address and phone number to create a false email and eBay account and make a major purchase using one of my credit cards.) Hackers—and those of us who are paying attention—have always known this, and it’s often not hard to spot the weaknesses in a security setup.

Finally, the author makes is perfectly clear that the best defense is a good offense. Knowing how to program is a useful skill, but it’s more important to agitate for cyber rights and the freedom of information. He points out that we actually used to have “illegal math” (cryptography) in the U.S., and not that long ago, either.

This is a very sophisticated book for young adults, and frankly, it’s about time we started talking up to teenagers instead of down to them. Buy a copy of this book. Buy one for your kids (if you have any), and consider donating one to the school library. Even you don’t agree with anything I or the author have to say, buy it in recognition of your right to dissent. And best do it before the autoimmune disease known as national security tells our schools and bookstores to ban this book. Ben Franklin reminds us that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” and Doctorow points out that giving up essential liberty for security that doesn’t work is just plain stupid.

Title: Rosemary and Rue
Author: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Urban Fantasy

I decided to take advantage of being on vacation to read something a little longer than my 250-page limit, and Rosemary and Rue came highly recommended by two reliable sources. And after reading it, I can see why. The point of view character, half-fey changeling PI October Daye (insert groan here), is engaging and delightfully devoid of self-pity. Full of sarcasm, frustration, denial and anger, to be sure, but that makes for good character development. Not to mention that I’d be pretty cranky myself, after spending fourteen years as a fish in the Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park (although I can think of worse places).

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and besides, the vast majority of the novel is in Daye’s post-piscine life. Having gotten screwed over by the fey side of her life, she’s trying to put together the broken pieces of her interrupted human existence. And if that had worked out well for her, then there wouldn’t be any story. Instead, she’s dragged back into the dual drama-fueled worlds of PI work and otherwordly politics when her “worst friend and best enemy” is murdered.

Like the main character, the novel is continually striking a balance between the urban and the fantasy, and it’s a good balancing act. It has the faced-past action you’d expect from a Harry Dresden novel combined with the wry humor and blase acceptance of the supernatural that one expects from the Nightside series. The difference between McGuire’s novel and both of those other series is that the protagonist is underpowered and well aware of it. The pacing, setting, and storyline compare favorably, however, and the teaser chapter at the end of Rosemary and Rue was over too soon for my tastes. While the story does have a satisfying ending, there are plenty of loose ends that will probably make great stories in their own right in the not-too-distant (I hope) future.

Title: Shadowbridge
Author: Gregory Frost
Genre: Fantasy

I’ve only read one other book by Gregory Frost, Fitcher’s Brides, and I seem to recall thinking at the time that the man has a gift for making the disturbing utterly compelling. It’s the literary equivalent of the fascination that comes from seeing a horrible accident, only in a good way. Which probably doesn’t make sense, but there it is.

Shadowbridge is definitely less disturbing, but just as compelling. Like the Arabian Nights, it’s a story about a storyteller, and so there are many smaller stories embedded in the main text. The storyteller—actually a puppeteer—incorporates the stories she hears into her own narrative. Frost has also found a nifty device for juxtaposing a variety of cultures, by putting them on an enormous, world-spanning bridge on a world that appears to be mostly ocean. He’s designed the magical elements into the story to the point where they are taken for granted, like light switches and internal combustion engines are in our mundane world. (People don’t stand around marveling at them, pondering their history, development, inner workings every time they use them. Those things are just there, and we are far more likely to remark upon them when they don’t work.) Finally, he manages to make divine intervention a sensible part of the story, rather than trying to shoehorn it in.

The only thing I didn’t like is that Shadowbridge has a bad case of narrative interruptus, as it’s the first of a two-part story. Although the writer part of me appreciates the nerve it takes to have your protagonist struck by lightning a couple of pages from the end of a book.

Title: Unshapely Things
Author: Mark del Franco
Genre: Urban Fantasy

Unshapely Things is set in a Boston that results from an intrusion of Faerie into the human world, complete with interspecies (elf/faery/human) politics. However, it’s the ah, interpersonal, interspecies action that is at the root of the story told from the point of view of Connor Grey, a down-and-out former druid who is trying to recover from the loss of his powers. In order to supplement his disability checks, he consults with the human police on cases involving supernatural beings.

The setting is lovingly detailed, with a modern noir woven into it, along the lines of a Jim Butcher or Rob Thurman novel. The supernatural elements are neatly planned out, internally consistent, and make sense. (All magic is result of manipulating essence, but each type of being manipulates essence differently.) I can’t really call it a realistic portrayal of magic, but I’ll happily give it full points for being plausible.

The characters are well done enough that I would like to read more about them (According to the author blurb, a sequel is in the works.) In addition to being a recovering druid, is also something of a recovering asshole, albeit more from thoughtlessness than malice. The supporting cast is fairly interesting as well, ranging from a family of human cops to an extraordinarily powerful mentor.

As for the storyline, most of the familiar tropes from detective fiction are played out, including the political struggle between enforcement agencies. The mentor character plays something of a deus ex machina role in the end, and I would have liked to see the climactic fight resolved a bit differently, but I was willing to go with it, especially in a first novel.

Title: Yellow Dog
Author: Charles de Lint
Genre: Mythic Fiction

I make no apologies for the fact that this a short review. I made the better part of a Thanksgiving dinner for sixteen that stretched nine very enjoyable hours today. Hope you had as much fun as I did.

De Lint has always been one of my favorite authors, and Yellow Dog reminds me why. It’s a brief fling in his ongoing love affair with the desert Southwest. It has the feel of a myth, rather than a story. I’m sure I could read it a dozen times–if it weren’t past my bedtime—and find something new with every pass.

What most authors might use as an ending is just the beginning of the best part of the story. His talent for evoking landscapes with just a few well-chosen words knocks me out. And his characters are real, complex people who don’t always do what you, or the other characters, expect. Good and entertaining in a thought-provoking kind of way.

Title: Bacchus & Me – Adventures in the Wine Cellar
Author: Jay McInerney
Genre: Non-fiction/Wine & winemaking

This post is something of a metareview, as I am reviewing someone’s else reviews. Of wine, in this case. These particular wine reviews are a collection of columns from House & Garden magazine, plus one article written for The New Yorker. The advantage in this case is having them all in one place, with some special bonus materials (which I’ll get to in a bit). It’s one of the very few books I own in which I’ve highlighted a passage (apparently when I originally bought it several years ago).

In my experience, wine writing—even the accessible, wine-for-unmitigated-morons level of wine writing—takes itself very, very seriously. McInerney suffers no such problem, and makes accessible wine writing actually accessible. While there a references to some of the “notes” one might expect to find in a given wine, the author is far more like to compare wines to music, movies, celebrities, and sex acts. To wit: “If Asti [Spumante] is basically Jerry Springer, Moscato d’Asti is more like Dennis Miller.” Obviously, one need not be an expert to enjoy the writing, and if you’re a novice, the sheer volume of information is couched in enough relaxing content to help you avoid information overload.

In addition to chapters full of advice, recommendations, and anecdotes—related and un—about the various kinds of wines (white/green/gold pink, sparkling, red, dessert) there are also a handful of articles about specific wine makers, and some more general discussions, such as what wine to serve with turkey, the various standard bottle sizes, and possibly the most useful thing I’ve ever read about wine, “Cliff Notes for the Cellar,” a list of ten rules…starting with why you should never serve asparagus with wine and ending with purchasing advice for Burgundies, “stay the hell away from the Cote d’Or, the source of more heartbreak and tears than country-music radio.”

While the specific vintage recommendations are a bit dated now that the book is seven or so years old, I have no doubt they’re good, mostly because McInerney is one of those people whose knowledge of wine comes from drinking a lot of it. Sometimes so much that, he admits occasionally, his notes get a little sketchy. The bonus materials, though, are pretty awesome. I can pass on the list of the world’s most romantic wines, because there are artichokes in Eastern Europe with more romance in their little vegetal hearts than there is in mine, but the food and wine pairing recommendations (traditional and contemporary) are awesome both from a culinary perspective and for their breadth. Everything from the traditional Port & Stilton to Riesling with dim sum to Australian Chardonnay with Kraft macaroni and cheese. (The author notes that both he and his children prefer the squeeze cheese rather than the powder, and that almost any ten-dollar New World chardonnay is improved by this dish.) This book also has the most readable glossary I’ve run across in a long time.

Oh, and the highlighted passage? From a column originally entitled “Big Red Monster from Down Under”.

Though it may seem absurd to generalize, the typical Australian Shiraz bounds up an introduces itself with a slap on your back, sticks a pot of jam in your nose, then offers to put you up for the night and lend you money

Title: Rocket Science
Author: Jay Lake
Genre: Science fiction

Most of the time, I think that “retro” is just another word for “leftovers.” It’s nice to be wrong about this particular visit back to the Golden Age of science fiction. The setting of Lake’s post-WWII novel is the key to its success. It brings together alien spacecraft, Nazis, Communists, the Kansas City mob, in a small Kansas town, with a slow enough buildup that by the time you realize how much disbelief you’ve suspended, you’re at the end of the novel. The ending is fairly open-ended, which makes me wonder if there’s supposed to be a sequel out there. I hope that there is, or will be, because otherwise the lack of closure would be a real disappointment.

I’d like to write more, because I did enjoy the novel and it’s a fun read. But honestly, I’m brainfried and it’s coming up on my bedtime.

Title: 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense – The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Author: Michael Brooks
Genre: Nonfiction/Science

This is another one of those books that I picked up at the library because of the title. And I’ll admit, I thought “This must be the advanced course for people who have already believed six impossible things before breakfast,” and “Only 13? Really?”

Of course, any book that detailed everything that didn’t make sense would be far too long for me to read and review for this particular project. Besides that, these are fairly broad topics, like life, sex, death, free will, and the universe. I’m sure that it’s not a surprise to any of us that those things don’t make sense. But it’s how and why they don’t make sense that’s interesting. And these aren’t things that don’t make sense because you skipped half of your freshman biology class fifteen years ago, or never bothered to take a physics class. These are things that don’t make sense to people who study them for a living.

So, in that context, there’s a survey of current knowledge, assumptions, and work on several concepts in cosmology, astronomy, physics, and biology. The really cool thing about this book is that it doesn’t really matter what side of a problem your knowledge and opinion incline you to believe. What you get a really good look at is the process of science. Theories are formulated, tested, analyzed, over and over again, in an attempt to prove or disprove them. For example, there are a lot of scientists whose collective panties are in a wad over the possibility that some of the physical constants aren’t necessarily constant—one of the constants Brooks discusses in this chapter is mu, which is the ratio of proton mass to electron mass. However, mu was only declared a constant in 1953, and we actually have no idea why constants have the values that they do. Plenty of other ideas have been modified or proven wrong since 1953.

What all thirteen things that don’t make sense have in common is that science my be approaching the limits of current paradigms, and what may be necessary for further breakthroughs is a sea change in the way we look at things, on the level of a Newtonian, Copernican, or Einsteinian revolution. But the real value of this book is that it does what a lot of other popular science literature and media don’t do. It demonstrates that science is an ongoing process, constantly changing as we learn more. New information constantly comes along, and is often ignored early on. Just because a theory turns out to be wrong doesn’t mean it isn’t useful—it may eliminate a strain of research that hasn’t been productive and direct resources and intellectual energy down a more fruitful path. Sometimes negative results are a lot more interesting than positive results.

Also, we learn that just because you’re a Nobel laureate doesn’t mean you can figure out an elevator at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels (something Donald Norman could’ve told you, but that’s another book entirely).

Title: Out of Time
Author: John Marsden
Genre: Science Fiction

John Marsden’s novel is about a kid named James, who may or may not be somewhere on the Asperger’s/autism spectrum, who manages to acquire a time machine through an unlikely but plausible set of circumstances. It’s not terribly clear whether or not the main storyline is set in the author’s native Australia, but that’s a reasonable assumption. There’s rather a lot that’s not terribly clear in the novel, actually.

Generally speaking, a novel that jumps around a lot in space and time and perspective—particularly one about time travel—doesn’t bother me. I trust that the author will bring it all together in a coherent fashion in the end. And while the story is definitely brought to a close, it doesn’t ever get particularly coherent.

I’m of two minds about this. The first is that it’s just not quite polished enough or somehow didn’t come together properly. The other is that the author is deliberately trying to create confusion, or replicate some sort of alternate state of mind of his protagonist. I’m going to guess it’s the latter, and give the author credit for a bang-up job.

That said, the novel is particularly memorable, although it’s not particularly bad either. I’d have to read more of Marsden’s work to really get a feel for his style, I suspect, but I am not inspired to do so.

Title: Gods Behaving Badly
Author: Marie Phillips
Genre: Fiction

Gods Behaving Badly is one part urban fantasy, one part Greek mythology, a pinch of Peter Pan, and a bit of an homage to Douglas Adams thrown in. Like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, it features ancient deities trying to live in the modern world while meddling with the lives of mortals for their own amusement. However, it’s also sort of an anti-American Gods, or at least a happy-bouncy take on the same situation. The tone sort of reminds me of a romance novel, in that one knows ho the story is going to end, and it’s the getting there part that’s interesting. If you like romance novels.

But I digress.

Apollo is a TV psychic, Artemis a dog-walker, and Aphordite a phone-sex operator. They and their siblings/spouses/parents/cousins live in a rundown house in London, and when one of Eros’s arrows makes Apollo fall in love with the house cleaner, Alice, things go about as any student of Greek mythology would expect…almost. A series of petty divine revenge schemes ensues, during which an unlikely minor hero emerges, in the form of the Neil, Alice’s would-be boyfriend. It’s well-written, particularly the interactions between Neil and Alice, which verges on farce without ever quite getting there. Overall, cute, clever, and amusing, and better than average. I’m not sure of there’s something that could have been done differently to make it truly outstanding, or even what that might be, but it’s certainly worth the time.