Books
drorzel | September 8, 2009Via the Infinite summer roundup, Infinite Detox has a post about the novel's treatment of my favorite supporting character, whose title I have shamelessly stolen:
The problem I have is that from a dramatic standpoint, the wave of Pemulis-bashing that gathers force on p. 774 and crests in endnote 332 isn't convincing to me. For the first 773 pages of the book Wallace presents Pemulis to us as a lovable rogue and prankster -- he has an acerbic wit, he's nobody's fool, he's the Jack Sparrow of differential calculus. He wears a yachting cap, for Christ's sake. What's not to like about this guy?…
drorzel | August 30, 2009I finished re-reading Infinite Jest this week. I'm a few weeks ahead of the Infinite Summer crowd, which is a little frustrating, because I really want to see what they say about the later bits, but they won't get there for a while yet.
Anyway, this is a tough book to summarize, because it's both a very large book, and a very expansive one. You could write elevator pitches about it that would put it in a bunch of different genres-- thriller (terrorists and government agents search for a movie that destroys the brain of anybody who watches it), school story (dope-smoking tennis prodigies try…
drorzel | August 23, 2009Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder's Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great:
The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder's work really, is that it's too easy to get caught up in talking about the wonderful ideas and backgrounds and not pay enough attention to the characters and stories. I think Schroeder's one of the best writers to emerge in this century, and his work seems to me to belong to this century, to be using newly discovered science and extrapolating from present technology, not just…
drorzel | August 10, 2009Tor Books founder and publisher Tom Doherty is one of the several Guests of Honor Who Aren't Neil Gaiman at this year's worldcon, and as such there was a panel titled "Locus interviews Tom Doherty." Which might better have been titled "Tom Doherty Tells Cool Stories About His Career in Publishing, with Occasional Prompting from Gary Wolfe and Liza Groen Trombi. That might've drawn more than the twenty-ish people who turned up, which would've been nice, because he has some cool stories to tell.
I won't attempt to reproduce them in detail-- the best involved a distributor in Philly literally…
drorzel | August 9, 2009The "Philosophy of Science" panel I moderated was surprisingly well-attended, and got some decent discussion going. Kate took notes, at least for a while, and I'll post a link if she writes it up on LiveJournal.
The "Knights who Say Fuck" panel was in a very remote room that was much too small to contain a panel with Guy Gavriel Kay, David Anthony Durham, and Patrick Rothfuss on it. Well, ok, it contained them just fine, but there wasn't really room for the hundred-odd people who showed up to see them.
I was one of about a dozen people who went to thie "Cross-Genre Hard SF" panel, probably…
drorzel | August 8, 2009My talk was Friday morning at 10am, on the title given above. This wasn't my choice-- when I volunteered to be on programming, I said some general areas that I'd be willing to talk about, and left it at that. Somebody else made up the title and description for the talk, which made it very slightly like PowerPoint Karaoke. Happily, this is a topic I can easily discourse about, but I think in the future I'll try to remember to suggest more specific talk titles...
I've posted the slides for the talk on SlideShare, and will attempt embedding them below:
Worldcon09
View more presentations from…
drorzel | August 4, 2009The Worldcon program has been posted, but only as a giant, confusing PDF. I was getting cross-eyed trying to figure things out, so I ended up creating my own blank grid sheets, and making notes on those.
The following is a by-no-means comprehensive list of things I think look interesting enough to attend. There are only a handful of thing that I'll definitely be at (I'll mark those in bold), but I'll probably choose many of the rest from this list:
Thursday
15:30: Re-reading
Graham Sleight, Jo Walton, Kate
Nepveu, Larry Niven
There is a school of thought that re-reading
is a juvenile habit,…
drorzel | July 26, 2009As previously noted, I will be on programming at the upcoming Worldcon in Montreal, including moderating a panel at 10am Saturday with the following title and description:
The Philosophy of Science
To what extent does SF explore the meaning of science for scientists and create the ideas that our culture has of science?
Panelists: Greer Gilman, James Morrow, Jeff Warner, Richard Crownover, and DD Barant
This is a little outside my normal range, so this post is a combination of thinking-out-loud and asking-for help as I try to figure out what sort of discussion ought to go with that panel…
drorzel | July 22, 2009Worldcon is less than two weeks off, which means that it's time once again for the SF part of blogdom to explode with complaints about the quality of the nominees. There are some reasonable reactions, but it's mostly slightly over-the-top broadsides.
It's worth emphasizing again that the source of the problem is also the solution to the problem: the Hugo Awards are voted on by fans. This means that they tend to skew to the middlebrow, true, but it also means that they can be fixed, in a way that, say, the Oscars really can't.
If you don't like the stuff that gets nominated for the Hugos, buy…
drorzel | July 21, 2009There are a lot of things about Infinite Jest that are easier to understand than most people seem to believe. I've never had a problem seeing a plot in it, for example, though a bunch of people don't see it.
One thing that I've never been entirely sure of, though, is just who is narrating this sprawling tale. The book is mostly told in a fairly tight third-person point of view (you're generally privy to the thoughts of one character at a time), but there are a number of asides that confuse this. In particular, the Don Gately sections include a number of footnotes mentioning that the words…
drorzel | July 17, 2009I've been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it's not hard to find more). For those who haven't read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the decision by the IAU to demote Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet."
I didn't think the point of this was all that difficult to figure out, but it seems to have created a great deal of confusion. Some of this is probably disingenuous, but a number of people seem to be genuinely…
drorzel | July 10, 2009If you're desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It's nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time talking about Michael Jackson (in a sensible way, not a vapid-entertainment-reporter way), the effects of fame, the effect of writing for an audience, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
It's about a week old, but I only got around to it yesterday. It's worth a listen, though. It also…
drorzel | July 8, 2009I'm something like 100 pages ahead of the Infinite Summer spoiler line (page 283 as of last night), meaning that a lot of the stuff I'd like to discuss or see discussed isn't fair game yet. I'm still greatly enjoying the re-read of Infinite Jest, though.
As I've said before, this is a dangerous book for me, in that Wallace's style has a tendency to leak over into my own writing when I read too much of his stuff(*). It's also a dangerous book in that a large number of the sections are written in a headlong style with very few breaks, and thus no place to stop until you get to the end of the…
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
drorzel | July 6, 2009One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don't align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded-- with tenure, promotion, and salary increases-- for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little institutionalized reward within academia for science popularization.
An extreme example of this is the failure of Carl Sagan's nomination to the National Academy of Sciences:
According to sources within the academy, Sagan was…
drorzel | July 6, 2009There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs.
As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
drorzel | July 5, 2009This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way.
While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…
drorzel | July 5, 2009I've been enjoying Tom Levenson's "Diary of a Trade Book" series quite a bit (the latest post is on cover art), so when I say a stack of copies of Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist at the bookstore the other day, I snapped one up.
As the title suggests, it's a little like CSI: London 1697, with a good deal of detail about how Newton built a court case against the notorious "coiner" and con man William Chaloner, who earned Newton's personal enmity by not only passing fake coins, but by spreading stories of incompetence and corruption…
drorzel | July 2, 2009There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day.
I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick's stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of…