Books
drorzel | September 13, 2007James Nicoll has a question about pop science:
Who today fills the niche of science popularizer once filled by people like Ley or Asimov? That is, who writes essays covering a wide range of the sciences, as opposed to covering one in detail for the public?
If you look in the comments, the second plugs Bill Bryson's science book, and you'll find me saying positive things about Natalie Angier's The Canon. (You'll also find me quibbling about Asmiov, but that's a side debate...)
They're not coming up with a whole lot over there, but surely ScienceBlogs readers have some ideas. So, are there…
drorzel | September 12, 2007Before it slips too far into the mists of memory, I should probably post some summary thoughts about Nippon 2007, the World SF Convention in Japan that Kate and I attended last week. To some degree, this will be inside-baseball stuff, but if you're not interested in fannish stuff, rest assured, there is some good, weighty physics stuff coming later. Also, some utter fluff. We aim to please, here at Chateau Steelypips.
So, the Worldcon in summary. Basically, I think it was an enjoyable experiment, and while I wouldn't call it an unqualified success, I'd be in favor of doing it again, several…
lundblad | August 29, 2007But he's not cooler than me. Which is one of the things I thought of several times while reading Spook Country, his new novel. If you don't want the long version, here's the gist: it's decent, he's still pretty good, buy it in hardcover, move to Vancouver, buy a Powerbook, learn Mandarin, get hooked on benzos, run a startup involving art, and find yourself some new cocktails to drink.
Minor spoilers ahead, but no big ones.
I really wanted to love this one. Gibson's of course been a big part of my life since I was a wee one; Neuromancer is one of the few books I've been…
drorzel | August 16, 2007A little while ago, James Nicoll posted about the shifting subject areas of SF:
In fact, a fairly consistent pattern in SF is to retreat away from areas that have come under the light of scientific examination. When probes began to visit the planets, SF retreated to the stars (There are very few novels these days set in the solar system). In fact, Trouble on Titan starts off with an essay by Nourse explaining that the attraction of Titan for him was that so little was known about it that he could set almost anything there and not have to fear contradiction from scientists.
It's the same…
drorzel | August 13, 2007The New York Times Sunday book review section yesterday had on the cover a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. "Oh," I said, "That could be interesting."
Then, I noticed. It's by Christopher Hitchens. "Well," I said, "Maybe they just don't know all that many British people..."
It opens with:
In March 1940, in the "midnight of the century" that marked the depth of the Hitler-Stalin pact (or in other words, at a time when civilization was menaced by an alliance between two Voldemorts or "You-Know-Whos"), George Orwell [...]
And that's where I stopped, because, you know, life is…
drorzel | July 25, 2007Some time back, I was offered a review copy of Why the Sky Is Blue by Götz Hoeppe by Princeton University Press. Looking at their web site, I noticed a forthcoming book by an emeritus professor at my alma mater, so I asked if they'd send me a copy of that, too. I'm all about the free books.
The Grand Contraption is an excellent example of what I call a Smart People Book, in which the author pulls together a wide range of material to take an exhaustive look at some topic or another, and basically show what a smart person he or she is. This particular book is subtitled "The World as Myth,…
drorzel | July 25, 2007If you'd like to know what hapens in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without having to read two hundred pages worth of camping-related program activities, there's a slightly snarky scene-by-scene summary at Gibberish in Neutral:
Yaxley: HAI I IZ DEATHEATER NOT APPEARING IN PREVIOUS BOOKS. YOU HAS NEWS?
Snape: Of course I have news. I'm an evil genius of unaccountable intelligence.
YAXLEY: THAT IZ GOOD. WE B FRENDS?
Snape: Come on, Lord Voldiething is waiting.
YAXLEY: LOOK MALFOY BE HAVING ALBINO PEACOCKS LOLOLOLOLZ!
Also, and here is a sentence I thought I'd never type, I basically…
drorzel | July 21, 2007Next weekend will mark the start of Vacation Season here at Chateau Steelypips. Or, rather, out of Chateau Steelypips, as we'll be spending four of the next seven weeks in other places.
This, of course, will require books for me to read on the various airplane flights needed to reach our vacation destinations. And while the shelves here are positively groaning under the weight of unread books, I'm a little short on good Airplane Books, mostly because I tend to tear through those as fast as I get them. A quick pass through Borders yesterday didn't produce much, either.
So I throw this open to…
drorzel | July 18, 2007Everybody is all abuzz about Harry Potter these days, what with the release of the final book coming this weekend. Scott McLemee takes up the really important question, though: what do professional academics think about everybody's favorite boy wizard?
In the years since the author introduced her characters to the public, they have become beloved and meaningful; and not to children only. At present, the catalog of the Library of Congress records 21 volumes of criticism and interpretation on the novels, in six languages. A collection called Harry Potter and International Relations, for…
drorzel | July 17, 2007Having finished all of the fiction nominees, I'm now basically ready to submit my votes for the Hugos. Though it occurs to me that I've actually seen two of the five movies up for "Best Dramatic Presentation," so I might Netflix the others, and check off yet another category.
At any rate, I'm sure you're all dying to know how I plan to vote, so here you go:
Best Novel
Rainbows End Vernonr Vinge
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn
Blindsight, Peter Watts
No Award
Glasshouse, Charles Stross
This ended up being an odd category for me. The Vinge wound up being the clear…
drorzel | July 16, 2007The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty attractive, so I carried it around for a while, reading bits and pieces in restaurants while Kate was away, and eventually finished it during our Michigan vacation.
The book is subtitled "A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science," and Angier has set herself a large task: to present the…
drorzel | July 16, 2007This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared.
Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…
drorzel | June 30, 2007My intention of reading all of the nominees for the Hugo Awards in the fiction categories hit a bit of a snag yesterday. I finished all the short fiction (novella, novelette, short story), and most of the novels, leaving only Peter Watts's Blindisght and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. James Nicoll described Peter Watts as the sort of thing he reads when he feels his will to live becoming too strong, and the description of Glasshouse did not fill me with joy. Plus, my copy of Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson just arrived (a birthday present), and I'd really rather read that.
(I'll pause here for…
drorzel | June 26, 2007This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse.
The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are:
"Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi
"Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn
"The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald
"All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman
Best…
drorzel | June 21, 2007I've never really understood the distinction between "Novellas" and "Novelettes"-- I know it's a length thing, but I don't have a good feel for where the dividing line is, and I can never remember which is longer. And, as far as I can tell, the only place this ever comes up is in SF awards.
Anyway, there are two Hugo categories for really long short fiction, and this is one of them. The nominees are:
"The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko
"A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
"Inclination" by William Shunn
"Lord Weary's Empire" by Michael Swanwick
"Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles…
drorzel | June 15, 2007As Kate and I will be attending the Worldcon in Japan, we're eligible to vote for the Hugos this year. In an effort to be responsible voters we downloaded the electronic version of the short fiction nominees that are available from the official nominations site, and I've been working my way through them. To this point, I've finished the Best Short Story nominees:
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties"Neil Gaiman
"Kin" Bruce McAllister
"Impossible Dreams" Tim Pratt
"Eight Episodes" Robert Reed
"The House Beyond Your Sky"Benjamin Rosenbaum
If anybody would like to make a passionate argument in…
drorzel | June 7, 2007Sort of in the same spirit as yesterday's summer reading post, another book-related question:
What's the best book you were ever forced to read for school? What's the worst?
The best, for me, is probably The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a sort of metafictional Vietnam novel in stories. I had a loaner copy of this when I took a class on Vietnam in my junior year of college, and after I returned it to the lending library, I went out and bought myself a copy to keep, because it was that good.
The worst book I was ever forced to read for a class has to be Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse…
drorzel | June 6, 2007Greetings from sopping wet Calgary, where thunderstorms and local flooding delayed my arrival until after midnight (2 am my time), which really put a damper on the 8am talks. I had meant to schedule some book-related posts to appear here while I'm gone, but I'm an idiot, and didn't select "Scheduled" from the posting status menu, so it didn't show up.
Now that I have stable Internet access, I'll post some physics stuff later on, but for the moment, here's a much shorter version of the book-related post I wanted to do today: There's a Joe Queenan essay in the New York Times Book Review from…
drorzel | June 5, 2007I'm off to the 38th annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society this week, which will be in Calgary, Alberta. Another province on the list of North American place I've visited...
I'm taking the tablet PC with me, so there may be some conferecne blogging, but I can't guarantee it. I'm going to schedule some book-related items, though, so there'll be some posts on the site even when I'm in Canada, and we'll start with this:
What do you tend to read on airplanes?
I've got a mental category that I think of as "airplane books"-- they…
drorzel | June 3, 2007Whatever you may think of his own books (and, really, don't bother to tell me what you think of his books), this New York Review of Books article by Lee Smolin on a great whack of Einstein biographies is well worth a read. I don't really have anything to say other than that, so here's a long quote:
In his new book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson explains that
studying Einstein can be worthwhile [because] it helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder...as the sagas of [science's] heroes reminds us.... These traits are...vital for this new century of…